The worst usability disaster you've ever heard about. (It involves mediawiki.)

It's the last day to vote for commons picture of the year.

Here are the finalists -- they all have that super-clear naturalistic wikipedian quality.

Shipping container architecture is an uncommon form of architecture that involves the use of steel shipping containers as the basis for housing and other functional buildings.

By the way, let me know if the new layout has problems or if the ads piss you off.

Hundreds and hundreds of coats of arms, vectorized.

Check this one out (SVG link). This too, actually. And this.

(Thanks, adam.)

The Great Hacker War was a 1990–1991 conflict between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and a faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD).

Wikipedia on the iPhone

Wikipedia:ZEN

Eigengrau (German: "intrinsic gray"), also called eigenlicht ("intrinsic light"), dark light, or brain gray, is the color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. Even in the absence of light, some action potentials are still sent along the optic nerve, causing the sensation of a uniform dark gray color.

(If you can't see the poll above -- or even if you can, and you just want to look at spiffy results map -- then follow this link.)

Websites personified (Wikipedia is at 2:55, though the best one is Facebook, at 1:50)

Really funny. The actual title is "The Internet Party: What Happens When Google's Parents Leave Town for the Weekend?" see also

Geoff:

For many Wikipedians -- if not most -- contributing to it is probably the most important influence they will have on the greater world.

In my own case, while I am not some 15-year-old fanboy living in my parents' basement writing articles about videogames or anime characters, this is true. I could stop contributing today & devote my energy to something (so to speak) more socially acceptible -- catch up on my yardwork, tutor children in a local school, volunteer for a political campaign -- yet nothing else will have the same persuasive effect on so many people as contributing to Wikipedia.

Much the same thing happened after World War II in the United States: a lot of books were published about the war because there were a lot of veterans (& parents, sisters, & brothers of veterans) who wanted to read about what they had been part of.

Fortunately I defined my life long before Wikipedia came around, so while I know its importance, I can tear myself away from it & devote myself to other things, most of which are more important than whether an article on Charles Darwin should include the fact tha the was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. (Or whoever those 2 people were that led to a silly edit war a few years back.) However, there are many people who have not done this, & their numbers can only increase. ("Wow, anyone can edit this? My words will be read by millions? This is way cooler than the drudgery of my daytime job.")

One could describe them as having encountered sunlight after dwelling underground for a long time; they are blinded by Wikipedia's importance, & have no way to put things into a healthy proportion. (And maybe the rest of the Platonic allegory applies in this case.) These members fight over every dispute viciously for an immediate solution because they cannot envision why allowing Wikipedia content to develop & mature could be a good thing.

Facepalm

Simo Häyhä (December 17, 1905 – April 1, 2002), nicknamed "White Death" by the Soviet army, was a Finnish soldier, and is widely considered to be the most successful sniper in history.

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).