March, 2006
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Wikipedia temp-blocked in Pakistan?
Posted on March 31st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.
Wikipedia was reportedly temporarily blocked by three ISPs in Pakistan today. I don’t quite understand what this court order is suporting such actions, or why they might have reversed the block so quickly (it’s unblocked now); and hope for a more detailed confirmation from someone in the know.
China’s still blocking WP. Someone claimed that Burma is as well; is this so? And has Iran ever blocked it? Sadly, I don’t know the answer. This last part should be fixed.
Wikicities II
Posted on March 28th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
The Company Formerly Known As Wikicities, the world’s largest provider of MediaWiki hosting (and employer of an increasing number of my friends), this month closed a $4M round of series A funding from Omidyar and Bessemer Ventures (whence new board member Jeremy Levine) and a few lucky individuals (including one-name stealth disco star and serial board member Joi). Congratulations all around.
Finding times when all board members are on terra firma at the same
time may be difficult… but with modern technology, also increasingly
unnecessary. (I look forward to a photoset from inside Wikia Force One.)
The company is now known as Wikia (sometimes
“wikia.com”), a name which you may recall fromits former life, adorning
a related search engine portal. It continues to host the world’s drollest wiki, and will hopefully be yet another channel for MediaWiki development, so that all those fine programmers still sitting on the fence about which wiki platform to use with can make up their minds with light heart and easy conscience.
Perhaps we need a live ticker…”MediaWiki. Powering 3.00001542% of the world’s public web pages.”
Anyway,
Wikia has been getting better this past year. Unlike every other online community aggregator I’ve seen to
date, they really understand the need for free licensing, the
importance of linking projects together and avoiding redundancy, and
the utility of guiding communities towards producing meaningful lasting content, not just short-term attention sinks. (I used to direct people at times to pbwiki and
other hosts, but I have little patience for any ‘wiki’ whose default
state is not world-editable. For crying out loud… why should every
site need a ‘wiki password’ you must know to edit it? I’ve stopped
counting the number of pbwikis I’ve been foiled from editing, and I’ve
stopped telling people about the site. Sorry, David! :-/ )
Hao Wu imprisoned : HEY!
Posted on March 28th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Even the best and the most harmless can be trapped in China for being too curious.
“>
Hao Wu (å?´çš“) technologist, documentarist, global blogger
– eloquent and talented, recently devoted to documenting life in
China. After finishing his first whirlwind piece, Beijing or Bust, Hao was working on a second documentary in Beijing when he was detained ‘temporarily’; and then slooowly — it only hurts when it breaks the skin — held indefinitely, without charge or timeline.
This could be any of a dozen of my friends, returning to their respective home countries and turning to peaceful documenting and reporting… only to discover too late that they had crossed the wrong political line. I hope the Chinese government will release Hao Wu’s immediately; and that he is able to return to a normal life.
Wikicities + Joi + JLevine = Wikia, Mark II
Posted on March 28th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
The Company Formerly Known As Wikicities, the world’s largest provider of MediaWiki hosting (and employer of an increasing number of my friends), this month closed a $4M round of series A funding from Omidyar and Bessemer Ventures (whence new board member Jeremy Levine) and a few lucky individuals (including one-name stealth disco star and serial board member Joi). Congratulations all around.
Finding times when all board members are on terra firma at the same
time may be difficult… but with modern technology, also increasingly
unnecessary. (I look forward to a photoset from inside Wikia Force One.)
The company is now known as Wikia (sometimes “wikia.com”), a name which you may recall fromits former life, adorning a related search engine portal. It continues to host the world’s drollest wiki, and will hopefully be yet another channel for MediaWiki development, so that all those fine programmers still sitting on the fence about which wiki platform to use with can make up their minds with light heart and easy conscience. Perhaps we need a live ticker…
Anyway, Wikia has only been getting better this past year. If you’ve had a burning idea you want to turn into a wiki, think about hosting with them. Unlike every other online community aggregator I’ve seen to date, they really understand the need for free licensing, the importance of linking projects together and avoiding redundancy, and the utility of guiding communities towards producing meaningful lasting bodies of content, not just short-term attention sinks. (I used to direct people at times to pbwiki and other hosts, but I have little patience for any ‘wiki’ whose default state is not world-editable. For crying out loud… why should every site need a ‘wiki password’ you must know to edit it? I’ve stopped counting the number of pbwikis I’ve been foiled from editing, and I’ve stopped telling people about the site. Sorry, David! :-/ )
“Fatally Flawed” — Internal Britannica Review Tackles Nature Methods
Posted on March 23rd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Below is a letter that Encyclopedia Britannica sent out today to some of its customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. A more detailed review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com; you can also see an HTML version of the review here (thanks to Ben Yates).
that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopædia Britannica
with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of
knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject.
