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Another "guest" post, this time from Evolving Trends.
License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Two years after I published this article it has received over 200,000 hits and we now have several startups attempting to apply Semantic Web technology to Wikipedia and knowledge wikis in general, including Wikipedia founder’s own commercial startup as well as a startup that was recently purchased by Microsoft.
Recently, after seeing how Wikipedia’s governance is so flawed, I decided to write about a way to decentralize and democratize Wikipedia.
(Article was last updated at 10:15am EST, July 3, 2006)
The Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) promises to “organize the world’s information” in a dramatically more logical way than Google can ever achieve with their current engine design. This is specially true from the point of view of machine comprehension as opposed to human comprehension.The Semantic Web requires the use of a declarative ontological language like OWL to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and make new conclusions, not simply match keywords.
However, the Semantic Web, which is still in a development phase where researchers are trying to define the best and most usable design models, would require the participation of thousands of knowledgeable people over time to produce those domain-specific ontologies necessary for its functioning.
Machines (or machine-based reasoning, aka AI software or ‘info agents’) would then be able to use those laboriously –but not entirely manually– constructed ontologies to build a view (or formal model) of how the individual terms within the information relate to each other. Those relationships can be thought of as the axioms (assumed starting truths), which together with the rules governing the inference process both enable as well as constrain the interpretation (and well-formed use) of those terms by the info agents to reason new conclusions based on existing information, i.e. to think. In other words, theorems (formal deductive propositions that are provable based on the axioms and the rules of inference) may be generated by the software, thus allowing formal deductive reasoning at the machine level. And given that an ontology, as described here, is a statement of Logic Theory, two or more independent info agents processing the same domain-specific ontology will be able to collaborate and deduce an answer to a query, without being driven by the same software.
Thus, and as stated, in the Semantic Web individual machine-based agents (or a collaborating group of agents) will be able to understand and use information by translating concepts and deducing new information rather than just matching keywords.
Once machines can understand and use information, using a standard ontology language, the world will never be the same. It will be possible to have an info agent (or many info agents) among your virtual AI-enhanced workforce each having access to different domain specific comprehension space and all communicating with each other to build acollective consciousness.
You’ll be able to ask your info agent or agents to find you the nearest restaurant that serves Italian cuisine, even if the restaurant nearest you advertises itself as a Pizza joint as opposed to an Italian restaurant. But that is just a very simple example of the deductive reasoning machines will be able to perform on information they have.
Far more awesome implications can be seen when you consider that every area of human knowledge will be automatically within the comprehension space of your info agents. That is because each info agent can communicate with other info agents who are specialized in different domains of knowledge to produce a collective consciousness (using the Borg metaphor) that encompasses all human knowledge. The collective “mind” of those agents-as-the-Borg will be the Ultimate Answer Machine, easily displacing Google from this position, which it does not truly fulfill.
The problem with the Semantic Web, besides that researchers are still debating which design and implementation of the ontology language model (and associated technologies) is the best and most usable, is that it would take thousands or tens of thousands of knowledgeable people many years to boil down human knowledge to domain specific ontologies.
However, if we were at some point to take the Wikipedia community and give them theright tools and standards to work with (whether existing or to be developed in the future), which would make it possible for reasonably skilled individuals to help reduce human knowledge to domain-specific ontologies, then that time can be shortened to just a few years, and possibly to as little as two years.
The emergence of a Wikipedia 3.0 (as in Web 3.0, aka Semantic Web) that is built on the Semantic Web model will herald the end of Google as the Ultimate Answer Machine. It will be replaced with “WikiMind” which will not be a mere search engine like Google is but a true Global Brain: a powerful pan-domain inference engine, with a vast set of ontologies (a la Wikipedia 3.0) covering all domains of human knowledge, that can reason and deduce answers instead of just throwing raw information at you using the outdated concept of a search engine.
Notes
After writing the original post I found out that a modified version of the Wikipedia application, known as “Semantic” MediaWiki has already been used to implement ontologies. The name that they’ve chosen is Ontoworld. I think WikiMind would have been a cooler name, but I like ontoworld, too, as in “it descended onto the world,” since that may be seen as a reference to the global mind a Semantic-Web-enabled version of Wikipedia could lead to.
Google’s search engine technology, which provides almost all of their revenue, could be made obsolete in the near future. That is unless they have access to Ontoworld or some such pan-domain semantic knowledge repository such that they tap into their ontologies and add inference capability to Google search to build formal deductive intelligence into Google.
But so can Ask.com and MSN and Yahoo…
I would really love to see more competition in this arena, not to see Google or any one company establish a huge lead over others.
The question, to rephrase in Churchillian terms, is wether the combination of the Semantic Web and Wikipedia signals the beginning of the end for Google or the end of the beginning. Obviously, with tens of billions of dollars at stake in investors’ money, I would think that it is the latter. No one wants to see Google fail. There’s too much vested interest. However, I do want to see somebody out maneuver them (which can be done in my opinion.)
Clarification
Please note that Ontoworld, which currently implements the ontologies, is based on the “Wikipedia” application (also known as MediaWiki), but it is not the same as Wikipedia.org.
Likewise, I expect Wikipedia.org will use their volunteer workforce to reduce the sum of human knowledge that has been entered into their database to domain-specific ontologies for the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) Hence, “Wikipedia 3.0.”
Response to Readers’ Comments
The argument I’ve made here is that Wikipedia has the volunteer resources to produce the needed Semantic Web ontologies for the domains of knowledge that it currently covers, while Google does not have those volunteer resources, which will make it reliant on Wikipedia.
Those ontologies together with all the information on the Web, can be accessed by Google and others but Wikipedia will be in charge of the ontologies for the large set of knowledge domains they currently cover, and that is where I see the power shift.
Google and other companies do not have the resources in man power (i.e. the thousands of volunteers Wikipedia has) who would help create those ontologies for the large set of knowledge domains that Wikipedia covers. Wikipedia does, and is positioned to do that better and more effectively than anyone else. Its hard to see how Google would be able create the ontologies for all domains of human knowledge (which are continuously growing in size and number) given how much work that would require. Wikipedia can cover more ground faster with their massive, dedicated force of knowledgeable volunteers.
I believe that the party that will control the creation of the ontologies (i.e. Wikipedia) for the largest number of domains of human knowledge, and not the organization that simply accesses those ontologies (i.e. Google), will have a competitive advantage.
There are many knowledge domains that Wikipedia does not cover. Google will have the edge there but only if people and organizations that produce the information also produce the ontologies on their own, so that Google can access them from its future Semantic Web engine. My belief is that it would happen but very slowly, and that Wikipedia can have the ontologies done for all the domain of knowledge that it currently covers much faster, and then they would have leverage by the fact that they would be in charge of those ontologies (aka the basic layer for AI enablement.)
It still remains unclear, of course, whether the combination of Wikipedia and the Semantic Web herald the beginning of the end for Google or the end of the beginning. As I said in the original part of the post, I believe that it is the latter, and the question I pose in the title of this post, in this context, is not more than rhetorical. However, I could be wrong in my judgment and Google could fall behind Wikipedia as the world’s ultimate answer machine.
After all, Wikipedia makes “us” count. Google doesn’t. Wikipedia derives its power from “us.” Google derives its power from its technology and inflated stock price. Who would you count on to change the world?
Response to Basic Questions Raised by the Readers
Reader divotdave asked a few questions, which I thought to be very basic in nature (i.e. important.) I believe more people will be pondering about the same issues, so I’m to including here them with the replies.
Question:
How does it distinguish between good information and bad? How does it determine which parts of the sum of human knowledge to accept and which to reject?
Reply:
It wouldn’t have to distinguish between good vs bad information (not to be confused with well-formed vs badly formed) if it was to use a reliable source of information (with associated, reliable ontologies.) That is if the information or knowledge to be sought can be derived from Wikipedia 3.0 then it assumes that the information is reliable.
However, with respect to connecting the dots when it comes to returning information or deducing answers from the sea of information that lies beyond Wikipedia then your question becomes very relevant. How would it distinguish good information from bad information so that it can produce good knowledge (aka comprehended information, aka new information produced through deductive reasoning based on exiting information.)
Question:
Who, or what as the case may be, will determine what information is irrelevant to me as the inquiring end user?
Reply:
That is a good question and one which would have to be answered by the researchers working on AI engines for Web 3.0
There will be assumptions made as to what you are inquiring about. Just as when I saw your question I had to make assumption about what you really meant to ask me, AI engines would have to make an assumption, pretty much based on the same cognitive process humans use, which is the topic of a separate post, but which has been covered by many AI researchers.
Question:
Is this to say that ultimately some over-arching standard will emerge that all humanity will be forced (by lack of alternative information) to conform to?
Reply:
There is no need for one standard, except when it comes to the language the ontologies are written in (e.g OWL, OWL-DL, OWL Full etc.) Semantic Web researchers are trying to determine the best and most usable choice, taking into consideration human and machine performance in constructing –and exclusive in the latter case– interpreting those ontologies.
Two or more info agents working with the same domain-specific ontology but having different software (different AI engines) can collaborate with each other.
The only standard required is that of the ontology language and associated production tools.
Addendum
On AI and Natural Language Processing
I believe that the first generation of AI that will be used by Web 3.0 (aka Semantic Web) will be based on relatively simple inference engines that will NOT attempt to perform natural language processing, where current approaches still face too many serious challenges. However, they will still have the formal deductive reasoning capabilities described earlier in this article, and users would interact with these systems through some query language.
On the Debate about the Nature and Definition of AI
The embedding of AI into cyberspace will be done at first with relatively simple inference engines (that use algorithms and heuristics) that work collaboratively in P2P fashion and use standardized ontologies. The massively parallel interactions between the hundreds of millions of AI Agents that will run within the millions of P2P AI Engines on users’ PCs will give rise to the very complex behavior that is the future global brain.
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.
"Programming languages are like cats. It is easier to get a new cat than to get an old cat fixed." -- Douglas CrockfordEditor(s): Casey, Walter , Corrector(s): Alex , Thanks to: Rand, Steve Bennett, Brion, Domas, Nando, Erik, Belayet, Naoko, Chad, Kul, Jay, Signpost, Adrignola, rainman-sr , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
This seems to be a power outage at our European proxy caching cluster; we’ll see if we can give more details later.
European traffic has been rerouted to our US servers, but the extra load may cause the sites to be a little sluggish for now. (If your DNS is still seeing the old entries, you can manually configure your browser to use the US proxy: rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org port 80. You should only do this temporarily, as you won’t be able to access anything *but* Wikipedia and our sister projects. :)
Update 21:13 UTC:
European servers are coming back online, we should have this cleaned up pretty soon.
Update 21:26 UTC:
We’re starting to switch traffic back to Europe. Should be better in a few minutes… In the meantime, amuse yourself reading the Twitter panic. :)
Update 21:40 UTC:
You can also use the SSL interface to Wikipedia, which doesn’t have the proxy overload.
In March I posted about dipping our toes into cloud computing.
