Grassroots support is the best way to grow wiki use. People respond well when they see peers actively using and evangelizing it. Don’t mandate wiki use; make it available, then let people find where it’s most useful to their work:
Grassroots support is the best way to grow wiki use. People respond well when they see peers actively using and evangelizing it. Don’t mandate wiki use; make it available, then let people find where it’s most useful to their work:
The I/O scheduler problems have drawn my attention, and besides trusting empirical results, I tried to do more of benchmarking and analysis, why the heck strange things happen at Linux block layer. So, here is the story, which I found myself quite fascinating…
(more…)
California’s primary election comes up in the morning, as are those of a buttload of other states. These combine selections of the various per-party presidential candidates in preparation for the November election, as well as various vital local and state ballot measures — parks, cops, and of course Indian gaming agreements.
Unlike everybody else with a blog, I’m not going to presume to tell y’all who to vote for.
But I have to admit I’ve been pleasantly surprised poking about Obama’s web site. I stumbled on this speech he gave on religion in politics, which is probably the first thing a mainstream American politician’s said about religion that hasn’t made me cringe and want to run away to Canada.
Fun election fact: California has a “modified open primary“, allowing voters who haven’t registered a party affiliation to cast their votes in the primary nomination process for a party of their choice… but only among those parties which have opted into it. We briefly had a completely open primary (so you could pick *any* party), but this got shut down on constitutional issues. Currently only the American Independent and Democratic parties are opted in to the system.
commons.wikimedia.org:
Klosterkirche hirschhorn fenster.jpg
from commons.wikimedia.org,
provided by JuliusR
de.wikipedia.org:
Atlantic Puffin Latrabjarg Iceland 05c.jpg
from commons.wikimedia.org,
provided by Aconcagua
en.wikipedia.org:
07. Camel Profile, near Silverton, NSW, 07.07.2007.jpg
from commons.wikimedia.org,
provided by Jjron
Since you can’t copy and paste text (yet) on iPhone (necessary for getting links into blog posts unless you want to type them by hand), I think the new Prologue theme released by WordPress is a great interface for iPhone blogging. Prologue’s interface clearly encourages short, Twitter-style updates.
Furthermore, with the growing awareness of the need for Data Portability, I’d like to use Prologue to keep my status updates on my own domain, and feed them to Twitter using RSS. This might even reduce the load that seems to cause the timeout errors I see multiple times a day from Twitterrific.
In related news, Chris Brogan suggests that Prologue is a step in the right direction toward a distributed, behind-the-firewall version of Twitter. He suggests that it may be very attractive for enterprises:
I think it’s a great implementation for short messages like status and the like inside the firewall. I think it’s a great step in that direction, and as WordPress has tons of other extensions and hacks, it’s the kind of thing you can imagine getting to the other missing parts of Twitter.
First things first. I’m no no-holds-barred Obaman like Larry Lessig.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Boyish Orator’s style, and give him a leg up over Her Royal Cleverness, but don’t stay up nights worrying about the future difference to world peace their differential election would make (other things keep me up, even in politics), and not because I don’t think peace a devastatingly important realm for immediate change.
At any rate, Lessig taped a Barackish paean, and Ball and Prime started simulscribing in gobby. Gobby sessions exert a gravitational pull on me and soon I was transcribing myself, to exercise day-cramped hands — though I would never have listened to the piece otherwise. You can read the result of our labours.
The promise of making a set of ideas more accessible and revisitable is an infinitely better reason to divest oneself of twenty minutes of life than amusement or boredom… Which makes me wonder why we don’t see dotsub everywhere, at least among the sj crowd of one. Maybe it just needs a gobby plugin, or a way to find two friends and start transcribing in tandem. I’m even feeling the itch to ride a tandem bike or sidecar. Ach. Time for a seaweed shower.
Your competitors are using wikis. Your customers are using wikis. So are other employees in your organization. You need to use wikis too. It’s where your future is. And I’ll show you how.
A new video will be posted here each weekday, and the entire series will be archived at ikiw.org/21days
Stan James of Lijit has kept a list of frustrating things about Outlook since he started using it a year ago. My favorites from experience:
This might be the most egregious thing about Outlook. We should be well past the era of trying to lock people into using one web browser. Search isn’t the only thing crippled in Outlook Web Access. When using a browser other than Internet Explorer, you can’t mark a message as unread. This was a big frustration for me since I would often briefly scan new messages, then mark unread the ones I wasn’t ready to reply to yet.
Google “gets” archiving much better than Microsoft. When you archive a message, Gmail simply moves it out of the inbox, but it’s just a click away in the “All Mail” category, and search in Gmail is top notch at finding just the message you want very quickly.
These are just a few that stand out from my days using Outlook, but Stan’s list is full of other ones and I’m sure you’ll find a few that resonate with you. All the more reason(s) to reduce your email dependence and use a wiki as often as possible for collaboration!
