NonNotableNatterings

Appropriate editorial emphasis of the lead Global Warming article in Wikipedia

2010-02-25T13:22:00.006-05:00

I.ve gotten a bit involved in trying to assist in bringing some more collegial editing to the Global warming and Climate Change areas within wikipedia

One thing that has come up is what the right emphasis for the lead article ought to be... should it be primarily science or should it be on more than just that, such as sociopolitical and economic considerations as well, and how much of which. My talk page has been abuzz with this and other GW related topics (for example see Primary focus (a permanent link once archived will be in archive 63)

I decided to see what Britannica had to say as a possible guide to the right emphasis...
here is what I found... Read it for yourself. I confess I found it a bit harder to follow what their lead was but they do seem to lead with the science. However there is a fair bit of emphasis given to other matters as well. So perhaps not a perfect test but interesting.

Password masking considered harmful?

2009-07-03T07:00:00.003-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

We've all seen it, it's ubiquitious... the little box to type your password into. The line of asterisks grows as you type the secret characters in.

We've had it drilled into us, make your password safe, use lots of different kinds of characters (some sites even require that you use 3 of the 4 types, lowercase uppercase, numeric, special characters), don't use a common dictionary word, make it long, and so on.

So there I am on some site or another that shall remain nameless, trying to enter in "RodgerD0dgerC0dger!" and all I see is a line of *********

The phone rings mid stride. What character am I on anyway? hmm.. let me count backwards... I think I got it... OK.

"wrong password". Let's try that again ... A bird chirps outside the window Hey, did I remember to make that third 0 a zero but not the first one? Ah, must be right... OK.

"wrong password". Drat... Give it another try. Almost done.... Did my hand slip when I was holding down the 1 to make the ! ? No way... OK...

"wrong password" followed by "You have entered an incorrect password three times in a row and are now locked out of the system, please call our help desk between the hours of 8 AM and 6 PM Mumbai time to get it reset"

Argh! It's happened to all of us. And it's so needless. What do those asterisks do for us anyway? Unless we are being shoulder surfed, nothing.

As reported on Out-law.com there may finally be a realisation dawning that this is needless, and mindless, security. Well known usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently wrote about this in his AlertBox of 23 June 2009, opining that it's not needful, cleartext is better, and it may actually make things less secure. For those that actually have to deal with shoulder surfing, a checkbox to make the system use asterisks in that one case (or default to that for high security sites) is the easy way to handle that.

High time this was done. Start suggesting it to the sites you frequent. I think I'll go open a Bugzilla bug for MediaWiki if there isn't one already.

Oh, and RodgerDodgerCodger isn't actually my password.

Dirty Laundry

2009-02-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Dirty Laundry, out for all to see... Image via Wikipedia

There is rather a nasty thread on WR right now, about me. I have been holding back because this whole thread is wrong on many levels. The following doesn't exactly put me in a very favorable light as far as interpersonal relationships go. So be it.

When I started editing on WP, my wife and I had been estranged for almost 10 years. We led completely separate lives. I was approached by a female Wikipedian and we had a short relationship. That led to a couple more, none lasting more than a few months. To me, at the time, these were serious, sincere relationships, not casual, and I am still on good terms with these women.

After some time, Josette and I started talking again. She decided to look into Wikipedia and LEGO to see if we might find some common ground, and by mid 2007 we had decided to get back together... it's been bumpy, I've made mistakes, and even backslid a couple of times, but we are trying very hard, we are still working at it, and things are getting better. The other women I had relationships with all understand that I have gone back to my wife and they all respect that. One benefit of this statement is to ensure that women that don't know the situation are now also aware of this.

I had heard vague rumors of stuff being shopped around to ArbCom, but until the last few days, I did not know what this was about, or who the person was that supposedly took offense and later raised a ruckus on WR. She gave me no indication of any problem at the time. Rather, she used phrasing like "mad 4 it" in response to my seeking permission as the conversation progressed.

While it is true that I have always been a flirt, this whole thing bothers me because I have always respected the women on WP and women in general. I am sorry if any woman feels I was out of line in my chatting, but I was always, I thought, careful to repeatedly check for permission, to ask if it was OK, and to always remember that "no means no". Even so, I'm sorry anyway, it should not have happened.

The important takeaways from this are:

None of this has any bearing on my carrying out my duties and responsibilities on the various wikis.
If you think someone is acting inappropriately and you don't like it, call them on it. Or get a friend to say something. Or just leave. Any of those things are better than engaging in whisper campaigns later.
The days of my looking for relationships, of having relationships, are in the past, and have been for quite a while, because I am committed to my relationship with my wife.

Something for nothing?

2009-01-21T07:00:00.001-05:00

Chrysler Headquarters,
Auburn Hills, MI,
Image via Wikimedia CommonsS0... Fiat (late of greenmailing GM not to merge with them after GM foolishly signed up, to the tune of 2B USD) gets 35% of Chrysler.

What did they give in exchange? Billions of dollars? Some factories? 35% of themselves? Nope. None of the above. They gave nothing except the promise of some future advice and access to technology.

Great work if you can get it...

Tell you what, Mr. Nardelli, give me .0035% of Chrysler and I'll give you some advice. Or maybe I'll just give it to you for free. You should have actually come out with the Durango Hybrid back when you first started talking about it. You know, in 2000? Then you'd have some technology experience by now. And stop giving away your company for nothing.

Infrastructure?

2009-01-19T07:00:00.001-05:00

Amtrak Locomotive
image via Wikimedia CommonsFirst, as a libertarian, I'm of course holding my nose even just writing this post... things should be funded by private enterprise rather than government. But since it's being talked about, and it's going to happen anyway... might as well make some constructive suggestions

Everyone has ideas for what sort of infrastructure the big stimulus should build. Everyone says be smart, and avoid pork... way easy to say but hard to do.

Some stuff is obvious:

Improve the electric grid so that renewable energy can be routed to where it is needed.
Fix bridges, tunnels, water mains, and so forth that really need it

Those are both "construction" sorts of things. Manufacturing has been hit too, though.

Amtrak has seen a surge in ridership of late, as other modes of transportation have become pricier. But they're running into limits. Why? Amtrak has a rolling stock shortage. For years, their capital budget has been far short of replacement, and there are lines of passenger cars in need of repair, awaiting funds. New trains or more frequent service are proposed and often deferred because there just isn't the rolling stock available.

So then... build some... increase Amtrak's capital budget, and get the shops going repairing things. That has the advantage of not only stimulating manufacturing, it also produces something that's actually needed, and when used, will reduce energy consumption.

And don't limit it to Amtrak, review all the other mass transit modes and see what capital improvements for rolling stock have been lacking. We need that more than we need new freeways that promote urban sprawl.

Bonanzle

2009-01-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

Network effect.
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI sell on eBay. Mostly LEGO brand sets, because that's what I have a lot of and what I know a fair bit about (plus b... IBM doesn't sell a lot of LEGO products so I'm clear on Conflict Of Interest concerns)

(I think I've got a link to my store over there on the sidebar... but hey, just in case you missed it, my store is Milton Train Works...)

I made Power Seller status a while back. Nothing big, it's very small time, but we do sell a fair bit. I do OK, but I am there not because it's cheap but rather, it's the biggest venue. Network effect means it's a good place to be if you want a lot of buyers.

For the record eBay charges small sellers like me, all in, somewhere around 15 %, give or take, of the gross sale price when you calculate store fees, listing fees, and final value fees. Plus another 3% for Paypal. Periodically, I look at what eBay is charging me and wish I had a different alternative. People keep trying to introduce some, but so far none has panned out.

But maybe this time it will be different. Bonanzle.com has come on the scene fairly recently and seems to actually be doing OK. They make it easy to migrate, you can just import all your eBay listings into a "booth" and away you go.

So I figured why not. I set up yesterday. It was easy. And today, I had my first sale.

Color me pleased. I hope you will give Bonanzle a try. Competition is good.

My Bonanzle "booth" is also called Milton Train Works. Tell all your friends :) If you mention this blog posting when you make an offer, I'll give you a 5 percent discount. Let's see if that viral marketing thing actually works :)

Toward less boring layouts

2008-12-09T13:48:00.004-05:00

Bill Ward, of BayLUG/BayLTC has a blog...

This post on track geometry is worth reading. Though LEGO has ended 9v, there is a lot of 9v track out there. As well, the ideas work for their new RC track too.

The images were done with Track Designer but you can experiment with BlueBrick as well.

MichLUG uses some of these ideas (notably the 45 degree curve) but there are others that we don;t use enough of. Myself, I use the 1 straight == 2 curves alignment trick all the time.

Why I chose not to run for ArbCom this year

2008-11-27T23:20:00.001-05:00

This is not me...
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI have received a number of queries about why I am not running in the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections this year.

I was seriously considering it. I felt duty bound to put up or shut up, to try to effect the "change we need". But when I saw the quality of some of the candidates (whose views I by and large agree with) that were standing, I decided to stand aside. I have a lot of things to do and the last thing the project needs is another arbitrator that can't give full measure, attentionwise. I'd rather someone else were elected that could devote full attention. I hope I'm not wrong in judging their quality (and winnability) and that candidates I support and agree with do end up getting elected, and candidates I oppose don't.

But another factor is that with the SlimVirgin-Lar case so recently closed, after some analysis, I felt that the potential for drama and disruption if I ran was high enough that standing aside seemed a good thing to do for the good of the project. I'd note that the SlimVirgin motion has, even though it's been closed and SlimVirgin desysopped, been used by ElinorD to re-raise issues I feel are already well and truly settled, and by others to trumpet some of the victimization memes we've heard before.

As far as that case goes, I continue to feel constrained by privacy considerations about what I can and cannot say, and by decorum in not wishing to use the same level of vitriol as some of my opponents have employed, and by honesty in not wishing to distort matters in the way I feel some of my opponents have done... an election campaign with me in it at this juncture would possibly lead to more disharmony. Given that there are competent, generally right thinking candidates standing, why do it?

Instead I put those questions of mine together, at some considerable thought, as a summary of some of the important issues and philosophical underpinnings facing the project. Candidates have been evaluated by me (and others... I want to single out Kato for his particularly cogent and insightful work in this area) on how well they answered them. If the community nevertheless chooses candidates that fail to answer these well, so be it. But asking these questions and NOT running seemed more likely to effect the change we need than NOT asking them and running, and having the campaigns veer off into internecine warfare and drama.

So that's why.

If next year is a rerun of this year, if the candidates we elect this time, with the strongest community mandate for change we've seen yet, nevertheless give us the same arbcom we got before, or worse ... then maybe I'll run next year. Or find a different hobby. Because if there isn't a change for the better, we're in for it. And since I've been there, done that... I don't want to do it again.

Bail out the Big Three?

2008-11-17T18:46:00.004-05:00

Image via WikipediaEveryone's talking about it, so surely this is just one more voice in a sea of noise...

Bailing out the Big Three (Chrysler, General Motors, Ford) automakers is a bad idea. They should be allowed to restructure. Even if that means bankruptcy. Why? Because without restructuring, we are just postponing the day of reckoning and making it worse when it does come.

Look, I'm from Michigan. It will be painful. Hugely. People will lose their jobs. But the alternative is worse. The Big Three made some bad decisions. Bankruptcy is a way to take the useful assets and try something different.

Some will say that bankruptcy means everything shuts down. Nope. The automakers will still be making autos, still be making spare parts. Just not under current management and with current contracts. Airlines keep flying. Railways keep running. Stuff just gets cut.

Some will say that no one will buy cars from a bankrupt maker. If the maker is bankrupt it doesn't mean the car that was OK to buy yesterday all of a sudden falls apart. Nor does it mean that parts will never be available or that cars can't get repaired. Parts come from a network of suppliers. Ford hasn't made Model T parts in over 70 years, but they're out there, in the aftermarket. Repairs are carried out by dealers. And dealers make most of their money from service, not sales... dealers will continue to repair things, they'd be foolish not to.

So... let them fail, if they're going to. And let them KNOW they will fail if they can't sort things out themselves... that will give them incentive.

Schumpeter speaks of creative destruction. Let it create. This is a case where the village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Out with the old, in with the new..

2008-11-04T21:10:00.005-05:00

Out with the old... Good bye Bush II!

In with the new... Hello new little one!

Today I should be a grandfather. I sit here in the hospital waiting. Daddy (newly become a citizen, this is his first election) stopped to vote on the way to the hospital. Priorities seem right to me :)

Update: I AM a grandfather.

And McCain's concession speech was high class.

Reframing

2008-10-26T07:00:00.002-04:00

A picture frame
Image via Wikipedia In US politics this year, as always, we have seen a fair number of attempts to change the subject. The McCain campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on Obama's involvement with Stephen Ayers instead. The Obama campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on such things as Sarah Palin's incipient grandchild.

This is reframing things. When presented with a question, answer something else. Or better yet, make a charge that is entirely unrelated.

It's a particularly effective technique, and a particularly insidious one. When you're losing... change the subject. Accuse the other side of something else. If it's scandalous enough, it doesn't even matter if it is completely irrelevant to the question at hand

If this sort of behaviour were confined to US politics alone, we could brush it off... politics as usual. But it's not. Reframing happens in everyday life as well. Look hard enough and you'll find it in your walk of life too, I bet. And woe be to you if you're the frame-ee rather than the frame-er. It can be quite hard to get the question back where it belongs.

So watch out for that.

Know of any examples of reframing? Let's hear about them

Finger pointing

2008-09-30T07:00:00.003-04:00

Barney Frank
Image by Getty Images
via DaylifeSo the bailout failed. Count me in the glad camp, maybe now a second try will come up with something more reasonable, something that really gets after the problem. Taking up toxic paper and leaving taxpayers holding the bag wasn't going to solve this mess.

But in among the finger pointing for the failure going on here (and there is a lot of it going on isn't there?), where is the finger pointed at Barney Frank? I think most agree this mess is due in large part is the vast number of bad loans given out during the housing bubble. Bad money drives out good, and when you had Fannie May and Freddy Mac competing against private lenders, but using loose underwriting standards, it only caused investors to clamor for other lenders to do the same...

Frank's irresponsible comments and actions to sabotage reining in the two GLCs are among the causes of that cause. His attempts to deflect inquiries into that by harping on CEO pay ought to be treated as what they are... BS. If you want to know the root cause, start by looking into which lobbyists gave which legislators how much, and when, and what the effect was on bills that would have required GLCs to follow the same standards as private companies.

You're no doubt tired of hearing it, but my party was against this well before it was fashionable.

Is this the best we've got?

2008-09-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

Joe Biden explains something
Image via Wikimedia CommonsRecently , when interviewed by Katie Couric, Joe Biden was quoted as saying:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed,"

Look, I'm not really a big fan of either of the duopoly parties... or their candidates (my guy is Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and yes I know he's not going to win) but I just have to wonder... how well did Joe Biden actually pay attention in history class?

The big crash was in 1929, before FDR was president
In 1929 TV was just an experimental idea, not really something that presidents spoke on. (the first president to even be seen on television was Truman, in the 40s, and it wasn't until 1951 that a president spoke nationwide)

So maybe we have a VP problem regardless of who wins?

