A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

A bit of background.  The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s.  It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham.  But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics?  And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.  Details after the jump.

The dominance of today’s Internet makes the latter question easier in ways and harder in others.  We can track revisions of most Wikipedia pages, but the use of this term predates the creation of the new software to preserve all revisions,  in August 2001 — so some guesswork is required even there.   Certainly the Wikipedia usage was guided by the linguistic usage before it:  “word sense disambiguation” and disambiguation in semantic analysis were all the rage across linguistics in the 1990s, as the term had moved out of computational linguistics into the field’s mainstream.

Early uses of the term in the 50s are in the context of ‘disambiguation programs’ and ‘automatic word disambiguation’.   Then by 1960 comes Dwight Bolinger, using it boldly and provatively.  “understanding presupposes disambiguation.  Disambiguation presupposes the processes that make it possible”.    This was picked up by literary critics in France, and by other linguists such as Anthony oettinger writing about automatic translation.

Sometime around March 20, 2001, the issue of disambiguating Wikipedia articles comes up.  User:Invictus (NB: no userpages back then) creates the article [[RushBand]], following the earlier model of [[NirvanaBand]].   And who should respond with a philosophical note on the right way to disambiguate than Larry Sanger, starting the page Naming_conventions/Disambiguating .    Within eight months, Magnus Manske has written new code allowing the use of parentheses in article titles, and the use of the term ‘disambiguation’ to describe appending a parenthetical clarifier at the end of an article name, and pages listing similar titles, has taken off.

I have to say, I do like it better than the alternative name suggested for those lists : ‘jump pages’.  So a tip of the dab-hat to Larry, may this be only one of your lasting contributions to encyclopediana.

For following along with me for so long, here’s a special bonus : the original quotation from Bentham’s papers laying out the place of Disambiguation in the heirarchy of Exposition.  This is from George Bentham’s 1827 Outline of a New System of Logic, in which he reviews his uncle’s papers and a recent set of writings on logic by one Dr. Whately.

He diagrams the elder Bentham’s 12 modes of exposition (physical designation, translation, etymologization, definition, individuation, paraphrasis, archetypation, description, parallelism including antithesis, enumeration, exemplification, and illustration), and says:

If exposition be considered with respect to its immediate object, it may be divided into Onomatopoea, or the giving a new name to an idea, and into Exposition of existing words.

In following the same principle of division, exposition of existing words may be subdivided into the following operations:  —
1. Substitution of a new sense to the one in which a word has already been used, an operation resembling onomatopoea, but attended with much more practical inconvenience, excepting where the use of the word in its old sense be at once disadvantageous, and of rare occurrence.
2. Elucidation—where the object is to give clearness to an obscure term.
3. Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians, and erroneously reckoned as a species of division.
4. Ampliation—where it is to extend the sense of a term.
5. Restriction—where it is to restrict the sense of a term.

Extra special nostalgia bonus: note the link-preserving awesomeness buried in the first post to wikipedia-l : that link still works, through a dozen TLD, domain, software and naming changes.

I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center.  There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires.  And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.

I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.

* My discomfort stems from a few reasons:

• The focus on people with a background in commercial website research strikes me as uninportant — this is different enough that it hardly matters.
• The effort to spend money on an industry vet rather than attracting a couple insightful / innovative graduates & wikipedians doesn’t seem optimal.
• The idea of posting this first as a job rather than clearly defining roles for talented researchers in the community doesn’t scale and hides the community’s natural talents.
• There is always the overarching point that as long as the Wikimedia Foundation remains staffed primarily by noneditors and does not aggressively direct spotlights onto contributors (including the many community researchers who already answer questions such as those listed in the posting above), every increase in official staff weakens and obscures the core strength of the projects.

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

• Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
• Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
• Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
• Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
• Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
• Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
• Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam’s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
• Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold.

Before we continue, you may want to revisit the origins of the modern fractional-reserve banking system.  The international banking scene includes an additional layer of derivatives (”Not Your Father’s Financial Calculus” ), leading to a world with over 15x as many financial tokens as could ever be redeemed for underlying assets.  Here is the liquidity ‘pyramid’ from a few years go; it is twice as top-heavy now :

Bear in mind in the weeks to come : what scares the central parts of global banking systems is the knowledge that their empires are built on air… not just a cushion of air, for a single country, but clouds all the way down, for everyone.  People may talk about 10:1 or even 60:1 leveraging of assets, but even  the 1 in those equations relies on shared standards of value and basic trust.

