Wikileaks wins

Danny Wool's blog has been great lately -- he analyzes wikipedia by scholarly metrics of empire decline, evaluates wikimania in alexandria, etc.

Deletion Solution

Okay, I've been railing on for awhile about how bad it is when articles get deleted. It doesn't focus energy on more "serious" articles; instead, it frustrates people, drives them away, and has a chilling effect on the whole project.

The irony, of course, is that "deletion" is the wrong word -- the article's just hidden.

The obvious solution is to move the "deleted" article somewhere off-wiki. It's a shiny happy utopian obama-like solution because it resurrects the thousand-flowers-bloom spirit wikipedia once had, where every action seemed somewhat focused on building an awesome body of work that anyone could enjoy.

Four things prevent it from happening, though:

1. Inclusionists fear wikipedia will lose even more articles because they won't be able to argue "if you delete this, nobody will see it".

This is a bad strategy! It forces people to choose between two opposites (delete or keep); "delete" will eventually win, and that will be that. Plus, it's wrong on principle because it impoverishes the conceptual space and constrains what's possible.

2. There's nowhere else like wikipedia.

Telling someone to move from Wikipedia to Everything2 is like kicking your friend off your living room couch because "I think there's a pillow or something in that alley".

This will only be solved when other places get more vibrant. The more articles are moved, the faster that happens.

3. The interface between wikipedia and the rest of the web is really bad. To put it another way:

(a) There's no easy or automatic way to move an article off-wiki because you've got to move its whole history to preserve the authorship record.

(b) Once the article's been moved, it leaves no trace. The deleted wikipedia article is an ordinary blank page, with no indication that the content is still there, potentially a click away.

4. Over-caution. The best place to move things is Wikia, which is a commercial wiki farm that for all sorts of reasons (taxes, culture, brandt) can't be seen as an appendage of the non-profit wikipedia; it has to be walled off, like the church and state. This adds some friction to the export process and generally makes people shy away from working on it.

The fix is obvious enough: always provide a bunch of different links (to wikia, bluwiki, and wherever else). It would help if other wiki providers knew their shit as well as wikia.

Anyway, the main point is that all of these problems are solvable. There aren't any insurmountable obstacles.

Wikipedia undelete is a script for greasemonkey/firefox. Every time you visit a deleted article, a bunch of links appear showing versions of the page that are cached on archive.org. (Like this one.)

Caveats:

• Needs firefox (duh).


• Only works (for me) when visiting w'pedia as a logged-out user.


• The links only show up when visiting one particular "not found" page -- for example, on /wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives, which is where incoming links will take you, but not /wiki/Special:Search?search=List+of+fictional+expletives&go=Go or /w/index.php?title=List_of_fictional_expletives&action=edit, where internal links and the search field lead.


• Doesn't clearly indicate what content is added by the script and what content was already there, so you're sort of in your own web-browsing universe. This is a common greasemonkey problem.


• The author of the script didn't know that every "deleted" wikipedia article is actually still on the server. If he did, he might have arranged a better system whereby people collaboratively request that deleted pages be moved to their userspace; the script's links would point there (or somewhere else the articles can be edited), instead of archive.org.

A slidewalk is a fictional moving sidewalk structurally sound enough to support buildings and large populations of travelers. Adjacent slidewalks moving at different rates could let travelers accelerate to great speeds.

The act known as Eskimo kissing in modern western culture is loosely based on a traditional Inuit greeting called a kunik.

A kunik is a form of expressing affection, usually between family members and loved ones, that involves pressing the nose and upper lip against the skin (commonly the cheeks or forehead) and breathing in, causing the loved one's skin or hair to be suctioned against the nose and upper lip.

About Wikileaks. This article indicates that Julius Baer bank is now kind of fucked, and reveals a funny detail: the court ordered that its ruling be emailed to Wikileaks -- but since it had just abolished the wikileaks domain name, no email could have gotten through.

The New York Times has a good article on this Wikileaks business (and editorial) ; the Register has some interesting technical details.

Mother Jones states the obvious: Shutting Down Wikileaks Will Backfire.

Wikileaks is a site that allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents. It's broken several important stories and survived censorship attempts by the Chinese and Thai govs.

But now if you try to visit wikileaks.org, you'll get an error message.

