Archive for February, 2005

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Wikinews gets a scoop, gets laid

Thursday, February 17th, 2005

Well, a scoop at least. The “SHA-1 broken” story broke on Wikinews, and then Slashdot (with just a Wikinews link) almost 12 hours before it broke in other international English-language press. Presumably the original source was in Chinese… WN also just got written up as a possible salvation for the future in BusinessWeek, which is pretty nicely laid out.

Huzzahs all around, in particular to the trio of crackers — all women, thankyouverymuch — who ‘deprecated’ the infamously hoary algorithm.

I love a world in which that can refer to something less than twenty years old!

Posted in metrics | 2 Comments »

Wikimania accepting papers

Thursday, February 17th, 2005

Wikimania is now accepting submissions of papers on a variety of subjects.

Everyone within and outside of Wikipedia are invited to suggest panel
discussions they would like to see, submit abstracts for lectures and
workshops, and submit abstracts for brief papers or posters they would
like to present. The audience will consist primarily of active
Wikimedia users from all over the world.

Topics should contribute to Wikimedia’s projects and its goals.
Original research is not needed but welcome.  Wikimania is meant
to be a social event as well as an academic conference, so be bold in
your submissions.  Suitable topics include but are not limited to:


Wiki culture

* Research into wiki culture (philosophy & sociology)

* Criticism of the efficacy of wiki collaboration and communities


Wiki projects and tools

* Succesful subprojects on your favorite Wikipedia

* Existing or proposed wiki projects, and their parallels in the non-wiki world

* Ways to enhance or integrate existing projects and their communities

* New wiki software and interfaces

* Corporate wikis,


Free culture

* Free knowledge, free licensing, and its applications

* Universal access, automatic conversion between formats, fonts, and languages

* Preservation and distribution of knowledge and cultural information


Collaboration

* Collaborative writing and research

* Collective intelligence, “excellence from mediocrity”

* Tools for better-nuanced / more immediate collaborative feedback


Multilingualism

* Multilingual interaction, related translation issues

* Integration of international perspectives; similar global projects

* Linguistic projects; uses of our multilingual corpus

* Preservation of minority languages

 
(read more…)

Posted in international | Comments Closed

Wikimedia Weekly Week

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

A glorious old proposal about a regular Wikimedia news outlet, with
colour and good humour, is ripe for development.   We already have
an almost-quarterly newsletter, and a local project news outlet on
Wikipedia. We had 5 or 6 major cross-project news stories last week. I suppose we’d better get cracking on the WWN. Suggestions for a better name, and help submitting links and article ideas (or writing for it!), will be appreciated.

Posted in international | Comments Closed

Best Children’s Book Ever?

Monday, February 14th, 2005

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best children’s book ever.  Not that one with demons and archangels and archaeopteryx hanging out in the museum post-twilight, bathing in the fountains and gathering plastic four-leaf clovers
from the astroturf.  No, I  mean the one with the astonishing
string of meaningless, mundane coincedences leading to a Really Bad Day.

Well, strange things have always happened to me, particularly ever since a fateful conversation with Sarah Ettling.  Often things so strange that I would never share them with other people
because, well, why bother them with meaningless impossibilities? 
I’m still taking flack for showing people the disturbing smiley-face biscuit that turned up under my hood the night my battery mysteriously died in the STAR market parking lot.  I should have thrown it away.

Or so I thought at the time.  I’m feeling more open towards the world these days, and towards humanity, and see only humour in their very unlikeliness; perhaps you will, too.  What unlikely things have happened to you so far this year?  (read more…)

Posted in indescribable | 3 Comments »

Building Bridges

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Schedules for Bridge-Builders events is avaialable online here (full html) and here (just a text table, modified info)

Posted in %a la mod | Comments Closed

You know what time it is…

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Hug thy neighbour!

Posted in %a la mod | Comments Closed

Ferrets and Stoats

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

I was checking up on a particular stat for this blog, and accidentally visitied “…/stoats” instead of “/stats“, and was disappointed to find nothing there.  Dave Winer, take note: the next revision of Manila should include stoat functionality.

Posted in indescribable | Comments Closed

Global card catalog

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

There are a few projects afoot which combined should make for a fine global citations database and card catalog substitute.  First, the pilot Wikicite project on the English edition of Wikipedia (see also its abstract specification and growing list of feature requests).   Then there are various partial implementations of a simple strutured-data specification called Wikidata; see for instance the similar templates for biographical data on de.wikipedia, and for news-source citations on wikinews.) 


And finally, there are projects by the LOC and modern library associations to do away with traditional card catalogs, and provide better interfaces for referencing texts.  Sadly, in direct contradiction of the Laws of NatureTM, I know least about the last set of projects, though they have been around the longest now, and have the most proponents/contributors… perhaps we can start a small discussion here about how these projects could interrelate.

Posted in metrics | Comments Closed

Googlicious Wikipedal Fun

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

Slashdot has a story about it.  The New York Times (NYT article, 2/11) wrote about it.  Blogs and IRC chans are buzzing about it.  Meta even has a page about it, one out of only 3,000.   What’s this all about?  Google has offered Wikimedia
some hosting.  People seem to think this is the first hosting
donation (it’s not), or the only such offer in the pipeline (there are
at least 3 others), or that only the few and the proud can offer
hosting at all (anyone with a small colo facility and goodwill can do
the same).

Just to clear things up a little, here is an overview of Wikimedia partners and hosts.  And a separate page where anyone can offer to host Wikimedia content.   There are already a handful of good static mirrors, a center in
Paris donating  machines and hosting (handling requests from the
UK and northern Europe), and a hosting deal being worked out with an educational group
in the Netherlands.  Google is just more exciting because they’re
so damn cool, and because they can move quickly if something is worked
out (in contrast, the Paris arrangement spent almost half a year in
limbo between the acceptance of their offer and the first transfer of
traffic to the new location).

See also presroi’s thoughts on the matter.

Posted in popular demand | Comments Closed

World-wide gathering

Thursday, February 10th, 2005

There is a meeting of the minds, cultures, and spirits this Sunday evening at 6pm in Harvard Square.  Local Wikipedians, local bloggers, and grassroots Bridge Builders brought into town for a week by a special project of Harvard’s young Center for International Development (CID).

What: Dinner and discussion, perhaps good music
Where: Smile Thai Cafe,
on Eliot St. in Harvard Square.  Check the menu listed on their
website.  Call me (6 1 7 | 529×4266) or the cafe (6 1 7 |
497-8288) to coordinate.  (I wanted to go to Veggie Planet but they don’t have enough seating)
Who :   A mix of 20-25 wikipedians, bloggers, grassroots organizers… and you!  Call / email an RSVP.
When: Sunday, Feb 13, 18:00 EST  / 23:00 UTC
Why? For extra bonus karma.

Posted in %a la mod | Comments Closed

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