You are looking at posts that were written in the month of September in the year 2004.
Posted on September 18th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.
Perhaps I should say, “published about WP in the WP”.
The Washington Post led their Business section ten days ago with an article about “Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way“… despite the placid title, they couldn’t resist letting Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of the Britannica, get in a dig at Wikipedia’s clearly-labelled Disclaimer.
Of course Britannica, like every other large information site online, has a long page full of the many facets of its terms of use… including a disclaimer. And theirs is in ALL CAPS. Wikipedians had been joking about this for weeks, since the first jibe about our disclaimer came out. But this was in such a prominent article, it demanded a response… which the Post was nice enough to publish in today’s Saturday paper:
…I would like to bring to Mr. Hoiberg’s attention the disclaimer of warranties tucked away in Britannica Online’s terms of use. It reads in part, in all capital letters:
“ALL INFORMATION . . . INCLUDED IN OR ACCESSIBLE FROM THIS SITE [IS] PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. . . . YOUR USE OF BRITANNICA.COM IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.” Wikipedia takes great pride in — and as much responsibility for it as is legally tenable — all of its content. Online, Britannica appears to do the same.
I’m not surprised they clipped out the “harsher and less visible” that had been modifying “disclaimer” (the WP editors have a fine grasp of NPOV), but I don’t know what to make of their rearrangement of the last paragraph… the way it was originally written was no longer, but grammatically correct. And I shouldn’t have tried so hard to verify that Hoiberg was a “Dr.”, since they dropped the title anyway. Someday I’ll figure out how to use titles in print, hopefully before I have to start writing about honoured Brits.
Posted on September 18th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
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.
Posted on September 7th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Once more, I tried to use frassle today. I was hoping to exploit some of its features, but instead found myself too frustrated to continue until I had had some tea. Updates once I’ve settled down a little.
Okay, so I just spent an hour on Frassle, seeing how it works. And I’m still frustrated, and I got only two useful categories out of my browsing. But I think I know how it works… The features that often assuage my frustration on other sites, the help pages and the search function, don’t work the way… one might expect.
The main difficulty I have is that the site doesn’t tell you what you can do with it. You are immediately presented with three big link-tabs at the top of the screen, for an aggregator, a “publisher“, and a “weblog“. The publisher looked interesting, but why would I use that and not my weblog? After I got my first inexplicable red-inked error (on my second submission), I stopped trying to publish, and stuck to blogging.
The second striking problem is that many features of the site and interface are subtlely dependent on your context — whose writings you’re looking at, whether they are being published or blogged, and whether they are already categorized by you in your aggregator or not.
Finally, many tasks are not readily reversible. Things can be added from interfaces that disallow deletion. Things can be moved or renamed, sometimes magically, from one interface but not from another which looks almost identical. In one particular case, unsubscribing a feed from a category could only be done by clicking on the category title and then clicking on the word “subscribed” in the resulting page… this alone took me a few minutes to figure out.
In any case, the whole categorization interface (and categorization + the long arm of cross-category matching are frassle’s calling card) is painful to use and only sporadically intuitive. Flashier now than the last time I visited, but still painful. And while it occasionally adds helpful mouseover text (which compensates for vague elements in the interface), that too is sporadic.
On the bright side, there seem to be a few new people streaming in to test it out (and hey, I went back :), so I have some hope that alpha 17 will start to look really neat. I figure I should check back around Hallowe’en.
2005.