sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Wikipedia is among the 5 most visited reference sites, after reference.com and two map sites, according to everyone’s favorite inconsistent public eyeball yardstick (inconsistency: WP shows up as both 5th and 6th;  www beats out en: by a hair).  At least now it is linked from the main Reference page.

The O’Reilly Network’s Scott Hacker wrote a piece on
wiki support yesterday,  Where’s the Movable Type of the Wiki World?,
published with some eloquent commentary by visitors at the end.

Hacker suggests the Wiki world needs its own elegant, soup-to-nuts
wikiproject, comparing the chaos of wiki communities and documentation
to that of the blogging world pre-Movable Type.  He shopped around
for a wiki to use for an educational project (which was itself inspired
by WikiPedia, retro camel caps and all), and finally settled on
MediaWiki.  Unfortunately, its “scattered and obtuse”
documentation,  “stupidly difficult” customizations, and lack of
compact, neatly packaged documentation for end-users, left him
cold. 

U.Penn student Swarat Chaudhury, writing for India’s venerable
paper The
Statesman, is a bit more optimistic:

Alright, not a million dollars, but ”’1,000,000”’ articles.
That’s the milestone the collected Wikipedia language projects — all 105 of them — passed this weekend. Of course there are better predictors of quality and utility, but ”man”, that’s a lot of volunteer-effort, fully searchable, advert-free, widely-translated text.

They’re having a fundraising drive this week; please contribute to it if you can. Also, don’t miss the sexy newsletter going up this week… if you can find it.

Back in August, a now-infamous Syracuse Post-Standard article about Wikipedia centered on quotes from a local high-school librarian, one Ms. Stagnitta, who seemed to be thoroughly against the idea of Wikipedia as a reference source. A few days after the SPS article came out, some Wikipedians forwarded her a miffed response they had sent to the paper, to which she replied quickly (and with some chagrin).

It turns out she has no bone to pick with Wikipedia at all. Who knows, she may even like the site.

“I’ll probably regret saying this… this is what got me in trouble in
the first place, but… you may quote me,” she said, and I realized today while talking to a friend that her response hasn’t been quoted nearly enough. An excerpt:

I just re-read what I originally sent to Al Fasoldt in the recent Post-Standard column. I’m afraid I do have egg all over my face… The message was NOT… that Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. The message was that the best thing about the web (the sharing of information and ideas) can also make it harder for the average high school student to make a judgement call when checking the authority of a source used for research. I’m sorry if this generated controversy over the authority of the site, this is NOT what was intended. It just illustrates the problem.

So it does.

Five minutes a day to summarize journals, periodicals and feeds that you read. You don’t have to summarize everything, just start with one page or one day of a feed and note how far you get, so the next person can pick up where you left off.

For starters, list what you read on this page.
If there are things you’d *love* to read, but just don’t have time to,
add them too. After all, that’s what this is all about.

Of course, some of you are already doing this on your blogs… in which case, please CC-by-attrib or GFDL a relevant feed of your blog, and it will be automatically added to the collection.

This is what I’m talking about.