CloudCampPDX, to my knowledge the first CloudCamp here in Portland, was Tuesday night and I was glad to be in attendance. I have been curious where the other cloud folks are in town and it was comforting to see that there are local companies doing cloud magic also. It seemed like everyone was really curious to see what was working and not working for others.
I hope it becomes a regular thing. There is some information about the CloudCamp community here. I may have missed somebody mentioning it, but I did not hear that there is a user group here at the moment. If not, I would like to propose that we start one, so get in touch with me if you are interested. (Lyric at AboutUs dot org)
Some other folks in this ’space’: The Cloud Appreciation Society
قمت بتصميم لوحات إعلانية (Banners) ليوم ويكيبيديا العربية الخامس الذي لا يفصلنا عنه إلا 15 يوما (أي أنه سيكون يوم السبت 11 يوليو 2009), اللوحات مصممة بمختلف الأقياس ليستطيع الجميع إستعمالها في مواقعهم و مدوناتهم, للإطلاع على اللافتات الجديدة في ويكيميديا كومنز إضغط هنا. و أخيرا أرجوا أن تنال هذه اللوحات على إعجابكم.
Hi all,
Some of you might have already seen my blog posts about LiquidThreads, Wikimedia’s in-development discussion system.
For those who haven’t, this is a quick primer on what LiquidThreads is, and what it’s going to do for Wikimedia’s communities.
Currently, Wikimedia’s discussion system sucks. Here’s why:
Imagine being a new user and trying to figure out how to add your comment to this.
Enter LiquidThreads. LiquidThreads is a system that makes MediaWiki’s discussion system behave like a forum or comments thread, while still maintaining the unique refinements that make wikis work. It was originally designed by a Google Summer of Code student, David McCabe, and I’ve been making incremental improvements to make it work for Wikimedia.
Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface
So, what’s changed?
If you’re interested, I’ve put together a test setup for you to play with it.
As always, questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome, in the comments or elsewhere.
This is the third in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for 
Download.
How many of the emails you receive require your direct input or feedback on the contents of an attachment?
The first usability release, Acai, hit Wikipedia and sister projects this afternoon. The new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar can be turned on from the user preference under “Appearance” and “Editing”. Search result page now has a new layout with less daunting information. Vector is only available for left-to-right languages at a moment due to IE6 incompatibility. However, the enhanced toolbar can be selected from all languages and the new search result page is enabled globally. We could not roll out two features we had planned. First, warning messages for unsaved changes when a user switches away from the edit tab did not work properly thus they are disabled. So please be careful when you switch away from the edit tab. Secondly importing language specific configuration for special characters were not graceful, so we disabled special character function from the toolbar. We are working on the fixes and plan to roll them out as soon as we have stable solutions. The usability project wiki has Vector and the new toolbar as a default, so if you prefer to check them out without changing your preferences it is a good place to visit first. Let us know what you think. We would love to hear from you.
Best,
Naoko
I’m very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a USD 300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading. See the press release and the grant proposal as submitted (PDF).
This should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. Wikimedia Commons , the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.
We want to begin to change that, and make sure that everyone who has useful educational media to share can do so easily. As part of our partnership with Kaltura, Michael Dale has already done some great work on external repository searches and transfers, and on integration of uploading into the editing interface, so we’re hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.
We’ve also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany’s investment in multilingual search (German link; see Google Translation) are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we’ll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.
Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course we’re enormously grateful to the Ford Foundation for funding it. Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Out of all the anti-New York City things to do, Macy’s quietly announced last week that it had moved the 4th of July fireworks show off the East River to host it on the Hudson. Supposedly this is in honor of Henry Hudson, but really it’s a slap in the face to New York City. The East River is the most New York City river that there is, touching the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. The Hudson is partially New Jersey’s, and they can get their own fireworks show.
Macy’s just told the other boroughs that the only one that counts this year is Manhattan. And…New Jersey. So to all you people in Queens and Brooklyn who were planning rooftop parties, here’s what to do:
Boycott Macy’s during the month of July, New York City, and show them how much you appreciate them taking away our fireworks. Make sure they don’t do it again.
Spread the word!
Seeing this post last week about the 11 Unitentionally Hilarious Domain Names reminded me that I wanted to write about that from the AboutUs angle.
First of all, we have a bot who gets public, fair use information from a website that we haven’t heard from. Then the bot tries to CamelCase the domain name – which usually results in a successful event. When it doesn’t the results can be hilarious, as noted from Identity Woman a couple years ago.
When the bot gets it wrong, it gets it really wrong. As noted by RunningAsRoot last year. (No we don’t think they are trafficking marijuana.)
Please, for a good time, check out some of our bot’s best-miss-hits, AboutUsBotGoneBad
Come join us at WikiWednesday 5:30 – 7:30 tonight (107 SE Stark) to discuss these wiki ideas and more! (like the new Wikia bliki option and SocialText’s new offering)
Oh, by the way, even the Cub Scouts get this idea!!
props to Vartan for the fancy bot graphic!
With six projects in over 250 languages, multilingual communication and content translation are big priorities for us. That’s one reason I was excited to go to the Open Translation Tools 2009 conference and be in the same room with 80 other translators, content providers and developers all working in the open translation space. Another reason is that the conference was held in Amsterdam in the old city center, in a beautiful venue right by one of the canals.
We have some amazing opportunities to collaborate with folks on other projects, from translation memory based systems like that in use by the World Wide Lexicon to source code string repository interfaces like Transifex. As one person put it, the perfect testbed for crowd-sourced translation is Wikipedia; if we can’t make it work there, where can it work? I also had a chance to talk with Gerard Meijssen and Siebrand Mazeland about new ways to facilitate tighter integration with translatewiki.net and to encourage more projects to make use of the translatewiki facilities. It should be a really productive year.
Folks told me to go visit the Van Gogh Museum, so I was dismayed to find that they don’t allow photography. However, the Wiki Loves Art NL project, organized by the NL Wikimedia chapter, had reached an agreement with the museum to allow two small groups in for photographs, during the week I happened to be there! So, come Tuesday morning, I was one of 20 lucky Wikimedia community members and photojournalists to be given private access to the Van Gogh collection. Some photos from the group are already available on the flickr group from which they will be uploaded to the Commons.
Right after the conference I went to the first two days of the OTT book sprint, which had as its goal the production of a comprehensive manual for beginner volunteer translators of open content with open tools. Once again we were in an awesome venue (see the picture; we were in one of the turrets!) and under the expert guidance of Adam Hyde we got a huge amount of content generated in just a few days.
On the last day I skipped town to go visit a colleague on one of the Wikimedia projects; we’ve worked closely together for over two years and had never met face to face. Perhaps that was the most important part of the whole trip: bringing our virtual community into the real world one person at a time.
My keynote for the Personal Democracy Forum, in New York.
Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)
Over the last year we have lived through a profound and perhaps epochal shift in the distribution of power. A year ago all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook users to turn out on election day. Today we bear witness to a ‘green’ revolution, coordinated via Twitter, and participate as the Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the unpleasant little secrets buried in the MPs expenses scandal – secrets which the British government has done everything in its power to withhold.
We’ve turned a corner. We’re on the downward slope. It was a long, hard slog to the top – a point we obviously reached on 4 November 2008 – but now the journey is all about acceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the past. The configuration of power has changed: its distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble with circumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand with a loss of control. At a certain point our entire global culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will go airborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the roadbed of civilization behind, we can spin the steering wheel all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its own rationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force will meet force. Force is already meeting force.
What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what happens in the guts of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can learn a lot – if we’re clever enough to watch these collisions as they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision will recognizably be governments or quasi-governmental organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before we glory, Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash, we should remember that these institutions are, first and foremost, the domain of people, individuals ill-prepared for whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is wearing a safety belt, even as things slip noticeably beyond control. Someone’s going to get hurt. That much is already clear.
What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political science for the 21st century. We need to understand the autopoietic formation of polities, which has been so accelerated and amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity. We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence. We need to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into action, and how this action spreads and replicates itself through hypermimesis. We have the words – or some of them – but we lack even an informal understanding of the ways and means. As long as this remains the case, we are subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor control. We can end the war between ourselves and our times. But first we must watch carefully. The collisions are mounting, and they have already revealed much. We have enough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new territory.
I: The First Casualty of War
Last month saw an interesting and unexpected collision. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia created by and for the people, decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would hereafter be banned from the capability to edit Wikipedia. This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the equivalent the Supreme Court in the Wikipediaverse.
It seems that for some period of time – probably stretching into years – there have been any number of ‘edit wars’ (where edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the Church of Scientology and certain of the personages in the Church. These pages have been subject to fierce edit wars between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics of the Church on the other, and, in the middle, Wikipedians, who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking, above all, to preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the encyclopedia aspires to in every article. When this became impossible – when the Church of Scientology and its members refused to leave things alone – a consensus gradually formed within the tangled adhocracy of Wikipedia, finalized in last month’s ruling from the Arbitration Committee. For at least six months, several Church of Scientology members are banned by name, and all Church computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia.
That would seem to be that. But it’s not. The Church of Scientology has been diligent in ensuring that the mainstream media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstream medium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology which are unflattering to the Church. There’s no reason to believe that things will simply rest as they are now, that everyone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for six months, like children given a time-out. Indeed, the Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quickly issued a press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking, “What’s next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?”
How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come will be driven by the structure and nature of these two wildly different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and control flows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not in charge of Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a social contract between the parties participating in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you participate, the more power you’ll have. Power is distributed laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia has some ultimate authority.
What happens when these two organizations, so fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique. But Wikipedia has thus far proven immune to lawsuits. Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia, running its servers and paying for its bandwidth, that is not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the machines, it is not the bandwidth, it is not even the full database of articles. Wikipedia is a social agreement. It is an agreement to share what we know, for the greater good of all. How does the Church of Scientology control that? This is the question that confronts every hierarchical organization when it collides with an adhocracy. Adhocracies present no control surfaces; they are at once both entirely transparent and completely smooth.
This could all get much worse. The Church of Scientology could ‘declare war’ on Wikipedia. A general in such a conflict might work to poison the social contract which powers Wikipedia, sewing mistrust, discontent and the presumption of malice within a community that thrives on trust, consensus-building and adherence to a common vision. Striking at the root of the social contract which is the whole of Wikipedia could possibly disrupt its internal networks and dissipate the human energy which drives the project.
Were we on the other side of the conflict, running a defensive strategy, we would seek to reinforce Wikipedia’s natural strength – the social agreement. The stronger the social agreement, the less effective any organized attack will be. A strong social agreement implies a depth of social resources which can be deployed to prevent or rapidly ameliorate damage.
Although this conflict between the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia may never explode into a full-blown conflict, at some point in the future, some other organization or institution will collide with Wikipedia, and battle lines will be drawn. The whole of this quarter of the 21st century looks like an accelerating series of run-ins between hierarchical organizations and adhocracies. What happens when the hierarchies find that their usual tools of war are entirely mismatched to their opponent?
