Now I can retire...

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?

Knol and Wikipedia

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?

The answer wasn't blowing in the wind

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?

Evaluating Britannica

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.

Britannica free access?

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?