That's because Wikileaks had posted documents from a former vice president of the Swiss bank Julius Baer alleging that the company engaged in "stalking, corruption and coercion...according to Elmer he and his family are subject to observation by private investigators working for Julius Baer, to an extent that his 6 year old daughter needs psychological treatment and his life is overall suffering from it."

Since the site posted that information, a fire occurred in their datacenter and Julius Baer successfully convinced a California judge to pull the entire Wikileaks.org domain name off the net! Obviously, any Swiss court cases aren't under California's jurisdiction, so this is a blatant abuse of the legal system.

Thankfully, you can still access the site at its ip address: http://88.80.13.160/

More good coverage at the BBC (though their technical language isn't quite right) at Kos, and at Wikileaks itself (one, two, three)

Spurius Carvilius Ruga (fl. 230 BCE) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G.

The petition about removing the pictures of Muhammad? It's up to 160 thousand signatures. That's not a significant proportion of the total population, but the worry is that the muslim street could flare up unpredictably due to network effects.

Here's a moderate muslim response (filled with useful links, too). "Wikipedia has refused to delete the pictures and has released a statement as to why they are not removing the pictures. This statement seems perfectly reasonable to me as a Muslim."

The guy who started the petition has opened an official petition blog.

Here's a list of his Wikipedia edits. On another blog, he writes: "I am proud to call myself a fundamentalist and even your government preach fundamentalism by opposing the gays in few of the states in US." (Update: that's not really a representative quote.)

Former foundation insider Danny Wool talks about the audit. Wool's new blog is worth reading if you're interested in internal goings-on -- he knows where his towel is.

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown.

The long-awaited financial audit is finally released.

The Talking Statues of Rome were a form of anonymous political expression in Rome begun in the 15th century and continuing until the advent of the modern media.

NYTimes on the muslim protest thing. Wikipedia comes off really well -- "polite but firm".

Also: "The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images." When was this?

About 80,000 people have petitioned Wikipedia to remove its images of Muhammad. These run the gamut from polite, respectful requests to (a very small minority) crazy threats of violence.

It's possible it could have been nipped in the bud if the top of the Muhammad article linked to a version without images (instead of to a page telling people to edit their custom server-side javascript file. sigh.).

Also, here's the on-wiki censorship request page.

If you're going out to vote tomorrow, please support Obama. Choose the future.

Quick list of reasons:

• Obama's detailed technology platform is pretty much perfect.
• He is much stronger than Clinton against any republican challenger.
• His policies are phrased so that they don't terrify republicans but still provide the same benefits as Clinton's.
• He is capable of convincing people of things, not just tacking effectively toward the polls.
• He is capable of disarming powerful interests (in all senses of the word), not just warring with them.
• He is endorsed by Lessig, XKCD, and danah boyd.

Boyd:

When I was [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, I expected everyone to be pro-Hillary and anti-Barack because of the whole "experience" thing. I was shocked to find that this was not the case at all.

Most foreign diplomats and companies thought that Barack would be much better at negotiating with foreign powers than Hillary. They all knew that the candidates would have huge advisory teams that would help them understand what was going on. Even though Hillary knew more people already, they felt as though Barack would be more effective. (And most were extremely worried about how Bill would overshadow anything with Hillary... another sad reality.)

Before Bush II, the U.S. had only once -- in its entire history -- seen the son of a former president elected himself: John Quincy Adams, in 1824, and there were 3 intervening presidents between him and his father.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be without any precedent at all, and you can rest assured that the dynastic pattern is not a coincidence. Looking objectively at other countries, a dynastic government seems -- even when democratically elected -- to indicate weak institutions, unsophisticated voters, and a cloistered and ossifying inner circle.

The people who brought you the 10,000-year clock are excited about Wikipedia's potential as a canonical "Futurepedia".

Think about articles like 2020 -- "If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect."

I hate to be the one to break it to them, but there's no way that's going to happen within Wikipedia proper. It's not verifiable. It doesn't cite authoritative sources. It's not encyclopedic. Basically, it breaks all the rules, and it'll get slapped down before it gains any steam. Wikipedia's incredible realized potential lives side by side with a lot of squandered potential.

You're not going to win this one by fighting it out in the AfD trenches -- anyway, 1head-to-head combat isn't the wiki way. Wikipedia desperately needs to be nested inside some broader, more permissive architecture.