wikiboarding

Posted on July 20th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: SJ, Uncategorized, wikipedia.

I am running for the Board again this year, with the hope of bringing a stronger community voice to the Board, and organizing good and frequent open discussions between the Board and community about priorities, core services, new initiatives, and the like.  Angela organized a few open meetings long ago when she first joined the Board which I really appreciated, and which encouraged some previously invisible community members to come forward with good ideas.

Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations :)

She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

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2 comments.

Getting tweet

Posted on July 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Steve Gillmor puts it well with his hyperbolic streaming loquaciousness.

And Tim and the new Web Ecology Project (’researching the Internet so you don’t have to’) has their first whitepaper up on the subject — I look forward to more.

0 comments.

Brilliant Apollo moonshot anniversary reenactment website

Posted on July 18th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

This is a weekend of writing for me. I’m holed up in a quiet breezy room with two laptops and a stack of statements, letters, and essays to work through (currently: 2 of 12).

I just ran across a fabulous moonshot website via SJv’s photostream, however, that deserves immediate blogging.  In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it is a multimedia site broadcasting a real-time reenactment of the launch, flight and landing.  Even the name of the site is a pleasure : we choose the moon.  They are currently in Stage 6, with almost 2 days to go before moon-landing.

Take a look!  It’s a fantastic site to share with teachers and children as well, since links to the primary sources are all neatly integrated with artist’s renderings of the elements involved.

0 comments.

sjmail : email that anyone can respond to

Posted on July 7th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I’m working on the gmail-to-wiki idea, since I’m trying to minimize my use of private channels and want to be able to truthfully say “for fastest response time, please use my [public|wiki|shared] email address”.  (Note to linguists : we lack the right word to fit in those brackets.)

How it might work:

  • you write to wikisj@gmail .  It posts to the sjmail wiki : subject becomes title [or dab], metadata gets put in a wiki-template (or sem wiki form) .
  • a mwiki extension adds a “reply” button at the top of main article namespace pages.  this appends the reply in its own section on the article page, and emails the result to the original sender and cc list [you get normal options of reply, reply-all, &c].
  • the response email that senders receive looks like a normal email, with a footer saying “sent by user:hill  at <site url> via sjmail”
  • senders who care can log into the sjmail site to set their preferences — they can opt to get aggregate updates rather than every email response, or just abbreviations of the response with a link to the full page.
  • repliers can use the system to send a private email as well : it would note a reply was sent with timestamp somehow in the thread flow of the page but not show or store the contents.  Of course if you know the email address of the original correspondent (which wouldn’t be directly visible on the site, only stored internally), you can write them out of band.  But that’s true too if you see an email printed out or read it over my shoulder.
  • wikilinks [between messages, to wp, &c] used in the reply gets converted to URLs when sent via email.

Thoughts?  Naturally this idea came from the success and scalability of user talk: pages, which are nothing but a simplified public messaging system where anyone can come and modify, wikify, or reply to my message to you.

If you’ve done gmail-to-site hacking and are interested in the project, let me know.

I’d like to see this expand to be a useful service, with individual namespaces for any number of people.  I can see the resulting body of correspondence being an interesting store of public knowledge; perhaps individual user namespaces matched to target email address ‘recipients’, RC by user, and a shared common namespace not unlike everything2 in feel — everything one might want to say about “getting around Boston” might be linked from [[getting around Boston]] in someone’s reply.

What do you think?  I’m also looking for better ideas for a name!

1 comment.

Relying on non-specific reputation can be deadly

Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Openly peer-reviewed journals would never be able to mislead the way Elsevier can.  And there would be no slipspace for them to be tempted to misbehave.

Publicly authored works, with public drafts showing the stages of development (appropriate for anything but creative art, where the illusion is part of the package, don’t you think?), would never be able to imply original research and fact-checking the way Chris Anderson can.

0 comments.

Zeal is zeal is zeal

Posted on July 1st, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Jeremy and I were discussing climate dynamics and related brinks claimed in countless debates around the globe – from academic journals to political and economic forecasts to doomsday prophecies.

We disagreed about whether the truth of the importance of the matter was obvious.  As someone who still has no idea what the real fundamentals are, I don’t find this obvious.  Some clever scientists doubt the brinks.  Some dedicate their lives to explaining that this is the defining crisis of our times.  It offends me deeply as a scientist that the opinions of scientists fall strongly along political lines.  What the hell is wrong with our scientific community?

