Okay, we need to start selling this sticker

Wikback is a new Wikipedia-related discussion forum.

NYTimes: Did proto-science-fiction writer J. Borges predict Wikipedia? (He did, after all, spend his life in a library.)

THEN [1940] “What person, or people, invented Tlön? People, I suppose, for sure, since the idea of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously rejected. It's thought that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a cabal of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.” Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

NOW Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 “active contributors,” many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia’s contributors is: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

Reading Borges quotes you can feel a unity of life and wiki:

• If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.
  
• The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
  
• No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
  
• The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
  
• A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
  
• I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
  
• Life itself is a quotation.

(By the way, anyone who likes Borges should check out Greg Egan.)

The galactic year is the duration of time required for the solar system to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

It invites comparisons to the year (the duration of time it takes the Earth to orbit once about the Sun) and the month (traditionally the duration of time it take the moon to complete one orbit around the Earth). It also provides a conveniently "graspable" unit for thinking about cosmic and geological time periods

Warning: not Wikipedia related.

My band (the Afternoon Round) is playing our first show tomorrow night -- which is to say, 7 p.m. saturday at the BLUEStage Club. If you're near Jackson michigan, you should come see us; we're pretty fucking good. Alt-country/rock. All original material.

No soup for you!

Wikipedia administrator Andrew Lih, a former media professor who is writing a book about the six-year-old venture, has accused it of developing a "soup Nazi culture," referring to the fierce gatekeeper on the television program Seinfeld who tosses out customers if they don't comply with the arbitrary rules at his soup stand.

"The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."

Wow, I just found Urban Dictionary's wikipedia swarm.

My favorites are wikipause (During a phone call or office conversation, a pregnant moment of silence while someone queries Wikipedia, before announcing a previously-unknown piece of information) and wikipedance (The force that resists the importation of knowledge into a wiki, with especial reference to Wikipedia).

There are also terms for intellectual pwnage (wikifuck, wiki-front) and Wikipedia-inspired offline uses (wikifitti).

Plus, of course, the usual outpouring of anger about article deletion that happens anytime wikipedia is discussed in public (wikinazi, wiki nazi, wikifascist, wikibitch).

The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe several brief unofficial cessations of hostilities that occurred between German and British or French troops in World War I.

The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles on trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols, most notably Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British troops in the trenches across from them responded by singing English carols.

The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land" where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, jam, cigars, chocolate, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respects. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm.

The truce spread to other areas of the lines, and there are many stories of football matches between the opposing forces. The film Joyeux Noël suggests that letters sent home from both British and German soldiers related that the score was 3-2 in favour of the Germans.

In case you haven't been following it, here's the story on Jimmy Wales's wiki startup, Wikia:

1. Wikia was founded as a Wiki farm where people could start wikis on any topic. The tagline: "building communities". Good stuff. Wikipedia gurus were recruited into the ranks, people who knew how to nurture the fragile wiki stalks into fullgrown gardens.

2. This year Wikia's been attempting to build "human-powered search". Wikia search is apparently launching soon.

Maybe it's my rust belt location talking, but step #2 seems like bubble fever. Wikia is thinking much too big. Like, several orders of magnitude too big. Where's the business sense? This commenter says it well:

Google could add a human factor into pagerank in like 5 seconds. They’ve already started with ratings.

Wikia’s success rests on Wikipedia and the reputation only. They are technically inferior to Google by several orders of magnitude, and this is closed source. The collective knoledge that made mediawiki great is not included.

Of course, Wikia is great at building communities, which Google is terrible at. (Hence my low expectations for Knol.) How much less would it have cost to hire away Mahalo's graphic designer?

Offshore radio refers to the practice of radio broadcasting from ships or fixed maritime structures, usually in international waters.

It's not flawless, but check out this fantastic radio piece from the Globe and Mail:

So wikipedia is less of a digital book and more of an electronic river, always changing around you even as you stand in one spot. The Wikipedia I step in is not the Wikipedia I stand in, to paraphrase the words of a poet who was, at the time, emphatically not writing about Wikipedia.

It's all pretty wonderful, but it's not on a path to perfection...the things that matter most to it in its world are the things that make it happiest -- its wikipedia creature comforts. Things like what it watched on TV last night, its favorite hockey players, the act of pointing out every word in the language that's a portmanteau, or seeing to it that no family guy reference goes undocumented.

...

Let's face it: If anyone ever did create a website that contained the single definitive entry on every topic on earth, wouldn't it be the tiniest bit fascist? I don't think people would like that site at all. As soon as someone put up a site the size of wikipedia that really did have a claim to real authority, the first thing that people would want to do would be subvert it, replace it or change it, and then you'd have wikipedia all over again.

