Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced albin) was a name intended for a Swedish child who was born in 1991. It is one of many unusual personal names.

Culture Jamming -- does it make any sense?

Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid

The Louis Braille article before google linked a search for "lewis braille birthdate" from its logo. The article 24 hours later. (Wikipedia Signpost on the subject. And the current version of the article, for the hell of it.)

Good Village Voice article (on wikipedia, of course. No new info, really)

More wikiTourism: check out the pictures of Trondheim, Norway and Wyoming's Snake River.

Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard.

Thanks to De Beers, diamonds may be a Veblen good (but they're not a Giffen Good). Via.

I'm writing from Mott Haven.

Good post about the media and wikipedia. (I should steal the disclaimer for this blog.) One highlight:

The point of registering users is not to make it easier to sue errant Wikipedia contributors. It will in fact have the opposite effect. Wikipedia tracks unregistered users' IP addresses — which, with a court order, can usually be traced back to a real-world identity — because it has no other way of telling if a slew of trash articles are coming from a single source. Wikipedia does not track the IP addresses of registered users because their pseudonyms serve the same purpose. So requiring people to log in will make them more anonymous, not less. But it will enable Wikipedia's reputation system to operate more effectively on new entries. And it will cut down on the ~5,000 new entries created every day, of which about 3,500 are obvious junk ("Asdfasdf" is a particularly popular entry) quickly weeded out by the Wikipedians who patrol the site.

Allowing unregistered users to edit existing articles plays into that reputation system. Says Jimmy: "Why do we allow anonymous users to edit existing articles when we know that the flow of edits from anonymous users is worse than from logged-in users? It implicitly self-selects trolls because we see the IP number but not the login name."

Jimmy thinks the the mainstream media misunderstood this story because they have a cognitive problem when it comes to anonymity and accountability:

"The thing that people always latch onto is that it has to do with anonymity. But it doesn't have to do with knowing who you are [in the real world] . We care about pseudo-identity, not identity. The fact that a certain user has a persistent pseudo-identity over time allows us to gauge the quality of that user without having any idea of who it really is."

I'll be in New York City this week. As befits a city that's practically it's own country (see the world-spanning New Yorker cover for an appropriate perspective), it has a crazy amount of wikipedia content. Start at the portal.

2006

Large numbers.

The Milgram experiment was one of many famous scientific experiments.

Journalism scandals

Wikipedia is not a cesspool of poison-penned libelists. It is not a tabloid. Should they chance upon vandalism, most people will be smart enough to figure out that "alex smith = gay!" isn't the fourth step of the Krebs cycle.

But Wikipedia does have a problem (well, a few) : while bushels of isolated facts stick to an article like bugs to flypaper, the regular wear and tear of wiki life (revert wars, adding detail, etc.) tends to atrophy an article's readability until, like beach footprints, it's reduced to a barely-differentiated indent. (Well, not an indent. I should stop being so metaphorical.)

Articles that have the most frequent edits are the ones most likely to suffer. (In a cruel twist of fate, these tend to be articles that are (or were) the best -- once an article passes a certain quality threshold, it draws visitors from all over.)

If you've been editing wikipedia long enough (and I have) it's a familiar feeling: you go through an article, nipping and tucking until it's brilliant and clear and readable, then you check back 3 months later and it's descended back into the fog.

So what to do?

Stable Pages

There's been a lot of talk about stable versions lately. They'll probably be implemented soon, which is a good thing. Here's how they work:

The very best wikipedia articles are doubled up: one version remains in the Standard Wikipedia, subject to immediate edits by whomever, and the other is preserved, temporarily, under glass, viewable but not editable. This preserved version is updated all at once, periodically.

As someone in the mailing list put it: as long as we're forever pushing the boulder up the hill, why not put a wedge behind it once in awhile?

One of the more important functions of a stable page will be serve as a label for the temporary high water mark -- instead of having to dive back into the history to see whether an article's gotten worse since being featured on the front page, you just have to compare the live and stable versions side-by-side. And there's a definite, well-defined goal for each page, a version number (as it were): Good changes can be periodically reincorporated en mass when the stable page is updated.

With enemies like this, who needs friends?

Disputed grammar!

A roundup of wikipedia tips and resources

Hilariously insulting article about a movie director.