sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Hopefully, whoever they are, they would appreciate the role that their suffering naturally plays in the grand scheme of things.  And would they have all the good songs?

Perhaps I should say, “published about WP in the WP”.
The Washington Post led their Business section ten days ago with an article about “Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way“… despite the placid title, they couldn’t resist letting Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of the Britannica, get in a dig at Wikipedia’s clearly-labelled Disclaimer.

Of course Britannica, like every other large information site online, has a long page full of the many facets of its terms of use… including a disclaimer. And theirs is in ALL CAPS. Wikipedians had been joking about this for weeks, since the first jibe about our disclaimer came out. But this was in such a prominent article, it demanded a response… which the Post was nice enough to publish in today’s Saturday paper:

…I would like to bring to Mr. Hoiberg’s attention the disclaimer of warranties tucked away in Britannica Online’s terms of use. It reads in part, in all capital letters:

“ALL INFORMATION . . . INCLUDED IN OR ACCESSIBLE FROM THIS SITE [IS] PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. . . . YOUR USE OF BRITANNICA.COM IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.” Wikipedia takes great pride in — and as much responsibility for it as is legally tenable — all of its content. Online, Britannica appears to do the same.

I’m not surprised they clipped out the “harsher and less visible” that had been modifying “disclaimer” (the WP editors have a fine grasp of NPOV), but I don’t know what to make of their rearrangement of the last paragraph… the way it was originally written was no longer, but grammatically correct. And I shouldn’t have tried so hard to verify that Hoiberg was a “Dr.”, since they dropped the title anyway. Someday I’ll figure out how to use titles in print, hopefully before I have to start writing about honoured Brits.

Homestarrunner meets They Might Be Giants. Holy moneybags, Batman!

And speaking of Flash, what’s up with this presidential cartoon anyhow? They project 30TB of downloads this month… ”nice”.

Well, my infatuation is only growing stronger, but I think I’ll go back to posting about communication and general dissemination of ideas and hold off on the wikilinks for a while.  First, however, I want to share one of the recent results of the Wikibooks project:  A colorful, neatly laid-out German primer for English-speakers, with audio files and external references (to websites and texts), broken into three levels of advancement.  In all, this is probably the equivalent of a full year of university German; I suppose that means that in print the text(s) would run you some $60. 

This trio of texts is complete now, though still undergoing quiet improvements; the project to develop this book was begun six months ago.  Of course many of the people who contributed had been gatharing their own private notes and images for years prior to that, but this is how life goes — 99% of all usefully-collated information gets packed up in a box and eventually recycled… as tree pulp, not as information.  A non-rival award of two oofm to those who reuse such order instead.

Coming soon to a Main Page near you:  the most commonly-observed photonic crystalline lattice, in living color.