II: War is Hell
Even the collision between friendly parties, when thus mismatched, can be devastating. Rasmus Klies Nielsen, a PhD student in Columbia’s Communications program, wrote an interesting study a few months ago in which he looked at “communication overload”, which he identifies as a persistent feature of online activism. Nielsen specifically studied the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign in New York, and learned that some of the best-practices of the Obama campaign failed utterly when they encountered an energized and empowered public.
The Obama campaign encouraged voters to communicate through its website, both with one another and with the campaign’s New York staff. Although New York had been written off by the campaign (Hilary Clinton was sure to win her home state), the state still housed many very strong and vocal Obama supporters (apocryphally, all from Manhattan’s Upper West Side). These supporters flooded into the Obama campaign website for New York, drowning out the campaign itself. As election day loomed, campaign staffers retreated to “older” communication techniques – that is, mobile phones – while Obama’s supporters continued the conversation through the website. A complete disconnection between campaign and supporters occurred, even though the parties had the same goals.
Political campaigns may be chaotic, but they are also very hierarchically structured. There is an orderly flow of power from top (candidate) to bottom (voter). Each has an assigned role. When that structure is short-circuited and replaced by an adhocracy, the instrumentality of the hierarchy overloads. We haven’t yet seen the hybrid beast which can function hierarchically yet interaction with an adhocracy. At this point when the two touch, the hierarchy simply shorts out.
Another example from the Obama general election campaign illustrates this tendency for hierarchies to short out when interacting with friendly adhocracies. Project Houdini was touted as a vast, distributed GOTV program which would allow tens of thousands of field workers to keep track of who had voted and who hadn’t. Project Houdini was among the most ambitious of the online efforts of the Obama campaign, and was thoroughly tested in the days leading up to the general election. But, once election day came, Project Houdini went down almost immediately under the volley of information coming in from every quadrant of the nation, from fieldworkers thoroughly empowered to gather and report GOTV data to the campaign. A patchwork backup plan allowed the campaign to tame the torrent of data, channeling it through field offices. But the great vision of the Obama campaign, to empower the individuals with the capability to gather and report GOTV data, came crashing down, because the system simply couldn’t handle the crush of the empowered field workers.
Both of these collisions happened in ‘friendly fire’ situations, where everyone’s eyes were set on achieving the same goal. But these two systems of organization are so foreign to one another that we still haven’t seen any successful attempt to span the chasm that separates them. Instead, we see collisions and failures. The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf. While some may wish to turn the clock back to an earlier time when campaigns respected carefully-wrought hierarchies, the electorates of the 21st century, empowered in their own right, have already come to expect that their candidate’s campaigns will meet them in that empowerment. The next decade is going to be completely hellish for politicians and campaign workers of every party as new rules and systems are worked out. There are no successful examples – yet. But circumstances are about to force a search for solutions.
III: War is Peace
As governments release the vast amounts of data held and generated by them, communities of interest are rising up to work with that data. As these communities become more knowledgeable, more intelligent – hyperintelligent – via this exposure, this hyperintelligence will translate into action: hyperempowerment. This is all well and good so long as the aims of the state are the same as the aims of the community. A community of hyperempowered citizens can achieve lofty goals in partnership with the state. But even here, the hyperempowered community faces a mismatch with the mechanisms of the state. The adhocracy by which the community thrives has no easy way to match its own mechanisms with those of the state. Even with the best intentions, every time the two touch there is the risk of catastrophic collapse. The failures of Project Houdini will be repeated, and this might lead some to argue that the opening up itself was a mistake. In fact, these catastrophes are the first sign of success. Connection is being made.
In order to avoid catastrophe, the state – and any institution which attempts to treat with a hyperintelligence – must radically reform its own mechanisms of communication. Top-down hierarchies which order power precisely can not share power with hyperintelligence. The hierarchy must open itself to a more chaotic and fundamentally less structured relationship with the hyperintelligence it has helped to foster. This is the crux of the problem, asking the leopard to change its spots. Only in transformation can hierarchy find its way into a successful relationship with hyperintelligence. But can any hierarchy change without losing its essence? Can the state – or any institution – become more flexible, fluid and dynamic while maintaining its essential qualities?
And this is the good case, the happy outcome, where everyone is pulling in the same direction. What happens when aims differ, when some hyperintelligence for some reason decides that it is antithetical to the interests of an institution or a state? We’ve seen the beginnings of this in the weird, slow war between the Church of Scientology and ANONYMOUS, a shadowy organization which coordinates its operations through a wiki. In recent weeks ANONYMOUS has also taken on the Basidj paramilitaries in Iran, and China’s internet censors. ANONYMOUS pools its information, builds hyperintelligence, and translates that hyperintelligence into hyperempowerment. Of course, they don’t use these words. ANONYMOUS is simply a creature of its times, born in an era of hyperconnectivity.
It might be more profitable to ask what happens when some group, working the data supplied at Recovery.gov or Data.gov or you-name-it.gov, learns of something that they’re opposed to, then goes to work blocking the government’s activities. In some sense, this is good old-fashioned activism, but it is amplified by the technologies now at hand. That amplification could be seen as a threat by the state; such activism could even be labeled terrorism. Even when this activism is well-intentioned, the mismatch and collision between the power of the state and any hyperempowered polities means that such mistakes will be very easy to make.
We will need to engage in a close examination of the intersection between the state and the various hyperempowered actors which rising up over next few years. Fortunately, the Obama administration, in its drive to make government data more transparent and more accessible (and thereby more likely to generate hyperintelligence around it) has provided the perfect laboratory to watch these hyperintelligences as they emerge and spread their wings. Although communication’s PhD candidates undoubtedly will be watching and taking notes, public policy-makers also should closely observe everything that happens. Since the rules of the game are changing, observation is the first most necessary step toward a rational future. Examining the pushback caused by these newly emerging communities will give us our first workable snapshot of a political science for the 21st century.
The 21st century will continue to see the emergence of powerful and hyperempowered communities. Sometimes these will challenge hierarchical organizations, such as with Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology; sometimes they will work with hierarchical organizations, as with Project Houdini; and sometimes it will be very hard to tell what the intended outcomes are. In each case the hierarchy – be it a state or an institution – will have to adapt itself into a new power role, a new sharing of power. In the past, like paired with like: states shared power with states, institutions with institutions, hierarchies with hierarchies. We are leaving this comfortable and familiar time behind, headed into a world where actors of every shape and description find themselves sufficiently hyperempowered to challenge any hierarchy. Even when they seek to work with a state or institution, they present challenges. Peace is war. In either direction, the same paradox confronts us: power must surrender power, or be overwhelmed by it. Sharing power is not an ideal of some utopian future; it’s the ground truth of our hyperconnected world.
WIKICITIES, Helmand, Monday (NNN) — The kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Rohde in Afghanistan was suppressed not only by almost all press syndicates but also by Wikipedia, on the direct command-and-control orders of Jimbo Wales, who is personally responsible for every word in the popular web-based encyclopedia.
Conservative commentators were appalled at the suppression. “Would they have protected HITLER like this?” thundered Michelle Malkin. Wales pointed out that the encyclopedia’s biography of Hitler had already been appropriately edited and cited per the Biographies of Living Persons policy:
Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany[citation needed]. He is noted[citation needed] for his work on the moral fibre of German society[citation needed] and stimulating the economy[citation needed], notably through the Autobahn construction programme[citation needed]. Some[who?] have criticized aspects of his policies[citation needed].
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.
It would be nice to live in a world in which this sort of ruckus signals real consensus and indicates a focused field-wide annealing of research and analysis which, neutrally and from specific perspectives, steadily refines our understanding of the fundamentals and possibilities involved. Instead this seems to play out like almost any zeal-on-zeal controversy : people caught in their own emotional cycles, and professional and social circles, come up with bold ideas, become attached to them, get into edit wars and public fights, and come to represent caricatures of their own analyses on teevee. There’s not much scientific purity and valor that makes it through that awkward human noise.
Some of this can be blamed on laziness on the part of fields themselves. We have strong ethical or guild codes within academic disciplines, but in ways they could be stronger. In mathematics, there is a compulsion to take unsolved problems very seriously. If someone has a wild idea that they insist revolutionizes all of math, you can go to any card-carrying mathematician and get their take on a neutral assessment - or a pointer to someone who can offer the same. It is hard to find yourself in the middle of a turf war, with Italians dismissing the French topologists’ wacky methods, or a group of set theorists attacking the credentials of a Quinian or hinting she is funded by the NSA (? who are the big corporate baddies in good math-conspiracy fiction?) to suit their ulterior motives.
The same is often true of physics and engineering - it’s hard to get people to put dogma ahead of making sure a result is strong, resiliant, and doesn’t fail. But somehow I don’t see people taking environmental, energy, or medical scientific studies as seriously - there is a willingness to be sidetracked by entrepreneurial business ideas, political and economic overtones, and a desire for personal recognition. There is less open research and more done behind closed doors or with conflicted funders.
Maybe this is inherent to the topics involved and the difficulty we now have in immediately testing hypotheses, but I think not. We should be tackling climate analysis the way we tackle searching for supernovas and Higgs bosons : with coordinated global research efforts funded by dozens of interested groups, gathering billions and trillions of data points, and funding hundreds of the world’s best scientists to work together on what is recognized as a project of extraordinary public importance.
It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.
To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?
This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.
While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.
Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.
China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:
But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.
The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.
Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.
With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.
This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.
(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)
What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.
I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.
Then came the big one.
China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (”Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)
One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.
It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.
China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.
At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.
Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)
Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.
Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.
Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.
The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.
Aaron Rester explains why web sites that respond to and enable the collective activity of their audience are less likely to become occasionally noticed but little-used monuments:
Just as Lefebvre leads us to see built spaces not as the expressions of a single architect, but rather as the production of the wide variety of human interactions that occur within them, so websites created by cartographers would cease being grand edifices of unidirectional communication and become instead the collective product of the individuals whose lives intersect within them.
The rise of the social web demands that if we are to help shape meaningful online experiences for our users, we must rethink our traditional role as builders of digital monuments and turn our attention to the close observation of the spaces that our users are producing around us.
I think this is even more true for internal websites, i.e. wikis. Most intranets are “grand edifices of unidirectional communication” whereas wikis can be precisely the opposite, if structured and introduced appropriately.
We had 52 minutes of downtime on the English-language Wikipedia site today; only en.wikipedia.org was affected. Our master database server was thrown into a funky state in which hundreds of access threads were stuck in the “statistics” state — which seems to be MySQL’s way of saying “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”.
It’s unclear exactly what set it off, but basically nothing works until you restart MySQL. After switching the site to an alternate master database, all has been well.
At 52 minutes from start of event, this took us a bit longer than I’d like to resolve — we had to percolate through a couple levels of alert calls before we finished diagnosing it and getting the DB switch pushed through. (Sorry to wake you up early Tim!)
A similar event in future should be fixable within a few minutes, thanks to Tim’s work on making the master-switch system more foolproof. We’re fixing up our internal documentation so all our site ops will now know how to run the database master switch script next time!
