The Longest Now

I was checking up on a particular stat for this blog, and accidentally visitied “…/stoats” instead of “/stats“, and was disappointed to find nothing there.  Dave Winer, take note: the next revision of Manila should include stoat functionality.

There are a few projects afoot which combined should make for a fine global citations database and card catalog substitute.  First, the pilot Wikicite project on the English edition of Wikipedia (see also its abstract specification and growing list of feature requests).   Then there are various partial implementations of a simple strutured-data specification called Wikidata; see for instance the similar templates for biographical data on de.wikipedia, and for news-source citations on wikinews.) 

And finally, there are projects by the LOC and modern library associations to do away with traditional card catalogs, and provide better interfaces for referencing texts.  Sadly, in direct contradiction of the Laws of NatureTM, I know least about the last set of projects, though they have been around the longest now, and have the most proponents/contributors… perhaps we can start a small discussion here about how these projects could interrelate.

Slashdot has a story about it.  The New York Times (NYT article, 2/11) wrote about it.  Blogs and IRC chans are buzzing about it.  Meta even has a page about it, one out of only 3,000.   What’s this all about?  Google has offered Wikimedia
some hosting.  People seem to think this is the first hosting
donation (it’s not), or the only such offer in the pipeline (there are
at least 3 others), or that only the few and the proud can offer
hosting at all (anyone with a small colo facility and goodwill can do
the same).

Just to clear things up a little, here is an overview of Wikimedia partners and hosts.  And a separate page where anyone can offer to host Wikimedia content.   There are already a handful of good static mirrors, a center in
Paris donating  machines and hosting (handling requests from the
UK and northern Europe), and a hosting deal being worked out with an educational group
in the Netherlands.  Google is just more exciting because they’re
so damn cool, and because they can move quickly if something is worked
out (in contrast, the Paris arrangement spent almost half a year in
limbo between the acceptance of their offer and the first transfer of
traffic to the new location).

See also presroi’s thoughts on the matter.