Jeremy and I noted that some very smart people are convinced that human contributions to climate change will change and effectively destroy life on Earth within short order.  They put their careers on the line with projections of environmental and economic catastrophe with low error bars within 30 years, and work to convince everyone, in science, art, media, policy, business, and planning, that this is the essential crisis of our time.  Others put their careers on the line insisting that there is no such crisis and everyone should stop wasting effort even investigating it.

Or do these zealots put their careers on the line?  It’s acceptable as a scientist to tilt at windmills, even drawing many others along with you, and then to end up having been wrong.  There are certainly scientists who are make a good living holding forth a minority theory, and I can’t think of any active mechanism to censure someone for mere ‘innocent’ deception and misguided analysis if they don’t stoop to plagiarism or data forgery.

I reckon our society hasn’t moved passed the stage where playground challenges and antics are acceptable discourse, and where shouting “Fire!” on the global stage evokes more than a raised eyebrow.  Scientific disciplines should be the first to change this.

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0 comments.

Government transparency gets real

Posted on June 30th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Our fair government, global champion of the public domain, returns to its roots of maverick transparency : with public ‘dashboards’ showing exactly where our $70B of annual IT spending is going, what projects are on or behind schedule, which officials are in charge of each division and which contractors are responsible for each project.

I love it — and I want it for every organization I care about.  Mad props to Vivek Kundra – whose quote about “having up to 30 days” to get used to the new system is priceless.

1 comment.

on disambiguation and The Atomization of Meaning

Posted on June 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, metrics, wikipedia.

Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ’specify’ for ages.  And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly.  At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics.   And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century.  All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia.  In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.

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?

bentham-ontology-exposition

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.

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2 comments.

weddings and nostalgia

Posted on June 13th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, wikipedia.

I was at the wedding of my dear friend Erik Cohen-Levy two weeks ago, in Texas – quite a lovely and relaxing celebration.  And was bitten by something unpleasant which over time made me quite ill.  It took a while and some divergent opinions to get a blood test… I should know more Monday about what it is.  But it’s nice in a way to know I don’t have the flu.

So I’ve been exercising, hydrating like I had a concert every night, and feeling inexplicably nostalgic.  And as I’ve been too tired to move around much, I had time to get to a piece of sleuthing I’ve been meaning to do for a while : to track down who popularized the term ‘disambiguation‘, which Wikipedia has now made a household word !  The nostalgia wiki was helpful, and I’ve turned up some interesting leads, which I will share in another post.  But if you have information on the topic, please share.

2 comments.

^_^ VIBBER

Posted on June 5th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

In 1024 words.

2 comments.

The weekend, synchrony, and collaboration

Posted on June 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Let me amplify a bit the aside in my last post, because it is important.  To pull back from the week[end] for a moment, there are many universal elements to modern human culture which we take for granted, and even sometimes rail against, but rarely appreciate as one-time innovations.  Roughly in order of adoption:

apprenticeship, language, engineering, drawing, storytelling, astronomy, religion, music & art, holidays, government, law, agriculture, geometry, biology, architecture, education, currency, written language, geography, calendars, numerals, abstract mathematics, books, history, universities.

Many of these innovations have given rise to entire fields of study, so much so that I can more readily name the field than its founding innovation.  The ordering is just a guess in many cases, and of course the timeline varies by culture even after distinct societies meet.  I included some very specific innovations which seem so natural today that it is easy to forget how recently they were adopted by our civilization.

Privately, holidays and later calendars help to organize regular reflection and pause.  They improve the mindfulness of individual life, amplifying the impact of new discoveries and the capacity to change individual habits.  But the distributed effect of sharing this practice with others are more profound.
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1 comment.

wikizine

Posted on June 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I’ve started helping out with wikizine again, and am working to make OLPC updates come out on a weekly basis as well.  The invention of the week was a great human innovation, and we would all do well to honor it more.

(Aside: Honoring the Sabbath is something much more deeply meaningful than simple adherence to faith; it was an early step in global collaboration and division of labor, an arena in which we still have a few magnitudes of synchrony and productivity to eke out.)

Give wikizine a whirl, add your own news if you have any, browse the archives (soon to be on Meta as well), and help with translations if you can, particularly into/out of Spanish.

2 comments.

