Friday, October 12, 2007
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Who Writes Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is large; it contains multitudes.
Is it mostly written by the general public? By a hard core with 4000 members? Well, both and neither. Obsessed volunteers add more apiece, and do the most copyediting, but there aren't very many of them, compared with, you know, the whole world (or wikipedia's readership, whichever is smaller). Specifics are hard to come by, and studies contradict each other.
The most recent study is clever: it doesn't consider each Wikipedia edit to be equal (fungible, an increment to be counted) like previous studies did. The authors got special WMF access (that is, decent statistics) and figured out exactly how many times each contribution to wikipedia was actually viewed by wiki readers:
We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that an overwhelming majority of the viewed words were written by frequent editors and that this majority is increasing.
As a proxy for the value contributed by an edit, we use the persistent word view (PWV), the number of times any given word introduced by an edit is viewed. [My emphasis.] PWV builds on the notion of an article view: each time an article is viewed, each of its words is also viewed.
Two key insights drive this metric. First, authors who write content that is read often are empirically providing value to the community. Second, if a contribution is viewed many times without being changed or deleted, it is likely to be a valuable.
When they say overwhelming, they mean it.
The graph (annotated by me :P) shows that:
Editors who edit many times dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia. The top 10% of editors by number of edits contributed 86% of the PWVs, and top 0.1% contributed 44% – nearly half! The domination of these very top contributors is increasing over time. [That makes sense, because a stable, well-liked edit keeps getting veiwed and therefore racking up PWVs as the years go by. -WikipediaBlog] Of the top 10 contributors of PWVs, nine had made well over 10,000 edits. However, only three of these users were also in the top 50 ranked by number of edits. The number one PWV contributor, Maveric149, contributed 0.5% of all PWVs, having edited 41,000 times on 18,000 articles. Among the top PWV contributors, WhisperToMe(#8) is highest ranked by number of edits: he is #13 on that list, having edited 74,000 times on 27,000 articles.
Also:
...we found essentially no correlation between [number of] views and [number of] edits
Heh.
The Signpost has more coverage
Monday, October 08, 2007
The Richat Structure, a prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert of Mauritania near Ouadane, has attracted attention since the earliest space missions because it forms a conspicuous bull's-eye in the otherwise rather featureless expanse of the desert. Be sure to click the images
Complete list of nude/erotic images on Wikipedia. You know, for research.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Lessig, in a rather inspiring video:
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/5jkZFIwmc-8]
Link, if you're reading this in a feed.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Mary Tofts (born c. 1701) was a maidservant from Godalming, England, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to at least sixteen rabbits.
Erik Moller is on the wikimedia board; his blog has been pretty interesting lately.
For starters, LiquidThreads is sort of a cross between a wiki and a discussion forum. And why is Wikipedia a natural ally of the rest of the open-source movement, anyway?
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
If you're pissed off at Apple, you could buy a Wikipedia Think Free poster. Proceeds benefit the Foundation. (And I did the graphic design.)
Atmospheric beasts (also sky beasts or sky critters) are organisms which could hypothetically exist within the atmosphere of Earth or other planets. These could fly (or float) without wings as they weigh less than air. See also: Extremophile, Astrobiology.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Aokigahara(青木ヶ原), also called the Sea of Trees, is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji. The caverns found in this forest are rocky and ice-covered, even during summertime. It is an old forest haunted by many legends of monsters, ghosts, and goblins, which add to its sinister reputation.
Creative Commons is being sued!
If you're not a geek, here's some background:
This sounds boring, but Creative Commons is actually tremendously important because it writes and produces these licenses. Wikipedia predates Creative Commons and doesn't use its licenses. It uses the GFD License instead, which was originally intended for software documentation and is craptastic in several ways but impossible to get rid of at this point.
Alright, the geeks can start reading again.
Update, 2007年10月9日: The rest of this post is a bit of a stretch -- which is to say, I've changed my mind about the conclusion. It's preserved below, but just for history.
You might have heard part of this story already, but to recap:
1. Virgin Australia found an an ordinary, charming snapshot on Flickr. The photo used a creative commons license that allowed commercial use.
2. Virgin cropped and colored that photo into a kind-of-insulting, borderline-racist cell phone advertisement.
3. Without ever contacting the 15-year-old girl in the snapshot, Virgin put the ad up on billboards across Australia.
4.
Which is all well and good. But now the girl's family is suing Creative Commons, too, for "not adequately informing" people what "license this photo for commecrial use" means.
Aside from the sheer communitarian spirit involved in suing a cash-strapped nonprofit organization that has taken unparalleled pains to make legal language useful and comprehensible to ordinary people, there's also some small possibility that a negative ruling could affect Wikipedia—and, really, anyone else who's trying to fix our grungy copyright system by making an end-run around it.
So thank you, Virgin, for being such complete jackasses that you've possibly (though this is still unlikely) set back an entire global collaborative intellectual movement.
Nono, really—thank you. From all of us.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
The Silver Arrow is a ghost train that (according to an urban legend) haunts the Stockholm Metro.
Friday, September 28, 2007
The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who owned a small general store and inn in Labette County, Kansas from 1872 to 1873.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries. Like most of the new stuff at Cracked magazine, this is pretty funny.
(Of course, being funny doesn't make it literally true. As usual, the comments sections are buzzing with people pissed off about articles being deleted.)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
So how many continents are there, again?
The 7-continent model is usually taught in most English-speaking countries, China, and most of Europe. The 6-continent combined-Eurasia model is preferred by the geographic community, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Japan. The 6-continent combined-America model is taught in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Iran, Greece and some other parts of Europe.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Dancing mania is a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion.