You are looking at posts that were written in the month of October in the year 2004.
Posted on October 25th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: fly-by-wire.
A current events and a related “In the News” section have existed on Wikipedia for a long time. They are among the more popular sections of the site, but there is some controversy about what kind of news notes are appropriate for the encyclopedia. Is a news update every day okay for a major story? Clearly newsflashes should also update the relevant article. How about local news? Is an event which attracts attention today but won’t be encyclopedic tomorrow (predictions about where a hurricane will hit ground, rumours of a big scandal which may be substanceless) worth its own paragraph? Its own article?
Right now, the only place for newsblurbs is in a long list on the current events page, which is later archived by month. A new Wikimedia project proposes to change all of that : Wikinews, a year or more in the conception (and still uncertain of the breadth of its mission), is attracting active discussion again, and may get its own domain this month. It aims to be a place to develop both news summaries and the occasional original report. This last bit sticks in the old craw; questions of neutralization of extreme points of view and hysteria, categorization, archiving, verification, and finalization of verified reports remain to be addressed later… but clearly much of the excitement over the project stems from the lure of this small proportion of its content.
Posted on October 24th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Talk to me, people. I want to know what you think about all of this.
Posted on October 24th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Blog-Wiki morphology probed by MSNBC.
Reading World Books as a kid can give you great ideas, or so goes the investigative thread of the Newsweek staff who wrote a quick column on Wikipedia, topping it with the greatest image of Jimmy Wales’s floating head yet snapped. Of course they refer to the site occasionally as “wikipedia.com”, and can’t quite figure out how it all fits together, but they are enthusiastic. And that counts for a lot.
Posted on October 23rd, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
But how much clout does the WIPO have? They are interested in open source development, and have been sponsoring many related conferences, issuing statements &c for a few years now. Is this really a change of heart for them? What motivates the people who set down these regulations?
More importantly, how can one translate the great societal benefits of a creative Commons into short-term gain for corporations, governments, or individual politicians? The benefits of open development of ideas and innovation are so great that it is no loss to give up much of it to friction.
Posted on October 22nd, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
A new content contest is available for those of you eager to hone your non-fiction writing skills. Check out the list of suggested topics and join in the fun!
Posted on October 15th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Now you can find out how far removed two Wikipedia articles are from one another… more or less. Give this script two article titles and let it rip.
Of course it needs some tweaking, removing the easy links b/t articles, such as years and days (which get linked often, in a quirk of WP style), but it’s ”’wicked fun”’ to use. Sample results:
Barry Bonds →American football →Basketball →January 20 →1970s →Barry Manilow
Cheers →Alcoholism →Clich
Posted on October 9th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Wordpress, by mediawiki user Matt, seems like a nice new free option for blogging software. I haven’t looked at it much, or at blosxom recently; but should do. What a britishism!
There’s already a WP-linking patch for wordpress…
Posted on October 9th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Google ads are a horror and a menace. Why can’t they allow people to choose only “educational” or “environmental” or “oil-related” ads? What if you don’t want your competitor’s ads showing up on your site? You should be able to display links that are useful to both readers and site-owners, while showing discretion and attentiveness to the purpose of a given page. Lazy ad-matching is alright for the 90% of people who don’t care, but the 10% have a lot of devoted fans… for a reason. Enough time has passed since this idea broke out of its gates; it should be suitable for polite company by now.
Posted on October 9th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Angela Beesley’s lovely new blog, WikiSearch, is on the short list of must-read wikiphile blogs. Especially if you want a centralized search feature. Maybe I’ll make a little list of them in the sidebar soon, but for now you can see her take on the recent german WP content review. (A brief effort: Andrew Lih (et. al.), Jimmy Wales (free knowledge, culture, & software), wordpress (plugin), M.Sch.)
Meanwhile, c’t is planning to release video of their content review — what, do we get to see the experts making jokes in the reading room, being blindfolded while someone reads them the sample text, laughing at poor entries? life-size puppets representing the contenders sparring for the title? — with the regular TV-magazine version of their print mag. Yow! Keep your eyes peeled to that link next week.
Posted on October 9th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
New search engines abound this month. Clusty, from vivisimo, has a ”’Wikipedia”’ tab that only searches the web’s mutant encyclopedia. They also have a wicked 40’s retro pattern going… Meanwhile, Clush, proving that good things come in convergent-evo clusters, also provides some neatly-clustered search results. In particular, the title above links to a great search for ‘sites with content that might be compatible with/contributed to the w’s m. e.‘
Google of course is responding by taking these efforts very seriously, and working hard not to fall off the magic ball of public respect. Most search engines have disappeared, as a a report on the subject from one of Google’s lead developers notes. Let’s hope these new efforts at least enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame.