In this screencast, John Udell analyzes the evolution of the Wikipedia article “Heavy metal umlaut”.
Feb 222005
Feb 202005
The Economist, in its January 1 – 7, 2005 edition, cited Wikipedia as a reference in a chart entitled “From ants to atoms” (which compared the size of things in nanometers). As an occasional Wikipedia contributor and an enthusiast of the Wikipedia concept, and as a long-time Economist junkie, I was chuffed.
It brought to mind, however, the ongoing debate regarding the credibility of Wikipedia. The pot was most recently stirred by Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, in A Personal Statement about Wikipedia’s Reliability. Sanger believes that Wikipedia should “fork”, so that the publicly-contributed content is separated from content reviewed and approved by academics and subject-matter experts.
Fair enough. Wikipedia is not unaware of the problem – it has a prominent General Disclaimer that reads: “WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY”. Credible, academic peer-reviewed content is a GT. But I hope the solution lies in “one and the other” instead of “one or the other.”
Wikipedia is an example of what happens when Ideal meets Reality. Marx-Engels communism versus Soviet totalitarianism; the United Nations in 1945 versus the UN in 2005. Continue reading »
Feb 202005
A light bulb just went on over my head. Just a little one – no cure for AIDS, no solution to the question “Why can’t we all just get along?”. But, hey, Sunday morning light-bulbs are enough of a rarity that they should be treasured, regardless of their breadth and depth.
I love the Mozilla Firefox feature where you can type search terms in the URL field and get the top-ranking page match. I hate it when the top-ranking page is a PDF – kunkle-ding, kunkle-dung, hard drive chitters away for five or six seconds, mice running madly on treadmill, while I am taunted by the Adobe splash screen. I probably say: “Wrack-a-frack-ing Adobe” twenty times a day.
I know that the app’s load time has a lot to do with it being embedded in the browser (although it’s no screamer in its native environment either). But if I take off my Engineering Groupie hat, which says: “Awww gee, that’s probably a hard problem“, and put on my User / Victim hat, I say “Too bad. It may be a hard problem, but it shouldn’t be my problem. Solve your own damn problems.”
I’m no fan of the PDF format. It’s another example that the Network Effect (where ubiquity of adoption sets the standard) is not rational. Continue reading »
Feb 192005
In the Distributed Proofreaders forum (membership required for forum access), someone recenly asked if on-line images could be substituted for poor-quality scanned images. (Distributed Proofreaders is a feeder project for Project Gutenberg that prepares public-domain books for publication on the Internet.) For example, if a public-domain book contained an old, fuzzy photograph of Millay’s “Fishermen”, could the photograph of the same picture published on the Louvre’s web site be copied and published with the Project Gutenberg version of the book?
Project Gutenberg’s answer:
We just got some news on this issue. It turns
out (based on the most recent legal cases) that pictures
of artwork (at least, paintings) that try to depict
the artwork accurately are public domain, if the artwork
itself is public domain.Basically, this opens the door for *any* photo of a
painting created prior to 1923 – even if the photo is
more recent.
This decision stems from the Bridgeman vs. Corel case.
To celebrate this news, Jenerator is pleased to present “Fishermen”, a charcoal drawing by Millet.
…and my goodness didn’t this train of enquiry turn up an interesting blog…