Other comments:

Wednesday: Kenneth Rogoff suggests a $2T bailout may be needed to ‘contain the contagion’.

Wednesday night: The UK Telegraph reports on the day’s global credit freeze and the ongoing hit to the Moscow bourse, where trading was suspended after the Micex dropped 24% in 2 days.

…

On this motif : compounding the fear of having no fundamental support : our urban centers have in theory no hard backstop preventing total financial collapse, with a loss of faith in any institution to protect and safeguard value over time, and a loss of any shared sense of abstract value or usable currency.  In contrast, the closer one gets to self-sufficient communities with their own natural resources and balanced sets of local skills, the more superfluous these abstractions, and the less deadly their dissipation.

There is something to be said here about the stabilizing value of multiple competing (or even not entirely substitutable) currencies in a community, in comparison with a strong central bank, but I don’t know how to formulate it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Boyish Orator’s style, and give him a leg up over Her Royal Cleverness, but don’t stay up nights worrying about the future difference to world peace their differential election would make (other things keep me up, even in politics), and not because I don’t think peace a devastatingly important realm for immediate change.

At any rate, Lessig taped a Barackish paean, and Ball and Prime started simulscribing in gobby. Gobby sessions exert a gravitational pull on me and soon I was transcribing myself, to exercise day-cramped hands — though I would never have listened to the piece otherwise. You can read the result of our labours.

The promise of making a set of ideas more accessible and revisitable is an infinitely better reason to divest oneself of twenty minutes of life than amusement or boredom… Which makes me wonder why we don’t see dotsub everywhere, at least among the sj crowd of one. Maybe it just needs a gobby plugin, or a way to find two friends and start transcribing in tandem. I’m even feeling the itch to ride a tandem bike or sidecar. Ach. Time for a seaweed shower.

Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances?   I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.

Global Voices tracks stats in a number of ways : a stats site, with day-level data; Technorati numbers; and the results of a great survey.

Global Voices : Some Statistics …

YouTube and Libya compared for value, brought up by a thoughtful Italian blog on next-media and society.

A good point. …

The result of the Great Wikipedia “Foo 2.0” debate of August 2006 : See the enterprise social software page and the social computing discussion page.  Please contribute to the quality of those articles, still in sad shape and hardly a useful reference for any audience.

As always, it amazes me that so many people — homemakers, high school students, firemen — who simply care about the development of a reference work can be as sensitive to nuance and level-headed in academic discussions as academics (who have devoted much of their life to scholarly discourse).  It makes me at once proud and disappointed by our civilization; that all manner of subtleties can be picked up without special training; and that much capability is untapped through ignorance or denial of this.

But I’m ranting again, when I should be describing how to add constructively to WP.  Until then… find a hill to fly a kite this long weekend, be kind to your neighbors and good to your family, and don’t labor too long or hard.

Foo 2.0 : deletion debate and resolution …

BBC Focus put out a micro-comparison of Wikipedia, Britannica Online, Encarta, and Infoplease, asking three experts to review one article apiece.  Suburbia describes it well. 

Reporters running a statistically insignificant comparison with other references, is becoming as popular as vandalizing Wikipedia, when it comes to coming up with a story to publish.
BBC Focus put out a micro-comparison of Wikipedia, Britannica Online, Encarta, and Infoplease, asking three experts to review one article apiece.  Suburbia describes it well. 

Reporters running a statistically insignificant comparison with other references, is becoming as popular as vandalizing Wikipedia, when it comes to coming up with a story to publish.

Hey, didja catch that BBC Focus article? …

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).

The original English Wikipedia turns 1 million this week.  Kudos to KG, who won the millionth-article pool… the two-millionth pool is now closed, but you can still place (gentleman’s) bets on when the eleventy-billionth article will be written.  (Full disclosure: My money’s on 2021.)

1 Million What?? …

New traffic data from Hitwise (.doc)
suggests that by their standards, Wikipedia is also in the top 20 orgs
with popular websites; though some, such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and
Myspace, have more than one site ahead of it.  Thanks to Hitwise  for sharing their results for the millionth article press release.