Now I can retire...

2008-08-11T07:00:00.002-04:00

My image of Taliesin West
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, I have written about how Encyclopedia Britannica introduced a free access scheme for bloggers. Nifty. But this flows both ways. EB is also moving to make use of resources available to it.

Point in case, the image at right.

As I am sure other people do, I periodically search for my own name using Google's search capabilities. Well, the other day, on the second page of the search (may not still return results) I found this link ... Turns out that EB chose to use my image to illustrate their article on Taliesin West! (Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA from 1937 until his death in 1959.)

So now I'm rich, right? Well no. That image, as you can see, is freely available on Commons, for anyone to use, as long as the license (in this case the GFDL 1.2) is honored. Which it is.

So am I upset? Nope! I'm delighted. This is how it's supposed to work. Free images are made free so that people can USE them. EB has properly atttributed the image and thus is free to use it as they see fit.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that EB is using a free image FROM a WMF site to illustrate an article which is supposedly better than the same article on Wikipedia. (which by the way, currently uses someone else's version of basically the same composition)... and, better or not, clearly is in competition.

But it's nifty! Got any other examples? I wonder who else has been honored this way?

By the way, here are both articles, you decide which is better:

Wikipedia's version is here.
Encyclopedia Britannica's version is here.

In all honesty, I have to say EB wins this one. What do you think?

LEGOdometer

2008-08-09T07:00:00.001-04:00

Image at right is from Brickshelf...

I'm slow. This has been buzzed up already, and I'm late to add my raves. But for the benefit of my paltry readership, if you like LEGO at all, you need to go check this out. Read the LUGNET posting.

Shaun Sullivan of NELUG has built a LEGO based odometer for measuring distance that trains run on exhibition layouts.

Note that an odometer was used at the PNLTC Guinness record attempt but it was electronic.

This one is purely mechanical. It's testimony to Shaun's addiction that he chose to do it this way... but ironically used significant computer time to calculate the gear ratios needed to get to within 8 feet per mile of accuracy in his measurements.

Signal to Noise, part II

2008-08-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?

Knol and Wikipedia

2008-08-01T07:00:00.002-04:00

Wikipedia's Knol page
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr
Fair use claimed for commentary
By now, everyone and their brother has blogged about Knol. If you don't know what it is, you've been under a rock, apparently (not that there's anything wrong with that)... follow the link. (which naturally leads to Wikipedia)

Probably half of those blogposts have to do with the relationship between Knol and Wikipedia. Again, go find them if you want to read them.

Some people are saying it's a new gold rush. I have an AdSense account so I decided to see what if anything in the way of gold there is to be had.

I've taken some content from Wikipedia and put it on Knol. The content I took is content I myself authored... I took my DYK articles, at the point of the last edit by me prior to the first edit by someone else, so all content was mine, and Knolised them. (why that edit? Because at that point the content is solely authored by me. That means I can relicense it as I see fit, granting GFDL does not take away the right to license under other terms as well)

The actual formatting leaves a lot to be desired, since they are paste jobs, if I see any signs of traffic I'll improve them. But for the most part at least so far, they are the only Knols on those topics. All their links lead straight to Wikipedia, at least for now.

I am not going to pimp them by linking... if you want to find them you can.

I'm curious as to how this all will play out... will these get any traffic? Will I get improvement suggestions? Will Knol itself complain? Most of these show high correlation to Wikipedia which is not unexpected.

What do you think? Have any of you done this? What will the long term effect be?

This post intentionally left blank

2008-07-20T08:16:00.005-04:00

Blank pages in a book
Image via Wikimedia CommonsSo Risker pinged me on my talk page, and like these sorts of low semantic content conversations do, it veered off into other topics, notably how posts sometimes have little content... and whether "no comment" really is "no comment" or actually more like "almost no comment"... this led to "This page intentionally left blank" ... and well... I'll repeat what I said there.

IBM is famous for making a great deal of use of these pages (back when IBM published all its manuals in hardcopy form). They would carry a footer with the manual name and the page number of the manual where they belonged. I can recall inserting them into manuals on my desk, many a time. (Periodically one would receive packets of pages in the post containing fixes to manuals, which one duly inserted into the manual binders, hopefully in the right places. Sometimes some of the new pages would be blank, to replace a page that described something that had been obsoleted, and sometimes some of the new pages would be non blank, but would replace a page that had previously been blank, as they described something new which space had been reserved for in the organization of the manual) There is an apocryphal story that there was an APAR opened against the entire publication group, requesting that all pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" be replaced with pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT ALMOST BLANK" on the grounds that was a more accurate statement... Needless to say if there was such an APAR, it must have been rejected, as the cost of the PTF to identify, produce and print all those (thousands of different) pages (properly numbered and with proper footers, since that is how things were done), mail them out to every manual receipient, and so forth, would have been enormous. Even for IBM.

(this is not the only apocryphal story about APARs and PTFs, remind me sometime to tell the one about the APAR against IEFBR14)

Oh, and by the way, this whole post is a way for me to NOT talk about what really has me steamed right now.... perhaps I'll, in the best IBM tradition, replace this post with what I really want to say instead.

Update:

In accordance with the recommendations made by the This page intentionally left blank project, I decided that my personal site needed one of these. So I created one.

You got me...

2008-07-07T07:46:00.003-04:00

Randall Munroe
image via Wikimedia CommonsSo, today's xkcd consists of a drawing of the Wood article in Wikipedia, but cut away to show only the lede, and the bottom, which is a large "in popular culture" section, with such gems as "In episode 7 of Firefly, "Jaynestown", Jayne is given a wooden rain stick by a villager", among others.

Wikipedia is big enough time that it now gets mocked in cartoons on a regular basis (in xkcd's case, lovingly... I think. :) )

Random questions:

Does anyone not think this is one of the funniest Firefly episodes? :) (it goes without saying that I expect most of my readership (all 3 of you) to have seen all the Firefly episodes)

Does Randall Munroe not actually like "in popular culture" sections? Or, is he annoyed that Wood doesn't have one? :) (It goes without saying that it doesn't have one, actually)

Was I the only xkcd reader to go check if Wood actually had an "In popular culture" section? (It goes without saying that I did go check)

Third world country?

2008-07-04T10:45:00.003-04:00

Transformers arcing
Image via Wikimedia CommonsWe are without electric power. A bad series of storms roared through W Michigan on Wednesday afternoon, knocking power out for about 200, 000 customers. As of this writing we've been on generator for 36 hours... we might get power back today, might not. Consumers Energy isn't very clear on that point.

Now, we are fortunate. We have a portable generator. It doesn't meet all our needs, when the well comes on other things flicker and so forth, but it's better than nothing. Others do not have generators ( Others also are not dropping 80 USD a day to run their generators, or getting smelly gas all over everything when they refill them every 4 hours, so maybe they're ahead. :) )

I am not complaining but given that this is our 5th power outage this year, it does make one wonder if this is just bad luck, or something else. I'm inclined to think that yes, storms are getting worse, that Global Warming is for real... that, coupled with the heavy regulation of the power industry (which leads to disinvestment and a grid that can handle only small outages, (local, regional and national) means that we are more susceptible to upset.

I am not complaining but it does make one feel like one is living in a third world country.

OK maybe I am complaining :)

How to spot a cabal

2008-06-29T17:42:00.004-04:00

Image via Wikipedia(This used to be in my user space, for a few hours... I had it tagged as an "essay")

The term "cabal" gets thrown around a fair bit in these parts (the english wikipedia). Sometimes in fun (see WP:LOC ) and sometimes not.

This essay is concerned with the latter kind. Because after all, what could possibly be wrong with the BRC?

The easiest way to detect a cabal is by the actions of those you think are members.
* If it seems that they always rush to each other's defense...
* If it seems like there is a "siege mentality"...
* If they offer defense for behavioural issues along the lines of "we are engaged in important work here" or "why are you saying these things", or "you're a proponent of X"...
* If they attack anyone "outside" their circle for raising issues...
* If they get angry if people observe they may be a cabal...
* If they deny the existence of the putative cabal...

...those are all bad signs.

In the course of normal events in collaborative projects, especially this one, it's natural to form working friendships with other editors, and even ask them to come in when you are in a spot where another set of eyes might be helpful. That's not cabalism, it's defending each other and is to be encouraged. There is a danger that this can slide down a slippery slope.

We should all be vigilant against that sort of sliding.

Supreme Court rules in favor of gun ownership rights

2008-06-26T14:03:00.003-04:00

Image via WikipediaThe Supreme Court of the US have struck down a District of Columbia law absolutely prohibiting gun ownership or possession within the district. I have to admit I am surprised by this. I had expected the DC law to be validated. But this is, in my view, a good ruling.

It's broader than many expected... the Supremes tend to rule as narrowly as possible, so many were expecting the court to rule on some narrow interpretation. But Justice Scalia, writing the majority opinion, said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted. (quoted from Yahoo's report).

That's a strong affirmation of the interpretation that "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." means individual rights, not army rights... For a long time, the meaning of "well regulated militia" has been in dispute, not least because the language has changed... militia then meant every able bodied male, and regulated didn't mean subject to regulation.

I expect that I will be in the minority among my viewing audience in being happy about this.

That's OK.

New privacy policy?

2008-06-14T08:15:00.004-04:00

Wikimedia projects (copyrighted
logos used under fair use)
Image via Flickr The board of the Wikimedia Foundation is going to vote fairly soon on a new privacy policy. A draft of it has been placed on meta for comment.

The board often moves slowly on matters like this, but not this time, so if you are interested, you may want to comment.

Note that the foundational principle of allowing anonymous editing remains.

Happy Birthday Amnesty International

2008-05-28T07:00:00.001-04:00

Image via WikipediaFreedom comes in many flavors. While the Wikimedia Foundation projects are primarily concerned with free content and free access to knowledge, that freedom goes hand in hand with other sorts. Freedom from oppression, freedom to speak and believe, freedom from injust political imprisonment are in some ways more important (although the entire basket of freedoms go hand in hand) and that's what Amnesty International is most concerned with.

Today is Amnesty International's birthday. Founded in 1961, it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Happy birthday!

Here's a Wikipedia link. Here's a Britannia link too.

I work hardest on wiki projects but the fight for freedom takes many forms. Let us not forget...

2008-05-26T07:00:00.003-04:00

Artist's depiction of
Phoenix landing
Image via Wikimedia CommonsThe Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars. We watched.

My son said "this is my generation's moon landing..." That may have been hyperbolic on his part but it WAS exciting... and a bit freaky to realise that the "now" was actually "10 minutes ago" due to transmission delay.

That another spacecraft managed to get a picture of Phoenix's parachute during the descent is ragingly cool.

So why did we need a Canadian network to bring it to us? ... seems it was too uncool/geeky for US networks.

Well I'm just glad someone was carrying it.

Did you watch? What did you think?Artist's depiction of
Phoenix on Mars
Image via Wikimedia Common

Cleveland rocks?

2008-05-23T07:00:00.003-04:00

Except when it doesn't.

I had a bit of a fright on Thursday trying to get to the CLE airport from my client, who is somewhat to the east of the airport. Seems 480 westbound got stuck somehow and of course I was running late. So I took surface streets, counting on my GPS to steer me right, but in this case, surface was also backed up.

Cleveland, which claims to be where the traffic light was invented, hasn't quite figured out light timing... I would get a green, go the limit, and get ot the next light just after it turned red. This continuned for 10 miles, with more traffic streaming onto the surface road at every cross, until all of a sudden, it was like a cork was let out of something, and it was completely empty roadways for the last 5 miles. It was due to a light that was way too long in the other direction and too short in ours.

Fortunately I had a Mazda CX7 so I was able to out accelerate all the laggards whenever there was a break in traffic.

I just made it, but next week I'm leaving earlier!

BrickWorld is coming

2008-05-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

Some of us in the LEGO fan community have to ration how many fests we go to each year. While I used to go to BrickFest pretty regularly, this year I'm going to attend BrickWorld. This regional fest will be in Chicago, Illinois from June 19 to 22.

The BrickWorld site is at http://www.brickworld.us/ (that's right, a us domain... seems squatters have both the com and org domains already...)

There will be a large train layout on display with multiple clubs participating. I think Jo and I will be the only MichLTC representatives participating in the train display, which will be interesting... the display is being coordinated by Jeramy Spurgeon of IndyLUG and RailBricks fame.

Hope to see you there!

From the "read the fine print" department

2008-05-20T07:00:00.003-04:00

If Chrysler still made this
maybe I'd buy it!
Image via WikipediaIn case anyone hasn't noticed, we in the US are now paying 4.00 USD or close to it per gallon for our gas... (yes, I know, the one European in my readership has been paying way more than that for years... we get it, we were lucky)

The US auto industry has been hit hard (and that means Michigan has been hit very hard) by this. Automakers are scrambling to compensate for the lost sales.

Seems Chrysler has come up with a gimmick to move some metal languishing on their dealer lots... 2.99 gas! The basic idea is that you buy a new car, they give you a passthrough credit card that you buy gas with, and they don't charge you more than 2.99 for it, up to a certain number of gallons per year, for 3 years.

Seems like a not too shabby gimmick, as far as gimmicks go. Until you read the fine print. This only counts for 87 octane gas. But Chrysler's own owners manuals suggest 89 for most vehicles and there are a few that require 91, no less. Chrysler will subsidise your gas, but only if you buy the kind that violates your warranty. If you want 89, that's 15 cents extra. If you want 91, it's 30 cents extra. Since the markup usually is 10 or 11 cents per grade step, that's a bit less of a deal.

No thanks. I think I'll stick with my 11 year old Stratus a bit longer.

(OK, two car posts in a row, what's up with that?)

Have you seen any silly gimmicks that make you scratch your head lately?

Alvin!

2008-05-19T07:00:00.001-04:00

My car is a bit more silver
and has better wheels :) ... ]
but it's rustier too!
Image via WikipediaSo my 11 year old Stratus (don't laugh, it's paid for and it gets 34 mpg on the highway... keeping a car for 11 years is actually a rather green thing to do compared to buying a new one every 2 or 3) started having electrical problems... first the tach would randomly cut out, then the odometer too.

Took it to the local dealer, Grand Chrysler in Lowell, (who has been very good to us over the years) and they said it was electronics behind the dash... 500 USD to fix. Meh.

I decided I could live with a tach that cuts out, I shift by ear anyway. But last week, enroute to Holland to my client I noticed the idiot battery light on, and random other dash lights too. Fortunately the battery had a good charge, I was able to make it back to the dealer in the afternoon, just barely (by not running anything, it got hot and stuffy in there) on what the battery had in it.

They took another look, and reported... "you have a mouse problem"... apparently something had chewed the ground wire enough to make things erratic. So no circuit board replacement, yaay! When I told my wife we had mice, she laughed and said she had seen chipmunks exiting the hood area of the car several times.

So you darn chipmunks, that's the last time I say you're cute, you almost left me stranded. I'll be putting mothballs in the engine compartment, find somewhere else to stay warm.