In a post on improving cognitive ability through collaboration, Dennis McDonald makes this point:
When you think about all the pressures people have to stay within the “comfort zones” of professional or disciplinary communities, though, there are many situations where going outside is actively or passively discouraged.
Does your organization (or discipline) encourage or discourage you to directly go to others with whom you want to collaborate?
Many organizations cling to the traditional notion that people who want to work together need to do so by going through their supervisor. Essentially they have to wait until their supervisor talks to the other person’s supervisor, and if the two agree that people from their teams can work together, the respective employees will get the go-ahead.
Sound crazy? It is!
Even when this exact scenario isn’t the case, many organizations are so hierarchically structured that people from different teams have very few opportunities to discover each other.
Dennis goes on to suggest that collaborative tools and social networks can break down these boundaries. I think he’s right.
Wikis, for example, give teams a place to aggregate and organize their work in a centrally accessible place. They can choose to keep certain information private and accessible only to team members (and they should, when necessary).
More importantly, they can keep some pages in their wiki space accessible to the larger organization to share information they want others to have access to. This allows someone to find information they need about a project or service without sending you an email (thus helping control inbox overflow), or calling a meeting (which costs too much time relative to the value it provides).
By having access to that information, people outside your group will better know what you do. Then they can use other tools like an internal social network to get in touch and build a relationship around common interests, projects, etc.
Being a newly-minted California voter, I've been looking forward to my opportunity to exercise a little direct democracy tomorrow. (I'm not taking a position on whether direct democracy is a good idea, but surely if it's there one might as well take advantage of it.) I encourage you to vote as well; indeed, I encourage you to vote the same way I do:
Presidential Candidate for the Democratic Party: Barack Obama. Between Mike Gravel's inability to get more attention than a passing mention from Wikipedia and everybody else dropping out, the choice is apparently down to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hillary is the kind of sellout DLC centrist who cozies up to Rupert Murdoch; Barack Obama can hardly be worse. Still, he's sold out too and I vote for him under the illusion that he'll somehow revert to his community organizing, Iraq War-opposing, progressive old pre-sellout self sometime before becoming President. False hope springs eternal.
Proposition 91: No. So bad, even its supporters are asking you to vote against it.
Proposition 92: Yes. Community college is important and previous propositions have been screwing it over for years.
Proposition 93: Yes. Progressives seem to oppose term limits, on the grounds that they "shift[] more power to the governor and ensur[e] that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits)" (SFBG). I'm not so sure, but this seems like a fairly modest proposal which seems to strike a reasonable balance.
Propositions 94-97: No. The only people in favor of expanding the casinos while reducing their oversight seem to be their lobbyists.
Proposition A: Yes. Parks are nice.
Proposition B: Yes. Everyone seems to support this and if police officers want to work three more years, who am I to say no?
Proposition C: Yes. I know rationally this is an absurd proposal, but when you're there, in the privacy of the voting booth, looking at whether a geodesic dome should be built on Alcatraz Island, who's going to stop you from voting yes?
Anyone living in the United States who doesn’t know that tomorrow is “Super Tuesday” — the day when voters in more than 20 states will go to the polls to cast their votes for presidential candidates in their parties — has either been in a coma or is truly able to avoid all contact with the media. I for one will be glad when this first phase of the presidential selection process will be over, if only because it will mean a break from the drumbeat of political advertising and punditry.
All the chatter about politics has gotten me to thinking about one of the most ubiquitous features of modern political discourse–discussion of poll results. Is Obama gaining in California? Is McCain fading in Missouri? Poll results often come to dominate that discourse and, seemingly, to drive the decisions of candidates on everything from where to focus their energies (and cash) to what to talk about where. The history of modern political polling is fairly well known. George Gallup created the first of what we would call “scientific” samples for his national political polls in 1935 and achieved national recognition when his American Institute of Public Opinion correctly predicted the results of the 1936 presidential elections.
One sample from news reports about his polling is from the New York Times on August 30, 1936. In a story headlined Democratic Doubt Vanishes in the South, the paper reported, “Additional evidence of Mr. Roosevelt’s strength in the area is seen in the fact that the Southern States regularly return larger pro-Roosevelt majorities than those of any other section in the American Institute of Public Opinion polls. From Kentucky’s 61 per cent to Mississippi’s 91 per cent, the entire region seems to be solidly aligned in the Democratic Party once more.” Change the names (and the political affiliation of the American South) and these sentences could have been written today.
Of late, polling organizations such as Zogby, Harris, and others have experimented with a number of new methodologies, including interactive polls, while others have promoted the use of market mechanisms to predict political results.