– brion
There's been a lot of coverage of the New York Times story "Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia." It's prompted discussion about balancing issues of free speech, safety, and responsibility at the Times and Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, the discussion has only just begun, but has started off quite constructively as seen in Wikipedian Apoc2400's proposed policy: in the short term, Wikipedia should refrain from spreading information if that information is not widely and reliably sourced, of little public interest, and is "likely to have very severe direct negative consequences."
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.
I see this benchmark being quoted in multiple places, and there I see stuff like:
When carrying out more database benchmarking, but this time with PostgreSQL, XFS and Btrfs were too slow to even complete this test, even when it had been running for more than an hour for a single run. Between EXT3, EXT4, and NILFS2, the fastest file-system was EXT3 and then its successor, EXT4, was slightly behind that. Far behind the position of EXT4 were NILFS2 and then Btrfs and XFS.
There were few other benchmarks, e.g. SQLite showed ‘bad performance’ on XFS and Btrfs.
*clear throat*
Dear benchmarkers, don’t compare apples and oranges. If you see differences between benchmarks, do some very very tiny research, and use some intellect, that you, as primates, do have. If database tests are slowest on filesystems created by Oracle (who know some stuff about systems in general) or SGI (who, despite giving away their campus to Google, still have lots of expertise in the field), that can indicate, that your tests are probably flawed somewhere, at least for that test domain.
Now, probably you’ve heard about such thing as ‘data consistency’. That is something what database stack tries to ensure, sometimes at higher costs, like not trusting volatile caches, enforcing certain write orders, depending on acknowledgements by underlying hardware.
So, in this case it wasn’t “benchmarking file systems”, it was simply, benchmarking “consistency” against “no consistency”. But don’t worry, most benchmarks have such flaws – getting numbers but not understanding them makes results much more interesting, right?
Oh, and… thanks for few more misguided people.
Democrat Al Franken has been certified the winner of the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat by the state supreme court, as expected. Now is the question whether Norm Coleman will continue to hurt his state by continuing this pointless effort to keep his constituents from having two elected representatives. From Politico:
The question now is whether the incumbent Republican senator will petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case — and if Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty would sign an election certificate in the interim — potentially prolonging a final decision for months. Doing so also would force Coleman to raise significantly more funds to keep his court challenge going. In its final line of the ruling, the state Supreme Court said Franken is “entitled” under Minnesota law to “receive the certificate election as United States senator from the state of Minnesota.”
UPDATE: Coleman concedes (finally)
إخواننا المسلمون و العرب يموتون بالمئات و يجرحون بالآلاف في المحرقة الصهيونية الغاصبة على قطاع غزة, و كالعادة لا يوجد من يتحرك لتغيير الوضع إلا بضعة صواريخ أطلقها المجاهدين نسأل الله أن ينصرهم و آل غزة أجمعين.
هذا "الكود" مخصص لأصحاب المواقع و المدونات أرجوا أن يتم وضعه في مواقعم و مدوناتهم و مثال عليه موجود هنا في مدونتي, نسأل الله العافية لأهل غزة:
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<a href="http://www.freegaza.ps/" target="_blank">
<img src="http://i42.servimg.com/u/f42/12/22/35/22/18620010.gif" border="0" alt="قفوا مع اهلكم في غزة"></a></div>
حتى الآن 350 شهيد و أكثر من 1500 جريح, ألا متى تستفيق الأمة الإسلامية على جروحها؟!
يوم الأحد الماضي إنتهت مباراة المنتخب الشقيقين مصر و الجزائر بفوز "محاربي الصحراء" على "الفراعنة" بنتيجة 3 - 1 في المباراة المقامة ضمن فعالية الجولة الثانية من دوري المجموعات الخاص بالتصفيات المزدوجة لكأس العالم في جنوب أفريقيا و كأس أفريقيا في أنغولا العام المقبل, لهذا أحببت مشاركتم بالفيديو الخاص بالأهداف الأربعة المسجلة خلال المباراة:
سجل للجزائر كل من كريم مطمور في الدقيقة 60 وعبد القادر عزال بعد الهدف الأول بحوالي 4 دقائق ورفيق جبور في الدقيقة 80 أما هدف مصر الوحيد فقد سجله محمد أبوتريكة قبل 4 دقائق من نهاية المباراة. مبارك للجزائر هذا الفوز و "هاردلك" لمنتخب مصر الشقيق.
تويت-فيد.يو هي خدمة ويب 2.0 تعتبر مساعدة لخدمة تويتر, و الخدمة التي يقدمها موقع تويت-فيد.يو هي إمكانية إرسال وتوتات فيديو إلى حساب المستخدم في تويتر و توفير رابط خاص و ذلك للعرضها على موقع تويت-فيد.يو. يوفر الموقع بعض الخيارات الإضافية مثل إمكانية إرسال ملفات الفيديو عبر رسالة هاتف جوال. بإختصار تكمن فائدة الموقع الرئيسية في نقطتين هما:
بفضل هذه الخدمة أصبح يمكن لمستخدمي تويتر مشاركة ملفات الفيديو المفضلة لديهم بطريقة سهلة و سريعة و بدون تدخلات و تعديلات يدوية إذ أن بوت الموقع يقوم بإضافة الرابط تلقائيا بعد رفع ملف الفيديو.
أعلنت اليوم مؤسسة ويكيميديا عن نتائج التصويت الذي إنتهى في 3 مايو الجاري و الذي يطلب من المستخدمين التصويت على مستقبل حقوق النشر في مشاريع المؤسسة (ويكيبيديا, ويكي الأخبار, ويكاموس.. إلخ.) و ذلك بتحويل الرخصة من رخصة جنو للوثائق العمومية 1.2 إلى رخصة التشارك الإبداعي النسبة-الحفاظ على الرخصة 3.0, كانت نسبة المشاركة في الوسط الويكيميدي معتبرة حيث سجل 17462 تصويت. و قد تمت رعاية التصويت بواسطة مؤسسة SPI.
تقول مؤسسة ويكيميديا أن التغييرإلى رخصة BY-SA سيؤثر إيجاباً في عملية الإستفادة من المواد الحرة الموجودة في 
مختلف مشاريعها. أما بالنسبة للنتائج فقد بلغ عدد المصوتين 17462 مُصوِّت أغلبهم صوتوا بنعم لهذا التغيير و قد كانت النتائج التي سجلتها المؤسسة كما يأتي:
و بما أن أصوات الحياد لا تحتسب فكانت النسبة المئوية النهائية للتصويت هي 87.9% بنعم و 12.1% بلا, بإجمالي مصوتين عدده 15071 مُصوِّت, و ذلك لعدم إحتساب أصوت المحايدين. و بإختصار شديد فإن أغلبية المجتمع الويكيميدي يؤيدون هذا التحديث.
عند الإمتحان (إمتحان نهاية العام) يكرم المرء أو يهان.. لتمر العطلة مثل "الزفت" أو مثل "الفَل" :P أسئل الله التوفيق لنفسي (جيد لقد إنتهى الإمتحان و الحمد لله على توفيقي, لمن لديه إمتحان أرجوا له التوفيق) و أعتذر عن عدم التواصل مع العالم الإنترنتي خلال الأيام القادمة حتى يوم الإثنين القادم أين ستبدأ العطلة الطويلة.
رغم أنني حاليا من مستخدمي توزيعة من فصيلة دم أخرى و هي ماندريفا, لكني لا زلت متابعا لديبيان و هي الأم لكثير من التوزيعات الناجحة مثل أوبونتو و مابيس و نوبكس. نعم بعد حوالي 4 سنوات من الإنتظار صدرت أخيرا النسخة 5 (ليني) المستقرة.
و هذه بعض الروابط المهمة لكل من يريد تجربة النسخة 5 و أيضا لمن يريد الترقية:
أخيرا أتمنى لكل من يريد تجربة التوزيعة التوفيق, مواجهة المشاكل سواء في التنصيب أو في الإعدادات أو حصول إنهيارات أمر غير وارد خصوصا و أن هذه التوزيعة من أكثر التوزيعات إستقرارا.
هذا الموقع مميز! مجتمع كامل للعب الشطرنج على الخط, و ليس هذا فقط! بل موسوعة شطرنج و منتديات و نظام للفرق و للدعوات و دردشة حول الشطرنج! بصراحة الموقع مذهل و خدماته رائعة و تصميمه أروع, و لا أبالغ إن قلت أنه لم يسبق أن وجد موقع ويب للشطرنج بهذه الإحترافية من قبل!
تتنوع الأقسام و الخدمات و وسائل الترفيه فيه و لكني سأذكر بإختصار شديد أهم الخدمات التي وجدتها في هذا الموقع:
طبعا لازلت هناك الكثير من الخدمات الأخرى في الموقع و التي لم أتحدث عنها و لكن أكتفي بالقول: زوروا الموقع و سيعجبكم!. ملاحظة أخيرة: الرابط في الأعلى هو للتسجيل عن طريقي فالذي لم يرد أن يمنحني بعض النقاط الإضافية فليدخل من عنوان الموقع العادي :).
ستصل مساء اليوم ويكيبيديا العربية إلى 86 ألف مقال, لا تزال الموسوعة الحرة في قسمها العربي تحتاج إلى المزيد من الجهد لتصل إلى 100 ألف مقال و تتجاوز العديد من الويكيبيديات الأخرى. خصوصا العبرية و بعض الويكيبيديات الأخرى التي لغتها لأقليات في العالم.
eyeOS هو واحد من أكثر أنظمة التشغيل على الويب تطورا و نضوجا, و هو يدعم الكثير من لغات العام من بينها اللغة العربية, و هو يضم باقة مميزة من برامج عالية الجودة و تلبي كافة الإحتياجات(محررات نصوص, متصفح إنترنت, ألعاب.. إلخ). التسجيل في نظام التشغيل هذا سهل جدا و ستحصل في الحال على نظام تشغيل متكامل يعمل من متصحفك, مثل هذه الأنظمة تساعد الأشخاص غير المستقرين على حاسوب واحد أو لأولئك الذين يتواجدون في الجامعات أو المقرات العمومية.
بالنسبة لمن أراد تركيب مثل هذا البرنامج على موقعه الشخصي, يمكنه زيارة موقع تطوير نظام eyeOS. تحميل البرنامج متاح من الموقع نفسه و بالمناسبة هذا النظام حر و مفتوح المصدر! المجتمع الخاص بالنظام نشيط نوعا و يمكن الحصول على الدعم عبر قناة eyeOS أو عبر المنتديات.
هناك العديد من الأنظمة التي تعمل على الويب مثل eyeOS أهمها Desktop2 المدعم من طرف شركة Sun Microsystems و لكن يبقى eyeOS هو الأفضل في نظري.
On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the licensing change that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the GNU Free Documentation License as the primary content license to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig tweeted that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “free culture win” in the Creative Commons blog.
A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all our projects in all languages reflect the new terms (see this message for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.
Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.
This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.