Can you top that one? What's the strangest car repair story you've got?

Her first GA, can FA be far behind?

2008-05-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

Ann Eliza Bleecker,
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Forgive me for being a bit proud!

Background: While I tend to get involved in the meta aspects of Wikimedia Foundation projects (sometimes perhaps too much so) as well as write articles, my wife has instead concentrated on editing.

She has stated that she has no interest in becoming an administrator at any of the wikis she frequents. Can't say as I blame her, although she would be a good administrator, I am sure.

Except for occasionally voting in support or (rarely) opposition of various candidates, she stays out of the internal political discussions and controversies of Wikipedia (and other wikis), editing is all she does.

And when she edits, she's rather good. (I admit bias, mind you) I consider myself lucky to have a wife who enjoys many of the same hobbies I do (she's a skilled LEGO builder as well). She has built up a solid record of contributions.

She focuses on relatively obscure female historical figures, primarily Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, who have been underserved by Wikipedia articles. It's not as glamorous as writing about major contemporary figures, and not nearly as easy, the sources can be hard to track down. But she writes good stuff! Her articles usually make "Did You Know" after they are created.

Case in point, her first Good Article (GA), which I used in my Britannica comparison, and then nominated for GA a few days ago. Yesterday it got reviewed, put on hold, and then, in a flurry of cooperative editing by her, Giggy (the reviewer), and myself, (all coordinated on IRC) had all the faults Giggy identified corrected in under 2 hours (maybe not a record, but quite rapid time for an article to come off hold) and was promoted. Here's an excerpt from the lede:

Saratoga campaign,
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752 – November 23, 1783) was an American poet and correspondent. Following a New York upbringing, Bleecker married John James Bleecker, a New Rochelle lawyer, in 1769. He encouraged her writings, and helped her publish a periodical containing her works.

The American Revolution saw John join the New York Militia, while Ann fled with their two daughters. She continued to write, and what remained of the family returned to Tomhannock following Burgoyne's surrender. She was saddened and affected by the deaths of numerous family members over the years, and died in 1783.

Bleecker's pastoral poetry is studied by historians to gain perspective of life on the front lines of the revolution, and her novel Maria Kittle, the first known Captivity narrative,^[1] set the form for subsequent Indian Capture novels which saw great popularity after her death.

Bleecker was an important, if somewhat obscure figure in the American Revolution, and Wikipedia now has a good article about her, where previously it had none at all, thanks to the efforts of one editor. Wikisource also has a considerable portion of Bleecker's existing writings, mostly again thanks to my wife.

And she had fun doing the work. That's the idea. When Wikipedia fosters this sort of thing, it works, and works well. Reading about the issues and things that need fixing can leave you with the impression of a complete disaster, but that's not the case. Imperfect, yes? but darn good. Remember that, please. And go write something!

The Wikback, RIP?

2008-05-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

Things are quieter at
Wikback these days
Image from FlickrOne of my earliest postings was about UninvitedCompany's Wikback which is a forum designed to be a place where folk with an interest in Wikipedia and WMF projects could discuss things. (and one that would be run somewhat differently than Wikipedia Review)

At the time, I opined that there might be some inhibitory effects from some of the actions taken and rules in place, and that sparked 11 comments from various folk. I think that may have been my all time high, or pretty close! (Hi to all 3 of you readers still with me!) Some predicted it would fail, while others defended the idea.

Well, two months have went by since then, and it would appear that the activity levels at the Wikback have died down to very low levels. Apparently, in the past 7 days, there have been just 4 active topics, if this list is to be believed.

Not every forum that is started ends up a success. Sometimes it's just random chance as to whether something clicks. But sometimes it's the rules, the people or whatever. Is that the case here?

Could Wikback still spring to lively life? Or is the current activity level likely to be where things stay indefinitely? Or is it over? What do you think?

Couplers revealed

2008-05-16T07:00:00.001-04:00

LEGO Trains at NMRA
(one of mine is in the pic!)
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, I posted about the apparent change in the LEGO train coupler design, in which it seemed likely the old style coupler which consisted of a 3 part assembly (buffer, magnet holder, magnet) was going to be replaced with a single piece.

Railbricks, the fan generated LEGO Train online magazine had a piece about it at the time as well. It was discussed on quite a few venues, including LUGNET.

The LEGO Company has announced the new design, via a release to several fan sites, including Railbricks, which has this copy, and it confirms the speculation of fans, it was done for safety reasons.

I think the old design is more flexible, but the reasons given for the change (safety) do seem fairly irrefutable and they have put some thought into interoperability.

It's nice to see that the fans speculating got it right, and nice to see that LEGO announced the change well in advance via fan media. LEGO is getting better at working with fans.

What do you think? Good change or bad? Well publicized or not?

Anatomy of a BLP

2008-05-15T07:00:00.009-04:00

Seal of Michigan,
NOT a seal of approval!
Image via Wikimedia CommonsTwo days ago, I wrote about the recent Supreme Court case involving the "Defense of Marriage" amendment. I mentioned our Attorney General, Mike Cox. On a whim, I decided to go actually look at the Wikipedia article that my post linked.

What a mess I found!

This article is a textbook definition of an unacceptable Biography of a Living Person (BLP) article. Take a look at this revision. It contains word for word text taken from his biography on the State of Michigan Attorney General site, text which is quite flatteringly written (no doubt lifted from his campaign 2006 site, which although now a bad link, is still linked from the article), and which is copyrighted by the State of Michigan.

To "balance" this it also contains text from an attack site, again lifted in large part without change.

No inline citations, just a lot of text. And the article has a long history of (mostly IP user) edits warring over various aspects of the content. You may want to look at the Wikiscanner results too, they are interesting.

Sorry, you don't write a neutral balanced well sourced article by lifting text from puff and attack sites in about equal measure. That gives undue weight to the wrong things. Two coatracks don't make a good article.

So I stubbed it out. This revision shows what it looks like now. Mike Cox deserves a better article than that, but at least it wasn't the mess it was before.

How many other articles like this one on second rank politicians, midsized company CEOs, B list movie stars and the like are there? Those that say there is no BLP problem miss the point.

What do you think? Any horrors you've seen that really need stubbing?

The 3RR exemption

2008-05-14T07:00:00.003-04:00

Warning, esoteric topic!
Image via Wikimedia CommonsWarning, this is an esoteric topic. Those not steeped in the lore (and lingo) of WP may have no idea what I am talking about :)

The English Wikipedia Biography of Living Persons (BLP) policy includes an exemption to the normal prohibition on edit warring beyond three reverts (3RR) stating that reversion of edits that introduce problematic material (or which interfere with attempts to correct problematic BLP articles in general) are not subject to this rule, that is, reverts can be carried out indefinitely, if it becomes necessary.

Recently, Kim Bruning, who I generally admire strongly, attempted to edit the policy page to remove this exemption. A massive discussion ensued, starting at the section in the link, and going on for many subsequent sections over many screens (and spilling into various other pages as well, including the talk pages of most of the major participants, including myself)

Reading all this is instructive, as it shows that sometimes the Bold Revert Discuss (BRD) model breaks down in the face of trying to modify policy. There were a fair number of bones of contention, among them whether the BLP policy is prescriptive (it is written to be enforced as written, and changes when there is agreement it needs to change) or descriptive (it is written and updated to reflect actual practice, and changes as practice changes). Almost all policy at Wikipedia is descriptive but there are a few exceptions. Another bone of contention was whether there was a problem that needs remediating or not, and how did we measure it.

I am not going to in this post ascribe too much, as I was involved and the discussion got rather heated. It was a rather lame discussion in some respects.

What do you think? Should the 3RR policy have a BLP exemption? If so, is it properly being used/enforced? Was how Kim went at this the proper approach? Or did he mishandle things (it was for the most part him against a fair contingent of folk saying he had things all wrong)? Was my assessment after the fact too harsh?

Be careful what you ask for, you might get it!

2008-05-13T07:00:00.002-04:00

Red badge of shame
Image via WikipediaThe Michigan Supreme Court recently issued a ruling (pdf format) that upholds a fairly rigorous interpretation of the 2004 Michigan constitutional amendment popularly known as the "marriage amendment" which reads:

"To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."

It seems that the things proponents said at the time about this amendment only banning same sex marriages and NOT affecting things like benefits ... things said to reassure dubious voters (the amendment passed 59 to 41%)... these things are patently false.

The Supreme Court, rather unsurprisingly, by a vote of 5-2, affirmed that "similar union for any purpose", means exactly what it says... state and local governmental units can't take anything into account other than actual marriages when determining benefits eligibility for employees (the specific target of the suit) or anything else. (The opinion makes good reading... some of the twists, such as the AG and the Governor taking opposite sides on the matter, may surprise you)

Fortunately, private employers are not bound by this, at least not yet.

The Attorney General, in a press release commenting that the SC had affirmed the opinion given by the office at the time that this would be the outcome, said "[T]he people of this state could hardly have made their intentions clearer." ... tell that to the voters that got bamboozled by the propaganda at the time.

This is a very unfortunate decision, but it is, as the Grand Rapids Press opines, a correct one on the face of it. We cannot expect the Supreme Court to read our minds and should not expect it to fix mistakes we made. Perhaps now this amendment will be seen for what it is, repression, and will be repealed. Or perhaps that's too much to hope for.

What do you think?

The answer wasn't blowing in the wind

2008-05-12T07:00:00.002-04:00

MLCad, a popular modeler

(fair use claimed)

Image via Wikipedia
I found a nifty gadget, and I have a rather intractable problem to thank.

Many LEGO fans do it virtually, and have since 1995 when James Jessiman released the first software and parts library for LDraw. Since that time the LEGO Community has modeled almost all the parts LEGO has ever developed as part of the LEGO System, and there have been quite a few freeware or shareware tools developed, addressing parts modeling/authoring, model capture and development, rendering, instruction generation, animation and other aspects of virtual LEGO. The parts themselves are licensed under an open license (although getting there has been a bit of a struggle, perhaps a story for another blog post)

The LEGO company was a bit late to the game with their offering, Lego Digital Designer (or LDD), designed to be more kid friendly but widely derided as far harder to use by most serious modelers. It has the very significant advantage of being tied to official parts, and of being tied to the sales apparatus, things designed in it, if designed using a subset, can be bought from the factory.

So anyway... LDraw is great at modeling LEGO elements and constructions. These tend to be rigid or at least solid for the most part, and amorphous elements are rare... While there is a string generator out there, one thing that hasn't been addressed by this community is cloth. String at least is essentially a two dimensional problem, as most strings can be modeled as combinations of shape adhering sections, and catenary or parabolic curves that lie in a plane. But cloth has no such strictures.

Recently, there was a thread about modeling cloth. Don Heyse, long involeved in the LDraw community, was writing about the difficulties of modeling cloth in the LUGNET newsgroup lugnet.cad ... as part of explaining why it was so hard to model cloth he presented this little gadget. It lets you model cloth, and see the effect of wind and gravity on drapings, in real time. I found it quite enjoyable, and educational. Just a nifty little time waster. Hope you like it too!

So that is my serendipity story of the day, I guess.

Got any good serendipity stories?

Yes Virginia, there realy is a (hospital in) Kalamazoo

2008-05-11T07:00:00.001-04:00

Bronson campus, Kalamazoo
Image via Wikimedia CommonsWest Michigan has a bit of a complex about Detroit, and the southeastern part of Michigan in general. There's a perception that "they" get "more than their fair share" of ... well, of everything. More revenue, more media attention, better roads, etc. More of everything, especially if it's provided by government. (There's a reason for that, it has to do with the relative longevity of southeast Michigan legislators in office, among other things).

Going along with that there is also a bit of "we're actually better than them" that goes on. You'll find it to be fairly pervasive, wherever in W MI you go, people will explain why that is... less reliance on the Auto industry, better government, better quality of life, and so forth (despite the fact that we don't have a good road S to Indiana :) )

We had occasion to visit Bronson Methodist Hospital, in Kalamazoo Michigan, this weekend. A fine facility and very competent at what they do. But I was rather amused to find that while we WMers all share a common chip on our shoulder about Detroit et al, that it turns out that Grand Rapids sometimes is the villain in these little set pieces.

See their spring magazine (a pdf). It's just a little puff piece about how generally wonderful the hospital is, and in amongst the other articles is one about a bariatric surgery candidate. Tucked in the copy was this little dig:

Balkema drove to Grand Rapids to meet with doctors to investigate his options and discuss bariatric surgery.

“I wasn’t thrilled with my experience there,” says Balkema.

So that shows that sometimes Detroit isn't the villain. Moral of the story? There isn't one. I just found it funny.

What about you? Do you have any local rivalries in your area that you find amusing?

Evaluating Britannica

2008-05-10T07:00:00.008-04:00

Ann Eliza Bleecker
via Wikimedia Commons Some readers may recall that I was granted Encyclopedia Britannica access a while back, I described it here, and gave a possible gotcha (actually two, one relating to edit mechanics, and one relating to content licensing) here.

In the meantime I haven't been using it all that much, partly because it is not as well integrated in with Zemanta as referencing Wikipedia is, and partly because of the gotchas I describe.

On a whim, I decided to do a little test. Ann Eliza Bleecker was a writer and poet of the American Revolutionary era, who became famous after her death for the epistolary novel Maria Kittle, an important advancement of the then burgeoning captivity narrative genre.

"Historians today read Bleecker's stories and letters to gain a vivid perspective of war on the frontier, as recorded by an articulate, but terrified, young mother" (quoting from the Library Company site)

Presumably a fairly important person, right? Wikipedia until recently did not have an article on her at all. Now, Wikipedia does have a good one (I admit bias here, my wife did much of the work, starting from nothing to get the article to where it is now, and I helped a little... she also put up the text of Maria Kittle on Wikisource).

Britannica should have blown the doors off Wikipedia here, by having an article on her as well, right? And should have had it all along, right?

So I searched. (don't know if this link will work for you or not) Turns out, they do not have one.

At all.
Stephen Bleecker Luce
via Wikimedia Commons

The only American figure named Bleecker I could find in Britannica was Stephen Bleecker Luce, an admiral, editor and founder of the Naval War College. Here's the Britannia link, and here's the Wikipedia link. To my eye, the Wikipedia article is a BIT more comprehensive but they are about the same quality level just judging on appearance.

But no Ann Eliza

So what does that prove? I don't know. It's just a random sample. But I was surprised. I figured I would find a great article in Britannica. I didn't. One or two articles prove nothing, but anecdotally, it does show that at least for this one article (and the other one I wasn't looking for), Wikipedia is at this point, about 6 or so years in, more comprehensive.

What do you think? Fluke? or does this bear out in your observations? If you suggest an article or two to compare, maybe in a future post I'll do another sampling.

Ethnic Categories

2008-05-09T07:00:00.003-04:00

These are not Wikipedia Editors
deciding how to categorize people
... or are they? Image via WikipediaI've been writing about non Wikipedia subjects for a while. That's partly because there are a lot of things on the boil over there that haven't quite come to a clear resolution... and partly because some of those things kind of upset me.

