You are looking at posts in the category popular demand.
Posted on March 18th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
I was going to share with you a little something about Hieronima de Paiva, a Portuguese jew and Elihu Yale’s companion in Madras (now Chennai), but I don’t have time right now. Instead let me note that the English Wikipedia reached its 500,000th article yesterday, about the Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.
Articles were being written at a much higher rate then usual today, peaking at 150 per hour as the milestone approached. For comparison, the previous full 24-hr period of editing saw the creation of 915 new articles.
Posted on February 18th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
Modern debates about public v. private wifi outlays, and whether municipalities and dictatorial! monopolistic! governments should be involved, look pretty silly when viewed with the proper perspective… Glenn Fleishman highlights this in a recent essay with an excellent thought-experiment about electricity.
Reasoning by parallel analogy is wonderfully satisfying. (Even if reasoning by poor analogy is often the opposite…) All of this isn’t to say that municipal wifi control is the way to go — only that the standard arguments against it aren’t worth much.
Posted on February 17th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
In the March edition of WIRED, Daniel Pink has managed to turn a few personal meetings, a bit of leg-work (including a trip to the sparse Foundation headquarters in Florida), the stray historical quote and a bit of prognostication, into a poetic piece on Wikipedia. He refers to the project as the latest stage in mankind’s longstanding desire to “tame the jungle of knowledge”.
Titled “The Book Stops Here“, the piece’s layout runs to six pages, mimicing those of a gold-edged, leather-bound book. The frontispiece, showing Wales gazing levelly over a large stack of Britannica volumes and — are those the 2001 Florida Statues? — is coupled with a set of beautiful sketches of six active wikipedians (Angela, Bryan Derksen, Carptrash, Kingturtle, Ram-Man, and Raul654), whose stories are woven into the article.
Pink deals quite well with the nuances of community collaboration, good faith, administrators, stewards, and developers, and brilliantly captures vignettes of individual contributors and motivations.
Perhaps the one bit of internal culture he gets slightly off is the tone of the admiration community members show towards founder Jimmy Wales — the cheerful irony that accompanies the term “God-King” in wiki circles, is unlikely to carry over to an audience used to hearing the term associated with infallible emperors of times long past.
The one glaring omission in the article is an acknowledgement of the project’s unparallelled multilinguality. The only mention of other languages is a single sentence discussing the size of the encyclopedia — “Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.” Surely that 60% of the project deserves more than a nod. Similarly, other Wikimedia projects go unremarked, though WikiCities gets a few paragraphs.
Charles Van Doren’s 1962 essay, “The Idea of an Encyclopedia” in “The American Behavioral Scientist” is called in to wrap the piece up (Van Doren later became a senior Britannica editor):
“[T]he ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe…. what will be respectable in 30 years seems avant-garde now. If an encyclopedia hopes to be respectable in 2000, it must appear daring in the year 1963.”
Pink’s conclusion? “You can’t evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards.” Nevertheless, he feels the project is “about to become respectable.”
Other great quotes from the article:
Posted on February 12th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
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.
Posted on February 9th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
Just reading an old prediction by Nick Negroponte, the savant and seer currently pushing forward a $100 laptop initiative.
A fascinating read, about how he was sure the most active users of the
internet today would be appliances and gadgets and toys… also a
reminder that as a society of thinking creatures, we’re far from the
centered and peaceful self-awarenesss that would lead to sober
predictions about the future. Danger, Will Robinson…
For instance: if you really want to make $100 machines for the world,
design systems with easily-separable, interchangable parts. Don’t
rely on your own vision of a hundred million machines to provide
spares for people; assume they will have their own spares. You
don’t have to make ‘laptops’ with catch closures on the monitors (which
break) and monitors tightly integrated with the body (with hinges that
break) and embedded keyboards (which get crumbs in them and eventually
need to be replaced). There’s nothing magical, or even
attractive, about the standard modern image of a Lap-Top
computer. Just make the whole collection small and light, make it
fit into a cloth bag, and make it easy for people to get by with the
most prevalent spare parts.
Posted on January 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
A few people seem to already have started blogging the conference, creating programs for the attendees and pre-linking to this blog
as a resource for transcripts. I don’t know if I’ll have time to
upload transcripts during the day, however, so barring finding a good
log-bot, you may have to actually be on IRC to read the
proceedings.
Posted on December 10th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
I’m at the Berkman conf for Internet and Society today, and mmm, is it
a mixed crowd. Geeks, politicians, students and faculty of all
stripes. I have to run out again, so can’t stay for much of the
Biz lecture, but I’m sure a lot of people will be blogging it today.
There was, however, a distinct shortage of people live-transcribing
what was going on, either on irc or elsewhere. I have yet to see
a blog with more than just a passing quote… which is a real
shame. We should not let the luxury of having the bandwidth for audio and video feeds (note that they still fuzz out, break, drag on and on) preclude traditional, highly transferable and searchable, methods of archiving. It’s like the pending archival doom of the digital age, redoubled upon itself.
