Link Banana

Being a native (and, to my chagrin, monolingual) English speaker I’ve never much considered Wikipedia in other languages. The Arabic version is prehaps the most conspicuously small:

It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue, Esperanto.

Some possible reasons:

…young people find it easier to communicate in English online — whether chatting, sending instant messages or contributing to Wikipedia — both because not all keyboards are compatible with the Arabic alphabet and because they want their words to be more accessible to the wider world. (Some write in Arabic using the Roman alphabet.)

From Tierra del Fuego’s Yaghan language, the definition of this “world’s most succinct word”:

It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.

(via kottke)

…on Wikipedia. And enjoyed it. An interesting story:

Why I was compelled to be the one to change it, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s what I did. I added a “2008” as an ending date on his tenure at the show. I changed everything else to the past tense. And I did so post-haste.

I don’t know if the impulse was the same as the one that compelled that NBC subcontractor to go out and kill Tim Russert on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that it didn’t stem from a desire to make sure that the public was well-informed.

No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.

(via Fimoculous)

Another reason to love Wikipedia.

For a little linguistic fun, consider the following sentences:

• The old man the boat.
• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

(via Austin Kleon)

Clay Shirky’s pedaling some of the most interesting ideas about the internet and collaboration I’ve ever heard. This speech/essay is probably nearly as good as his Bloggingheads appearance.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message — I can do that, too — is a big change.

EDIT (4/28/2008): If video’s more your thing, Blip.tv now has that.

Finally recognizing that they might want to do something about this newfangled Wikipedia thing, Britannica is openning up. Sadly, only a little.

Since they don’t have a good quotable bit about it, they’re essentially letting “web publishers” gain free access to the content, and then allowing them to link to it and make the whole article readable by the world at large. It’s rather a Byzantine — and thus unlikely to make a big splash — system, but I have to give them some credit for trying.

(via kottke)

In similar trying-to-get-with-it news, CNN is selling shirt that feature it’s embarrassing headlines.

Essentially, The Independent cited (probably) false information from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Wikipedia page, and them became the cited source for that very information. A truly impressive thing to fathom.

(via Slashdot)

Led to look into the topic by this column — which I never managed to finish — I just had to share this one. For lack of a better resource, I’m linking to the rather-good Wikipedia article. On the page, they explain the problem thusly:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Click through to read the counter-intuitive answer.

Also of note, John Teirney offers other similar problems.

For The New Republic, Eve Fairbanks may or may not be reading too much into the effectiveness of Wikipedia editors:

To test the air, I undertook my own little, highly unscientific experiment. I made a professional-looking but somewhat negative edit on each of the candidate’s pages. For Hillary, I wrote a line on the hopelessness of her chances even when you count superdelegates; for Obama, I added a phrase about his loss of some white support. My Obama edit was fully scrubbed within three minutes, by an editor I’d never even seen before. My Hillary edit languished untouched for four hours until Schilling finally got around to deleting it. But, even then, he carefully preserved my skeptical text and pasted it onto the separate history-ofHillary’s-campaign page, a gesture of acceptance. It has remained there, a little wart on Hillary’s Wikipedia face, untouched, ever since.

(via Slashdot)

I thought Joel Stein had mastered the George Clooney profile a few weeks ago. A.J. Jacobs may have just topped him.

You may Google yourself from time to time, but George Clooney doesn’t. How could he? It’s different for him. It’s overwhelming. Its infinite madness could disintegrate a man’s personality. “George Clooney” pops up on nearly 11 million sites on the Internet. Spend a day browsing these sites and you will find unfathomable rage and baffling adoration. You will find America with all its insane colors refracted through the prism of George Clooney.

But George Clooney is also a brave man, and today he has agreed to spend a couple of hours exploring what the Internet has to say about George Clooney. A sort of This Is Your Virtual Life. Today he will see things that shock him, scare him, and make him shake with laughter. He will see things so disturbing that he will walk out of the room horrified. Also, he will see his own nipples.

(via brijit)

I feel like Wikipedia has come up a lot in the last few weeks, but “oh well.” The Onion’s A.V. Club compiled a list of surprisingly controversial topics, from k.d. lang to good old-fashioned “truth.”

I did enjoy Wikipedia’s time in the NY Review of Books, but I have to say that The Economist’s coverage of the battle between “inclusionists” and “deletionists” was more exciting and enlightening.

In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?

For the record, I’d be an “inclusionist.”

Nicholson Baker tackled Wikipedia for the New York Review of Books. Before you groan and moan “first they discovered blogs, now Wikipedia,” read this:

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with “one ugly animal”; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a “medium-sized inflatable banana.”

E. O. Wilson’s dream, as announced at TED a few years ago, is similar to a Wikipedia of animals. Though I don’t know or care much about zoology, it’s neat to see this thing go online — even if they seem rather unprepared for the volume of traffic they’re getting. As it explains itself:

EOL is an unprecedented global effort and we want you to be a part of it. Natural history museums, botanical gardens, other research institutions, and dedicated individuals are working to create the most complete biodiversity database on the Web, but without your help it cannot be done.

Perhaps I’m the only one who had mistakenly believed that she already had one (Wikipedia gives no hint that she’s related to Oh!/Oxygen), but Discovery is giving her the dead-next-year Discovery Health channel, which will be redubbed the “Oprah Winfrey Network.”