One of those things is the very existence of "ethnic categories" (for those who don't know, the Wikipedia category mechanism lets you put things, such as articles or user pages, or even other categories in categories. For example I'm in the category of Wikipedia administrators open to recall (among others), and my favorite article, SS Christopher Columbus, is in Great Lakes ships, Whaleback ships, Victorian era passenger ships of the United States, 1893 in the United States , and History of Chicago ... whew! go check to see what I mean, I'll wait).

An ethnic category, oddly enough, places a person's article into a category by what ethnicity they are. For example, the article on Barak Obama is included in the category Afro-Caucasian people among the many other categories it has been placed in. (again, go see, I'll wait)

So what's the harm in that, you ask and why am I upset? Well, because the BLP policy dictates, and good ethical behaviour requires, that editors do no harm. But the very act of categorizing someone is itself harmful. Especially if it is done "by eye". The project has seen editors who add someone to a category based on their appearance... if someone "looks a little bit black and a little bit white" they add them to Afro-Caucasian. We don't work that way, we need sources for things, not just eyeball identification. When challenged about this, some of these editors have resorted to calling those that challenge them, and remove the categories "racist", which is a bit of a stretch.

Further, in a fair number of cases there is little or no relevance to the categorization of someone as something. Consider Sydney Tamiia Poitier for example, you learn nothing from knowing she is in the category Afro-Caucasian, as the article at current does not touch on why it is significant that she is in that category. Yet we had edit wars over that category for some time.

The reader does not gain any understanding about the subject by seeing the category, and their ethnicity had no discernable effect on their career. The policy of undue weight says we should not be adding information to the article that doesn't advance the overall narrative, or that leaves false impressions.

I've been involved in some of these discussions with editors that resist removal of these categories and I find it highly frustrating. I wish the categories didn't exist at all. That's part of wishing we lived in a world where we are all color blind and don't care what a person looks like or where they came from, just what they bring to the marketplace of ideas. But if they must exist I want to see only people who have reliable sources documenting they belong there, and moreover, reliable sources documenting that it somehow matters. That it somehow is relevant to their biography.

So I'm frustrated with that.

What about you? Should we have ethnic categories at all? If we do, what should the criteria for inclusion in them be? Strict? Or not so much?

Tulip time!

2008-05-08T07:00:00.001-04:00

Tulips in Holland
Image via WikipediaThe Holland, Michigan Tuliptime Festival, going on this week, celebrates the Dutch ways that run strong in the west Michigan area, in Holland and Zeeland in particular, but the influence extends to Grand Rapids as well. (Our local grocery chain was started by Fred Meijer, and you can buy a car from Van Andel and Flikkema, or from one of the DeVos family, just to pick a few examples)

Every third business you see, it seems, in Holland or Zeeland, is owned by Van Someoneoranother, and Holland certainly embraces its heritage. The city owns Windmill Island Gardens, which has a (what else?) windmill, iconic of the Netherlands.

De Zwann Windmill
Image by jschneid via FlickrFrom the tourist blurbage at the city's site:

A beautiful oasis within the city of Holland, Windmill Island features a 240 year old working Dutch windmill "De Zwaan" (meaning graceful bird). The windmill towers over 36 acres of manicured gardens, dikes, canals and picnic areas.

And of course, tulips are everywhere in town, especially this time of year. They feature in the flowerbeds, in shop window decorations, as architectural motifs, even in some of the food you can get at the festival.

A big part of the festival are the klompen (wooden shoe) dancers. They are out in force during the festival, performing in parades, in the street cleaning (yes, the festival features street cleaning with brooms and buckets and the whole 9 yards, it is traditional that the Governor of Michigan comes out for it, steps into a pair of shoes, and gets cleaning... our governor Jennifer Granholm missed out this year since she just had surgery, and we had to make do with Miss America instead ) and just roaming around being part of things.
Klompen Dancers
Image by Mr. Mcgladdery via Flicker
What I found most interesting about them (and darn you, Zemanta, the image at right was the closest I could come to what I wanted to show) was not the shoes themselves (painful as those might be, you can see some here), but that so many of the dancers were girls. Even the boys. The dance itself was apparently traditionally performed by men and women. But it must be that Holland MICHIGAN men are too cool, because a lot of the "boys" dancing (in button vests and cloth caps instead of dresses) are girls, or more properly middle aged soccer moms 51 weeks of the year... and Klompen Dancers for one.

I found it amusing. And maybe telling, that us guys are too cool to dance. Or too cool to dance in uncomfortable wooden shoes.

What about you? (if you're a boy...) Are you too cool to dance? Or just too cool to dance in the streets of a small midwestern town in horribly uncomfortable shoes wearing odd costumes?

The outlook for Vista

2008-05-07T07:00:00.001-04:00

I feel like these guys...
Image via WikipediaMicrosoft recently announced they are sunsetting XP as of 30 June. What is up with that? For quite some time now, people have been complaining about how bad Vista is. Anecdotally, I have to agree. The one machine we have purchased with it, we downgraded back to XP... just as others urged.

The list of things I don't like is long, but tops among them are its insistence on constantly asking me for permission to do mundane things. Oh, and its bloatedness, and unreliability (it managed to get itself reconfigured so we could not talk to the net at all, then eventually tore itself apart), which is not what we wanted in a machine that was for a non technical college student.

This OS isn't ready. It's not just me whining either. No amount of strong arming the manufacturers, threats to kill XP, or spin control can fix that.

Indiana Jones IV

2008-05-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

LEGO Indy
Image via Wikipedia
Fair use claimedI got a chance to see the new LEGO sets for the Indiana Jones IV movie (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull) and I'm psyched. Nice designs, all in all.

LEGO brought out 4 sets earlier this year with scenes from earlier movies:

Indiana Jones Motorcycle Chase with 79 pieces
Indiana Jones and the Lost Tomb with 277 pieces
Race for the Stolen Treasure with 272 pieces
Temple Escape with 554 pieces

(links go to Peeron inventory)

Usually when LEGO does a new theme the sets are increasing in price as well as piece count, oddly this time two of the sets have almost the same piece count but one is 20 and the other 30 USD. Fans have been pretty complimentary of these.

When I was in California last week I got to see the new ones on display, all featuring scenes from the new movie:

Jungle Duel with 90 pieces
River Chase with 234 pieces
Jungle Cutter with 511 pieces
Temple of Akator with 929 pieces

(no links this time, the inventories aren't done by the fans yet.... but here's a link to the LEGO site's description of the new theme)

Anyway, I'm psyched. Great sets and great play value.

Oh ya, I'm excited about the movie too.

SpaceX, making it easier to get the heck out of Dodge?

2008-05-05T07:00:00.003-04:00

Falcon 1 at launch complex
Image via Wikimedia CommonsWhen I was growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. I suspect I wasn't the only person who felt that way. Heck, I even wrote NASA for an application.

In a previous posting, I questioned the value of Constellation and wondered why NASA isn't just farming the job out to SpaceX. That reminded me that I haven't written about one of my favorite new companies yet.

SpaceX, one of several companies started by Elon Musk, of PayPal fame and fortune, is trying to make space travel cheaper. This is a non trivial task, and the first two launches did not achieve orbit, but the company insists they were successful in the sense that they learned and refined a lot.

They have a novel approach to PR, they seem to be willing to put a fair bit of stuff right out in public... in particular they had live feeds of their first two launches, which was pretty cool.

Dragon and Falcon 9
Image via WikipediaSpaceX has three different projects going... the Falcon 1, and the Falcon 9, two different sized mostly reusable launchers, and the Dragon vehicle, which is a crew and cargo vessel that can be launched atop a Falcon 9.

With the activity at Scaled Composites (including winning the X prize) going on, it really looked like the 2000s were going to be the decade where space travel really went commercial. But both Scaled and SpaceX have suffered some delays. Scaled Composites had a damaging accident and the first launch of the Falcon 9 has been pushed back. They've tried to put a good spin on it, but still.Image by jurvetson via Flickr
So I'm still hopeful, but maybe not quite as. Maybe it will take a bit longer. Maybe it can't be done at all and we're doomed to government space? I certainly hope not! Is the fact that SpaceX have won some NASA contracts a good sign? A bad one? What do you think?

Free content can make money!

2008-05-04T07:00:00.005-04:00

Cover of
Old Man's War
Image via WikipediaReaders here (all 6 of you?) know I read John Scalzi's blog. A while back he talked about a new book by Scott Sigler, "Infected" and gave a link to get a free PDF of the book. (That link is no longer valid by the way...)

That's nice of John, to hook his readership up that way... but he himself is no stranger to it. You could say he got his start that way (as, arguably, Cory Doctorow did as well).

So now it comes out that it's possible to get a podcast of Infected if you follow this link.

I suspect that while there will be takers, and lots, it will also drive sales of the book. Why? because I'm sure I'm not the only person who got hooked on Scalzi by reading a free (unless you wanted to donate something, which I did) copy of "Old Man's War", or on Doctorow by reading a free copy of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". Although horror isn't my favorite subgenre of SF, the book was good and I plan to keep following the series

What about you? Do you read free books? Do you find yourself buying a copy of the book you got for free? If so, what motivates you?

(Note, I mean free as in beer here, the content is not freely licensed... in particular the image cover is used as a claimed Fair Use for review/discussion purposes)

Is Constellation just a rehash of Apollo?

2008-05-03T07:00:00.002-04:00

Image via WikipediaNASA has proposed "Project Constellation", which aims to put men back on the moon by 2020. Part of the project are the "Orion" manned vehicle, launched by the "Ares" (in versions I and V) rocket, and using the "Altair" lunar lander.

Some have evaluated the program and see it as another big expensive project that will compete for funding with science, and also will compete with the Commercial off the shelf (COTS) initiative.

While I've been a big fan of space exploration all my life, I have my doubts about this whole thing.

Except for some semi reuse at the beginning, it sure seems like the entire thing is more or less "Apollo, but bigger and better" ... Aries I and V (which use Shuttle SRB derived first stages) launch a crew module and lander separately, a rendezvous in orbit mates those and the crew module stays in orbit around the moon while the lander lands. The descent stage is left on the moon, just like the LEM.

Why do this at all? We already know how to do this. Instead of developing new government rockets, (and make work projects) why not just pay for launch capacity from SpaceX or whoever? Or better yet, how about actually building some industrial capacity on the lunar surface? I want the transformative activity in near earth space that science fiction promised us. It's 2008, where's my lunar catapult?

What do you think? Rehash or value add?

ArbCom Vacancy

2008-05-02T07:00:00.002-04:00

Wherefore "justice"?
(as if!) Image via
Wikimedia CommonsI think the little corner of the blogosphere that I (and presumably, many of my readers) hang out in has discussed the departure of Newyorkbrad from the English Wikipedia project, the events leading up to it, the events surrounding it, and so forth, quite a bit, so I'll skip the background.

But the departure leaves a hole in the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. Brad was widely regarded as a very good arbitrator.

So now what. As the picture says, wherefore justice? (recall please that I feel that Wikipedia is not a government or experiment in justice or social systems, and that arbcom is designed to solve things, not dispense justice)

Traditionally, Jimbo does sometimes appoint to fill vacancies.

And speculation about who he might or might not appoint is already running at a fever pitch. Some speculate that the next people in order from the 2007 election, Rebecca and Raul654, are the most likely appointees.

Well, while they might be the most likely, and while they might not be "bad" arbitrators (both have experience), I think a better idea is to make a radical pick, one that shows some new thinking.

So obviously, I'm stumping for Giano. (you saw that coming, right? grin!) He is 3rd on the list when sorted by percentage, but first, when sorted by number of supports received. (and he got a LOT!) My reasons given at the time
are just as valid as ever, in my view.

What do you think? Am I crazy? If so, tell me! Am I spot on? If so, tell Jimbo! :)

Fun with statistics

2008-05-01T07:00:00.002-04:00

A form of advertising not likely
to be directly seen on WMF!
Image via Wikimedia CommonsAdvertising as a funding source for Wikimedia Foundation projects is a fairly controversial topic, and there has been much discussion in the past. Opinions on the matter are held quite strongly by some folk.

Apparently Jimmy Wales ran a poll on advertising via a facility on Facebook that lets you poll things. Some analysis of this poll was carried out and posted on Meta (and, to my chagrin, although I'm active on Meta, I didn't find out about it that way).

The analysis is quite interesting, if only to show what sort of fun can be had with statistics.

Facebook: Image via Wikipedia
(fair use claimed)According to Techcrunch, Facebook demographics are somewhat skewed. this is not surprising when you think about it, but I did not realise it was apparently 2/3 female in make up. Lonely male geeks, take note!

So clearly the demographic of these polls is not necessarily representative of the entire population. That's OK and not necessarily a drawback if one is just trying to get some preliminary sense of matters and doesn't plan to use the findings for actual decision making, absent more study.

Personally, I think the thing I found most amusing, and significant, was the large number of people that were not sure what the project's current structure actually is, and were not aware that the project does not currently have ads on it.

This is something to remember... it's true that the english wikipedia is the 7th most visited site on the internet, but it's also true that many people don't know much at all about its project structure or funding sources. Or care, presumably.

What do you think?

Stemming the rise of the machines?

2008-04-30T07:01:00.005-04:00

The machines are reading
(c) Wikimedia Foundation Sometimes events move faster than we plan.

Another tidbit of my visit to the Wikimedia Foundation office Monday was that I got a preview of this post by Cary Bass, which addresses robots.txt, the bit of magic that controls what is searched and what is not. (more specifically, well behaved robots/spiders honor what it says and do not scan pages it names off... Less well behaved robots/spiders eventually get blocked completely once their bad behaviour is discovered.) Specifically, it makes the case that non articlespace pages ought not to be quite as visible in searches as articles, because unlike articlespace pages, which were designed to be read by the intended audience of the encyclopedia itself, they often contain bickering, name calling, or even worse, "userified" pages that contain clear BLP violations, fringe theories given undue weight or all sorts of other problematic content.

Unbeknownst to Cary, after Cary had written that blog post but before it published (the wonders of delayed publishing) Newyorkbrad posted this to the english wikipedia and foundation mailing lists. In it, he advances a remarkably similar thesis, that we should act to avoid giving undue weight to material that really isn't intended for the readership.

Bugzilla mascot, Image
via Wikimedia Commons
Partially in support of this, I entered an enhancement request in Bugzilla for code changes to make it easier to control what is and isn't in robots.txt... your thoughts or comments on that bug would be appreciated.

See also this mailing list post by Jimmy Wales in which he expresses agreement with the general idea that we should use this as a way to avoid doing unnecessary harm. Bravo!

As it turns out, this topic (among others) has been getting considerable discussion at the dreaded Wikipedia Review, but I believe Brad advanced the idea because it's a good idea, not because of the pressure that some were trying to exert. More on that topic later, but for a taste of it you can review this thread.

governance uproar?