In a world where search engine results become destiny, what if we were to use search queries to determine political popularity? GoogleTrends allows us to do just that. Do you want to know how the Democratic primary race in California is going? On the basis of search queries (I used hillary clinton, barack obama as my query), the race is neck and neck.
Is there a predictive value here? If we take a look at the Republican race in California, what we see is that volume of search queries would predict that Ron Paul is going to win the biggest prize on Super Tuesday–a result that even his most ardent supporters would have to admit is highly unlikely. However, this result does not mean that there is no predictive value. If the two marginal candidates (in California) are eliminated from the graph and we look at only the two front runners in the Republican race, what we see is a “search primary” that has narrowed to a dead heat, just like the Democratic case.
We’ll check these data again on Wednesday to see if there might be some predictive value for a “search primary”. If so, historians may well look back at this campaign as one where new kinds of data helped shape the campaigns. Or not. For now, all we can say is “stay tuned.”
Travature.com is a Web2.0 startup focusing on social traveling. It combines the power of automated trip planning with expertize from community members. (View Comments)
When I was [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, I expected everyone to be pro-Hillary and anti-Barack because of the whole "experience" thing. I was shocked to find that this was not the case at all.
Most foreign diplomats and companies thought that Barack would be much better at negotiating with foreign powers than Hillary. They all knew that the candidates would have huge advisory teams that would help them understand what was going on. Even though Hillary knew more people already, they felt as though Barack would be more effective. (And most were extremely worried about how Bill would overshadow anything with Hillary... another sad reality.)
Yay, coming this year to the MySQL conference again. This time with two different talks (second got approved just few days ago) on two distinct quite generic topics:
The abstracts were submitted weeks apart, so the ‘practical’ being in both is something completely accidental :) Still, I’ll try to cover problems met and solutions used in various environments and practices - both as support engineer in MySQL, as well as engineer working on wikipedia bits.
Coming to US and talking about character sets should be interesting experience. Though most English-speaking people can stick to ASCII and be happy, current attempts to produce multilingual applications lead to various unexpected performance, security and usability problems.
And of course, web applications end up introducing quite new model of managing data environments, by introducing new set of rules, and throwing away traditional OLTP approaches. It is easy to slap another label on these, call it OLRP - on-line response processing. It needs preparing data for reads more than for writes (though balance has to be maintained). It needs digesting data for immediate responses. It needs lightweight (and lightning) accesses to do the minimum work. Thats where MySQL fits nicely, if used properly.
Chris Brogan explains how social media can improve the velocity, flexibility and economy of your business:
We aren’t talking about the marketing department. We aren’t equipping PR professionals. This isn’t a new set of tools for launching campaigns. These are tools to improve interaction, and they are incredibly powerful and game-changing when you consider how much less impact on traditional business resources most of these solutions have.
Photographers of the world (that is, probably everyone who has access to read this blog), contribute to free culture by making your functional works available as free content. You could do this by uploading them to Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Attribution ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license, or upload them to Wikimedia Commons under one of those acceptable free licenses.
By all means, keep your artistic and creative works all-rights-reserved or with whatever other restrictions you feel are required. But by taking one extra click to make your functional works free content, you enable works like Wikipedia to slurp them up and be vastly improved.
Robert Scoble had the privilege to attend Davos, and thankfully he appreciates that privilege and has donated dozens of excellent photographs of famous, world-changing leaders into the public domain. He would have taken the photos and posted them on Flickr anyway, but thanks to his licensing choice, others can shuffle them over Wikipedia and instantly improve dozens of articles by a major factor.
Whenever you attend any kind of major even with your camera, please take the time to let others improve Wikipedia on your behalf by using a free content license!
So this is probably useful for people other than Wikimedians, but it is definitely useful for Wikimedians. :) This is a HOWTO on using Gmail to manage mailing list mail, get what you actually want to read and skip the irrelevant crud.
Why Gmail?
No mail client I know of comes close to providing these things, but I’m happy to be corrected on that matter. Even if you don’t trust Google to store all your mail, I think it’s worth using it just for mailing list mail for these reasons.
A credible alternative is Gmane. They do decent mailing-list-to-web/news archiving, with some very useful features. For example, at the Gmane equivalent of foundation-l you can find four different types of feeds. So if you don’t want your inbox being cluttered up, you can take your pick from RSS, web-based frames view or news (for your newsreader). Gmane is seriously awesome. You can also use the Gmane website to post to the list, although it’s a little cumbersome.
The only disadvantages to it are
OK, so onto Gmail. The plan is to make Gmail archive by default all the mailing list mail except for certain keywords, and put it all under a label for easy reference.
Click Save.
Now the filter is completed and you can see it listed under the Filters tab.
Last step.
With Keyboard shortcuts you can use the best feature of Gmail since conversation-threading, that is muting. When you archive a conversation it disappears from your inbox. But if someone replies on that thread then the conversation comes back to your inbox. Mute is like permanent archive, for stupid mailing list threads that you don’t care about and that won’t die. Now they will!