The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use MediaWiki, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
News and notes: Jackson’s death, new data center, more
Wikipedia in the news: Google News Support, Wired editor plagiarizes Wikipedia, Rohde’s kidnapping, Michael Jackson
Discussion report: Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
تم الإعلان عن ترتيب أحسن مواقع التورنت لهذا العام, و الذي شهد صعود مواقع و نزول فجائي لمواقع كبيرة في الترتيب و إليكم قائمة أفضل 20 موقع تورنت التي تداولتها المجلات و المدونات الأجنبية.
هذا بإختصار ترتيب عام 2008 لأشهر مواقع التورنت, ربما ترتيب العام 2009 القادم سيشهد تغيرات من جراء المنافسة الشرسة التي تعيشها المواقع الأوائل في هذا التصنيف.
Wikipedia has deliberately kept news of a New York Times reporter’s kidnap from its site. The reporter had been taken by the Taliban, and by colluding with 35 major news agencies, the Times managed to prevent the information from being disclosed from the general population. This media blackout was initiated with the hope of securing the reporters release by minimizing publicity about his location and reducing the possibility of increased coverage being used to increase in turn the possibility of the reporter being used as a “bargaining chip” by his captors.
There were dozens of appearances of the information, as the detail was reported by a few minor news agencies not privy to the embargo. Eventually, Jimmy Wales himself (after being asked desperately by a Times editor) stepped in by asking an admin to block the page so that the news would never make it live on the encyclopedia. The attempt was successful: all news agencies involved, as well as Wikipedia, managed to keep the news under wraps to a sufficient extent that the reporter was released. Everyone’s happy, right? After all, several competing organizations, as well as a website that has built a reputation as one of the hardest to control on the entire Internet, came together to ultimately save someone’s life.
Well, no. At least, not quite. There is no doubt that the actions taken by the news agencies to save someone’s life were commendable. Even the cover-up by Wikipedia is laudable. However, Wikipedia is an entirely different kettle of fish to news agencies. Newspapers and TV channels have always had bias, and always have – it is an inevitable side-effect of commercially-owned, politically-active companies. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has no such deficiency, and indeed prides itself on supposedly being free of any prejudice or bias point of view, or any particular allegiance to one political party or other. Does this mean, then, that Wikipedia (or more specifically, its founder and main man Jimbo Wales) go against its principles and policies by being part of the cover-up?
Wales’ defence centred on the fact that as the news wasn’t being reported by any of the media news agencies, any news confirming the kidnapping would not have come from a reliable source, thus under Wikipedia rules not having a high enough probability of being accurate information (if you put aside for the moment the fact that Wales himself knew for certain the kidnapping had taken place). Thus, even if there hadn’t been any cover-up on Wikipedia’s end, the information wouldn’t have remained on the site for long anyway. Wales made a point of saying, and indeed he is quoted in the NYT article on the subject, that “[W]e were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source ... I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.” What would Wales have done if it this hadn’t been the case? In my opinion, Wikipedia would have had no choice but to include the news. If it was appearing in reliable sources, then the information would be readily accessible, and there would be minimal further harm in Wikipedia publishing the news.
The point I want to make here is less to do with Wikipedia, but more about the media in general: If the media don’t report an incident, then to all intents and purposes, that incident didn’t happen. As they say, history is always written by the victors; and the same kind of theory applies here. If the media decide not to cover something, then no-one finds out about it, and Wikipedia, the puppydog that trails keenly “reliable sources” is forced into following their lead. NPR reported Poynter Institute journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride as saying "I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public". I find this comment a little naive: as I have already have said, media agencies are renowned for bias. Sure, this varies from provider to provider, so that information always gets reported in one form or another. But the media in general have been slow to report the takeoff in online journalism, for fear that their own institutions go bust – just one example where media outlets can band together to try and influence public opinion. And there are other instances, too: the government are constantly enforcing media blackouts to protect the safety of its armed forces, for example. So, in short, this incident has highlighted the power of the media, and the inevitability of Wikipedia having to follow suit.
For Wikipedia’s part, other serious issues are raised. If the rules are willing to be bent here, has a precedent been set for their breakage in other areas, at other times? Yes, the cause was a good one, but what is the point of having rules if they aren’t followed? Jimbo Wales has shown, as well as once again his power within the Wikipedia community, that rules can be broken. This can be good thing, as the rules are often criticized, but a rule, once broken, is always broken again.
هذا الموضوع كنت قد كتبته سابقا و لكنه ضاع و الله المستعان, سأعيد كتابته من جديد لأني أعلم أن هناك الكثير ممن تهمهم هذه الخدمات خصوصا أنها تتعلق بالمراسلة الفورية.
الجميع تقريبا يستعمل المراسلة الفورية للتواصل عبر الإنترنت فهناك من يستعمل ويندوز لايف ماسنجر و ياهو! ماسنجر و آخرين يستخدمون إيم و سكايبي و محادثة جوجل, على كل سنلقي الضوء في هذا الموضوع حول مواقع تقدم هذه الخدمات عبر الويب.
هذه المواقع من أهم الأمثلة في الويب 2.0, الذي شهد تطورا كبيرا في ميدان تصميم و إخراج المواقع بالإضافة إلى تبلور فكرة التفاعلية و بناء الزائر لما يراه.
From an Apple support discussion on why sharing documents online via iWork.com is better than emailing them as attachments:
I don’t need to send to 20 other people, then get 20 mails back and read through those 20 mails. At the same time, each of those 20 has no idea what the other 19 are thinking and thus means there will be many overlapped ideas in those 20 mails I have to go through.
That nicely sums it up.
Though it admittedly passed without much fanfare (yet!), last week marked the third year since AboutUs.org went live to the world. Though the ideas and collaborative team behind the site had been percolating for years beforehand, it was on June 20th 2006 that we came in to existence.
Time flies when you’ve got your nose to the grindstone, and since those first days, we’ve grown to become a venture-backed startup of more than 30 employees (and soon to be more!) that has built a site of 14 million pages.
But we didn’t do it alone. AboutUs is a community-built endeavor, and as a way of saying thanks for being along for the ride, we’d like to buy you a beer.
At July 17th’s Beer & Blog in Portland, we’ll be picking up the tab, so be sure to join us at the Green Dragon from 4-6pm. Beer & Blog is a venue where we’ve received much sage advice over the years, and we’re delighted to be its benefactor for a change.
Jean Coaxum, one of the staff members of Exodus Transitional Community, stands outside the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem with Jim McGreevey.
Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who riveted the nation when he came out as a gay American in 2004, is now the symbol of fallen Governors. When Eliot Spitzer stepped down from the New York governorship in the midst of his own sex scandal, Spitzer and his wife were even charged with copying the McGreeveys’ fashion (it is uncanny).
The comparisons between Spitzer and McGreevey were apt, since they were both active Democratic politicians in neighboring states around the same time, both were frequently mentioned as strong Presidential contenders, and both of their sex scandals were seen as hubris personified.
With South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose Argentinian affair is not only hubris but also hypocrisy personified, McGreevey emerged again to offer advice that he should proceed with humility.
“I’m filled with a sense of pain and anguish for him and for his family,” McGreevey said in an interview. “I think it was a very human moment.”
Sanford is only one in a recent list of “Love Govs” who have admitted to affairs. They include the aforementioned McGreevey and Spitzer; Jim Gibbons of Nevada; and David Paterson of New York.
I have known Jim McGreevey since 2007, when I photographed him as part of my public art project that Wikipedia hosts. At the time I was attending Saint Bartholomew’s in Manhattan on one of my many failed quests to find spirituality. St. Bart’s also happened to be where McGreevey, his partner Mark O’Donnell and his daughter Jacqueline attended service. One day I approached him to ask if I could do his portrait. He still possessed the boyish good looks and charm that were evident even at the height of his scandal.
However, he possessed more than that: he also displayed humility and an inner peace. Since that time we have become good friends.
He is in a healthy, happy relationship with Mark as he studies to become an Episcopal priest. He is giving back to others who have made mistakes, often because they were caught up in the circumstances of their lives.
Jim McGreevey and black Jesus at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem. Click on the image to see more.
Gay people mostly forgave McGreevey for his affair when it came to light five years ago. We are well aware of the many ludicrous situations that occur because men, particularly in McGreevey’s generation, have been forced to live their lives in the closet. That he is living such an honorable and giving life freed from the shame of the closet is testament to the real Jim McGreevey.
McGreevey volunteers at Exodus MinistriesTransitional Community at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem, New York, which tries to help newly-released prisoners learn life skills and handle the significant challenges that ex-convicts face. It’s not just job-hunting. One of the photographs below shows Jim helping one young man figure out how to set up a free e-mail account on Yahoo. With limited access to computers, the guy had no idea how to do this. This is not atypical. We take this kind of knowledge for granted, assuming everyone knows how to set up free e-mail. They don’t.
The gifts that McGreevey brings to these formerly-incarcerated men and women are vast. He still retains many of the contacts and friendships in government that he had when he was Governor, which has been a Godsend to a program that needs state assistance to function. McGreevey knows how the system works; he knows resources that are available to these people; and he is gifted with an ability to teach and reach them.
Many of these men and women don’t know who McGreevey is; they were not exactly following politics before their imprisonment. Nevertheless, it was obvious that they sensed in Jim that he knows tremendous mistakes, and he knows how to overcome them.
Of course, the tabloids, the Mark Sanfords and the Larry Craigs of the world will probably never forgive him. But who cares. Certainly not the men in these photos below, who see the same McGreevey that I see, and not the caricature who exists in the pages of the press.
UPDATE: The correct name is Exodus Transitional Community. There is a Dallas-based group named Exodus Ministries that does prisoner rehabilitation as well (You may remember Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers served on the Dallas group’s board, which was mistakenly thought to be the ex-gay group Exodus International). I was told they are affiliated with Dallas, but then later told that they are not.
Alvin Williams, one of Exodus’ intake counselors, talks to newly-released men about readjusting to life outside of prison, and the services that Exodus has to offer them.
McGreevey talks to the young men about life skills and how to re-engage society.
McGreevey and an Exodus counselor help a young man set up a free e-mail account. Many of these people have challenges, such as lack of access to computers, that many of us can not fathom.
McGreevey stands in front of James de la Vega’s East Harlem mural of legendary Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri.
The following is a guest post of sorts: Barry Kort wrote it for a Google Knol. They're his views, and not necessarily mine. Content reproduced under CC-BY-3.0
The governance model of Wikipedia was so anachronistic that it took me over a year to place it in the timeline of historic governance models adopted at various times in the annals of human history.
The thing that stymied me was the prominence of blocking and banning as the primary tool of governance. I simply couldn’t place that among the recognized tools of governance in any historic context.
And then I happened to take a look at the oldest surviving account of secular law — the Code of Hammurabi of 1760 BC.
Of the 282 laws that Hammurabi of Mesopotamia carved into the stone tablets, take note of the very first one:
1. If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.
Evidently, banning (ostracism) was a common practice in the tribal cultures in the Middle East some 4000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization. Capricious and spurious banning was evidently such a common and egregious abuse of tribal overlords that Hammurabi made it a capital offense to ban someone without proving just cause.