2008-04-29T07:00:00.005-04:00

I did not steal any pencils.
Image by kaurjmeb via FlickrIronically (or not) I'm writing this from the Wikimedia Foundation office... (although since I'm using Blogger's draft mode, I can queue it up for posting tomorrow morning, I hope they promote that from draft to production soon...) I happen to be in San Francisco on business and popped in to visit. There is a certain cachet to doing so, I guess

The announcement of the board's restructuring seems to have caused a bit of an uproar in some circles... Danny posted, and then referenced Durova's "community petition" part II post... maybe it's fashionable to express ... concern? dismay? outrage? what?

Myself, I think I'll just hang back and let others comment further, because I'm not sure I'm concerned... or dismayed, or outraged, or whatever... the structure doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me... some allocation to the chapters, which are growing in importance, some to the community, and some internal. If I had any concern it would be about the notion of experts being seated rather than being consulted but I'm fairly sure things will sort out on their own soon enough.

So call me unfashionable I guess. I'm more worried about the more immediate things like BLPs and the Checkuser policy churn that's been manifesting itself lately than I am about board structure.

Would you vote for this man?

2008-04-28T07:00:00.003-04:00

My cousin, Jerry Swartz, is a long time educator and labor activist, is running (or I should say, recently ran, by the time you read this, the election will be over) for MEA Secretary Treasurer of the MEA, the Michigan chapter of the National Education Association.

Jerry is one of four candidates running. I'd like to tell you who the other three are but I haven't sussed that out yet. The MEA website has a search capability but I wasn't able to find that information.

Jerry and I are, you could say, diametrically opposed on a lot of matters... (He's a union organizer, after all) but he's a very hard working and well meaning person who has done a lot of good for his local and who is not afraid of keeping those in power honest.

The state MEA would do a lot worse than Jerry Swartz as Secretary Treasurer...

Besides, I don't have any other relatives who have had their picture taken with Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm!

Governance Reform for Wikipedia?

2008-04-27T07:00:00.003-04:00

WMF logo as a mosaic of images
Image via Wikimedia CommonsPreviously, I wrote about a Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wide Wikicouncil. That idea continues to spark discussion (whether I think it's a good idea or not is another matter :) ) ... it has been the subject of discussion by the WMF board, but it appears that the idea is shelved, at least for now.

There is another initiative brewing, perhaps somewhat more grass roots, to foster "governance reform" on the English Wikipedia. The proposal and the talk page make interesting reading.

The argument put forth by proponents is that there has been a failure to get many proposals for reform enacted using the existing (consensus based) processes, and very few reform proposals imposed by fiat either, and that therefore a new process is needed.

Wikimedia Foundation wikis tend to operate using policy that is "descriptive", that is, policy lags behind practice and is written to describe how things are actually done, and as practice changes, policy changes to follow it, or lags practice. By contrast, "prescriptive" policy is written to describe how things ought to be done, and it is changed to force a change in actual practice, that is, policy leads practice.

If this proposal were adopted it would be a major change away from descriptive policy, and, some argue, away from the "wiki way".

Given the number of abortive attempts to change BLP policy that there have been lately, and the frustration I and others have expressed, this proposal has a certain attraction. Heck, it's a siren song... to think that if this were passed, 50 (or however many) reasonable people would now be able to change policy to be as I think it should be, regardless of "consensus" not being for the change. (we have seen things get 65% support and then be declared as dead, lacking consensus)

But there's the rub... who's to say that the 50 (or however many) people selected to be on this thing will be "reasonable", "thoughtful", "bold", etc? If the process used to select them is anything like the Request for Adminship process of late, it's just as likely that they will be popular, non controversial people who have never annoyed anyone or taken a stand on anything... and how do we know if they've never taken a stand what their stand will be on matters going forward? We won't know.

So I don't see this as a good idea, even if we wanted to change away from the wiki way of descriptive policy.

What do you think? Do you think the English Wikipedia has a problem with getting policy to change? If so, do you think the way to solve it is to change to prescriptive policy? And if so, do you think this governance reform is the way to achieve that?

I'd like to know! Tell me! Put your comments in on the talk page as well!

Bauer Power

2008-04-26T07:00:00.003-04:00

Solar cells, Image
from Wikimedia Commons
Previously I wrote about SolarCity and Sungevity, two California based companies. I've been searching hard to see if there was anyone local, because I would rather give less money to the power company if at all possible.

I have found an outfit called Bauer Power (hey, rhymes with flower power!) local to me, in Wayland... They also offer the turn key solution I crave but time will tell whether it's what I want. Unlike the two Cali companies I profiled, Bauer charges you for the initial design. This may be to keep people serious. But it's worth it to me to find out if I'm right that our house would be ideal, and to see what they propose. So I've scheduled them to come out in mid May and evaluate things.

I'm not totally clear on what our utility, Consumers Energy, actually provides for customers that want to be bidirectional. Their net metering page is a big vague (and hard to find), but this PDF brochure gives a bit more information. Time will tell.

How easy or hard is it to use renemable energy where you live?

Britannica free access... gotcha?

2008-04-25T07:00:00.001-04:00

EB building name plate with thistle
Image by Robert Brook via FlickrPreviously, I wrote about Encyclopaedia Britannica's free access offer. I may have more to say later but I thought I'd update you a bit with a couple of things I ran into

First, it seems I can't edit my previous post! I'm very used to just going into already published posts and tweaking them (I always find typos after I publish them! Why is that???, er, don't answer....).

For whatever reason, an attempt to edit that post blanks it out. I'm not sure if this is a glitch at my end or what (further testing is needed) but the only think that is different about that post is the widget I embedded. If in fact I can't edit posts that have those widgets that's a strong disincentive to embed them. Hopefully just a glitch that will be sorted out.

A somewhat more serious matter was blogged about by the author of Pattern Recognition, who sat down and analyzed the Terms and Conditions of use. It seems that the T&C has that dreaded "non commercial use" clause... (I was going to put a link to it about here, but Jason Griffey is a better searcher than I am, I can't find the page that has the Ts and Cs!... silly me...)

Now, on my blog, if you look over to the left, and if you look between every second posting, you're going to find ads... so far I think I've raked in a total of 24 cents or so from them but it's commercial use, technically. So if you come back one day and find that first posting gone and any and all links to Britannica content gone, that's why...

For now, though, I'm going to assume they don't really mean exactly what they seem to say by that, since (thanks again, Jason) their next paragraph says:

If you want to post, publish, or use content from (or contained within) the Services on your Web site or in any other Internet activity, you will need permission from Britannica, even though your Web site or Internet activity is free of charge.

Well hmm... wasn't that what I just signed up for the ability to link to EB articles? Color me confused I guess.

What do you think? Does EB really mean that?

Doc quits

2008-04-24T19:00:00.001-04:00

An Ostrich, although not one
with its head in the sand. Image
via Wikimedia CommonsDoc Glasgow, one of the leading voices in the effort to improve Wikipedia's handling of Biographies of Living Persons (BLPs) has apparently quit the project. (his goodbye statement, ironically enough, was first posted at Wikipedia Review!)

This is unfortunate. It's tempting to just dismiss this departure as one of many, point to UseMod's GoodBye essay, and say it doesn't matter, the project has thousands of contributors. And in fact that's what I usually do. But Doc's voice was a good one and an important one.

Consider this page on the BLP problem and why it's important, and the outpouring of discussion around it.

Or consider this proposal, for allowing marginally notable biography subjects to "opt out", now marked as rejected, and the discussion around it.

Or consider this proposal, for reversing the default outcome of BLP Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions to delete. It has led to this thread at the BLP page itself, in which SlimVirgin proposes adoption. (the straw poll shows it running at least 65% in favor of adopting it so that's something anyway)

Every one of those is from Doc or had Doc pushing hard for it. And those are just the ones I thought of offhand, there are others. Doc was one of the hardest workers on the BLP mess for quite some time.

Perhaps he just got disheartened at the apparent unwillingness of some in the community to admit that there is a BLP problem and that the current approach isn't handling it. Can't say as I blame him, the level of ostrich in the sand -ism seems quite high there.

If you agree maybe you would consider taking the Responsible Editing pledge? Those undersigned are either:
* already using accounts identifying their real identity (and will not use sock puppets on BLPs)
* OR pledging not to add content concerning living people
* OR intending creating separate accounts, linked to their real identities, for this purpose
I signed it. If you edit Wikipedia, you should consider doing so too.

A Life

2008-04-23T07:00:00.004-04:00

A Purple Heart
via Wikimedia CommonsRichard A. Lockwood passed away on Friday April 19, somewhat suddenly, but not unexpectedly. "Grandpa Lockwood" was the patriarch of the clan, with 5 children, 14 grandchildren, thirty some great grandchildren (including my two children) and 3 great great grandchildren. He was 89. He is survived, but surely not for very long, by his wife Helen, a stroke victim who is no longer quite aware of what goes on around her.

Dick was a member of the "Greatest Generation", that generation that lived through and took part in World War II. A recepient of the Purple Heart, he never liked to talk about his part in the war. He joined late (he had several children by the time the war started for the US) But he was there, as part of General Patton's 3rd Army. His service was marked at his funeral services by inclusion of "Patton's Prayer" in the memorial program and by the things members of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post did, saluting at the beginning and end of the service, firing a salute, and presenting a service flag to Helen. She was oddly quiet... perhaps she had some awareness of what it all meant.

Ever since I married into the Lockwood clan, Grandpa Lockwood was an important part of my family life. The family would come to the old Lockwood farmhouse on Ingalls road, in Smyrna, just about every Sunday to sit around, eat Grandma's cooking, (made with food bought by Grandpa as he had once complained about what Helen bought... she vowed never to ever set foot in a grocery store again, and she stuck to it) trade wild stories, and watch sports. (you had better not have had anything bad to say about the University of Michigan teams, or good to say about The Ohio State University teams, though)How one gets one of them
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Richard was born in that farmhouse, and grew up there, and lived there for 72 years of marriage, raising his 5 children, who dispersed to far corners of the US, and raised their own families, had their own careers, their own triumphs and sadnesses.

It is not everyone who is lucky enough to live to see great great grandchildren, to be sure. But it's also not everyone who has to help bury his own great great granddaughter, as Dick also did. It is not everyone who is lucky enough to live a full life. But it's also not everyone who outlives his own son by over 20 years. His son Gary died of AIDS in the mid 1980s, and was cremated at his own request, with his ashes scattered on Lake Waramaug, which he loved. We were able to finally bring some closure there when we placed a bottle of the lake water (with some tiny part of his ashes in it), which we had been saving all this time, in the casket.

It was a good life. He will be missed.

Sungevity, another easy route to solar power?

2008-04-22T07:00:00.002-04:00

Earth Day ecology flag
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI previously wrote about SolarCity, the California outfit trying to make it easy to get greener electricity.

It seems fitting, for Earth Day, to talk about another vendor who's trying to make it easy, Sungevity. These guys, like SolarCity, offers pretty much a turn key solution. Contract with them, and they handle the planning, paperwork, financing, and installation. There is major motivation to make a go of it, because California has put 3.3 Billion USD worth of incentives in place. (why I think that's not necessarily a good idea would be the topic for a different post... the point is, the money's out there for California residents to get, so if they can, they should)

The twist in the business model here is that the folk at Sungevity think they can reduce costs by using satellite imagery to understand your house's layout, south facing roof configuration, and so forth, allowing them to design an installation without ever actually doing a site visit. I'm somewhat dubious, but they are claiming a 10% price advantage over the competition. Basically their process has you enter your address, choose what you want in a system, and they generate a plan and quote from the imagry

It's good to see competition and different ideas being tried, it will be interesting to see how things turn out. But I have my doubts.

Meanwhile I'm continuing my search for a vendor that's local... stay tuned on that, I may have found someone, we'll see...

Britannica free access?

2008-04-21T19:00:00.002-04:00

A print Encyclopaedia Britannica
Image via Wikimedia CommonsThe Encyclopaedia Britannica recently announced "free" access to some of their content. The basic scheme is that if you are one of the "people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers," you can register for the ability to share access. Their reason?

"Britannica covers a wide range of topics with thousands of articles and multimedia features. They’re relevant and useful, and we’d like more people to be able to take advantage of them." (quoted for review purposes)

Many have said the real reason is more obviously commercial... that Wikipedia is eating into their online market share (and the web in general eating into print encylopedia share, c.f. the recent announcement by a German print encyclopedia that they were publishing their last edition) and that this was an attempt to win market and mind share (as well as Google ranking because there would be more inbound links to their content) TechCrunch observed something somewhat similar.

What's on offer are widgets as well as direct links.

I decided to sign up and see for myself. The sign up process was simple enough, fill out a form, give a link to your blog, and wait. Shortly thereafter I received a mail with another link, I filled that out and now I have access to content. Here's an example widget:

(I haven't sussed out how exactly to specify what I want to display so gosh knows what topic you're seeing.... the help page wants me to watch a video... I'd rather just read directions) and here's an example link (to the Britannia article on Wikipedia).

I think it's instructive to compare that article (go read it, I'll wait) with the Wikipedia article on Britannica... (again, go read it, I'll wait)

While it is true that Britannica has been around longer... and therefore there is more to say, I find it odd how much of the Britannica article seems to focus on Wikipedia's flaws. While I do not fool myself that Wikipedia is perfect, and I have criticised the project for its flaws, it's not quite as dire as EB seems to paint matters. Perhaps they have fallen into the trap of not exactly having a neutral point of view about their competition?

I'll no doubt have more to say about this later but it's an intereesting development. What do you think? Why did EB do this? Will it be useful to folk? Will this experiment work for EB?

House Flags

2008-04-20T07:00:00.006-04:00

The trigger: MC&S ad
Image via Wikipedia
(fair use to illustrate blog)
In one of those chains of odd connections, it turns out I want to write an article about "house flags"... these are the flags that civil shipping companies fly on their ships to show what line the ship belongs to. The same scheme is often used to decorate the smokestack(s) on more modern ships, which can be seen from farther away

Why do I want to write that article? Well you can thank Rettetast, I guess. He, or his bot, left me a message that a magazine ad image I uploaded (conforming to the then current Fair Use standards) long long ago (mid May 2006, and 2 years is a long time in wiki time) to illustrate the Merritt-Chapman & Scott article was no longer in compliance with current practice, and I needed to write a better justification. Perfectly legitimate and an important thing to fix, since the WMF has mandated all wikis be in compliance with fair use.

In reviewing the article I thought to myself it would be nice, since the MC&S house flag featured in the logo (and in the bottom of the ad) if I could find a house flag image to use that was better than the very grainy one in the ad. So I searched, only to find this page. It has a better house flag all right, drawn by Eugene Ipavec... but the irony of it alll! It's a recreation, based on the very Wikipedia article and image I myself uploaded!

This spurred me to search, and I found that the term "house flag" is used over 30 times in articles but has no article of its own. Doing the research is problematic though, as the term is very common and thus you get a lot of false returns. But I thing I may have found some few tidbits and if i can tear myself away from drama I will take a crack at changing the redirect I put in to become a real article. It may not end up very large but it would be better than the tidbit in the Maritime flags article (which itself is better than nothing)

What serendipitous connections, or even self referential ones, have you found that spurred you? And do you have any leads for good sources for a House flag article? (grin)

Getting off Hivemind

2008-04-19T11:00:00.003-04:00

If you're on Hivemind (the site, not the Hivemind OS software) and you want to get off, all you have to do is publish your real name on your Wikipedia page... simple right?