I hope that some of these leisure sites will start to integrate more
useful content with their portals, and not remain paeans to the id; it
is heartwarming to see useful content providers (such as pure search
engines, and news portals) near the tops of the list. 

Wikipedia fields 11% of education-related traffic, and 0.17%
of all traffic they measured, with Answers.com getting 1/3 of
that.  I asked for details on their methodology and sample size;
they claim 25 million users, but I don’t know their distribution,
geographically or otherwise.  They also show a pretty flat age
distribution from 18 through 44, and an even split along gender lines.

Wikipulse is gone . But its spirit lives on.  Perhaps it can be revitalized on a New Machine.  We can rebuild it. The Six Million Dollar Analytic>

Pulses, Zeitgeists …

This week Wikipedia briefly broke into the top-17 list of most visited websites, as gauged by Alexa Toolbar users; snagging the attention of 3% of them that day.  Rock on…

In other news, if you want to find out more about Wikipedia and are in the Boston area, come to the upcoming presentation at Simmons on Feb. 13.

17 lovers around the world rejoice …

Earlier today, Jay-Zed pointed out the humor in juxtaposing fears of a Closed Web and resulting closed society, with the dramatic changes in openness, penetration, and reusability of information and tools over the past decade.  He posited that the existence of certain types of platforms
– for instance, inverted-hourglass networks and PC architectures –
was a specially enabling design decision, which was somewhat arbitrary
and potentially outmoded.  The implication was that without these
platforms, said dramatic changes would have been far less dramatic.

I also enjoy the juxtaposition of the recent explosive openness
with current fears about open channels of communication being closed
off; and do at times find myself laughing at over-pessimistic
statements about the world today.  On the other hand, I don’t
think that focusing on architectures, or on historical platform
choices, is very relevant to the changes we have seen.  A firmer
association can be found between penetration and reuse, and the
availability of ever-better toolchains and factories for mass
production.  

A methodical Gutenberg was not the unilateral harbinger of
the modern newspaper; that took many revolutions in pulp-processing and
printing-press design.  Today’s cheap, colorful paper production
is the result of tens of thousands of excellent, focused
innovations.  Likewise, ENIAC was not the harbinger of Ruby on
Rails (or any other modern library that allows someone with basic
programming skills to leverage 10 hours of familiarization into
a fully-customized and appealing application) — that took many
revolutions in software abstraction and philosophy…  nor were
DARPANet and IBM and Microsoft the natural father, mother, and holy concubine
of the modern “all-purpose computer”; this too was many scores of
years, and thousands of mathematical, engineering, and social
innovations in the making.

It is certainly charming that I can now find out what the Ohio
newspapers and tv stations are printing and showing, by looking online
or flipping through my satellite service.  But all the same, we hardly
live in the ‘most open’ environment our modern world has ever
known.  In many ways, we remain less open and networked than, say,
a cozy, classed Greek city-state, with a shared educational, social, and financial gossip network; shared religious, historical, and cultural anecdotes; and shared metrics
for success, civilization-wide goals, and honour; all far more intimate
than parallels in my country today.  Even the most all-telling of
tell-all [auto]biographies is diluted by this lack of openness.

Let us end on a positive note.  What further expansions in
openness may be expected or hoped for in the coming decades? 

• An improvement in open sharing and classification of ideas,
  so that a good idea in one place is recognized and taken up in many
  others.  Great window-hinge, washing-machine, hobbyist and diaper
  designs should traverse the oceans; great experimental designs the
  fields; &c.
• A new consciousness of making information public;
  people actively choosing every day to free and share their
  observations, discoveries, thoughts, and analyses — rather than only
  on special occasions.  This consciousness filtered out into
  processes, organizations, and governments.
• A renaissance in the libraries of methods
  available to access information — one’s own, that of one’s family,
  that of one’s community and office, that of the world at large. 
  This is not dependent on a simple ‘application layer’ provided by a few
  organizations; any more than the question of “where can I find a copy of Anna Karenina” depends on the ‘layer’ of friends’ shelves, bookstores, libraries and online book-sellers I have access to.
• … add your own!  good comments will be added to this list.