The Longest Now

The Wiki World is indeed Wonderful. The talk should be called, “Sam’s Most Excellent Presentation”. Many talks are good on technics, but lean on the “… and Society” part. Not so here. For example, Sam observed that in Wikipedia, often the apparent free-for-all evolves fairly quickly to a dialectic between very knowledgeable people about very subtle points.

He showed us a hack in beta that automatically inserts links to Wikipedia in arbitrary source text. I initially thought this the greatest thing since sliced bread. I later remembered that I am on a low carb diet. Also, such a tool might encourage people to link to stuff without reading what they are linking to. This has happened for eons in the carbon-cellulose world. One of the reasons it took me 10 years to get my PhD is that I insisted on reading all the things in my bibliography. [Hard to tell how this compares to the drugs and rock and roll though.] It was only when I was almost done that a postdoc pointed out how terribly silly I was.

How ’bout a tool that opens the proposed links to Wikipedia in Mozilla tabs and has “link to it” and “next candidate” choices on the mouse right menu?

Finally, congratulations on being posted to post. I’ll scroll back.

HARVARD! Not just a job! An adventure!

-r

Hmm. Don’t see how to edit a comment.

Can you embed html?

Or should i say
will Manilla interpret it for me?

The Wiki World is indeed Wonderful. The talk should be called, “Sam’s Most Excellent Presentation”. Many talks are good on technics, but lean on the “… and Society” part. Not so here. For example, Sam observed that in Wikipedia, often the apparent free-for-all evolves fairly quickly to a dialectic between very knowledgeable people about very subtle points.

He showed us a hack in beta that automatically inserts links to Wikipedia in arbitrary source text. I initially thought this the greatest thing since sliced bread. I later remembered that I am on a low carb diet. Also, such a tool might encourage people to link to stuff without reading what they are linking to.

This has happened for eons in the carbon-cellulose world. One of the reasons it took me 10 years to get my PhD is that I insisted on reading all the things in my bibliography. [Hard to tell how this compares to the drugs and rock and roll though.] It was only when I was almost done that a postdoc pointed out how terribly silly I was. How ’bout a tool that opens the proposed links to Wikipedia in Mozilla tabs and has “link to it” and “next candidate” choices on the mouse right menu?

Finally, congratulations on being posted to post. I’ll scroll back. HARVARD! Not just a job! An adventure!