Once you’ve done this, you can access all the mailing list mail under whatever label you gave it (it will listed in a menu on the left). This is useful as your filter may be too strong and miss threads you’re interested in. So whenever you have some spare time you can look at the threads under the label, and move the interesting ones back to the inbox. That kills the muting/archiving and after that that thread will pop back into your inbox with new messages. Over time you can also tweak your filter if it is too strong or too weak.
And possibly the best part is, as the days and months pass, you will build up a better archive within Gmail at your ready reference for searching. You will only wish you had started it in 2005…
Thus concludes the lesson on how to use Gmail and Gmane to manage crazy-traffic mailing lists. :)
Well, Saturday was the last part of LCA – Open Day. I had a table on Wiki[mp]edia with Brian who kindly volunteered to help me out.
We gave away:
We gave out around 90 of each of these things, and over 120 of the leaflets.
I looked for promo material on all the projects, but Wikipedia and Wikiversity were the only projects that had anything decent that appeared to be even remotely up-to-date. We communities really need to do some work on this…
We also sold around 80-90 of DVDs containing the 2007 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year zip, which added up to about 1.2G of data. I should have put the 2006 archive on them too. Too late now… Anyway we sold these for $1.50, as that is what getting the discs made cost me. I will more or less get completely reimbursed for the free stuff.
Brian brought his laptop and had a slideshow of the images on the disc running, which worked very well. I had my laptop open with Wikipedia on it.
Talking to people was interesting. Lots of people said “I love Wikipedia, I use it all the time” to which I would immediately reply, “Have you ever edited it?” Two people said back, “I would, but I’ve never found anything wrong to correct”. That’s really interesting; not long ago, I would never expect that response.
A couple of people had edited Wikipedia and had some anecdote to share. They got to a point where they wanted to do something and weren’t sure what to do or how to find it out, so they left it. So it was nice that Brian and I could answer some questions.
One case was about negative material being removed from an article on a school. The guy had never bothered to pay attention to the tabs at the top of articles and had therefore never realised that each article had a “history” tab. (!!) Clearly we have to do some better PR, because this is one of the most important aspects to Wikipedia…
Another was about missing entries on languages spoken in Indonesia. With that, I said to the guy, “Hey, let’s start the articles right now,” and so we did. :) (Because he doesn’t have an account, this way he can edit them – you need an account to start a new article, but not to edit it.) I hope he does go and improve them now. That will be cool.
Paul, who took this photo, talked me into giving a lightning talk on Wikipedia. This is a talk with a three minute time limit. I gave an example of an edit war via slides – color/colour/color/colour/color/colour/color/colour/color. This is nice; Australians understand how this would be a unresolvable conflict. :)At the end I gave a plug for Wikimedia Australia.
Afterwards Brian and I had a cool drink at a cafe and discussed conferences and organisation organisation. LCA is the second example I’ve experienced of a well-run volunteer-coordinated large-scale conference (after Wikimania ’07), so I have a new set of ideas and tips filed away in the back of my mind for when we try it on for Wikimania. :)
My current thinking goes like this:
The workshop idea was influenced by talking to Dutch Wikipedian Ciell, who has been travelling in Australia and with whom I had dinner last Tuesday. However the tyranny of distance may still be too great for it to work here. I am not sure the community is actually large enough yet.
Please vote. It’s the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your friends, your country, and your world. You have the power, and together, We can make change happen. Yes. we. can.
From a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman, discussing a talk by Andrew Keen of Cult of the Amateur infamy:
[Keen is] a fan of Citizendium, the Larry Sanger project to create a wikipedia by leveraging experts; of Google’s “wikipedia-killer”, Knol; of Jason Calcanis’s hand-rolled search engine Mahalo. These projects seem deeply reactionary to me, like they’re missing the fundamental truth of the projects that they’re copying: that the movements of a mass number of people on the internet can accomplish tasks that it’s very hard for a small group of experts to solve.
This might be an apt criticism of Knol and Mahalo (maybe — it’s a very simplistic criticism, in any case), but it represents a total misunderstanding of the Citizendium. It is very sad that some people still think that we are an experts-only project; we aren’t, as anyone who has investigated us the slightest bit knows.
What Ethan and, sadly, too many outside of the CZ fold do not realize is that CZ represents a step forward, not a step backward. I as much as anyone helped pioneer the very practice Ethan praises, of mass online movements accomplishing distributed content tasks. I’m not about to give up on that (for chrissakes). And CZ doesn’t. In fact, we invite everyone to participate, as long as they are willing to follow our modest, sensible rules. We know (indeed, we illustrate) that distributing work in a bottom-up way among an open community is the best way to run the sort of project we’re pursuing. But we are a step forward in that we have actually set up a more sensible governance framework to pursue this project. Part of this involves giving experts a role — not a top-down command-and-control role, of course — in the project. But another part involves requiring people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions. Another part involves having contributors commit to a set of principles that the community runs by.
