2005: Year of the Wiki

Posted on December 31st, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

2005 will be the year of the wiki.  And not simply because Wikimania will be Europe’s hottest event next summer. Mark my words… even if Gartner’s coolness report doesn’t realize it yet.

0 comments.

Berlin scratchpad

Posted on December 30th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

In Berlin… taxes: included.  condiments: not included. 
telephone calls, wireless access: not included.  calling card
calls from many phones: not possible. 

Berlin gender inequality:  men’s haircuts: 30% the cost of women’s
cuts.   women have their own sessions at hacker conferences,
with topics such as ‘how to get more out of being a [female hacker]
than just sex’.

Berlin ice skating: set up and taken down each day in a public square; free access.

East Berlin at night : surprisingly safe, at least on the four nights I
wandered the streets.  All neon and concrete… and a lovely river
running through it. Photographs to come.

1 comment.

Eating Vesper

Posted on December 26th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

That is, the evening meal, cold sweetmeats and bread and Nutella - perhaps you know it as Brotzeit, ‘like breakfast, only in the evening’, here in the Black Forest.  Delightful… we didn’t sing Vespers beforehand, but next time I will try to remember a few suitable rousing prayers.

I tried to learn a bit of the local dialect from my hosts, but
everyone was laughing too hard when I managed a word or two.  Thomas is a perfect gentleman; I couldn’t have hoped for more from my niece’s boyfriend.

More tomorrow from Berlin…  that is, today from Berlin, after three days of fabulous conferencing. 
Ive been in Berlin a long time, in fact, thinking this had already been
posted.  However, it sat around for a few days first.  
My heart goes outto Manila’s excrutiatingly wrong-headed posting interface, for facilitating this brief lapse in postage.

1 comment.

Life, Love, and crossing over the water

Posted on December 24th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.

I’m posting this from newark airport.
I just did something totally foolish —
signed up for a $7/day wireless connection when
I have only 10 min before my flight.

I did this because I just realized something odd - a sequence of inexplicable events made me think, with a black flash, that if I were ever to get into an air accident, this would be the flight for it.

And I would hate to go without even a final word!  But thankfully my flash belonged to some alternate reality, and I managed a few extra words in regardless.  And now you all know more certainly than before what a wonderful mother I have. :-)

7 comments.

Delicious search exaltation

Posted on December 24th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.

This has nothing to do with del.icio.us, but is instead a WPsearch
update.  Kate”-” and bbc-tom combined their efforts to produce yet
another
masterpiece of wikitomfoolery : A honeyed search enhancement to make
your jaw drop and your lower lip quiver with excitement.  A smooth
match-as-you-type javascript confection
drops down a dynamically-changing list of page titles that begin with
what is being entered in the search box.  Then, once you’re done
searching, you get two lists of possible spelling corrections : a list
of common keywords similar to one of your search terms, and a list of
page titles with fuzzy substring matches against your search string.

All of this is handled outside of the database, by software parsing a
static copy of the relevant db content.  This can be updated
incrementally ever 10 minutes or so, providing fast, timely sarching
with minimal db load, which could easily be served from a separate
machine.

Delicious search exaltation …

1 comment.

WP critics deemed ‘boring’; competition for Wikinews

Posted on December 23rd, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

For those of you who can’t wait for the next Quarto to come out, here is a quick rundown of some media highlights from December:

Forbes had one of their encyclopedia editors (they manage American
Heritage these days) half-heartedly compare WP to Britannica Online :
checking Haydn, Millard Fillmore, warblers, King James II.

…Frederick
Allen, Managing Editor of American Heritage admitted, ‘it looks as if
Wikipedia’s gotten a lot better, more thorough and more
accurate.’…Even the Wikipedia’s James II of Britain article beat
Britannica in size, reach and outside references…

(For those of you keeping score at home, it is James II of “England”,
if you please.)

Meanwhile, Tim Bray sat down and wrote a delightfully thoughtful piece
on the emerging properties of  Wikipedia.

…the
proposition that the Wikipedia is a misguided waste of time is boring.
Something poorly-understood is happening here, and the observed results
are immensely better than intuition from first principles would
suggest. This is interesting; it seems obvious to me that there are
lessons to learn here, about reference publishing in particular and
knowledge husbandry in general.

