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!
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.
Maps > Encyclopedias > Reunion Sites …
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:
Despite flaws, users hope for dominance of Wiktionary, Mediawiki …
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.
Parenthetical Summarizations …
This is what I’m talking about.
Jessica sez there’s buzz in various circles about a librarianesque content-related topic, as distinct from topics related to content that is educatoresque, information manageresque, etc.
Discussion Leader: Baumgart?; location: Harvard campus somewhere; audience: people, librarians and otheresque, interested in developments in librarianship via blogging in the present decade of fast-paced technological diversification.
of why WP is fantastic. This article on Marc Dutroux is better than any single report or source you can find online or, I presume, in any newspaper. It is comparable to an excellent magazine feature, save that it lacks primary interviews/research [a flaw by design?] and that if there were other significant opinions or points of view that contradicted the main thrust of these first few authors, those opinions would stand some chance of emerging as well and finding a place in the WP article.
I feel a subtle pressure change as we drop below a certain threshhold for frictional costs of scaled, detailed transparency. .
This press release was collaboratively drafted on the Wikimedia Foundation’s wiki (meta.wikipedia.org – page history). Before its release it was edited 259 times by 37 different volunteer authors, and drafted in 18 different languages. The text of this press release is placed into the public domain.
A shift in the quality of transparency …
You know you wanted to read more about different theories of wealth and value, ‘subsistence techniques‘, and the like. A shame that these are so ignored by serious philosophy today. An embarrassment that some people consider such ideas in opposition to capitalism.
Speaking of cultures with differential notions of value, here’s a lovely chart of delegates representing aggregate valuations of some big party coming up, or already going on…
Anthropological theories of value …
An amazing recounting of vote recounting, by danny from blogforamerica. Waiting for his permission to keep this long excerpt up… wish I could link deeply into a list-of-comments. And more on the odd counting, reporting, and “99%”ing of state delegates.
Primary Vote Counting in Seattle …
Getting the news via wikipedia is so rewarding. I get a paragraph about the recent ricin scares at the white house — both of them — and a page about ricin itself. Excellent proportions.
News as it should be [NAISB]: Ricin …
So what’s the new news? Why is it so hard to find steady updates on stories like this? Should I really have to visit either a lawyer-geek’s site or a FCC-watch site to track the progress of related bills and proposals?
New FCC Progress: thanks, Powell. …
…everything seems ridiculous. The problems of “Denial of Service” and “spoofing” have been around since long before there was human-generated electricity… now it’s just cheap and easy to carry one out from across a country.
What prompted this commentary is SCO’s new letter claiming open-source software is a threat to national security. So: who’s really behind their current program? Do they have an arrangement with MS? Why is this broad extension of their initial lawsuit a profitable foray for them? [It would seem much more profitable for a larger company with more to gain — MSFT, a thousand times larger than SCO, seems like a more promising suitor]
And: if people start publishing sincere meaningless letters, and research papers [prompted, say, by business interests, or for personal fame], and books [propaganda, private vendetta, political or financial gain, sincere delusion], and financial reports, historical documents, resumes, instruction manuals, etc — how can the world react in such a way as to efficiently cull truth from fiction? In which areas of writing/thought is it possible to perform such a separation?
Presumably, in the presence of a quick cheap metric, one could enact spot checks combined with stiff punishments to probabilistically suppress misleading communications. Else? How to leverage distributed community efforts, accounting for 2d- and higher-order errors? This seems to be a significant problem of universal inliquidity.
When people abuse communication channels… …
Gough finished his 7-month naked trek across England on Friday. He refused to don clothes even as winter came on and he neared the northern extent of his journey. He was arrested on many occasions, only proving his point that the natural Body had a major image problem to overcome in England. What a hero! Also high on my list for the year.
Everyone loves to ignore the delegate count in favor of the ranking of candidates in each state by popular vote… I find the delegate system [and its disappearance from the public mind — how many people do you know who understand how delegates are selected, cast votes, interact with their Party?] fascinating. This article keeps track of the running delegate count for all candidates…