Wikipedia had recently received attention for its alleged inaccuracies, but
Nature’s article claimed that Britannica’s science coverage was only
slightly more accurate than Wikipedia’s.
Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a
finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Perhaps you even saw the story
yourself. It’s been reported around the world.
Those reports were wrong, however, because Nature’s research was invalid. As
our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research
in depth, almost everything about the Nature’s investigation was wrong and
misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not
inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not
even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and
its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.
Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica’s closest
colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an
explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study.
Almost everything Nature did showed carelessness and indifference to basic
research standards. Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included
the following:
* Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several
of the “articles” Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of,
or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from
more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica’s coverage of
certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors
never created, approved or even saw.
* Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have
found dozens of inaccuracies in Britannica that didn’t exist.
* Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were
not even in the encyclopedia.
* Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to
Britannica based on statements from its reviewers that were themselves
inaccurate and which Nature’s editors failed to verify.
* Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature’s own
figures, (which grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in
Britannica) Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the
headline of the journal’s report concealed this fact and implied something
very different.
Britannica also made repeated attempts to obtain from Nature the original
data on which the study’s conclusions were based. We invited Nature’s
editors and management to meet with us to discuss our analysis, but they
declined.
The Nature study was thoroughly wrong and represented an unfair affront to
Britannica’s reputation.
Britannica practices the kind of sound scholarship and rigorous editorial
work that few organizations even attempt. This is vital in the age of the
Internet, when there is so much inappropriate material available. Today,
having sources like Britannica is more important than ever, with content
that is reliable, tailored to the age of the user, correlated to curriculum,
and safe for everyone.
Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research,
it’s now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and
retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so.
Nature responded with a polite but firm declination.
Welcome to Harvard!
Posted on March 21st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
A hearty welcome to new econ grad students, from two of its luminaries. Soon you, too, can speak this way.
Pitasticity
Posted on March 21st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
How to improve the universe, one RSS at a time
Posted on March 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: indescribable.
Yeah, well, I like the category indescribable for this cartoon because there just isn’t much else to say about it.
anarchordia
Posted on March 12th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.
I’ve been running into a bumper crop of Marxists recently. So when I saw an ‘encyclopedia’ page about how society works leading off a section with “It should be clear that the dominant institution of our society is capitalism“, even though the page as a whole is clearly young and hastily written, I felt a familiar rant coming on.
First of all, society doesn’t have “a“
dominant institution. And institutions of family, of civil society and
the existence of government, are vastly more pervasive and dominant
than the various religious, economic, and legal institutions.
Second, I hate to see fundamental innovations get locked into
early implementations. “Capitalism” isn’t a single institution.
Neither the set of general philosophies that have used that title, nor
the various implementations, are ideal or even consistent over time.
(That’s true of many high-profile one-word abstractions.) The writer
above goes on to say ‘capitalism rewards maximizing short-term profit’
– no, it doesn’t. The pursuit and reward of short-term profits is one
of those other institutions built into the fabric of modern society.
Rant over, man, rant over. Now
for balance I should indulge a rant about the inadequacy of ‘ideal’
markets, and the complacency of those who feel they are the only
framework needed to scale discussions, comparisons, and decision making
from two neighbors inconversation to a networked billion-person
planet…
Reembering Push Singh
Posted on March 9th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.
I spent today thinking about Push Singh, someone I have known for four years. Every time we have met, I have come away struck by his thoughtfulness, his good nature, his giving smile, and the pleasure of speaking with him. He died last week; today there was a memorial in his honor at MIT. I don’t usually cry at funerals — death is the most storied event in life, not necessarily a sad one — but found myself tearing up today as I hung outside the MIT chapel.
My thoughts are still with him, and with his family. I wanted to walk up to them as they stood by the crosswalk waiting for the lights to turn; but I did not.