sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Day 1 of the Wikimania was a definite success.  Everyone arrived
and found their way to the hostel (and, in Achal’s case, the hotel)
without incident; the hackers self-assembled to a midday start, and in
the process of discussing the first day’s topic, hacked out a first draft of a metadata solution.

After the day’s talks, and after what seemed like a fine dorm-style
meal, there were many good, quiet discussions and a viewing of Pi. Eugene and Sven and I talked about the active disinterest in HtmlArea
by Wiki programmers, including many of our friends.  Without my
mentioning my interview with Ward Cunningham, Eugene commented that
Ward probably wouldn’t feel strongly about it. 
   
When I pointed out that, in fact, Ward had twice listed “lack of WYSIWYG
editors”  as the greatest remaining barrier to the general public
using wikis, Eugene was surprised, and commented that nobody had blogged
about it.  Which was true!  Mea maxima culpa.

So, I’m going to blog about it now; better late than never. 
      

Jeff Young and Outgoing‘s Thom Hickey are working on developing a
Metawiki to hold structured metadata along with each record.

Talis advisor Paul Miller (of Common Information Environment fame) comments:

It would be interesting – in the spirit of openness and cooperation – to understand any relationships between the [Silkworm] Directory and OCLC’s MetaWiki.

Contrast this with recent ideas about a WikiCite project for annotating all references that might be used in books or encyclopedia articles, and you can see a lovely tool just waiting to emerge.

The Wikimedians don’t care about the differences between the Silkworm Directory and the Metawiki and Wikidata; they just want to get down to creating annotations as soon as possible. People can argue over what format they should be in and how they should be propoagated later…

With bird song accompaniment, Jimmy Wales focused on international, multi-lingual Wikipedia efforts. An IRC transcript is available.

Jimmy Wales gabve a presentation for the whole of Jonathan Zittrain’s penultimate class today. An IRC transcript is available. There was also an audiostream, which will probably be archived; links as they turn up.

In the past few days: a Big Dig source pretends new report is positive; and a Harvard divestment from PetroChina.

The Weinberger thoughtfully transcribed what sounds like a cheerful, fast-paced panel on metadata. What I like best about the session is that most people got hung up on the terms and implementations currently being used, and didn’t get down to any kind of serious discussion of where metadata comes from and how to allow and support multiple overlapping schemas.

Instead there were brief discussions about empirics: why people have done things, where there is consensus and where everyone does their own thing. I don’t think they even managed to touch on the issue of how often people don’t metadatalize things ideally according their own preferences. The fact that everyone is different doesn’t mean that they don’t regularly make ‘typos’ (or whatever the equivalent is when you’re trying to annotate, contextualize, metadatify, classify… there must be a word for this in librarianship).

For my part, now that the bar for linguistic acrobatics is being set by the growing abusonomy of modern almostl33t-speek, I will try to help people overcome their %@&!sonomy and “prototag” fixations by insisting on referring to all such entities as “metadata,” or some verbal fauximile thereof.

Technometadata: *nomy |
etech | joho[ho]

Derek Ramsey, Daniel Mayer, Bryan Derksen, Seth Ilys, Charles Matthews, and Stacey Greenstein
were all featured in today’s Wired News article on Wikipedia, as six of
the most prolific and active [English] contributors.  Still no
thoughts on the rest of the world, nor really a recognition that it
exists.  Charming profiles, though.

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!

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.

Now you can sign into my blog as a guest editor, and create your own posts. Sign in like so:

email:  guest  [@t]  googlish  d|o|t  com
pwd:    guest

Now you should be able to create news items (though they won’t immediately be live; bear with me here).  Sforza!