The result is that we are approaching 5,200 entries (with an average article length several times what Wikipedia’s was in its first year) and we continue to accelerate. Expect not just solid growth this year (that much is a given), but great things. I’m serious; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
And, please. By now, CZ is obviously no longer a “Larry Sanger project,” any more than Wikipedia can be described as a “Larry Sanger project.” It is a CZ community project. Did I write all those articles? Of course not. It bothers me when people describe the project that way, because it gives me credit for their work. I don’t deserve that.
But people will always insist on shoehorning facts to fit their own cynical and simplistic analyses…
No matter how much cash they offer. It’s trying to remake itself as a tourist trap, but hasn’t quite got the concept clear. Online petition here, for what that’s worth. The British Consulate is on the case, but it’s difficult since he hasn’t been charged with anything yet. Further reading: 1, 2, 3, 4. Feel free to spread this around.
The twentieth episode of Digital Campus is now up and ready for you to download. In this episode, Tom, Dan, and I discuss what the open access movement means for higher education. We also have a few critical things to say about BigThink.com, some positive things to say about PublicDomanReprints.org, and decide that as much as we think it looks cool, we’re all three going to have to pass on the MacBook Air. To find out why, give us a listen. We are very interested to hear what you think too, so be sure to leave some comments on the Digital Campus website.
MyCreditStrategy.com is a community based educational website aimed at teaching its users how to correctly use credit cards, and specifically, balance transfers to make a profit. With sections like “General Strategy” and “Effects on Credit Score” its WikiPage itself is a valuable resource for financially minded individuals. Check it out! (View Comments)
The Queensland Spatial Information Council seems like the appropriate government site but I don’t have the patience right now to find any document announcing any such release. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet…
At any rate, it sounds impressively progressive for a government body!
I'm really pleased to announce here that one of the projects Maj and I have been working on for a long time has finally come to fruition. Today Wikitravel Press launched its first two Open Content printed guidebooks -- Wikitravel Chicago and Wikitravel Singapore.
When we started Wikitravel back in 2003 (!), our sincere hope was that at some point in the future, people would be able to carry Wikitravel guidebooks with them on a trip. I think that mobile technology is excellent, and it's amazing how much you can read on a cell phone or PDA these days. But there's still something so convenient about a printed guidebook: it never runs out of batteries; you don't need an uplink to read it; you don't have to worry about it getting stolen because you flashed it out in the wrong café or restaurant.
To be honest, I thought that one of the "traditional" guidebook publishers would step in and use Wikitravel content in their guides. But that didn't happen, and along with our partner Jani Patokallio, Maj and I decided to start a publishing company ourselves. Thus Wikitravel Press, and our first two books.
We have a number of other books in the pipeline, and our hope is to have a few dozen available by the end of the year, and a few hundred by the end of the following year. I'm working on the Wikitravel guide to Montreal, and Maj and I are collaborating on Buenos Aires. We're taking a 6-week trip to Argentina in February/March, so this should be a great time for research.
I heartily encourage any writers or editors who are interested in working on travel books to contact Wikitravel Press about your ideas of bringing Wikitravel content to print. I think this is a great opportunity for people who want to encourage Open Content, or who want to get into the travel writing field, or who just love the idea of wikis-to-books.
tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress travel guidebook singapore chicago
According to a report published today by Gartner:
By 2010, end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and services acquisitions made by IT. The rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of the browser interface have made computing approachable and individuals are now making decisions about technology for personal and business use.
Accordingly, the report says, IT departments are increasingly taking this into account when making IT buying decisions. Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking tools, tagging and RSS are steadily growing in presence and importance in organizations because of the value people have found by discovering and using them outside work.
The same report also predicts that Apple will double its current 6.1% US and Western European PC marketshare to ~12% by 2011. Now that’s good news for long term investors in the company!
John Gruber has some good analysis:
…if they’re right, the math is just spectacular for Apple: it’s not like Apple is expanding into the low-end budget computer market, so if they do double their share, it’ll take place entirely in the middle-to-high end of the market.
(via AppleInsider)
We’ve got a semi-experimental mobile portal for Wikipedia, based on the Hawpedia code using Hawhaw, that’s been up for a while.
I’ve updated it to the current version of the code, which seems to handle some templates better, as well as producing proper output for iPhone viewing.
Today’s fancy phones with their fancy browsers (the iPhone, Opera Mini, etc) can do a pretty good job handling the “real web” in addition to the stripped-down limited “mobile web” of yesteryear, but there are different pressures, which one should take into account when targeting mobile devices.
