Barf (soap)

Turritopsis nutricula is a jellyfish with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature stage after having reached sexual maturity. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. This cycle then repeats, rendering it effectively immortal.

It's worth paying another visit to Unwiki, which displays recently deleted articles pretty much as they are deleted. It's striking that the articles are no longer pure crap, as they once were, just majority-crap.

Two new search tools:

Woogle bills itself as "Wikipedia search that doesn't suck", which is a fair description. It's pretty much just a Google frontend (and its incredible superiority to w'pedia's intrinsic search underscores how the wikimedia's foundation's commitment to total independence occasionally bites it in the ass).

Mayflower search is a similarly kick-ass search tool for Commons images.

List of United States territories that failed to become states

Astrosociobiology is the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies.

The article rescue squadron made the Signpost. Cool.

This is not exactly Wikipedia-related, but a zillion people are talking about a plainclothes political protest (formal attire only) and I've started a wiki to organize it. I could use some help making sure there's no vandalism or anything while it finds its legs.

Software developers talk about the "patterns" a particular programming language makes possible. What about Wiki patterns? (Focused mostly on business wikis.)

An individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number — which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős — and one's Bacon number — which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Congress should use a Wiki to edit bills. Bonus, from the comments:

"Many in Congress wouldn't want version control. But the point [in the long term] is to make it a cultural norm, by making it a technical norm. It's a lot harder to object to something when to object means to deviate from the expected behavior."

And that, kids, is why you should do your math homework.

Interesting discussion about the nature of Wikipedia's hierarchy.

I've started the Article Rescue Squadron to prevent misguided deletions. Sign up if you're interested.

Unthinking deletion is becoming a serious problem. This isn't your run-of-the-mill "should we include individual TV episodes?" stuff; it's deletion of major public figures and important companies.

Andrew Lih: "How did we raise a new generation of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask questions whatsoever?" Lih, by the way, used to be known as a deletionist. His positions haven't changed; the admin mainstream has.

Couple more points:

* It is easier to delete articles than to create them. Even if most admins keep, deleters will have a huge impact. (This bot tells people when an article they've worked on might get deleted. Only functions for a small subset of articles, but it's a step in the right direction. Systemic solution to a systemic problem.)

* If you work hard to write something, and then it's deleted, that really really sucks. It's a terrible user experience, if you want to think of it in business terms, and an asshole move if you want to think of it in social terms. Someone who goes through that experience is less likely to keep contributing.

A day in the life.

"I’m the chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charity that manages Wikipedia. I don’t need much equipment — I have a five-year-old iBook laptop in the sitting room and a phone. The desk in the sitting room is my space. The sun streams in and I can see the Puy-de-Dôme volcano in the distance. Thomas is free to crawl around...It’s possible one day I’ll be more proud of Wikipedia than of the kids. Wikipedia’s become a kind of child to me too."

And the election results are ... Oscar is out; Frieda is in. Sounds fine to me.

Winners

1. Eloquence (Erik Möller) 1671 votes
2. Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh) 1427 votes
3. Frieda (Frieda Brioschi) 1254 votes

Nonwinners

4. Oscar (Oscar van Dillen) 1234 votes
5. Michael Snow 1229 votes
6. Danny (Danny Wool) 1217 votes
7. Yann (Yann Forget) 1153 votes
8. Kim Bruning 1124 votes
9. UninvitedCompany (Steve Dunlop) 1047 votes
10. Kate (River Tarnell) 889 votes
11. Kingboyk (Stephen Kennedy) 864 votes
12. Ausir (Pawel Dembowski) 693 votes
13. ^demon (Michael "Chad" Horohoe) 672 votes
14. WarX (Artur Jan Fijalkowski) 571 votes
15. DragonFire1024 (Jason Safoutin) 495 votes

I think this calls for a chart. Unfortunately, my mac's in the shop; here's the best I can do in Excel (it still kind of sucks).



For those who don't know, this was approval voting -- people can vote for as many candidates as they want.

Eloquence and Mindspillage -- both incumbents -- were the unsurprising standouts; among the other qualified candidates, the race was very close. Which is a good thing. It'll keep the board on its toes.

Godwin's law (the hitler thing) is named after Mike Godwin, who just got hired by the Foundation. Cool.

Voting has ended on the board elections. Results will appear here. I'd meant to offer endorsements, but man ... there were a lot of candidates to evaluate.

I voted for: Eloquence (Erik Möller), Frieda (Frieda Brioschi), Michael Snow, Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh), Oscar (Oscar van Dillen).

A rather conventional ticket, but I'm of the opinion that the current board is a little like Bush Sr. -- his single greatest asset was not fucking anything up. The first gulf war was a success because the leadership didn't do wrong any of the million things they could have; the same (well, almost) is true for the fall of the USSR. Competent leadership is a tightrope, and the current president demonstrates how far down the ground is.

Make no mistake: the wrong board could completely kill the Wikimedia projects -- well, splinter them, set them back a few years. Danny's plan to dismantle the bottom-up board and replace it with "captains of industry and academia" would go a long way down that path, for example -- no surer ingredients for a board that will inadvertently discourage a healthy wiki community than one that has no idea how wiki editing works. (To be fair, Danny has plenty of other things to say that are pretty smart.)

In other news, I've added a chat widget to the sidebar. Experimental.

Snowclones are a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context.

Chronologal snowclones. From An X doth not a Y make (A swallow doth not a summer make, 400 B.C.) to im in ur X, Y-ing your Z (im in ur base, killing ur d00dz, 2007).