Except my real name's been there all along. Very first edit to the page, in fact.

But I got added to Hivemind recently. No. I'm not giving you the link to Hivemind, it gets enough inbound links as it is. Trying to ask Brandt why gets zero reply.

Maybe it's more like you have to also not annoy Daniel Brandt by calling him a weenie (or worse, see this blog post). Or maybe you have to get behind whatever his latest hobby horse is... delete whatever he is hot about, sign whatever petition he is keen on, etc. Or maybe ??? Who knows?

Point is, if you want to be seen as acting on principle, as Brandt claims to be doing, you have to actually act on principle, and not act based on personal grudges.

That's what I try to stick to, and "acting on principle" is precisely what I was arguing in defending the redirect deletions... the principle of deleting them was correct even if Daniel Brandt himself was not a nice person.

Else, if you consistently don't act on principle, you're just a bully. As Moulton pointed out, Brandt's actions fit the description.

Kato justified Brandt's tactics here. I suspect that there is some validity to the claim that you have to fight unfairly if you have been treated unfairly. But on the other hand, is attacking those who most want to help the most reasonable way to effect change?

I don't think so. Do you?

David Koudys' LEGO Animation

2008-04-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Dave Koudys has been working on animating a LEGO classic space vehicle. His work has come to fruition...

First he shared some of the preliminary mechanization with us... going in a circle is hard enough...

but he's managed to do a dogbone covering 3 Classic Space grey baseplates.

Here it is in action:

And here is the mechanism that does the magic:

Dave is also working on a crane/gantry/repair bay:

Animation is a great way to make displays more exciting and keep crowds interested.

Dave's work, like that of many other hobbyists, no doubt takes inspiration from and builds upon earlier work, like that of the GMLTC (members animated a mine truck) and Steve Ringe of MichLTC, who has animated cars in a street, including two way traffic. Both of these earlier works used the general principle of a magnet moving beneath the baseplate that "couples" to a magnet on the vehicle being animated, but the drive mechanisms differ.

What have you done in your displays to improve crowd interest? Or if you're not a LEGO builder, what sorts of animation do you enjoy the most?

Money can't buy happiness?

2008-04-17T07:00:00.002-04:00

Sometimes following tangents finds you interesting things. Danny's "White Fathers" blog post yesterday on what really would help folk in Africa, whether the WMF's mission of knowledge sharing was the most needful thing started the wheels turning for me.

Those wheels got a push from this thread on Wikipedia Review, and from Danny's "Congo" response to it here. I think maybe sometimes we lose track, in our situations, of how things really are and aren't, and what we can do about them. What I'm about to say should in no way be taken as diminishing how tough things are in places like the sub Sahara, the Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe and the like. They're tough, make no mistake, way tougher than in the rich world...

So when I hear people saying "Money can't buy happiness?" I want to call BS. First, take a look at this classic essay by John Scalzi, "Being Poor" It's a rich world essay to be sure, but it drives home the point... being poor really really sucks.

Then take a look at this New York Times article... Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All ... Granted, its a study of the rich world, and of the well off people within it, but (quoting)

The fact remains that economic growth doesn’t just make countries richer in superficially materialistic ways.

Economic growth can also pay for investments in scientific research that lead to longer, healthier lives. It can allow trips to see relatives not seen in years or places never visited. When you’re richer, you can decide to work less — and spend more time with your friends.

That's rich world stuff... but the same thing is true in the less rich world. As Ben Yates cited in a "White Fathers" reply, cellphones can make a difference, and that says to me that aid isn't the solution. Changing society is the solution. Economic growth is the solution. Knowledge is the solution. Danny's right when he says an encyclopedia per se isn't the answer, that more thought is required, it has to deliver the things that are needed. But those who decry encyclopedias and economic and societal change in favour of direct aid? They miss the mark.

Money can't buy happiness? Tell it the the lady in Alabama with the 800 dollar car. Tell it to the mother in Gambia without the money to buy a sack of maize.

Money CAN buy happiness.... but the best kind of money is money you control because you earned it, because your society enabled it, not money that dropped in your lap.

The times, they are a changing

2008-04-16T07:00:00.001-04:00

A Brickshelf folder Originally
uploaded to Flickr by Repoort

The net of 10 or so years ago was a far different place. Things were much more primitive. If you wanted to present content, you had to arrange for your own page and image hosting (or use a free site, remember GeoCities?).

In particular, the nascent online LEGO hobby community had few or no options for hosting pictures. And how could one share one's creations without pictures?

Enter Brickshelf. (site description at Brickwiki)

Kevin Loch, an AFOL living in the DC area, set up the Brickshelf site to allow for fan hosting of images. The user interface was fairly rudimentary. Log in, select or create a folder, and upload images. Fixed thumbnail sizes, no description text, and simple keywords. Uploading multiple images required placing them in zip files. No slideshows, no user groups, tagging, communities, user profiles, etc. Just images. Moderation of images occurred by hand. Copyright of the images was retained by the owner (unlike, say, Commons which requires a free license of some sort) and the subject could be anything (as long as it was LEGO related).

Brickshelf was a huge hit. Everyone in the LEGO community kept their images there. People linked to images from their LUGNET posts, from their personal web pages, and so forth. Kevin even added a repository of instruction scans (with the tacit approval of LEGO themselves, as the scans hosted were for sets already out of production) Fortunately, Kevin worked somewhere that bandwidth was inexpensive and the millions of images hosted in the scheme were not a huge drag. Or so everyone thought.

Kevin introduced some ads, and accepted donations. People urged him to update the interface, broaden the appeal and try to monetize the site. But after the initial spurt of development, the site underwent little or no change for years. In 2002, the instruction scans were removed (eventually to be moved to Peeron, another fan operated site), as part of setting up an LLC, and some ads were added but little else changed.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007. Brickshelf, now 10 years old, was struggling to keep the lights on., and no one knew. One day, visitors saw a discontinuance message and the topic was widely discussed on LUGNET and many other sites and blogs. Maj.com, an image hosting service also run by Kevin Loch, but with a more general focus, stayed up. The outage turned out to be a warning, the next day it was back up, but with a notice that it would go down by the end of the month, which Kevin explained on LUGNET.

Flickr page originally
uploaded to Flickr by camflan A huge amount of discussion ensued. People vowed to help save it, complained bitterly at the loss of a free service, stated they were going to host elsewhere and loads of other things. Eventually the discontinuance was rescinded and a membership scheme introduced. But the dominant position of Brickshelf as the most widely used image site was at an end. There has subsequently been a large upsurge in use of Flickr and at other sites, with new groups forming there and the like.

So earlier this year, when Maj, com went away for a day or two, and then come back again, it was with far less fanfare. It seemed like almost no one noticed. After the temporary disappearance of Brickshelf last year, in which many fans expressed dismay, sadness, or even outrage, this seems to have elicted little comment.

That may well be because it no longer matters as much. To stay dominant, first mover isn't always enough. Sometimes you have to change with the times. There are so many well capitalized hosting solutions now, and people have learned to use them instead of Brickshelf, that the loss may not be as missed.

Do you have things you rely on that you would miss if they were gone? Are they the same things as they were 1o years ago?

More on the BLP policy

2008-04-15T07:00:00.005-04:00

A biography, although
not of a living person :)
Image via Wikimedia CommonsYes, this is the 4th time I've written about the topic of Biographies of Living Persons (or BLP for short) , and unfortunately, I expect it won't be the last. (here are screeds one, two, and three)

Wikipedia user Doc Glasgow has written an excellent summation of the problem on a user subpage The_BLP_problem. It also includes analysis of several of the possible solutions that have been offered in various places lately. Those who say there is no problem really really need to read this page, it's very well done.

Wikipedia Review folk thought so highly of it that they reproduced it, verbatim (as of when it was copied) as one of their editorials. This topic is now getting more and more attention so I'm hopeful that some progress will be made. As I've said before, the stakes are too high, and the injuries possible to those affected by BLP too risky, not to do something.

To see the magnitude of the problem, take a look at the Some Statistics section in the WR editorial (reproduced from somewhere else I can't find at the moment):

Maintenance category	Articles	Percent
Total BLP articles (Category:Living people)	259210	100.00%
Cat:Articles lacking sources	13908	5.37%
Cat:Articles with unsourced statements	13740	5.30%
Cat:Articles needing additional references	5475	2.11%
Cat:Orphaned articles	3157	1.22%
Cat:Articles to be expanded	2511	0.97%
Cat:Articles with topics of unclear notability	1971	0.76%
Cat:Articles lacking reliable references	1918	0.74%
Cat:Articles with trivia sections	1510	0.58%
Cat:Wikipedia articles needing style editing	1420	0.55%
Cat:Articles lacking in-text citations	860	0.33%

Data from March 12 2008

5% lacking sources, 5% unsourced statements, 2% needing references (some overlap there to be sure)... that doesn't even track the articles that are coatracks or hatchet jobs. 5% isn't bad, you say??? except that is 13 THOUSAND articles that may well have problems.

There have been a fair few proposals to address this recently... semi-protection, BLP-Lock, (by SirFozzie, et al) Opt Out (by PrivateMusings, et al) AfD rejiggering (by Doc Glasgow) , dead tree standard, (by many folk) and some I've forgotten.

Some ideas are more radical than others of course... perhaps one of the more interesting offers related to this was Daniel Brandt wagering Hivemind. Probably nothing will come of it. (I made Hivemind myself recently, but that's probably the topic for another posting)

So what do you think? Has the tide turned and we are going to see change in this area at last? Or do you think there's no problem at all?

From the what were they thinking department

2008-04-14T07:05:00.001-04:00

The iconic LEGO brick.
Image via Wikimedia CommonsThe LEGO company continues to confound and confuse adult train fans.

Their latest move, apparently, is to replace the current magnetic coupling scheme, which uses magnets free to rotate around a horizontal axis, in a way that finesses which end is which polarity issues, mounted in a holder that is free to swivel from side to side (to allow the train cars to go around curves) and then mounted on a buffer, with a new scheme in which the magnet is apparently encased inside the buffer.

Why?

No one yet knows for sure. Speculation in the online LEGO community has it that this is to address safety concerns that might arise if young children swallow magnets... there have been reports in the media of children suffering problems when two magnets join adjacent stomach or intestinal walls and cause blockages.

How do we know this?

Seems that the new part libraries just refreshed into LDD show some new parts. You can see the images at this LUGNET post.

All in one and presumably harder to swallow by kids.

Oddly, these will probably be harder to swallow by adults too, as they make it harder to build things compared to what they replace.

Well, one more old style part to hoard, I guess, along with 9V motors and track.

PS: don't mind this Technorati Profile ... it won't hurt a bit.

FSM and gumption

2008-04-13T07:01:00.001-04:00

FSM car thingie.
Image from Commons
So I got a Flying Spaghetti Monster thingie to stick on the back of one of our vehicles. Amazon has them but I am sure they are elsewhere as well.

But I don't have the guts to actually put it on. Grand Rapids, as you may know, is a big time part of the Bible Belt... and I'm not sure how well received such, um... blasphemy would be received.

We got a hard time for having a "No W" sticker (a W with a line through it, which of course shows that we are not the biggest fans of our dearly beloved George W. Bush...) on the back of our car a few years ago, and nothing has changed since.

No W!
Image from CommonsStill, it does seem a good way to show where our beliefs lie. I'll have to find the gumption to actually get it on there sometime soon.

Do you have any beliefs you're not quite willing to share with the world by displaying them on the back of your car?

SolarCity, making it easier to be green?

2008-04-12T07:00:00.011-04:00

Solar Cells.
Image from Wikimedia CommonsBeing green isn't easy, just as Kermit said. We are not the most green household, far from it. But it is not for lack of desire, or even for lack of motivation, it's that it is hard work and there is little incentive. I suspect we are not the only Americans that feel that way.

Why is that?

I won't speak to why recycling is so hard, other than to mention that something that you have to spend more time doing, and pay extra for (as is the case in many munincipalities), isn't likely to win a lot of converts in the US, that's just how we Americans are.

I won't speak to why fuel efficient cars and hybrids don't have a larger share of the US market already (although this is growing) except to mention that at present, most vehicles of this type don't make economic sense yet. (note, my current vacation is the first chance I've had to drive a Prius and I think I'm in love... it just needs a way bigger battery. But I digress)

No, those are large topics and I'll leave further discussion of them out of this post except to say that they are hard problems. Make them easy, anyone, and people will change habits. However some people (those more concerned with economics and practicality instead of ideology) there will be no change in habit before they're easy.

Green electricity is another hard problem. So, let me tell you about a nifty outfit I learned about called SolarCity. (as with anything I mention, disclaimers apply, my opinion only, do your homework, don't take my word for it, etc. etc.) This company, one of several started by Elon Musk, of PayPal fame and fortune, is trying to make solar electricity easy, especially for residences.

Putting aside the engineering and efficiency problems that need improving (and which are being addressed by many researchers), a very big problem with solar is how daunting of a project it is. As their website outlines, there are permits to obtain, construction to oversee, financing concerns, agreements with the power company to worry about, ongoing maintenance, and eventual replacement of parts, and a host of other concerns. Much hassle.

SolarCity's approach is to be a bundled provider, their PowerStation product is more or less turnkey, as it includes all the componentry, the photovoltaic solar panels, inverters, electric interconnects and metering, and ancillary hardware, and more importantly, all the paperwork, needed for a residential installation. They offer a purchaseable installation in PowerStation, as well as a leasable option in SolarLease which reduces the upfront cost. The only problem I have? They're not yet in our area, so far it's a California only operation.

There is a significant fraction of the population that will only go green when offered this sort of turnkey approach, in my view.

Does that include you? Are you green already? What's holding you back?

Addicted to GPS

2008-04-11T07:00:00.007-04:00

The Angeles Crest Highway
Image via WikipediaSome technologies are transformative. Cell phones are one example. (seen many payphones lately?)

I think GPS is another. Right now, I'm in LA, coastering... We have a part year exchange student (he was a switchout from another family) and I decided it might be fun to go coastering somewhere with him (and my son) during spring break. We're Cedar Fair season pass holders, so Knotts Berry Farm was an obvious choice. (most of the other CF parks aren't even open yet)

We arrived Wednesday around noon and decided to spend the half day sightseeing. I love the Angeles Crest Highway drive into the mountains, I try to drive there every time I'm in LA (it's a thrilling, curvy, steep, narrow drive) and wanted to share it. So up we went.
Antennas atop Mount Wilson
Observatory at left
Image via Wikipedia
I'd not been to Mount Wilson (which hosts the Palomar Observatory as well as a lot of transmitters) before, so we decided to take a drive up there on the way back. It's a very impressive outcropping. Circling "Video Drive" we went past one transmitter after another. As we passed a particularly large and impressive stone blockhouse-like base structure, the audio system in the rental Prius buzzed. Thinking nothing of it, we got some pics and started back.