Posted on December 6th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
Hypergene writes about WikiNews,
the possibilities of the new medium, and all the people discovering
wikis these days. Their thoughts on local news would be suitable
for disussion on WikiNews itself, but perhaps they will come up with
something sexy on their own, a meme for small communities.
Posted on November 24th, 2004 by .
Categories: popular demand.
It looks like all we can do is log in and create posts. I don’t see editorial links on older posts and most of the editors menu is missing. I’ll bet I can’t knock this post live. Contributing editors have the power to assign categories, so perhaps you should let us know what they mean…
Choose the category that you think is most appropriate. Just don’t use the awful “Mr. Ed” category which I can’t find a way to expunge. +sj
Apparently, contributing editors can’t edit their own posts, either, but content editors can. As for bylines… all contributing editors seem to have the same byline, so please add your byline by hand at the end of your posts. –j + sj
Posted on November 22nd, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
This business of Manila not storing the history of posts is a real shame… a template bug just blanked a pair of posts. And my local text editor doesn’t store temporary revisions, so I lost a segment of writing last night in a crash. What is it about tracking revisions of text — an amazingl cheap operation these days – that is so difficult?
What I wanted to say about texts on CD is that the German Wikipedia CD — shorter, cleaner, and well-cut — has seen 100k downloads on top of its physical distribution to 30k people, and the CD image has had many times as many downloads. Lovely. And, contrary to popular belief, it works on both Windows and Macs.
The company (Directmedia) that helped bring this about also publishes titles like “The Great German Classics” on CD. A good decade into the Gutenberg Project, why are these publishing houses so unknown? Why can’t I rattle off the name of a major publisher of Classic Literature CDs in English, the way I can say “Addison-Wesley, Penguin, O’Reilly, Dover, Springer-Verlag“?
Posted on November 9th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
I missed the live panel with HIV-positive children yesterday, but everyone is stll discussing retroviruses (when did “virus” take on the generic plural?). David Baltimore just made a conversational appearance, along with purified viral stocks. This state is passing lovely, and somehow I am dancing between predicted rainclouds; sunny, fogless, and clear today, as twas in SF all weekend.
Posted on October 25th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
The French paper /Le Monde/ is now using Wikipedia as a “see also”
reference for various articles in its online version (see the
right-hand column, under “sur le net”).
For instance, the following articles link to [[Ophiuchus
(constellation)]], [[Surr
Posted on September 22nd, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
A new newsletter about the Wikimedia Foundation is out. It has all kinds of statistics about the projects, including some of the newest ones that are just starting out, and a long interview with Ward Cunningham about the evolution of the wiki concept. Sweet!
Posted on September 21st, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
Going on about the encyclopedia that slashdot built (oh wait, that’s E2, not WP), /. produces a few gems.
On the proliferation of Wikipedia clones making Google searches useless:
And for this you blame wikipedia? That’s like blaming Led Zeppelin for the existence of Motley Crue and hair metal.
Posted on September 18th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
This looks like the month of wiki in the media.
In addition to the recent “Britannica v. Wikipedia” debates raging around the Net these days (btw, look for my letter to the editor in tomorrow’s Washington Post on the subject, responding to their article from a couple weeks back), now there are weekly posts in the german press about www.wikipedia.de and its projects.
Even the recent “article contest” on the german site, one more project in a wiki of major ones, has received its own blurb on the news site www.heise.de. We have yet to get to the CD release at the end of the month, which will distribute the german encyclopedia to 40,000 households (along with a bevy of other excellent free content).
And tomorrow… well, tomorrow should give a whole new meaning to the term “encyclopedic” in the media.
Posted on August 16th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
So what *is* the massive public demand that has lead to this glorious pollution of randomly-named groups serving as email lists for disordered, sporadic spam? It has been preying on my mind…
A lot of them seem completely harmless; typical list-spam re: getting rich, what to do with one’s money once rich; staying healthy; finding good cheap porn. And yet the list of members is all autogenerated and meaningless; the group descriptions likewise — what kind of network is this, and what does Yahoo think about it all?
Posted on May 17th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
250 same-sex marriage license were handed out b/t midnight and 1am this morning at Cambridge City Hall, after an afternoon-long party in front of the city hall. Everyone looks beautiful when they beam! And there were a lot of beaming faces there. I walked back home just as a line of policemen were walking back to the Central Sq station; someone was taking a photo of the passing line, and her friend started singing the “one of these things is not like the others…” theme song.
All I have to say is, if I were getting on in years, there could hardly be a better old age home than the one across the street from that city hall. Those gentlemen and women have front row seats to everything, and they seem awfully happy.