Too tired to go to the Web 1.0 party (and it was at MIT, too. hmph.). I will say this about Cambridge: good street musicians during the day, terrible ones at night. It seems like a city that loves and understands acoustic folk, but is interested in other styles mostly as academic curiosities. (Or maybe I'm being an asshole for judging a city on the kids trying to make an easy saturday buck. I remember russian clubbers in detroit for whom anything with a melody, or chords, or filters, or slower than 160 bpm, is crap.)

(Dr. Thompsen's Wikimania 2006 Journal. Detailed.)

Preemptive critique of the times story: it's possible that one angle that might pop up is "wikipedia takes a relative approach to truth: wikiality: truth is whatever the mob says."

But NPOV and concensus (and a hands-off approach toward differing cultural norms) are not academic philosophies of knowledge, they're practical approaches to the process of collaborative writing, imperfect but workable solutions that allow wikipedia to (dare I say) thrive.

Wikimania feature in tomorrow's NYTimes week in review the NYTimes at some point

(Update: Here it is.)

I'm at Language and cultural barriers and challenges to Wikipedia. Upstairs, small room. All the cool foreign kids.
There's a New York Times reporter here who says he's writing about us for Week in Review. (I got out of there fast after he unmasked himself (well, and after the session ended). I'm waaay too sleep-deprived to be anywhere near a times reporter.)

Update: I misread that exchange -- the reporter was saying he had an article not about Wikimania, but about language. The wikimania article is yet to be written.

The session

Should we aim for an ur-wikipedia that every language version feeds into, with every perspective? (Well, no.) How independent should each language version be? (The question becomes more complex when you look at areas in which multilinguism is common -- see africa segment below.) ("If you attempt to combine languages, some of the knowledge actually disappears." But there's not necessarily a conflict here: multimodal translation directions, etc.)

(In other news, I think I said "dutch" when I meant to say "danish". I blame the public schools.)

The Swahili wikipedia is exapanding: >1000 articles. The guy next to me, from Tanzania, is talking about using social networks and students to help it grow.* "If you want to convince people in the developing world to do something like this, that's new, you have to be very persistent. Extremely persistent." (Swahili is not an african lingua franca, contrary to stereotype. However, it doesn't belong to any particular ethnic group, so it carries less baggage. There is tension because ethnic languages are being lost as Swahili becomes more common.)

How big is the overlap between wikipedias? How many polish-language articles don't exist in the english version?

What about nations in which the cultural makeup of the bilingual crowd is different from that of those who only speak the native language. What about bilingual people who choose to write in english because they can reach a wider audience? See also.

*He's also working on a project to rewrite Tanzania's constitution using wikis.

I almost forgot:

The group is forming a new mailing list to continue the discussion and make recommendations to the board.

Man, I was tired (up all night 'till the late afternoon). Archived media -- though the videos aren't up yet.

Jimbo: Wikiwyg yet to come.

Unsurprisingly, Lawrence Lessig gives a fucking great presentation. video feed

We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code. --Clark

Update: Clicknoise has some interesting commentary.

I'm at Identity, Anonymity and the Wiki. (Video feed (rm))

Update: Great question about articles for deletion, and ensuring consistency: should there be case studies, like in law? Would people refer to the 2006 GNAA precident for reference? Could these be automatically generated, as in google news? (It seems like that last would be difficult.)

As I type this, I'm in Cambridge, listening to Jimmy Wales talk about talking to Jimmy Carter. (here's a live video feed

There's a generalized Wikimania blog (not by me).

I'm one of the judges for the Wikimania awards -- I'm judging on-wiki, though, so you can follow along as I pick through cool photos.

Update: CNet's picted it up.

Wikimania Hacking Days - Day 1
Originally uploaded by fuzheado.

David Weinberger (the guy behind Small Pieces Loosely Joined) blogs about about how nervous he is about his Wikimania keynote.

In other news, there are -- At This Very Moment -- people doing what I presume are brilliant, consequential things at Hacking Days (and I'd be there if I was more geeky -- I'm at about the trough of the asymptotic geekiness distribution curve, just far enough up to realize how stupid I am compared to the real geeks).

This New Yorker article nails Wikipedia's appeal.

Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about Prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can.

That's the bloggiest part, but it's a great article all around:

Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia's twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.

What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. "Obviously, this was the work of experts," he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.

Who is responsible for this?

Why have I never seen Larry Sanger's blog before?

Chicken sexing is the method of distinguishing the sex of chicken hatchlings, usually by a trained person called a chicken sexer.

It turned out that Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa by simply walking out the door with it hidden under his coat.

The theft was master-minded by a con-man who had commissioned a French art forger to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original. Because he didn't need the original for his con, he never contacted Peruggia again after the crime. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to a Florence art dealer.

Distinguishing "blue" from "green"

Pediapress sells print-on-demand compendiums of wikipedia articles. Hopefully it's the first in a minor ecosystem of companies repurposing wikimedia content: that's what the GFD Licence specifically allows.

But wait! The name Wikimedia isn't free; it's trademarked. And the names of the subprojects, too (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc.). But repurposed copies have to use that name to show where the content's from. And how's Wikimedia going to prevent scam artists from using its name (for example) to sell articles peppered with implanted ads for real estate?

The GFDL and trademark law collided to produce this byzantine debate on the mailing list.

In semi-related news, the Library of Congress and Wikipedia might share content.

A paternoster is a doorless elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers who are agile enough can step on or off at any floor they like.

THE LONGEST ESCELATOR IN THE WORLD

(addendum: Hong Kong Island is dominated by steep, hilly terrain, which makes it the home of some rather unusual methods of transport up and down the slopes.)