Screens are small, bandwidth is low. Wikipedia articles tend to be very long and thorough, but often all you need for an off-the-cuff lookup is the first couple paragraphs. The WAP gateway splits pages into shorter chunks, so you don’t have to wait to download the entire rest of the page (or wait for the slow phone CPU to lay it out).
Even on an iPhone capable of rendering the whole article and the MonoBook skin in all its glory, I find there’s some strong benefits to a shorter, cleaner page to do quick lookups on the go. (Especially if I’m not on Wifi!)
The biggest problem with the Hawpedia gateway today is that it tries to do its own hacky little wiki text parser, which dies horribly at times. Many pages look fine, but others end up with massive template breakage and become unreadable.
Long-term it may be better to do this translation at a higher level, working from the output XHTML… or else in an intermediate stage of MediaWiki’s own parser, with more semantic information still available.
Popular file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, is facing court action in its host country, Sweden. The four men who run the site face charges of conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law.
Industry Week reports on the results of a study on wikis in business by the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC):
When considering use of wikis, CIOs should keep in mind that in reality, a large number of companies may already have employees using wikis for work purposes without the authority to do so. Perhaps a better question than whether unsanctioned use of wikis should be tolerated is: “How and what can be done to ensure employees use wikis productively and for the larger good?”
It’s good to see APC suggesting that CIOs should take existing wiki use as a positive sign, and focus their energy and resources on furthering that use. I think the best approach CIOs can take when they learn of existing wiki use in their organizations is to:
Here are seven strategies the APC report recommends for a successful corporate wiki. After each, I’ve linked to appropriate Wiki Patterns from Wikipatterns.com that can help you with each step:
The bottom line: This is an excellent piece of research from APC, and something business wiki users, IT leadership, and CIOs should take seriously. It’s nice to see level-headed thinking that promotes the business value of wiki use!
(via elearningpost)
Here’s what people are saying about the book:
And the results are in ...
* 51 posts to the foundation-l mailing list about what song to play on the WMF office telephone.
* 14 posts to the foundation-l mailing list on the WMF's values.
If values were like candidates in the U.S. primaries, they would have long quit the race.
Hi folks,
I’m delighted to announce that Veronique Kessler will be the Wikimedia
Foundation’s new Chief Financial and Operating Officer (CFOO). Veronique
will start with us February 4.
Veronique has 15 years of very strong managerial and financial
experience working with a wide range of organizations. She joins us from
the non-profit Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, where she was
Director of Finance and, before that, Controller. Prior to JCCSF, she
did financial consulting for clients such as Stanford University,
brokerage firm Charles Schwab, and the venture capital and investment
firm Berkeley International Capital Corporation. And before that, she
was Controller for the Walden International Investment Group, financial
reporting manager for the private investment company The Fremont Group,
a senior accountant with the Wells Fargo bank, and a senior auditor with
Deloitte & Touche, one of the world’s “big four” audit firms.
Veronique is a CPA (certified public accountant), with a B.A. in
Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has a
strong and varied international background including work with Hong
Kong, China, Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore, and she speaks fluent French.
The role of the Wikimedia Foundation’s CFOO is to oversee our financial
and operational activities. In general, Veronique will ensure that the
Foundation operates smoothly, effectively, and in compliance with 501(c)
standards and generally-accepted accounting principles.
She will report to me. The heads of business development (Kul Wadhwa)
and fundraising (hiring in progress) will report to her, as will our
office manager (Erica Ortega), my assistant (Cheryl Owens, formerly
Steffen), and our accountant (currently Oleta McHenry, in St. Petersburg).
The Chief Financial and Operating Officer is a critical position for the
Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled we have found such a
highly-qualified person to handle this important role. Veronique's
delighted to be joining us – she’s excited by the importance and global
impact of our work, and is looking forward to being part of the
open-source and free culture movement.
Please join me in welcoming her to the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
I love the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest. The 2007 results were recently announced. I voted for Henri Camus’ storm at Pors-Loubous.
Here are top 22 images. The width is proportional to the number of votes each received.
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
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I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing - 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” - something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
The press release for the Wikipatterns book is now out on BusinessWire and PRWeb. One site that picked up the release is DayLife, which impressed me because it prominently displays quotes extracted from the release itself. From a reader’s perspective, I can imagine how seeing a compelling quote might grab attention and encourage a look at the full story.
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wiley Publishing is releasing WIKIPATTERNS (Wiley Publishing; December 2007; $29.99), a how-to guide for growing wiki use. Susan Scrupski, noted blogger and Chief of Applied Research at BSG Alliance, said on the book’s release, “I’m going to recommend this without even reading it! Should be an Enterprise 2.0 must-read top-shelfer.”
Wikipedia, the wildly popular online encyclopedia, is the most well-known example of wiki. But wikis are also taking hold in organizations, because they streamline collaboration, help employees be more productive, and offer better security for sensitive information.