And yet, on Wikipedia, indefinite blocks and bans without due process are a common occurrence. That is to say, the prevailing governance model of Wikipedia corresponds to a pre-Hammurabic tribal ochlocracy that is so anachronistic, it predates the advent of the Rule of Law.
When Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders drafted the US Constitution, one of the provisions they put in Article One was a prohibition against Bills of Attainder. A Bill of Attainder is the technical term in the law for declaring a person to be an outlaw (without respect to having violated any specific law that applies equally to everyone). The Founders excluded Bills of Attainder from the tools of governance because 4000 years of political history had demonstrated that such a toxic practice is corrosive and ridden with corruption, and invariably sinks any government that comes to rely on it.
The irony here is that Wikipedia purports to be the “sum of all knowledge” with an educational mission that reaches out to students, teachers, and scholars around the world. And yet those exercising power in Wikipedia have not yet learned the oldest and most profound lessons in the annals of human history — lessons enshrined in the first written law and in the first article of the US Constitution.
The consequence of adopting such an anachronistic governance model is that Wikipedians are fated to relive and reify the long-forgotten lessons of history. They relive those lessons by reprising the same kind of political dramas that fill the history books since the dawn of civilization.
The anachronistic governance model which Jimbo Wales foolishly and mindlessly introjected into Wikipedia is simply not a sustainable model in this day and age. Summary and capricious banning wasn’t even a sustainable model some 3768 years ago when Hammurabi first singled it out as an unacceptable practice in a civilized culture.
So what to do about it? The answer can be found in the second law of Hammurabi’s Code. As Hammurabi advises, the solution is to tell them to go jump in the lake.
Or as they say in Yiddish, “Nem zich a vaneh!“
So apparently some guy called Michael Jackson died the other day. Several questions were inevitably raised from the passing: was the death preventable, and did lawyers’ warnings to stay off the drugs go unheeded? What will happen to the rights of the Beatles music, which Jackson acquired when he bought ATV Music Publishing for $47.5 million in 1985? For the Wikipedians among us, however, there is only one really important question: how did the illustrious online encyclopedia deal with the death?
Answer: not too bad, actually. Whilst it’s true that the site did go down for a while, with several users reportedly encountering 404s and other infamous error messages, it would be unfair to blame Wikimedia for this when the death of such a famous celebrity tested the entire internet to its limits. There are other angles, to analyse though. When the news first broke, the Wikipedia article on Jackson was one of the first sites to spread the information. However (and this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone even faintly familiar with the way the encyclopedia, or indeed any wiki, works) edit wars broke out. As the news was in its infancy, understandable concerns were raised about the verifiability of the information. After all, there have been several famous incidents in the past where a hilarious prankster has altered a Biography of a Living Person (Wikipedease for an article about a person who’s still alive) to say that said person had in fact died several years ago.
Normally, edit wars are controllable. They are an unavoidable side-effect of real-time collaboration. On the day of Michael Jackson’s death, however, normal rules did not apply. Sentences inserted claiming his death were removed, and then reinserted, and then removed, ad nauseam. At other times, by completely different people, all occurrences of the word ‘is’ were replaced with the word ‘was’, and ‘his most recent album’ changed to ‘his final album’. In short, more than a hundred people, with varying degrees of intelligence, experience with Wikipedia, news of Jackson’s death, and bias towards the man himself (several people who edited the page were simply refusing to believe the news) were attacking the article all within the space of a few minutes. In the majority of cases, huge edit conflicts occurred as multiple people attempted to alter the article simultaneously. All this came at a time when people were understandably turning to Wikipedia for solid, trustable information on what exactly was going on. Wikipedia, as a general rule of thumb, doesn’t report things that aren’t true, right? Unfortunately, the end result for the casual reader was less than ideal: contradictions within the article itself, with opposing phrases only a few sentences apart, and fundamental details about the event changing every time you hit refresh.
So what needs to change, if anything? It’s clear that Wikipedia really isn’t able to cope with sudden news which mostly comes from unreliable sources. One option would be to automatically lock articles which are experiencing an edit meltdown, with the version before the war took place being shown. Alternatively, using the flag system, contributors could draft a new version behind the scenes, and when the facts have been established, this version could be opened up for consumption by the general public. The problem with both these methods, though, is that the public are looking for immediate, but correct, information. At the moment, thought, this simply looks like an impossible feat from Wikipedia.
I spent some time last night playing with my parents’ shiny new HDTV, which puts my 2005-vintage 26″ set to shame.
Pretty nice set; 40-something inch, 1080p, 120 Hz whatchamahooie, and you can plug in a USB stick full of JPEGs and force your family to watch your vacation photos. Nice!
It seems to be all the rage on new sets to have motion interpolation which can take 24-frame-sourced content (feature films and most US drama and sitcom TV shows) and smooth out the frame-to-frame motion, making it look more like 60-field video. Lots of higher-end sets advertise 120 Hz or even 240 Hz, which honestly seems excessive to me — the human eye can’t distinguish much more than 60 frames per second. 
I’m a bit torn; on the one hand, the faster frame rate makes motion look much more vivid and realistic from any objective point of view. On the other hand, audiences have been trained over the last few decades to associate the video look with “cheesier” programming — soaps, reality shows, etc — while “serious” programs are shot on film at 24fps, making them feel more like a big-budget feature film… even to the point that lots of money was spent developing HD video cameras that could shoot at the slower, less realistic 24fps instead of HD’s native 60!
We stumbled into Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo of all things on HBO, and ran it for a while just to get a feel for the set. At first it drove me nuts seeing a movie I’d already seen on film looking distinctly like HD video, but after a half hour I got quite used to it and rather grew to like it. Of course as a former cinema-television student I’m extra-sensitized to this stuff — my wife immediately took to the more vivid display and commented on how much better it looked than when we’d seen it in the theater!
Looks like the mass audiences are happy to embrace high-motion video… I wonder if the long-standing holdover of the “film look” over the last decade was driven more by the oversensitized film geeks in the industry than any actual audience comparison…
Let’s learn a lesson here with our software development as well — those of us who’ve been nose-deep in web sites and software UI for years aren’t necessarily the most qualified to tell what our actual users are going to be most comfortable with.
Michael Jackson’s sudden and shocking death just about blew up the Internet this past week, and Wikipedia was no exception, even getting briefly knocked offline. And as the New York Times’ tech reporter Noam Cohen reported, the stunning news produced another milestone for Wikipedia:
The Michael Jackson entry in Wikipedia Thursday evening appeared to have set the record as having the highest traffic in the eight-year history of the online encyclopedia.
In the 7 p.m. hour alone Thursday, shortly after Mr. Jackson’s death was confirmed, there were nearly one million visitors to that article. (In fact, for that hour more than 250,000 visitors went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.” Even his brother Randy Jackson had 25,000 visits that hour.)
“We suspect this is most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.
The article goes on to note that this represented about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s total traffic on the day — this may not sound like much, until you recall the English Wikipedia has more than 2.9 million articles. Writing midday Friday, Cohen predicted that the article could surpass 5 million visits on Friday. As it happens, Cohen set his target a little too low:
1.4 million visits is pretty remarkable, but 5.9 million visits in unprecendented. However, there is one discrepancy: yesterday’s estimates from User:Henrik’s Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool (and Cohen’s article) put the figure at 1.8 million visits, which means the numbers where somehow reconciled downward in the interim. I’ll be looking to find out why. And while Cohen names as a point of comparison President Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article, which received 2.3 million visits on Election Day, I know of a page that received more traffic still and offers a better comparison:
That spike you are looking at occurred on the day that Senator John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the final days of August, 2008 (as previously discussed on Blog P.I.). Between Jackson and Palin we have one well-known but mysterious and one little-known but suddenly very public figure, thrust into the middle of a breaking news story. By comparison, Obama was a highly visible public figure and Election Day was known far in advance. Perhaps that actually makes the 2.3 million that day even more impressive. But it’s hard to read much more into bar graphs such as this beyond acknowledging they represent a sudden and externally-driven interest in the subject.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that the article containing the information people presumably want most, Death of Michael Jackson, has not recorded anything like the traffic of the primary MJ article:
Why is this the case? Part of the answer is the power of Google, which is the overwhelming driver of traffic to Wikipedia. On that note, I don’t know about you, but in the past 24 hours, Michael Jackson’s official site and his Wikipedia article have traded places on Google, with Wikipedia now ranked first overall. Second, the link to this article is found deep in the primary one, albeit of course at the top of the section concerning his death. Still, 527 is a rounding error compared to 5.9 million. Perhaps the Michael Jackson article itself satisfied their curiosity, before clicking over to iTunes and downloading a copy of Thriller.
And one last, somewhat morbid note: it is strange indeed that the King of Pop is no longer covered by Wikipedia’s Biography of living persons guideline.
Yesterday, Brian Kerr sent me this great weblog post: On making About Us a real conversation and not static. I personally have a connection to the city, since I moved from Ann Arbor, MI a few years ago to Portland, Oregon – home of the original wiki and the AboutUs wiki.
Part of our vision for AboutUs is that nearly every single website has a static ‘about’ page – and so our wiki is an attempt to give a place for dynamic ‘about’ information.
We now have a small item that could help make an actual ‘about’ page on your site more dynamic: our widget.
Some had originally thought of it as a widget just for blogs, but what we are seeing is that more people are using it on their websites, like these.
I can easily imagine people placing these on their ‘about’ pages – I also have vision of a larger white label AboutUs widget for the ‘about’ page, in the future.
Imagine if every website had a door to an into open, collaborative, transparent, social media website. What excites me is the connections that are possible and the things, relationships and solutions that could come from that.
Let me know what you think!
Update: AnnArbor.com already uses for its ‘about’ page, a wiki page on ArborWiki! Kudos and props to them!!
Meryl Evans wrote a guide for remote workers on Web Worker Daily, and included this tip from me on maintaining strong communication:
Communicating Without Geek Speak
Stewart Mader: A strong ability to communicate about what you’re doing. If you work for a company, you need to be good at using the intranet, enterprise wiki or other social computing tools to keep others up to date on what you’re doing, ask for their feedback and make sure they know you’re available to help them too.
When several different people make queries and the same advice needs to be given, it's probably better (or at least less work) to blog the darn thing. So here's one of my little methods for defusing content disputes. Call it the three week rule.
by Lise Broer (noreply@blogger.com) at 26 June, 2009 05:54 PM
This is the second in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for Download.
We asked how many of the emails people receive on a daily basis contain attachments.
65% of respondents said a few of the daily emails they receive contain attachments, and 25% said at least half contain attachments. Only 2% said that the vast majority include attachments.
Yesterday I walked over to one of my favorite mini-restaurants, Snack Dragon, to buy a couple of carne asada tacos. The topic of Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths were already on the lips of the two ladies eating rice and beans. We all started talking about it. Suddenly, one of the women said, “And then Liza Minnelli, too! I can’t believe it!”