On the way back down the mountain I noticed the GPS wasn't updating, it showed us still on the Angeles Crest Highway even after we got back to Glendale. A power cycle or two didn't seem to have any effect. The unit was receiving signals from the satellites, and could route to saved locations, it just thought it hadn't moved.

It dawned on me that we had no idea exactly how to get back to the hotel in Buena Vista, and LA freeways are not exactly trivial to navigate if you're confused. Fortunately my Blackberry also has GPS and integrates in with Google Maps nicely, so we were able to get turn by turn directions and limp back.

Magellan customer support is notorious for how bad it is. So I was a bit concerned about how to recover from that. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I connected the data cable, and tried to read some of the logs on the device. This caused it to display some error popup windows and lock up... this time, after power on, it went through a hard reboot and the GPS seems to be working again. Whew!

But the thought of doing the next few days without GPS was positively scary to me. Apparently I'm addicted. I've gotten very used to being able to blithely go where I want to go and have the GPS straighten me out if I take a wrong turn.

Agree that GPS is transformative? Disagree? What technologies are you addicted to?

Get Satisfaction!

2008-04-10T07:00:00.002-04:00

Listen to your customers!
Image from Wikimedia CommonsSo I just started using Zemanta, which I intend to talk about further, as a way to enhance my blog posts. I'm sure you've noticed the logo at the bottom of some posts. No doubt you'll hear more about it elsewhere too, I think a fair few number of people are using it. (the early reactions seem good, but that's not what I am writing about... oh no... this is just a segue to something else entirely! )

I can't actually remember how I found out about Zemanta, but I soon went to their website and discovered how they plan to give support and foster community.

They're using a tool called "Get Satisfaction" ... I'm obviously behind the curve on this and there are shedfuls of people that knew about it already, I suppose, but I'm impressed. Get Satisfaction seems a pretty robust tool for support. Many companies use forums (phpBB based and the like) but this tool seems to take things a bit farther. You can watch the problems and suggestions put in by others and rate comments, help, suggestions and the like as useful. You also can sign up as someone that works for a particular company.

I've reported a few problems I've encountered with Zemanta and so far it's going well. There are a fair few popular companies and products there already (Twitter, Facebook, etc) but oddly, I didn't see IBM there... I was not going to sign up as an IBMer, probably not a good idea from a volume of activity perspective. :)

If you haven't tried Get Satisfaction, you might want to check it out.

What do you use for getting support? Or for giving it?

Blog till you drop?

2008-04-09T06:05:00.001-04:00

I've got to get me some of these pencils!
Image by kaurjmeb via FlickrI know that people make money from blogging. (not me, unless you count the 34 cents in AdSense revenue (or whatever it is, I try not to look) I've gotten so far) But I had no idea that there were "blogger sweatshops"...

The New York Times reports that people are burning out, and other outlets are also talking about how some blogges have actually died.

That seems messed up to me. While I've gotten some comments about my update frequency and about the quality of my posts... I'm doing this blogging thing for me, not for pay. As soon as it's not fun any more, I will stop. That's as it should be I would think.

Does this frenzy to work, to make money at blogging have anything to do with WMF projects or with free content in general? Well, I'm not sure. Money? not so much... people shouldn't be creating content for the money... but obsession? I've talked about obsession before and how it ties into doing what we like to do. I am sure I'm not the only Wikipedia editor who has looked at the time in shock, wondering how it got so late! It is easy to lose track during a good work session on an article, a policy page, or what have you, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective. As with anything else, some rotation is good as well... don't JUST hang out at Requests for Adminship, or the Articles for Deletion pages or Featured Article Candidates or whatever... take some breaks.

That's one of the reasons I'm glad I have multiple hats to wear within Wikimedia Foundation projects... when I tired of the hurly burly of the English Wikipedia, there are always pictures to categorise or upload (after all, I've got plenty of old pictures!) over at Commons, or things to do at Meta, or the like. But I also have my other obsessions too. Oh, and a real life and a job and a family and bills to pay. That sharpens the perspective I think.

How about you? How do you keep a sense of perspective?

So why would anyone spend 2000 USD for a chair?

2008-04-08T07:00:00.003-04:00

What I thought I was going to get!
Image from Wikimedia Commons Charles and Ray Eames, famous 20th century designers, have done a lot of significant furniture design work. Herman Miller, a fairly well known office furniture company in Zeeland, Michigan, has had Eames furniture in their catalog for a long time. Here's an overview of items they did for Herman Miller.

But don't take my word about their niftyness, the Library of Congress recently put together a photo exhibition of their work and of the sorts of pictures they liked to take.

They have done some very iconic stuff... the "tandem sling" and row chairs are almost ubiquitous at airport gates, and the Eames Lounge chair is seen in many a high end home.

Well, we were in the market for some replacement office chairs for the computer room, the IKEA chairs we got were really at end of life, to be honest. (although you won't get me to admit it!)

So, on a whim, and because I am a fan of the Aeron chair, which Herman Miller makes, we decided to try Herman Miller's company store to see what they might have.

Lo and behold, we found a set of 4 Eames "management" chairs... as seen in this catalog page image. actually 3 aluminum group and 1 soft pad, all done up in the same fabric (which just happens to mostly match our color scheme!)

Now, these are good chairs, and we fell in love with them. We were a bit knocked back by the price for them, used... over 2000 USD for the set of 4. But on thinking about Aeron prices, and sitting in them, and thinking some more, it seemed a good thing to us to get them, so we did (impulsive creatures that we are)...

But imagine our shock when we did some research... If these were new, they would sell for over 2ooo USD each (don't believe me?? check the price list.. page 14) for the soft pad, and over 1400 USD each for the aluminum group (page 7) ...

I like the finer things in life, to be sure but I was knocked back.
Who would pay 2000 USD for a chair? Even an iconic, very cool, very comfortable one. Would you?

Information wants to be free

2008-04-07T07:00:00.003-04:00

Pantone colored products,
Image from Commons
So what is the nature of a copyright? What can be protected and what cannot? Consider Pantone... The Pantone Matching System is a proprietary color space used for specifying pigments and colors precisely. Pantone holds that the numbers given to particular shades are "intellectual property" and cannot be reproduced without permission.

So if you want to discuss colors using the Pantone scheme, you have to comply with the requirements. There are many examples elsewhere.

Consider chemical compounds. The nomenclature is very confusing, since there is such a great profusion of them, discovered by many many researchers over several centuries in many countries. Not having a standard will impede progress. The Chemical Abstracts Service, part of the ACS, provides standardized compound identification and nomenclature. But the ACS doesn't want Wikipedia using CAS Registry Numbers for licensing reasons as discussed here. The basic argument is that

"SciFinder and STN are provided to researchers under formal license agreements, under which the researchers agree to refrain from using these tools to build databases"

and that Wikipedia is a kind of database.
CAS Headquarters,
Image from Commons
But, and this is a bigger problem here than it is with colors, these numbers are very standard. You'll find them in many contexts in academia and industry and you can't practically escape their use. Since chemical compounds are a sometime matter of life and death (few people have died from getting slightly the wrong shade of pink, but many have died from getting the wrong drug) standardization theoretically is a good thing to avoid confusion.

Wikipedia has a giant disclaimer that it's not to be relied upon, use at your own risk, etc... but people do rely on it anyway. So not being able to use these numbers will be a great hindrance

But there's hope, in this particular case, the ACS appears to be relenting. See the discussion at the WikiProject for Chemistry ... (as well as in the blogosphere) It now appears that the ACS has reversed position and will work with the project to enable accurate use of information.

Maybe it all will work out in the end. But I wonder if there are general principles to be had here. Is it possible to work with organizations that have proprietary, but vital, information and get to a good outcome in most cases? Have you seen this in other fields?

More on Anonymity

2008-04-06T06:00:00.000-04:00

John Siegenthaler Sr. an early
victim of bad biographical data.
Image from Wikimedia CommonsRecall that I've spoken about anonymity before ... I've also talked about biographies and notability, twice before.

I made a rather loud statement of no longer being in favor of anonymity at the Biographies of Living Persons policy discussion page, as part of discussion on a proposal to limit editing on all such articles using semi protection. This was one of a number of ideas that have been advanced recently to try to deal with the perceived growing problem in this area.

Kim Bruning asked why I felt that a fundamental principle ("anyone can edit") should perhaps change to one in which only those willing to reveal their real name (verified as well as Amazon verifies real names, that is, not a perfect scheme, but not trivial to fake) would be allowed to edit at all. Clearly it goes against the early spirit. And I'm not happy about the idea, to be sure.

Simply put, the reason is that Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation have become too big. As the projects become more and more important, higher and higher ranked, more and more turned to, the stakes for accuracy are higher than ever before, with no end to this growth in significance in sight. The project participants, and the projects, have a greater responsibility than when this was a toy site.

Merely wishing to do no harm is insufficient. Merely saying that section 230 provides protection because the projects are "not publishers" is insufficient.

Sooner or later, someone with a biography that is seriously damaging (and make no mistake, with 250,000 odd biographies out there, there are sure to be some that are) will be mad enough and well off enough to sue. Don Murphy certainly threatens to. And moreover, with the recent success at securing large donations (a very good thing, make no mistake) the WMF is now a more attractive target.

So what's to be done? More than is being done, I say.

Just as with trademark law, where the holder must show reasonable care in defending against infringment, just as with trespass law, where the owner of a property hosting an "attractive nuisance" must show reasonable care in preventing entry, the projects must show reasonable care at preventing malicious editing of biographies. Tightening of the BLP policy, making OTRS more effective, hiring paid staff, whatever it takes.

But more importantly, the model of anonymous editing, or pseudonymous editing, means that the lawsuit cannot be laid off onto the individual editor that did the bad edit, despite statements that under GFDL the individual contributors are responsible. Server logs and IP addresses are insufficient ties of responsibility. Too easily evaded, too easily used for other things, so deliberately not retained indefinitely anyway.

So... it pains me to say it, but I think the only answer is real names. Real names allow the reasonable care defense, and allow transfer of liability. That has two positive effects, one that it protects the foundation, somewhat, but a bigger positive effect? It makes people actually take responsibility for what they write.

What do you think? Is the project too big for anonymity? Or is there another way out?

Planet Wikimedia

2008-04-05T12:39:00.005-04:00

So I just put in a request to be added to Planet Wikimedia. This feed aggregation collects blogs from various wikimedians and is designed either for blogs that are primarily about Wikimedia Foundation related projects, or else that use filtered feeds to restrict the topics.

I had been holding off for a few reasons...

I wasn't sure I would be able to stick with this for very long, but I've been hitting an average of one post a day for over a month now (with a little fudging, note I said an average!)
I wasn't sure what I would be doing, I thought I'd be talking more LEGO and less WMF, but that hasn't been the case. (I have a few things I want to say about LEGO and I will )
I wasn't sure how to do filtered feeds. But this help explains it. Hopefully I did it right, we'll see. I filtered on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, and Commons. I (ha!) left out Wikipedia Review as a filter tag.
Ouroboros.
Image from Commons

So what do you think dear (4, is it now?) readers? Worth reading and adding or just vanity on my part?

(By the way, this may be the most self referential post I've done yet!)

(Also by the way, see that "Zemified" logo? That's a nifty little addon for Firefox I found from Zemanta, it will suggest links and pictures for you. The Ouroboros image at right was suggested by it when I put 'self referential' into the text)

Ok, seriously... are you TRYING to make Wikidefender's work easier???

2008-04-04T07:00:00.003-04:00

Let me get this straight...

Privatemusings has been having podcasts. He's had Danny Wool, he's had Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, he's had Michael Snow, he's had Featured Article director Raul654. He solicits guests and whoever turns up, turns up. He's not afraid of controversial subjects and the casts (despite his tendency to go on a bit instead of letting his guests talk... hmm... who do I know like that!) have been well received, considered interesting and fun.

Number 6 features some folk not known for their high regard for Wikipedia as it stands.

The podcasts themselves are hosted on Commons.

So NonvocalScream decides that to put the page describing podcast number 6 up for deletion at Miscellany for Deletion. Rationale? "banned users are not permitted to edit" as given here. The fact that the files themselves are hosted on commons, and that this is one of a series, seems lost on some... but aside from a few folk, this is almost a snowball keep. It's got the usual folk saying the usual things but it strikes me as a huge waste of time, sorry...

For those that don't get the title reference, Wikidefender runs a blog that many consider to be a bit of a pastiche of the stuff trotted out by those who think everything with Wikipedia is perfect, and may or may not have been the person behind this funny edit to my talk page. Not that he singled me out, NewYorkBrad got one too...

Is it just me or is this sort of nomination actually playing into the hands of those that say that some editors can't help but do silly things?

xkcd and obsession

2008-04-03T07:00:00.002-04:00

Sample xkcd comic.
Image from CommonsOK, so xkcd is a webcomic. If you don't know what that means, follow the links.

Anyway, the author of xkcd understands Wikipedia. Consider this comic. (Is there anyone reading this blog who hasn't seen it yet? Oh please! Cap yourself immediately) Consider this reference to xkcd from Wikipedia's Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents... clearly Wikipedia administrators understand where he's coming from too.

The xkcd author surely understands obsession. Consider this image... how long did it take someone (him) to draw that? Any why? On a whiteboard, no less. Sure, it's a great joke, but was the time spent worth the laughs? To him it was.

Some of you may know that webcomics got me more involved in Wikipedia than just a drive by fixer-upper... reading webcomics used to be one of my obsessions. LEGO still is. But over time, it seems that obsessions change and shift. What drives obsessions? What causes them to change? These are good questions. And important ones to many hobbies...

Wikipedia would not survive without a core of people who were not at least slightly obsessed with it. The same is true of many other hobbies... the NMRA relies on a core of folk who give their time and energy to an organization that ultimately, is all about something not essential to survival. But ultimately, that's a tribute to the success of our civilization. Instead of being obsessed with gathering food and staying alive, that can take up only part of our time and attention, allowing most of it to focus on what really interests us.

What are your obsessions?

My secret of Travel Success

2008-04-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

ORD... looks pretty doesn't it? Psych!
Image from Wikimedia CommonsOK, this is a bit of a ramble. Like the rest of my blog posts aren't? Grin.

Some of you know that I travel a lot. I work for IBM as a consultant (a Technical Architect, to be exact, which is a fancy title for being fairly senior, and knowing a little about a lot of products in our suite and being good with whiteboards and Microsoft Visio). My travels keep me on the road all week, unless I'm in a lull, or need a day to go to the dentist or whatever.

Some of you know I read John Scalzi's blog. He's pretty amusing for an SF writer (which is saying a lot because I find most SF writers very amusing... must be the geek in me. But I digress.), and if you haven't read "Old Man's War" you're in for a treat. Well, several posts in a row from him recently have been complaining about his travel woes. Seems he keeps getting delayed or stranded in Chicago.

