The Westinghouse Time Capsules were created for 1939 & 1964 World's Fairs. Both are buried 50 feet below New York's Flushing Meadows Park, the site of both world's fairs, the 1965 capsule 10 feet north of the 1938 one.

Both are to be opened at the same time in 6939 AD, five thousand years after the first capsule was sealed. Check out the messages from Einstein et al.

The Pornocracy or Rule of the Harlots was a period in the history of the Papacy during the first half of the tenth century.

Warning: not wikipedia-related.

My band (The Afternoon Round) is playing the crossroads festival in ypsilanti this friday (2 p.m.). If you're in the area, you should come see us.

You know, sarcasm is just really helpful.

:p Or should I say, ؟

Dion McGregor (1922–1994) was a New York City-born songwriter, whose main claim to fame is that he was a voluble dreamer, or somniloquist.

Hostile media effect

Escaping the tech ghetto

More about the foundation's experiment in turning middle-aged and elderly people into wikipedians.

Even if some of us were long-time Wikipedia contributors we learned a lot about Wikipedia within the first week:

• the longer Wikipedians contribute to Wikipedia the more they forget that Wikipedia is a very complex system. Newcomers are overwhelmed by this complexity and often don't know where to start.
• Wikipedia's help pages are confusing. The printed brochure "Das kleine Wikipedia-Einmaleins" we distributed at the opening (see the picture on the right hand; click on the picture to download the PDF) was much more useful as older people prefer printed material to online material.

I think this is a good time to plug my book, How Wikipedia Works

An older generation of Wikipedians?

The foundation is starting a program to turn senior citizens into "trainers" who will be able to run their own Wikipedia workshops.

The course will last six weeks. During the first weeks the participants will learn the basics of how to edit Wikipedia articles. In a second phase the participants will collaboratively develop a concept for Wikipedia courses for senior citizens. Subsequently, the participants should be able to act as Wikipedia evangelists and motivate other people of their age to contribute to Wikipedia.

This is a great idea; it's easy to forget how big the gap is between techies and the general public (McCain doesn't know how to use a computer, for example; Peter Jennings submitted his stories on a typewriter until the day he died).

I just hope Wikipedia itself will be welcoming when the seniors actually hit the water. Has anyone tried showing Wikipedia to people over 60? How did they react?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of marine debris in the central North Pacific Ocean. Size estimates vary from an area equivalent to the state of Texas to double that of the continental United States.

Good god, people.

Okay, here's what happened: Someone tried to start a discussion about "all the good things Wikipedia has done for you. Think of all the good times you have had on Wikipedia. Share with us the best memory you have from Wikipedia. Don't be shy!"

It lasted a couple hours before it was deleted for violating the what wikipedia is not ruleset.

Honest to god, fun is what makes the encyclopedia tick. If you're trying to turn contributors into automations, you're cutting wikipedia's feet from under it.

via danny

Writing your first wikipedia article. (How-to guide.)

The oldest living organisms.

Brilliant article about how the internet changes us (ignore the silly title).

Powerset is another wikipedia-specific search engine an alternate interface for viewing and searching wikipedia (and for filtering it in rudimentary ways). Mea culpa.

Great article about Jimmy Wales in the Economist. (Wales co-founded Wikipedia.)

“I think that reality exists and that it’s knowable,” he says, adding that Wikipedia aims not for truth with a capital T but for consensus. “You go meta,” he says, meaning “beyond” the disputes and to the underlying facts. For instance, when deciding how to describe abortion, “I may not agree that it’s a sin, but I can certainly agree that the pope thinks it’s a sin.” Despite their disagreements, people on both sides of a debate can in many cases reach a consensus on the nature of their dispute, at least. Through this process, says Mr Wales, Wikipedia articles eventually reach a fairly steady state called the “neutral point of view”, or NPOV.

“Wikipedia resolves the postmodern dilemma of truth by ultimately relying on process,” says Gene Koo of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. “Its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed—Foucault taught us that this is impossible—but simply visible.” To which Mr Wales responds, more simply, that NPOV is a way of saying: “Thanks, but, um, please let’s get back to work.”

NYT: Obama's Wiki Style

We wrote the book on Wikipedia

How Wikipedia Works is being published in August! My co-authors are:

• A dashing librarian named Phoebe Ayers.
• A mysterious mathematician and Go champion who calls himself Charles Matthews.

And me? I'm a technical writer & demagogue and also good with Illustrator.



Phoebe has a better understanding of wikipedia's nuts and bolts than anyone, Charles has knowledge of the broad forces inside and outside the project, and I have the ability to work Acoustic Kitty into any screenshot. Between us, we've been with Wikipedia for 47 years and made over five hundred million edits.

I'll be posting information all summer.

But if you pre-order it, you will not only be

1. receiving an utterly awesome and informative book in the mail — a physical book that you can
   • hold in your two hands,
   • take away from the monitor,
   • read in the bath,
   • tuck into your backpack to impress cute foreign exchange students, but! you will also!...
2. be supporting Wikipedia Blog, and
3. making me less broke.

Basically, I'm saying you should buy the book or I will shoot this puppy:



Cheers,

Ben


P.S. I won't actually shoot the puppy.

See also. Why are so many monasteries built on cliffs?

Wikipedia API for ruby. I stupidly learned ruby instead of python, so this might come in handy.