Indiana Jones IV

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.

Attacking the noise...

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.

Dilution of Critical Mass

This post combines two of my passions, wikis and the LEGO hobby. But not exactly in a complimentary way. :)

"Everyone knows" that Wikipedia is a huge success, and one of the reasons commonly given is due to the large body of articles there, and the large community of interested editors. But it doesn't always come out that way.

LEGO is a natural topic area for a wiki, or so many believe, as there is a lot of information out there to share. (consider the vast number of topics discussed at LUGNET, and the 7000+ set listings available at Peeron.com) And yet, there isn't one wiki to discuss and share information the wiki way about this rich field.

Instead, there are many. Most, but not all, use MediaWiki software

• Brickwiki, around since 2005 (full disclosure, I'm an admin there)
• Brickipedia which is a Wikia wiki and seems to have been active since January 2006
  
• Brickiwiki (note the one character name difference from Brickwiki, appears to have been started later, and uses Wetpaint wiki software)
  

These are all general interest. There are specialty wikis such as the LEGO Star Wars wiki (another Wikia wiki) as well.

Why so many? If you look at these wikis, you will find coverage gaps, topics that none of them adequately cover, as well as coverage overlaps, topics that have essentially the same material. None of them, apparently, have the critical mass to ensure vibrant growth. Some of these wikis have went days or even weeks between successive edits, not exactly what one would look for in an active wiki.

So wouldn't it make sense to combine forces? From the outside the answer would seem yes. And, it has been suggested. (as early as late 2005, in fact, and perhaps earlier) But nothing has ever come of it.

The answer why presumably can be found within human nature.

• Better is the enemy of Good Enough. There is little or no incentive to change things if what you have works. And each of these wikis does have useful content and does have editors and does have readers. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
  
• Actually combining these wikis would be a lot of work. Even the ones that are hosted on MediaWiki would require a lot more than just a dump and reenter, redundancies would need to be sorted, and categories reorganised, and so forth. Just tinkering around the edges is almost as satisfying, and far easier. And we're all too busy for such a large, focused task.
  
• Big frog, little pond. Without casting aspersions on the founders/leaders of these wikis, who would be "in charge" after the merger? That seems an easy question but it has stood in the way of many larger and more critical mergers in the past.
  

So, probably, things will muddle along as they have. Too bad, really, because none of these wikis has critical mass. Me? I'm too busy too. Carping from the edges is about the best I can manage. Besides, there's all the Jimbo/Rachael Marsden drama to read about (or worse, get involved) in... (or whatever the current drama happens to be when you, dear reader, stumble on this)