3qi-perfect

Posted on May 29th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Pfanne comments about the new Pixel Qi screen:

this completes the things that i want to have in my dreamnotebook…
40/45nm amd gpu/processor (with enough juice fur starcraft2+diablo3)
pixel qi display
gallium3d based driver
direct3d statetracker
6h+ batterylife
14inch screen
i’d give an arm for a computer with these specs…
more likely a leg, using a computer with only one arm is shit.

Now who’s pulling whose leg?  Congrats to Mary Lou and team on approaching their first release; it looks simply beautiful.

1 comment.

Another reason not to copyright logos

Posted on May 28th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, wikipedia.

…and should leave their source files publicly available.  Because most logos need work, and you never know who’s going to improve on yours for their own reasons.  (Of course you should still trademark them.)

Bjorn S. reflects on designing the first Wikipedia logo (designed for Nupedia but never used on that project), and describes how it led to today’s silver ball… and how he didn’t know about any of this until a week ago.

0 comments.

Wikipedia now incompatible with third-party GFDL text

Posted on May 27th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, wikipedia.

The GFDL 1.3 allows collaborative sites to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA 3.0 as their license, under limited circumstances.

Wikimedia has been advocating for this change for some time, and with much effort from the FSF and Creative Commons a solution was worked out last November: such a transition would be available only for massively collaborative projects, and only for a limited time.  If a project opted for this transition, it could not incorporate any new GFDL material after the release date of the new license (November 3, 2008); and it had to decide by August 1, 2009.

Given the first date, one would assume a site would want to move as quickly as possible to decide, to avoid a prolonged period when no outside material under most any free license could be incorporated.  Nevertheless, it took us over 6 months to decide to make the transition.  Now we are faced with two hurdles: ensuring that no GFDL material has been migrated into a Wikimedia project since November, and far more complex, communicating with the hundreds of smaller GFDL wikis who chose their license for compatibility with Wikipedia, to ensure they know about this change and what it means for them.  They only have until the first of August to figure it out.

So I’ve started compiling a list of GFDL wikis and other collaborative sites that have not yet indicated any awareness about the license switch or considered switching themselves.  This includes at least half of the 20 largest GFDL wikis other than Wikipedia, both major medical wikis (Medpedia and WikiDoc), PlanetMath, and the old Spanish Wikipedia fork.  Please help contact these sites and update their status on this project page: [[m:Licensing update/Outreach]]

1 comment.

Twitterpedia FTW

Posted on May 17th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Too weird for fiction, Uncategorized, indescribable, wikipedia.

It has been claimed that twitterpedia will one day replace Wikipedia, at the point where everyone needs no more than a tweet about any given topic.

FT2 astutely comments:

the predictable twitterpedia sequel follows:
- user#217869: pov warring!!
- @83476238 not so!
- @217869 is so!!
- @83476238 not so!
- @both: u blocked 24 hrs 3rr
- @admin plz no?
- @217869 o ok
- @admin kthxbai
- @83476238 u block I not u suxxor pov war!!!
- @admin u involved,, @arbcom plzdesysopkthx?
- @user no wai!!
- ……….

A tip of the hat to all involved for scrying the essential parts of our post-singularity knowledge landscape.

0 comments.

Wolfram α: baby oracle stretches its legs

Posted on May 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The wraps are coming off of Wolfram Alpha, and even in infancy it is poetry to my left angular gyrus.  A recent review compares it with Google.  Many rightly note that the two aren’t really tackling the same problem.  The interesting points to note in the review are those hits where the questioner is flooded with detailed data that, among other things, advises him about what dimensions of reliable detail exist.

On one hand, Google’s original mission, to provide information effectively to the world, does encompass this… but then it encompasses many things they do not yet pursue.  They have avoided projects that trying to directly answer difficult questions, or to provide more than an algorithmic gloss of public approval on top of public link- and word-association. Google Answers, which I would have expected to stay around forever even at a loss for its direct contribution to the mission, was shelved years ago.   Brief forays into public data portals for gov docs in the US and educational materials remain tentative.

So deep access to public data has been better provided by individuals such as Carl M. and by university research projects than by Google.  Of their recent initiatives, only their book and catalog scanning projects have really been successful at making public data more available.

On the other hand, the goal of search engines has always been basic search.  The field, and its developers and system-gamers, have been working with a limited, transient concept of what it means to capture the desire for knowledge and provide related resources.

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0 comments.

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