Businesses need to know how to introduce this new tool to employees or customers, and give them the best techniques for sharing and collaborating. WIKIPATTERNS shows readers:
- How an organization’s wiki differs from Wikipedia
- The best ways to get started
- How wikis streamline and simplify day-to-day activity
- How to encourage participation and make the wiki “stick”
Author and Atlassian Wiki Evangelist Stewart Mader provides readers with concrete, proven methods based on successful wikis in hundreds of organizations. The book is loaded with case studies from organizations big and small including: Sun Microsystems, Johns Hopkins University, LeapFrog, Red Ant, and the National Constitution Center.
“WIKIPATTERNS is inspired by the already thriving online community at Wikipatterns.com,” notes author Stewart Mader. “The website-itself a wiki-is a growing community dedicated to wiki use. The book includes the most wide-reaching ideas as it shows readers how to successfully grow a wiki.”
About the Author:
Stewart Mader is Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian, makers of the award-winning and widely used Confluence wiki software. Stewart has worked with business, academic, and non-profit organizations to grow vibrant collaborative communities.He publishes Blog on Wiki Patterns (www.ikiw.org), founded Wikipatterns.com, and is the author of two books: Wikipatterns, a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization and Using Wiki in Education, an online book on wiki use in education and research.
About Wiley:
Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has been a valued source of information and understanding for 200 years, helping people around the world meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. Since 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 350 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Peace.Our core businesses publish scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journals, encyclopedias, books, and online products and services; professional/trade books, subscription products, training materials, and online applications and websites; and educational materials for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. Wiley’s global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey, with operations in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. The Company’s Web site can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols JWa and JWb.
WIKIPATTERNS
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Publication date: January 14, 2008
$29.99; Paperback; 216 pages; ISBN: 978-0-470-22362-8
I did some refactoring yesterday on the title prefix search suggestion backend, and added case-insensitive support as an extension.
The prefix search suggestions are currently used in a couple of less-visible places: the OpenSearch API interface, and the (disabled) AJAX search option.
The OpenSearch API can be used by various third-party tools, including the search bar in Firefox — in fact Wikipedia will be included by default as a search engine option in Firefox 3.0.
I’m also now using it to power the Wikipedia search backend for Apple’s Dictionary application in Mac OS X 10.5.
We currently have the built-in AJAX search disabled on Wikimedia sites in part because the UI is a bit unusual, but it’d be great to have more nicely integrated as a drop-down into various places where you might be inputting page titles.
The new default backend code is in the PrefixIndex class, which is now shared between the OpenSearch and AJAX search front-ends. This, like the previous code, is case-sensitive, using the existing title indexes. I’ve also got them now both handling the Special: namespace (which only AJAX search did previously) and returning results from the start of a namespace once you’ve typed as far as “User:” or “Image:” etc.
More excitingly, it’s now easy to swap out this backend with an extension by handling the PrefixSearchBackend hook.
I’ve made an implementation of this in the TitleKey extension, which maintains a table with a case-folded index to allow case-insensitive lookups. This lets you type in for instance “mother ther” and get results for “Mother Theresa”.
In the future we’ll probably want to power this backend at Wikimedia sites from the Lucene search server, which I believe is getting prefix support re-added in enhanced form.
We might also consider merging the case-insensitive key field directly into the page table, but the separate table was quicker to deploy, and will be easier to scrap if/when we change it.
Via Luis Suarez:
Boy, would I have loved to see that whole session… You can check out some notes Luis made via Twitter during the session (starting at this tweed).
Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles
Technorati tags: IBM, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0
So an unnamed member of an unnamed government contacted the Wikimedia Foundation recently, asking for staff guidance on setting up a wiki so that unnamed citizens of the unnamed jurisdiction could collaborate on new laws. Since the staff mainly handle the operational aspects of the various wikis, the question got passed off to the volunteers — or, more specifically, me.
I sent a detailed response, advising strongly against anonymous editing and whatnot. The idea has been kicking around my head ever since, though, so I thought I’d post something about it and solicit further input on behalf of the unnamed elected official.
Long story short, I think that the proposed structure (”let’s get everybody together to write laws!”) is doomed to horrific failure, thanks to vandals, savvy agenda-pushers, and the fact that most people find most laws tedious and boring (and therefore would avoid watching the really important bills).
As evidence that vandals would pretty quickly make a nasty bitter mess of things, I offer the LA Times’s “wikitorial” experiment. Need more? Hang out on Wikipedia’s “recent changes” list and check out stuff in near-real-time; how many of those edits are actually useful?
Savvy agenda-pushers? I could refer you to any of those lovely articles on Wikipedia on controversial topics, but instead I’ll point you to this section of a Missouri law:
Services related to pregnancy, persons holding ministerial or tocological certification may provide.