“Liza Minnelli?!” I replied, mouth agape.
“Yeah - you didn’t know about that? They just announced she died today, too.”
“Holy shit,” I said, “the drag queen mascara is going to be running in the streets of Chelsea this gay pride.” We all talked about June 25th, and the deaths of so many amazing people on one day.
I had earlier broken the news about Jackson to my mother. She was floored. When I returned home with tacos in hand, I called her immediately and said, “And did you hear about Liza Minnelli?!”
Of course, Liza Minnelli is alive and well. It was only after I told my mother–”This is starting to feel like a terrorist attack!“–that I looked for information on Google about Minnelli and found nothing.
It turns out that the celebrity death rumor mill was in full swing yesterday, as pranksters preyed on the shock and raw grief of unassuming people. The New York Daily News reported that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum death rumors were circulating:
The rumors of Goldblum and Ford’s untimely deaths turned out to be false, and were in fact well-known Internet pranks that once made similar claims of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.
“Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue,” said the actor’s publicist in a statement Thursday night. “He is fine and in Los Angeles.”
According to Snopes.com, these stories are automatically generated with fake scenarios via prank websites. Users simply plug in any name - which in this case were Goldblum and Ford.
For Goldblum, it was suggested he fell to his death while filming a movie in New Zealand. Ford supposedly disappeared while on a boat in the French Riviera.
This kind of prank first appeared online in 2006, and targeted Hanks. Cruise was similarly reported “dead” in 2008.
It’s amazing how the Internet is reshaping our society in such a way that things like pulling pranks in the wake of tragic deaths are now completely common. It’s true: nothing is sacred anymore. We all better learn to live in that kind of world.
This image on Wikipedia was dedicated to editor Realist2, who has worked hard at creating high quality articles on the entire Jackson family. Click on the image to see where it is used on Wikipedia.
The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article is one of the better biography articles on Wikipedia, and it is directly-related to the efforts of editor Realist2. On June 25th, 1.4 million people hit it.
I have no doubt that Michael Jackson knew that this editor was keeping the article as close to the core Wikipedia policy of “Neutral Point of View” as possible. Realist2 is an example of the amazing work that happens on that site. He took an interest in popular culture and turned himself into a scribe of popular culture. That’s pretty cool.
Realist has worked on the articles about all of the Jacksons, and they owe him a debt of gratitude. We all do. I dedicated the image of a Michael Jackson impersonator at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival celebration of the 25th anniversary of Thriller in Realist’s honor. Also pictured are cast members of the television program Step It Up and Dance!, who put on a show at the festival with the original choreographer of the Thriller video.
With its dedication, Realist2 was inducted into the Wikimedia Hall of the Greats, along with other people who have greatly improved the quality and scope of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
this is source code for a tiny program I just wrote that traverses specified directories and removes them from file system cache.
There are few use cases for it. One is for all these people who benchmark stuff and want selective OS cache purges, another is for those who run high performance databases. Remember the O_DIRECT serialization everywhere? Well, XFS does direct I/O in parallel, unless there are cached pages (and they can happen because of any random outside-of-database activity, like ‘file’ command). Once you ‘uncache’ the files, XFS will be very much parallel again \o/ \o/
So, we had a major embarrassment last night. It consisted of multiple factors:
So, in summary, we had havoc in our cluster because stampede of heavy requests between cache purge and cache population was consuming all available CPU resources, mostly working on rendering references section on Michael Jackson article.
Oh well, quick operations hack looked like this:
Index: ParserCache.php
===================================================================
--- ParserCache.php (revision 52088)
+++ ParserCache.php (working copy)
@@ -63,6 +63,7 @@
if ( is_object( $value ) ) {
wfDebug( "Found.\n" );
# Delete if article has changed since the cache was made
// temp hack!
+ if( $article->mTitle->getPrefixedText() != 'Michael Jackson' ) {
$canCache = $article->checkTouched();
$cacheTime = $value->getCacheTime();
$touched = $article->mTouched;
It is embarrassing, as actual pageview count was way below our usual capacity, whenever we have problems is because of some narrow expensive problem, not because of overall unavoidable resource shortage. We can afford much more edits, much more pageviews. We could have handled this load way better if our users wouldn’t be creating complex logic in articles. We could have handled this way better, if we had more aggressive redundant job elimination.
Thats the real story of operations, though headlines like “High profile event brought down Wikipedia” may sound nice, the real story is “shit happens”.
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?
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.
Our CTO Brion Vibber offered a fascinating post on the Foundation’s Tech Blog today, highlighting the incredible traffic spike and related problems caused by the news of singer Michael Jackson’s reported death.
Expect the tech blog to be updated as other server developments unfold, and of course the Wikipedia article to go through some fascinating evolution and discussion.
Jay Walsh, Communications
What are your favorite resources about how collaboration — in a large or small group of people — works?
And yeah, the answer probably isn’t “report Michael Jackson dead and see what happens to the Wikipedia pages.”* Though, that works too.
* Answer: load spike. Slashdot ain’t got nothing on the King of Pop. See: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/current-events/ for fun analysis.
How would you make this button better?
We have begun exploring ideas for enhancing the visibility of a donate button, not only within Wikipedia and the Wikimedia main template, but also on every page of every Wikimedia project. We hope that enhancement will enable us to better informing our public that we are dependent on their donations as we promote the free and open knowledge movement.
As we saw in the last fundraiser, different messages and visual styles had different outcomes: different levels of gifts, origin of donors, and frequency of donations. We expect that a small change to the Wikimedia design template will result in a big returns in donations — increasing funds we use to keep the Wikimedia movement alive and growing. We expect that in return for a bit of enhanced visibility, we will see a daily increase of up to 20% in donations.
Working with the same designer that worked on last year’s donation page, we have culled his 30+ button ideas into 6 that represent some of the better designs.
We have posted several design options for your comments and input.
Design is only half of this change… words are equally important. We are also looking for input on messaging on the donate button and on most Wikimedia articles. What are the simplest words we can use? Can the text be easily translated into dozens of languages? We need text that will communicate that we are a non-profit and and express the importance of donations in keeping our projects active.
Join the discussions on our donation upgrades page and catch a glimpse of the upcoming improvements to our community fundraising efforts!
Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
One of Rush Limbaugh’s big sponsors is was Zicam, and was he ever hopping mad that a product he has relentlessly endorsed might damage his followers’ sense of smell. That is, he was hopping mad at the FDA, claiming that pulling this product was an effort by Democrats to hurt him! Stephen Colbert riffed on this hilariously, mentioning that this might be the reason Limbaugh’s listener’s have trouble smelling bullshit. Here’s the video:
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Zicam Recall | ||||
| www.colbertnation.com | ||||
|
||||
There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
--- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, almost all versions
The latest version of the External Data extension now lets you get data from two other sources (in addition to APIs and text files): LDAP servers, and database tables. This is a nice step forward, in that it’s no longer completely necessary to create an API for every data source you want to access from the wiki; which makes the concept of using MediaWiki for data integration potentially simpler and less breakable. Thanks to David Macdonald for this new functionality.
The New York Times used Geralyn Shukwit's photos, in addition to local blogs, to cover the collapse of a building in Fort Greene. Click on the image to see this and other images taken by Shukwit.
The recent collapse of a residential building in Fort Greene, a neighborhood in New York City, was a stark example of the New York Times heavily employing the use of citizen journalism on its blogs.
It’s difficult for me to consider citizen journalism without thinking of the failure of Wikinews to become anything that has long-term potential. The model of Wikinews is fundamentally flawed, and there appears to be no desire to fix it. Wikipedia, as Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner herself said, is now fulfilling a role as a mainstream news medium. Gardner essentially crapped on any hope Wikinews would receive much support from the foundation.
The New York Times use of citizen journalism is really the way things will go. Electronic eye-witnesses (aka “citizen journalists”) and the mainstream media are currently undergoing a courtship and eventual marriage. Media organizations have an incentive for this: it makes their product more enmeshed in the communities they cover and serve, and makes those communities more invested in their local papers.
Wikinews has taken the wrong approach: they are little more than an aggregator of rehashed mainstream media stories that are covered in more depth, and updated more quickly, on Wikipedia. A notable exception to this on Wikinews is Mike Halterman’s interviews, amongst a few other stand-outs; however, three or four original reporters aren’t going to save the site. With the mainstream organizations encouraging citizens to contribute to their product more, and the Wikimedia Foundation and community giving up on separating “news” items out of its encyclopedia articles, it’s difficult to see the need for Wikinews as it is now.
It’s too bad. If the Wikimedia community saw the benefits of Wikinews, and if the Wikinewsies themselves were more intent on changing the nature of that project, it would be more relevant. Neither scenario seems likely.
If anything, the New York Times is teaching Wikinews how citizen journalism should be done by websites: search out the citizens who are covering the events and encourage them to contribute. Wikinewsies expect people to come to them. But they don’t. They go to Wikipedia. Now they’ll also go to the New York Times et al. Those organizations are far more exciting for the average citizen journalist to contribute to than Wikinews.
Well it is conference season…
In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, washed-up movie star Troy McClure — you may remember him from such self-help videos as “Smoke Yourself Thin!” and “Get Confident, Stupid!” — enters a sham marriage with Aunt Selma to squash rumors about his sordid personal life and regain his former screen glory. As he is “romancing” Selma along a Simpsonized version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, McClure declares:
One day, my lady Selma’s gonna have a star right next to mine, so watch out [camera pans right] Laszlo Panaflex!
Like most throwaway Simpsons lines, it has faded from mainstream recognition — the episode’s imagined musical version of “Planet of the Apes” is surely better known — but lives on in offhand references made by those of us who have been watching long enough to remember the controversy over Bart Simpson and those “Underachiever and Proud Of It” T-shirts.
I thought of it again while watching Ghostbusters on TV last night, noticing that the cinematographer was László Kovács. Was Kovács’ the name Simpsons writers were riffing on? Following a well-established routine, I plugged his name — Panaflex’s of course — into Google, hoping for but not really expecting a Wikipedia article to pop up.
It turns out Wikipedia did show up first — but it wasn’t an article. Instead, it was a user page for someone using the fictional lenser’s moniker as a handle. It reads in full:
On the episode of the television show The Simpsons called “A Fish Called Selma,” actor Troy McClure attempts to revive his career by marrying Marge’s sister Selma. When Troy gets a star on the Springfield Walk of Fame, he says that Selma will soon have the star next to his, “so watch out … Laszlo Panaflex!” — the name on the star next to his.
The name refers to cinematographer László Kovács, who used a Panaflex camera on some of his films. A picture of a movie camera appears under the name on the star.
Simpsons Episode Guide: A Fish Called Selma
László Kovács at the Internet Movie Database
Nice. But this also got me wondering: is this a loophole in Wikipedia policy? Isn’t this a way to get an encyclopedic page on the site even if it would be otherwise deleted by Wikipedia’s relentless arbiters of significance? After, all articles appearing on what Wikipedians call the “mainspace” of Wikipedia are expected to satisfy a handful of core guidelines lest they be removed or radically altered.