Here's my secret of travel success, free of charge: Don't connect through Chicago. Avoid ORD at all costs. Simple really, but effective. ORD is the source of delays everywhere else, why would someone want to go to the source? It works pretty well for me. Don't believe that hype about it being the traveler's favourite airport 9 years in a row... that's just because so many travelers spend so much time in it, they had to spruce it up.

Secondary secret? Try not to connect through ATL either.

Hope that helps. See you out there! (and stop kicking the back of my seat!)

Happy April Fool's day

2008-04-01T07:20:00.007-04:00

Ima Hogg ca. 1910
Image from Wikimedia CommonsIt's becoming a yearly tradition at Wikipedia to have an, ahem, special main page on the first... and this year is no different. (some of the content is dynamic, here are start of day and end of day versions) This page, more or less, is the page from 2007, and this page, more or less, is the page from 2006.

The joke within a joke is... everything on the main page is true. It just doesn't SEEM that way. when you read it A dedicated cadre of volunteers (with too much time on their hands) works at this for quite some time in advance... bringing an article to Featured Article status through the normal process, identifying appropriate "on this day" entries, selecting a special Featured Picture, and so forth. The rules for DYK are bent a bit so that articles older than 5 days are eligible but otherwise, they have to comply with the expansion, referencing, and other requirements.

This years' Featured Article, Ima Hogg ( with the lead of the summary reading "Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to Hawaii to visit the Queen." and yes, that really was her name) was brought from nothing to FA status in extremely short order, and yet, it meets all the normal standards.

You can read more about the process at some of the discussion archives: 2006, 2007, and this years. It wasn't always this way. In early years the main page would be subject to what can only be called vandalism (adding complete nonsense, like, oh, that Wikipedia might carry ads, or was bought by Google, or that Google was launching a competitor to Wikipedia, among other things mooted) by established editors, followed by bouts of edit warring as various factions tried to restore normalcy, or restore Foolishness.

With the advent of the enforcement of policy that even on 1 April, everything has to be true, and everything has to work as a normal page (no messing with the links to helps or the page layout or the sidebar) relative peace has come... although some editors still don't even like the use of silly articles, it's hard to argue against a process that remains true to the spirit of truth (although perhaps NPOV is bent a little in writing the gag tag lines).

Do you know of other organizations that do only the truth in their prankery? Google, for example, does not. It has shared such novel new innovations as pigeon ranking, moon bases and this years gem, Virgle Pioneers, with us. (the sad thing is that except for pigeon ranking, these are all things I wish were true.)

What do you think?

(edits: fixed links to 2008 pages. Also note that this tradition is now a big enough deal that it gets media attention, such as this article. )

Attacking the noise...

2008-03-31T09:01:00.003-04:00

Xchat IRC client
Image from Wikimedia Commons...in signal to noise ratio.

I forgot about this, and I'm glad I remembered. It seems that there are IRC channels where fans of xkcd hang out and chat. ( xkcd is a webcomic. If you don't know what that means, follow the links.) Oddly enough, (or maybe not, see my post about obsession) this is popular enough that the channels were suffering from a surfeit of inane comments. Channel regulars were apparently not amused.

Turns out my fellow LEGO fan Dan Boger, alias zigdon (I have no idea why) a wizard Perl coder, and creator of the boffo Peeron.com LEGO set database coded up a bot... what sort of a bot, you say? Well, go read the source code and figure it out!

OK done? Figured it out? Your perl-foo is strong.

Everyone else: It's a bot to enforce originality. Say something in the channel that has been said before, and you get devoiced for 4 seconds. Say another something that has been said before, and the devoice quadruples. Not just something that YOU said before, something that ANYONE said before.
)
Read more about how this came to pass, and then laugh with me. Note, others have blogged about this as well...

I actually got to try this out, and it's surprisingly difficult to not get zapped by the bot. Think you can do better (warning, theoretically, it gets harder as time goes by, all the obvious things to say have been used up)? Try it and see, assuming you have an IRC nickname set up.

Wikimedia IRC channels need this! Well, some of them do. Maybe not all of them :) I suspect that the stewards channel needs people to be able to say !steward more than just the one time. But #wikipedia REALLY needs this! You know it does.

Church signs

2008-03-30T14:22:00.001-04:00

I can't take credit for finding this. It's not even new. But it's fun to play with. The guy has a fair few other good generators too. You can get some fairly realistic signs and tickets using them.

My favorite church sign I've come up with so far is
http://www.churchsigngenerator.com/makesign1.php?line1=St0p+st3al1ng+th3++&line2=l3tt3rs+%21%21%21+kthxby3&line3=&line4=++++++++++-+g0d
(you'll have to cut and paste it yourself to see it, understandably he doesn't want people embedding his images into their blogs and costing him bandwidth)

Along the same line, but not made up, is this commentary site.

Most of this stuff is funny in small doses but a bit much in larger ones, I suppose.

And no, there is no significance to publishing this on Sunday, we're all atheists in this house. It was just a filler I had lying around so I used it today :)

Anonymity

2008-03-29T16:06:00.002-04:00

Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", allows anonymous editing. It also allows pseudonymous editing. (yes, there's a difference)

Andrew Keen, a reporter for The Independent, makes the case that anonymity is bad for civil discourse, calling it "the last refuge for cowards and scoundrels". I can see some case for anonymity but I myself have never really hid who I was. My online identity is "Lar" wherever I can get it, and it's fairly tightly linked to my real identity, and has been for 25 years. I tend to find myself thinking that a fair few number of the problems that Wikipedia encounters would be reduced if a verifiable connnection to a real person was required.

I made a decision from the get go that this little blog would not allow anonymous posters in replies, only posts from blogger accounts. Some people have remarked on that, complaining a bit, at least in passing. Turns out since Blogger allows you to hide the account details, it's more or less the same thing, really, I still have no idea who some of these people are, even pseudonymously. This isn't the same thing as Wikipedia, to be sure, so perhaps some of Keen's arguments don't apply. Still, it is instructive.

What do you think of anonymity?

How to tell users about needed changes

2008-03-28T16:20:00.004-04:00

(or, how not to do customer service)

So my outbound email has been giving me fits lately. Why? Seems Comcast changed something. But Comcast didn't bother to tell anyone...

They changed from allowing port 25 for outbound SMTP traffic quite a while ago., demanding that users use a non standard port instead. What they seem to forget is that not all of their customers use comcast.net email accounts. Many of us like to have ISP independent accounts (for example I use an account which uses my hobby website domain address, Miltontrainworks. ) so that if we ever move, we don't have to change email addresses.

Comcast expected every other mail provider to switch to their non standard port... not really realistic. Finally I found a workaround, which was to continue to get inbound mail from the pop server I was using before, but to point outbound mail, over this non standard port, at their smtp server. This was something dragged out of them (the chat logs are amusing, at best)...

That worked fine, for quite a while. Earlier this week, it stopped. No idea why yet. Color me frustrated. Comcast support is pretty non helpful, they insist they never said to change to their outgoing for non comcast email addresses.

So color me frustrated till I figure out what to do.

Update. (29 march) It just started working again. Apparently the thing that wasn't broke got fixed.

Enough about the darn boat, already...

2008-03-27T23:55:00.001-04:00

By now all (3 of) my readers must be thoroughly sick of hearing about SS Christopher Columbus and her adventures as a Featured Article Candidate. After all, I wrote about this topic not once before, but twice...

Never fear, this is the last post on that article for a while, I would think, because the article has made it to Featured Article status... Yaay!

I had thought that every comment had to be resolved, but as it turns out, she was promoted with some remaining unresolved minor comments. Still, the article never actually got an oppose, and in a great display of collaborativeness, many of the commenters pitched in and fixed their own or other people's comments.

In fact the article even made the Wikirage top 100 list by edits over a 3 day period.. check out the graph of activity.

So I guess I don't know what all the whining is about? Or did I get lucky? The Featured Article process was exacting and demanding, yes, but ultimately the article's a lot tighter now than it was when we started. (and it was a lot smoother than getting the article to Good Article status, that took two tries!) And now I am trying to decide what other articles I should think about nominating! But why aren't I on this list yet? I demand answers. (obviously an evil bot!) Oh well, a topic for another blog post. What, you thought I was done with this topic???

well well...

2008-03-26T21:35:00.006-04:00

Hmph... maybe this FA thing isn't so bad after all. Hopefully I won't jinx things by saying that I think maybe the old girl is going to make it!

I can't really take all the credit, or even much of it, frankly. The collaborative editing on this article is nothing short of remarkable. Compare the difference (121 edits so far, and counting) before and after and see the edits by everyone using this nifty tool. (1)

So, no question for you today. Just happiness. The old girl deserves a great article. She got a raw deal, scrapped after 44 years of faithful service and nothing much saved from her.

-------------------------
1 - Another great tool is the external link checker, which is a very sophisticated tool, good for spotting and fixing all sorts of problems!

More whining about images

2008-03-25T21:06:00.004-04:00

Remember the other day when I was telling you about my old pictures? So I uploaded a bunch of them. In particular I found some loco photos. No, not crazy people, locomotives...

Turns out I had some good pics (or at least detailed pics) of the locos that Union Pacific had on display in Omaha, Nebraska, their DDA40X, 6900, and their 4-8-8-4 Big Boy 4023.

So I uploaded some. See? Well I am fairly... um... fussy, about getting them described just so. Including giving good names, which actually is pretty important. See the problem yet? Well, because I am also lazy, I start uploading by doing one pic, then backspace to get to the same upload form to reuse most of the stuff I entered, just changing the shot description. Soo.... because I was reusing the 6900 images upload form, my Big Boy images are all named "UP BigBoy 6023.......jpg" ... I remembered to change (in 6900) the 9 to a 0, and the 00 to a 23 but I forgot to change the 6 to a 4!...

Sigh.

So now I have to rename all those Big Boy images (every single one has the wrong number), or suffer my sense of order being off.

But renaming images in MediaWiki isn't easy, yet. (maybe someday, there are bugs in the bug tracker about it, in fact bug 709 is one of the oldest bugs extant, we are well over 10,000 now and it has ... 66!!! comments... wow. But I digress.)... to rename, you have to upload a new version and then delete (or tag for deletion) the old image. That's a pain. Probably someone has a bot but I forget.

What to do? Find someone with a bot? do it myself by hand, just say to heck with it? What would YOU do?

Update: (3/30/08) I fixed them by hand. Supposedly someone's working on a bot to do it.

Losing my temper.

2008-03-24T22:44:00.004-04:00

Well, this edit in the Daniel Brandt redirect deletion review was not my finest hour, It actually got me a No Personal Attacks warning from FT2... I stand behind what I said, and I said so... I think FT2 and I are square now. More or less anyway. I surprised myself at my vehemence. I hardly ever swear on Wikipedia.

Subsequently Daniel himself opined I'm a bad person. ... well, so's your old man.

I'd give you a link to our article on Daniel Brandt, but we don't have one. :)

Like I said, not my finest hour, I can't recall the last time I was warned like that.

So, over the top or justified? What do you think?

Next blog...

2008-03-23T16:10:00.003-04:00

I'm still bemused by all the blogs out there...

Just now, I found this one... quite the record of presumably famous people there. Pretty amazing, in an odd way. People use these things for so many different uses it sort of boggles the mind... (another blog by the same party animal is this one, which highlights real estate to rent or buy, and another one is this one, which promotes carpet steamers... apparently if you party a lot in rented real estate, you'll be glad you're in the carpet steamer biz!).

The other day I found this one, which has recipes that look yummy but a lot of work.

So... try hitting "next blog" some time, you never know what you'll find.

What do you use your blog for, besides opining?

Throwing myself to the wolves?

2008-03-22T17:54:00.006-04:00

Some time ago Giano opined that any Wikipedia administrator worth listening to should have at least one Featured Article (FA ... "Wikipedia's Best Work" ) under his or her belt, if not actually produce one per year. That suggestion was not met with universal acclaim. :) But there's some merit to it, nonetheless... or at least to the notion that everyone seeking any extra permissions, should have at least some experience with actually writing the encyclopedia.

While I have written some 25+ DYKs 3 of which are Good Articles, I don't yet have a Featured Article to my credit, and I've been maneuvering to get one to the state where it might be a candidate for some time.

So, armed with a lot of help, including the sage advice given here, I've launched a Featured Article Candidacy for SS Christopher Columbus, which is of all the articles I've written, perhaps my all time favorite. There are those that deride the FA process as overly "fussy" or bureaucratic, but I am not sure that's so... so far the suggestions I've gotten have almost all been actionable and were, for the most part, things I'd missed that really did need sorting. Extra eyes do wonders at spotting things needing fixing.

We shall see how it goes. I'm hoping for smooth sailing. Wish me luck!

Rooting around in old pictures

2008-03-21T22:09:00.004-04:00

More on the topic of images... as I said in "bad pictures" a bad pic is better than none. (1)

I happened to be rooting around in my old Brickshelf (2) folders and I realised I have a bunch of pictures from 2001 and even earlier that I really need to go through and see if there is anything of value in them.

In particular, I was fortunate enough to get a "backstage" tour of NASA's Johnson Space Center in August 2001. Since this was before 9/11, it was a fair bit easier to wangle one's way in than nowadays. I was in Houston, trying to sell stuff to Enron (!!) (3) and a friend of a friend gave us a tour. Sure enough, I have a big folder full of stuff... related to the X-38, to moon rocks, and to shuttle and ISS simulation. Much of it is really bad, blurry and out of focus, but I think I found a few goodies to upload.

Tell me what you think... did I miss any good ones? Any I really shouldn't have bothered with? Got any good stories of neat images you managed to score?

----------------

1 - yes this is another one of these backdated posts, I have to get out of that habit!
2 - Brickshelf is a free resource for hosting (mostly) LEGO related images. The interface is mid 90s' to be sure, but back then we didn't have Flickr, et al.
3 - I still joke that if Enron had bought our stuff back then maybe they wouldn't have went bankrupt.

More on notability and the BLP

2008-03-20T20:52:00.006-04:00

Dave Winer, in his blog piece "Whats Wrong with Wikipedia" opines (after pointing out what is good about the project) that his bio entry on Wikipedia is in bad shape. His thesis is that it doesn't give him enough credit for things he was involved in, and moreover, that articles which should mention him, don't.

This is, of course, kind of the opposite of the beef Don Murphy has, as I described in Notability and the BLP policy... Don wants less said about him, not more.

It is easy to dismiss both of these complaints as meaningless, or to say that they balance each other out. But the WikBack threads (among them "removing marginally notable BLPs" and others), the discussions elsewhere, the activity on new proposals (among them SirFozzie's latest, "BLP-Lock") suggest that while the project may have come a ways from Siegenthaler, it still has farther to go. Consider the biographies of Ashley Alexandra Dupré (of client #9 fame... hopefully that won't mean anything in 3 months), or of Abigail and Brittany Hensel... Does Wikipedia have too much detail in those?

I won't be so full of hubris to say that I know the answer. Heck, I am not sure I even know the right question... But my unease that Wikipedia is not doing right by living persons remains.

What do you think?