sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Hypergene writes about WikiNews,
the possibilities of the new medium, and all the people discovering
wikis these days.  Their thoughts on local news would be suitable
for disussion on WikiNews itself, but perhaps they will come up with
something sexy on their own, a meme for small communities.

It looks like all we can do is log in and create posts. I don’t see editorial links on older posts and most of the editors menu is missing. I’ll bet I can’t knock this post live. Contributing editors have the power to assign categories, so perhaps you should let us know what they mean…

Choose the category that you think is most appropriate.  Just don’t use the awful “Mr. Ed” category which I can’t find a way to expunge.  +sj

Apparently, contributing editors can’t edit their own posts, either, but content editors can. As for bylines… all contributing editors seem to have the same byline, so please add your byline by hand at the end of your posts.  –j + sj

This business of Manila not storing the history of posts is a real shame… a template bug just blanked a pair of posts.   And my local text editor doesn’t store temporary revisions, so I lost a segment of writing last night in a crash.  What is it about tracking revisions of text — an amazingl cheap operation these days – that is so difficult? 

What I wanted to say about texts on CD is that the German Wikipedia CD — shorter, cleaner, and well-cut — has seen 100k downloads on top of its physical distribution to 30k people, and the CD image has had many times as many downloads.  Lovely.  And, contrary to popular belief, it works on both Windows and Macs.

The company (Directmedia) that helped bring this about also publishes titles like “The Great German Classics” on CD.  A good decade into the Gutenberg Project, why are these publishing houses so unknown?  Why can’t I rattle off the name of a major publisher of Classic Literature CDs in English, the way I can say “Addison-Wesley, Penguin, O’Reilly, Dover, Springer-Verlag“? 

I missed the live panel with HIV-positive children yesterday, but everyone is stll discussing retroviruses (when did “virus” take on the generic plural?). David Baltimore just made a conversational appearance, along with purified viral stocks. This state is passing lovely, and somehow I am dancing between predicted rainclouds; sunny, fogless, and clear today, as twas in SF all weekend.

The French paper /Le Monde/ is now using Wikipedia as a “see also”
reference for various articles in its online version (see the
right-hand column, under “sur le net”).

For instance, the following articles link to [[Ophiuchus
(constellation)]], [[Surr

A new newsletter about the Wikimedia Foundation is out. It has all kinds of statistics about the projects, including some of the newest ones that are just starting out, and a long interview with Ward Cunningham about the evolution of the wiki concept. Sweet!

Going on about the encyclopedia that slashdot built (oh wait, that’s E2, not WP), /. produces a few gems.

On the proliferation of Wikipedia clones making Google searches useless:

And for this you blame wikipedia? That’s like blaming Led Zeppelin for the existence of Motley Crue and hair metal.

This looks like the month of wiki in the media.

In addition to the recent “Britannica v. Wikipedia” debates raging around the Net these days (btw, look for my letter to the editor in tomorrow’s Washington Post on the subject, responding to their article from a couple weeks back), now there are weekly posts in the german press about www.wikipedia.de and its projects.

Even the recent “article contest” on the german site, one more project in a wiki of major ones, has received its own blurb on the news site www.heise.de.  We have yet to get to the CD release at the end of the month, which will distribute the german encyclopedia to 40,000 households (along with a bevy of other excellent free content).

And tomorrow… well, tomorrow should give a whole new meaning to the term “encyclopedic” in the media.

So what *is* the massive public demand that has lead to this glorious pollution of randomly-named groups serving as email lists for disordered, sporadic spam? It has been preying on my mind…

A lot of them seem completely harmless; typical list-spam re: getting rich, what to do with one’s money once rich; staying healthy; finding good cheap porn. And yet the list of members is all autogenerated and meaningless; the group descriptions likewise — what kind of network is this, and what does Yahoo think about it all?

250 same-sex marriage license were handed out b/t midnight and 1am this morning at Cambridge City Hall, after an afternoon-long party in front of the city hall. Everyone looks beautiful when they beam! And there were a lot of beaming faces there. I walked back home just as a line of policemen were walking back to the Central Sq station; someone was taking a photo of the passing line, and her friend started singing the “one of these things is not like the others…” theme song.

All I have to say is, if I were getting on in years, there could hardly be a better old age home than the one across the street from that city hall. Those gentlemen and women have front row seats to everything, and they seem awfully happy.