First there is the general notability guideline requiring the subject to meet a certain threshhold of importance (often determined by news coverage). Articles failing the requirement are deleted, and relevant content is sometimes relocated to existing articles about the same topic. Laszlo Panaflex, as one joke in one episode, would never pass Wikipedia’s notability requirement because it would obviously belong on the page about the episode (and as of this writing, it is not even there). An example of a Simpsons reference that does meet this requirement is Homer Simpson’s ubiquitous “D’oh!”
Other guidelines it could elide and does in this case: Verifiability and Reliable sources. Sure, it helps to confirm my suspicion that Laszlo Panaflex is inspired by the real cinematographer with the accented name discouraging me from Ctrl-C/V-ing it again. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it was named for him, but certainly doesn’t offer a citation for the claim. I need more proof, and articles in the Wikipedia mainspace do, too.* User pages have no such requirement.
On the other hand, I think it passes NPOV with flying colors.
But is it a loophole to treat a user page like an article? After all, Laszlo Panaflex ranked right at the top of Google; other articles on semi-obscure subjects could as well. I don’t believe there is a policy, guideline or essay that specifically addresses this, though I fully acknowledge I may be wrong. In that case that I am not, the possibility exists for unworthy (or even “unworthy”) articles to be given a second home on user pages.
I can say for certain — alas, without being able to summon a link (I’ll look) — that there are a number of editors whose user pages are written to resemble a Wikipedia article. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. However, I do think it could make the Wikipedia community uncomfortable if it became a widespread practice, and was seen as a gray hat SEO technique.
In that unlikely event, the first suggestion that comes to me would be requiring a banner on user pages that specifies that it is not an “article”. It would be phrased like the banner I keep atop my own page, included as a disclaimer in case the page is swiped by an unscrupulous mirror site. After all, this non-accusatory template puts even a flawed but useful article about one Laszlo Panaflex in the proper context:
| This is a Wikipedia user page. |
This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WWB.
*It may be out there. Many other Simpsons-related Wikipedia articles, including “A Fish Called Selma”, are buttressed by citations to the commentary tracks on the official DVD releases. If anybody knows for sure, I’d be happy to help add the citation.
Announcing Semantic Bundle - a single downloadable file that holds Semantic MediaWiki and 16 other MediaWiki extensions that use it and/or are often used in conjunction with it. The aim is to simplify the confusing landscape of extensions that’s evolved around Semantic MediaWiki, so that users can just get one file instead of having to research and download many files individually to get all the functionality they would want. What we have is a basic super-set of the kinds of extensions people usually end up using on SMW-driven wikis (administrators can choose which of the extensions to include, once they’ve downloaded the bundle.)
Semantic Bundle is similar to the SMW+ package distributed by Ontoprise, although it’s a different set of extensions; both include SMW, of course, but other than that the number of extensions they have in common is surprisingly small - which just goes how to show diverse the set of features has become, and may be another argument for this kind of “curatorial” work.
Semantic Bundle was developed, and is distributed, by Sergey Chernyshev and me.
Today we’re excited to announce a very generous in-kind sponsorship from Amsterdam-based data center provider Evoswitch. This sponsorship, valued at over 300,000 euros has allowed the Foundation to house a large new bank of caching servers in a highly central location in Europe. Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.
Evoswitch operates a leading, 100% carbon neutral data center. Free culture, global access to free information, and sustainable, green data centers: it’s a tremendous mission-supporting partnership. We’d like to thank the great folks at Evoswitch for working with us to support our mission and for helping millions of internet users gain access to our projects.
Jay Walsh, Communications
[Early edition; some stories may expand in the next few hours]
Special report:Study of vandalism survival times
News and notes: Wikizine, video editing, milestones
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia impacts town’s reputation, assorted blogging
Discussion report: Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Click on the image to visit Buell's Wikipedia article, the source for much of this information.
On Wednesday the 24th, Rebecca and I have been invited to see a piece of rock history: Bebe Buell at the Hiro Ballroom.
Some people focus on the giant-sized names I have shot for the Creative Commons, but the people that linger in my mind are the hundreds of others who are not household names but who have successfully created full, interesting lives. The lawyers, academics, economists and artists who shape our world without our ever realizing it.
Bebe Buell is one of those artists.
She is famous in New York City for her ability to throw together–to embody–a scene, and as an accomplished musician in her own right.
In 1981, she recorded an EP with Rick Derringer and Ric Ocasek, and The Cars served as her band on two tracks. The rock band Power Station formed around her in 1984 when then-boyfriend John Taylor (of Duran Duran) pulled some famous friends together to provide backing for Buell.
Her music career is underscored by Buell’s presence for many of the Twentieth Century’s huge musical moments. In Almost Famous, director Cameron Crowe partly based the film’s “Penny Lane” character–played by Kate Hudson–on Buell. Hudson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe for the role.
In 1972, Buell began dating rock star Todd Rundgren, which lasted for several years. During and after their sometimes open relationship, she was associated with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Steven Tyler. In 1977, Buell and Tyler had a daughter together, the actress Liv Tyler. After her relationship with Steven ended, Buell began dating Rod Stewart. In the summer of 1978, she began an affair with the recently-separated Elvis Costello that continued on and off until 1984.
All of this shaped Bebe Buell into a piece of living rock history, and as you can see from my 2009 Wikipedia portrait of her above, one of the best-looking. She clearly kept a good head on her shoulders and took care of herself during what must have been some very debauched moments that she witnessed.
On top of it all, she raised an amazing daughter in Liv Tyler, who my friends in Hollywood tell me is one of the nicest, most down-to-Earth actors working today. That’s Bebe’s parenting; she spared Liv from many of the problems that afflicted her contemporaries.
Go to Amazon to hear the Bebe Buell Band’s latest single, Air Kisses for the Masses and find out what all of this influence wrought.
Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?
A. That marriage is between two PEOPLE who love each other- a personal vow and contract. God does not care who loves or married whom- only how we treat our fellow man. Love is free- it should not have a gender. Only a purpose- to love.
Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?
A. Alien. Oh wait- I AM an alien!! I believe we are born who we are meant to be so it is hard to imagine. But I have always been fascinated with nomads- people who wander and roam with no real anchor. Kind of like the TV show Kung Fu. So probably Tibetan.
Q. What is one misconception people have about you?
A. That I am sexual or good in bed. I’m really just a “love bug”- not armed with much sexual skill or sexual perfection. It is my heart that boils over with loving energy.
Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?
A. John Lennon. I cried for days and days. My 14 year old Chihuahua Chiquita- I was consumed with grief. But she was reincarnated almost immediately and my new “mutt” Chickenburger has a home.
Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?
A. I treat my goals as a desire- a passion. If I am meant to have it, earn it, own it… then I consider it a “gift”, a blessing. A gift from the karma police.
I never take anything for granted.
Especially love. My daughter. My family. My art. My music… my muse…
FIVE QUESTIONS - A SERIES
Every day brings an avalanche of new ideas and novel creations to the web, from witty t-shirts and viral videos to innovative methods of collaboration and powerful new software. The creation of unique and interesting things is not new, but the current surge in individual creative activity and its subsequent high visibility on the web is unprecedented.
The most compelling of these creative products I have been referring to as The New Awesome, and they represent a tiny portion of the total creative output. Historically, the word "awesome" might have been used to describe the power of a tornado or the grandness of a majestic vista. Today, the word is more often used to qualify the ingenious or impressive products of personal creativity, such as using hairspray to launch a potato 200 yards, hosting a talk show in Halo 2, or mocking the Kansas school board’s ruling with an ingenious take on religion.
But there’s more to the New Awesome than merely creative flair. The most interesting and, well, awesome creative products seem to share some common characteristics:
An interesting result of this creative surge is the rising importance of effective discovery and distribution of the best creative products. In other words, when there is a rising sea of mediocrity, how do we find and highlight the very best? Alas, this will have to be the subject of a future post.
by All's Wool that Ends Wool (noreply@blogger.com) at 21 June, 2009 05:35 PM
Here's an option if you want to contribute something positive with regard to Iran: help spread appreciation of Iranian history and culture.
by Lise Broer (noreply@blogger.com) at 21 June, 2009 04:29 PM
Aaron Swartz
AboutUs
Alex Rowe
Andrew Lih
Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)
Angela Beesley
Anthere
Anthony
Appropedia Blog
Arnomane
Bandan
Ben Yates
Benjamin Mako Hill
Blog on Wiki Patterns
Brianna Laugher
Brion Vibber
Britty (Aphaia)
Chris Harvey
Citizendia
Citizendium Blog
Cormac Lawler (Cormaggio)
Cyde Weys
DJ Bauch
Dan G
Daniel Kinzler
Danny Wool (Veropedia)
Dariusz Siedlecki
Database dump notification for EN-wiki pages-articles
David A. Russell (Cynical)
David Gerard
Delicious/kmartin69/wikipedia
Domas Mituzas
Durova
Dvortygirl
Elonka Dunin
Enoch Lau
Erik Moeller
Erik Zachte
Evan Prodromou
ExtensionTesting
Freifunk
Gabriel Pollard (Nzgabriel)
Gary Kirk
Geoffrey Burling
Gerard Meijssen
Guillaume Paumier
Guy Van den Broeck
Hsiang-Tai Chien
Ian Gilfillan (greenman)
Jakob Voss
Jim Brown
Jim R. Wilson
Jim Redmond
Jimmy Wales
Joe Anderson (Computerjoe)
John Broughton
Jon Harald Søby
Joseph Reagle
Judson Dunn
Julien Danjou
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
Keith Hopper
Kempton
Kris Olsen
Larry Sanger (Digital Universe)
Liam Wyatt
LiveJournal Wikipedians
Luna Santin
LyricWiki Blog
Marcel de Ruiter
Mark Pesce
Mark Rauterkus & running mates
May it Please the Court
Metavid
Mike Baynton
Milos Rancic
Mizanur Rahman
New Zealand Monarchy
Nick Jenkins
Nihiltres
Nikerabbit
Non Notable Natterings (Lar / Larry Pieniazek)
NonvocalScream
OmegaWiki
Oscar van Dillen
Our New Mind (Pete Forsyth's blog)
Pathoschild
Phoebe Ayers
Pictures of the Day
Piotr Konieczny
Post Geographic (Padraic)
RecentChanges.info
Rob Church
Robert Horning
ST47
Sabine Cretella
Sage Ross
Said Kassem Hamideh
Salah-Eddine Hamana
Samuel Klein
Sannse
ScienceRoll
ScribbleWiki
Sean Whitton (Xyrael)
Sebastian Moleski
Shankbone
Sopoforic Agents in Childhood
SpottingWorld
Stephen Bain
Strands of Thought
T. Mills Kelly
Terrell Russell
Titoxd
Tom Portante
Toolserver Journal
Urpo Lankinen
User:Chriswaterguy
User:Majorly
User:vishwin60
Utkarshraj Atmaram
ValueWiki
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04 July, 2009 07:54 AM
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