And journalists continue to get heated up about collaborative journalism:

Mark Glaser wrote a passionate piece on the collaborative news org he
wants to work for, almost a community Wikiproject (see also his earlier notes on Wiki and journalism).  Then Mitch Ratcliffe spun a long editorial on Wikinews itself…

And now some local citizen journalism enterprises are starting to take shape:
from the fully-realized Baristanet, “serving Montclair, Glen Ridge, and Bloomfield, NJ”, and the entire town of Greensboro, NC…  to Pegasus News,
“launching in Dallas in late 2005, but with a cool blog up now,” which
plans to eventually expand to “every major U.S. city with a monopoly
newspaper”… to Dan Gillmor’s “jumping out of a window, and building a
parachute in midair” departure from the SJ Merc to start his own venture that enables and illustrates the kind of grassroots journalism he has been writing about.
 
 ========

Finally, a question for the style gurus: is it “Wikipedia” or “the Wikipedia”?
Someone had better start thinking about this, fast. A quick score sheet from recent pubs:

- Frederick Allen, American Heritage editor  : “Wikipedia”
- Matt Rand, /Forbes/ writer : “the Wikipedia”
- Mitch Ratcliffe, veteran journalist : “Wikipedia”
- Robert McHenry, Former /Britannica/ editor  : [unintelligible]
- Tim Bray, Encyclophile : “the Wikipedia”
- Val Souza, Express Computer columnist, India : “the Wikipedia”
- Dr. ‘Alfaso’ Gizmo, semi-anonymous journalist : [frothing, unintelligible]
- Wired Magazine, various writers : “Wikipedia”

1 comment.

Berkman Center homepage bites the dust

Posted on December 21st, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.

One of the FAQ on the Berkman site is “How do I find out about upcoming events?“.  The answer seems straightforward enough:

We invite you to visit our “Upcoming Events” box on the Berkman home page.  You may also wish to subscribe to our electronic newsletter, The Filter.

Of course the ‘upcoming events’ box contains one random selection from
the coming year and one event which has already passed, and The Filter, while it seems at some point to have been published more than once a year, is stuck on the edition from April 19, 2004.

Now as it so happens, I know there is an interesting-sounding two-day conference on Blogging, Journalism, and How We Can Trust Them Sneaky Citizen Journalists With Our Mindshare. 
And I know it takes place Jan 21-22 at the Center.  But the only
information about it anywhere online, apparently, is on the personal
travel schedule of a friend of mine. How annoying.  Perhaps I
should let the webmaster know…

Berkman Center homepage bites the dust …

1 comment.

Our James II is Bigger than their James II

Posted on December 19th, 2004 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod.

Wikipedia surpasses Britannica observes Forbes
magazine after asking American Heritage managing editor
Frederick Allen to inspect some ‘pedias. 

Even the
Wikipedia’s James II of Britain article beat Britannica in size, reach
and outside references.

Choosing between “the Wikipedia” or “Wikipedia” as the referent of
choice is a matter in on which the Wiki style mavens have yet to weigh.

Our James II is Bigger than their James II …

2 comments.

Completing the Wikarchy

Posted on December 18th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Speaking of remiss, I’ve long been remiss for not writing about Wikinews, and how it works for or against my own interests in a press corps and clippings service that make use of this hyar new-fangled Whee-Quay technology.

The current wikinews project :
1) doesn’t take itself seriously enough to center itself on a grand vision, creating something for the ages, and
2) continues to focus on individual ego and interest rather than a notion of completeness as applies to news, but
3) picks up a definite pocket of interest that was stymied by having no real outlet in other wikimedia projects.

“…news content about
every newsworthy person, place, movement, and event, covering dated
news from the past (fit into a timeline), fresh news from the present
(qualified by how well and by how many indep sources it could be
verified), and spotty news from/about the near future (qualified by the
quality of leaking sources, idenfitied with related events in the past,
and cross-referenced with [statistics from] a predictions registry)…”

Now you’re talking.

Completing the Wikarchy …

0 comments.

Wixonomy and Wikispecies

Posted on December 18th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that there is now a little Feedster-enabled wikik-taxonomy tool called Wixonomy.  It’s creator, Shimon, is sussing out how to coordinate large-scale public taxonomy creation.  Certain librarians seem awful excited about this.

Of course it reminds me of Wikispecies, the slowly-growing species taxonomy project associated with the world’s phattest encyclopedia. 
Does Wikispecies need something like Wixonomy?  Is it possible to
duplicate the same effects using something as simple as Categories in MediaWiki 1.4?

Wixonomy and Wikispecies …

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