And that's the thing: the holes, omissions, errors, distortions, excesses, absurdities, and lies are the reason wikipedia works, not the things that keep it from working. They'll never get rid of them. But as a result, the rest of us will just keep looking at wikipedia as a shrub that, for some reason, hasn't blossomed into a maple tree yet.

...when you're writing commentary, it always helps to have someone to kick around. Wikipedia really is the perfect target. It's nameless and faceless and hard to offend; it's powerful and ridiculous at the same time; and everyone knows what it is.

But in the spirit of the season, let me say this: we should accept wikipedia for the gigantic, magnificent, mighty shrub that it is.

Because I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way. I read it all the time, and I love it just the way it is. It's a stupendous achievement and a cultural icon.

Merry Christmas, Wikipedia. I look forward to making even more fun of you come the new year.

Flux capacitor

So apparently Carolyn Doran, the Wikimedia Foundation's chief operating officer from january to june, is a felon.

"Doran's criminal record includes four convictions for driving under the influence, two of check fraud and petty larceny, one hit and run with fatality, and one charge of unlawful wounding for shooting former boyfriend Philip L. Brown in the chest in 1990"

Geoff has more.

There had better be a big fucking shakeup in the next board election.

I know, I know -- the board is overworked. Tough shit. This is beyond unacceptable. Quick question: is it worse for Wikipedia to rake in millions of dollars by running text ads on its search pages, enough money to hire some real administrative help (nevermind programmers), or for the board to be ideologically pure and untainted by the evils of adsense (because god knows google's money has just killed firefox) but so sleep-deprived that they appoint crooks to high positions?

It's becoming increasingly apparent that things cannot go on as they have. More in the next post.

Well, I'm back in michigan, and I never made another videoblog. But in case you're hungering for wikivideo from australia, here's Wikia's Angela Beesley in a surprisingly good interview:



link, for feed readers

see also

Live from Melbourne

Videoblog from Australia! (I work my way around to Wikipedia eventually.)

I had a hell of a time finding somewhere to upload this so you'd better enjoy it. :P



(Here's the link, if you're reading this as a feed.)

The Information Age

Back in the early days, the question was

How is wikipedia new? How does its amazing social structure work? How does the Biggest Document Ever get written without an editorial team or clear hierarchy?

But now that Wikipedia's the top google result for half the words in the english language, the question is

How does having Wikipedia at your fingertips change you? How does it change society?

* * *

Huckleberry Finn has been banned various times for various reasons — pretty much continually from when it was published. But at first, it wasn't banned for use of the N-word, or for undermining racist southern norms. It was banned because it used the word ain't — in other words, what shocked people was deviation from linguistic norms.

From 2007 this looks silly, but in the big picture, being shocked at the use of "improper" English serves an important social purpose: it slows the evolution of the English language.* If this seems unimportant, remember that without intervention, languages evolve at a ridiculous, breakneck pace.

Consider hunter-gatherer tribes in the tropics, where they can be totally self-sufficient: if half a tribe splits off, and sets up camp a few miles down the river, its language will be unintelligible to the original tribe within two generations.

Fucking Crazy.

If English evolved that fast, we wouldn't be able to read Twain, let alone Shakespeare. We wouldn't be able to pass down any knowledge at all. Everyone understands, on an instinctual level, how much that would suck — hence the constant debates about the "real" definition of words among everyone except people who've taken linguistics classes.

* * *

Maybe one social purpose of wikipedia is to provide canonical definitions of "unofficial" words and phrases that would otherwise be left to the drifting winds of spoken transmission.

For example: everyone who grew up in the '90s thinks Atlanta's ban on sagging is really strange. It doesn't make sense as enforcement of obscenity laws because Atlanta didn't care in 1998, when everyone and their mother sagged. And it doesn't make sense as evil racial profiling because Atlanta didn't care in 1994, when only black people sagged.

So what changed? Maybe the difference is that politicians can type "sagging" into google and read a wikipedia entry that says "Sagging has its origins in the prohibition of belts among incarcerated inmates, which was emulated as a fashion statement by non-inmates for its tough guy cachet."

Nobody in the '90s knew that was the origin of sagging. They just knew it made you look cool. The definition had drifted far from its origins, but Wikipedia ties it back. 15 years after sagging escaped from prisons, Wikipedia has dredged up the the collective unconscious and made it solid.

* Or maybe not. See the comments -- any linguistics professors in the crowd?

R.I.P.

"Wiki" gets its name from the "Wiki-wiki" bus at the honolulu airport -- the bus that's being replaced by an automated sidewalk.

Which animals can swim? (And how well?)

It looks like I'm on a bit of a hiatus -- busy with other stuff. I'll be back eventually.