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The next Recent Changes Camp
I've heard, unofficially, that next year's Recent Changes Camp will be convened to the south in the Bay area. (The link points to where "www.recentchangescamp.org" currently resolves.) But I know...
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Andrew Lih gets quoted by the press again
Deletionists vs. Inclusionists in back in the news. Simon Pulsifer, one-time champion of having the most edits on Wikipedia, is also quoted. I find it notable that Simon has adopted one of my tactics...
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Midway in Life
Saturday was my 50th birthday, and I celabrated it in a number of idiosyncratic ways with Yvette -- which included dropping about $100 dollars on Lego blocks at the local Lego store. (As a contrast,...
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I wish I had seen this far sooner
A fellow named David Wiley wrote this post, "OERs, Producers, Consumers, and Reuse", on the nature of open source and sharing knowledge. Applied to Wikipedia, it explains why the content on Wikipedia...
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A grab-bag of links
Ignite Portland will have their next event 5 February at the Aladdin Theatre. Some of the proposed talks look as if they'll match the quality of the last Ignite Portland.Pete Forsyth posted over at...
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Another frontier for Free Culture to tame
The new forum WikBack, where a number of Wikipedia/Wikimedia regulars are meeting, so far has proven to have a very favorable message-to-noise ratio. One of the jems here is UninvitedCompany's post on...
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Is Wikipedia Losing its Potential?
It's a familiar story, maybe bordering a little on urban legend: parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving their teenage son at home. Free of parential oversight, he throws a party and invites...
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A thought about advertising on Wikipedia
My friend Phil sent me this statement by the founder of PlentyOfFish.com; it came from his welcoming message when he signed up with that website. (This has also been reprinted over at Dating with...
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Piecemeal updates
I've been busy with many things that keep me away from my computer, as well as this blog, so I'm way behind in updating anyone who is still reading. But let me provide a paragraph or two on the most...
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We need attention, so let's insult Wikipedia
Pete Forsyth posted the well-deserved rant at a local historical society to the Portland Wiki-Wednesday list:Folks,Today's Oregonian carried a story about a joint project, http://oregonencyclopedia.org...
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Visons and reality
Maybe you don't read ValleyWag or Danny Wool's new blog, so you haven't heard about Jimmy Wales and Rachel Marsden. Truth be told, I didn't even know that he had separated from his wife -- but then as...
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A not-so-ethical Code
Lately, there's been a lot of talk about "A Blogger's Code of Ethics" -- incidentally about the time when a few of us bloggers associated with Wikimedia have openly wondered about the ethics of some...
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Another unhappy customer
I just stumbled across this post about one user's frustration with Wikipedia's increasingly user-unfriendly ways. This case is twice as bad because I happen to know Bart Massey, a professor of computer...
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A step in the right direction
You may have seen Pete Forsyth's blog post about the Oregon Revised Statutes being proprietary information. In brief, even if you are a tax payer in Oregon you can't put a copy of the laws you pay for...
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Professionals and Amateurs
I just saw this bit of news: within minutes of newsman Tim Russert's death last week of a sudden heart attack, one of the first things someone at the scene did was...update his article on Wikipedia....
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You think Wikipedia's tough on Experts?
Take a look a look at this exchange on Conservapedia, which calls itself "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia". In short, Andrew Schlafy doubts the findings of a published, peer-reviewed article which...
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Few cults have humor like this
Check out WikiSpeak for an example of how the Wikipedia community sees itself. And if you can find an article that the picture of Susan and Angela clearly fits, you may be awarded a Barnstar. Or not....
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Sitting on an Opportunity
A couple of weeks ago there was a thread in the Foundation-l list that started with an announcement about the Wikimedia Foundation 2008/2009 annual plan, then led to this comment:My reaction is...
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After much time
I left a comment on the Talk page to Wikipedia:Don't Feed the Divas, which expresses something that I've been trying to say in a way that didn't sound to me as if I were simply whining. I don't know...
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A thought for spring
The liberal arts is a struggle. It is the unending, yet inevitably unsuccessful, rearguard struggle against ignorance and oblivion. Every day new people are born, who eventually learn to talk, to read,...
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Oh gosh! There's porn in Wikimedia Commons!
By now, everyone who cares about the functioning of the Wikimedia projects has heard about Larry Sanger's allegations that he found child pornography -- which is illegal in every country on Earth which...
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Pending changes, & how it defines Wikipedia
Well, the English language Wikipedia I mean.For those of you who aren't that familiar with the latest conflicts at Wikipedia -- which has now come to include a large share of active Wikipedians --...
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Pending changes: Further thoughts
Thanks to Jospeh Reagle (here's his blog) for pointing me to Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics/Preliminary Analysis. I hadn't seen it before my last post, and I appreciate the work that Howief into...
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To make something, it helps to know what it is
Instead of doing something productive like folding clothes or writing Wikipedia articles, I spent a slice of my free time this afternoon looking at the links in the Navibox of Essays on building...
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Well-known & overlooked Wikipedia essays
Everyone who studies the phenomenon of Wikipedia knows about Raul's Laws. Everyone who writes about Wikipedia quotes from them as if they are the authoritative commentary on how Wikipedia works,...
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