376.1753. Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, any person who holds current ministerial or tocological certification by an organization accredited by the National Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA) may provide services as defined in 42 U.S.C. 1396 r-6(b)(4)(E)(ii)(I).
This was added to a health insurance bill and didn’t attract a whole lot of attention until after it had already hit the books. Then somebody finally got around to looking up “tocology” — it means “midwifery”, a practice which was at the time very sharply limited in Missouri. It was a brilliant trick, and it worked (if only temporarily) because everybody was too busy looking at the Big Provisions to notice this one wee alteration.
Now go to Wikipedia and start looking at articles on topics you don’t understand: math, physics, why people keep opting for short-term gain and long-term loss, whatever. How quickly could you spot very subtle vandalism? I’m not talking about pictures of penises on [[Johannes Kepler]]; I’m talking about a number changed here, a date there, a minor turn of phrase… If Wikipedia relies on its vast pool of editors to spot these things, and yet they still miss the tiny-but-important details, then how would a smaller law-wiki defend itself against subtle bias?
Finally, there’s the question of popularity. It’s trivial to prove that some articles on Wikipedia get a lot more attention than others: there’s even a game, “wikigroaning“, that makes light of this by comparing the lengths of a very geeky article and one that is much more mundane. (The link contains a few choice examples.) “Wikigroaning” only works because Wikipedia is done almost entirely by volunteers. Editors on the English WP are generally more interested in their own pet topics, so they devote more time and energy to those topics than they do to other, perhaps needier topics.
On a law-writing wiki, this phenomenon means that there will be much work on laws that relate to hot-button issues like abortion or war or taxes. That’s wonderful and everything, but most of a legislature’s in-session time is devoted to topics like infrastructure and school funding, which most people find excruciatingly boring but which are frighteningly important. Without additional eyes, though, editors with a vested interest may be able to get away with quite a bit.
+++
Now that I’ve said all that, I think that a wiki may work for writing laws, if it’s done right.
Any other thoughts on this?
Tags: politics, WikipediaF.D.: First of all, improvements to the software. This is something that's been under discussion for two and a half years: stable versions. The idea is to be able to identify which versions have been validated, and to enable users to see both the current version and the last version that was accepted as being more or less correct.
The second innovation, which I hope will become available in spring, is to give people the chance to put together a small personalised pdf file or paper version containing a selection of articles. Suppose, for example, that I want to know all about the Davos forum. I put things in a basket, just as on Amazon: the article on Davos, articles about the various personalities attending, global warming or the economic crisis. I compile my own little book which I can buy and have sent to me. That is Wiki to Print.
The third innovation, probably in autumn 2008 will be the possibility of adding videos to Wikipedia and editing them collaboratively, like a wiki text. That should be really, really good!
The Americans have long been aware of the impact of heavy metal music on foreign miscreants. They blared Van Halen (among other artists) at the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega when he took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City, and blasted similarly high-decibel music at Afghan caves where al-Qaida fighters were thought to be hiding.
Today I’m at Linux.Conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, where Brianna Laugher gave a talk called “Who’s behind Wikipedia?”
If I find the link to the video I’ll add it here, but in the mean time my quick notes from the talk are as follows:
Firstly, selling Wikipedia to geeks is an easy sell.
Brianna’s background: free content, rather than free software.
Talk assumes familiar with Wikipedia, and is for people who believe that the Wikimedia model can work. Not for conspiracy theorists, or people who think the model does not work.
What is Wikipedia? World’s largest grass-roots bureaucracy! 253 languages (145 have > 1000 articles), > 8 million articles total. Multilingual project.
Early timeline:
Will focus on the English Wikipedia. Different cultures will have different issues. E.g. Japanese Wikipedia has 45% of edits made by anon users, nearly twice that of English, which probably creates a very different culture in that project.
Wikipedia community : Hierarchy / diagram of User access levels, roughly from largest groups to smallest groups:
Wikimedia Foundation - provide essential infrastructure and organisational framework (i.e. part of function is glorified web host + enforce legal constraints to keep project running). Listed some of the WMF projects (wikibooks, etc.)
Some cornerstone guidelines:
Policies:
Guidelines:
Showed some tags that may be added to new articles, that new users may come across:
If concerned about undeletion of content added:
Dispute resolution:
How to get involved:
The future:
Audience Questions:
Wikipedia is being added to the default search plugins for Firefox 3.0.
Inspired by this.
This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction
Wikipedia Review
We do what we must
because we can
For the good of all of us
Except the ones who are banned
But there’s no sense crying
over every quick block
You just keep on saving
till the database’s locked
And the editing is stopped
A Squid failure notice up
For the people who are
still unbannedI’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now.
Even though you blocked my ass
And banned me
And blocked my whole college
And set the IT staff on my ass
As they kicked me out I cried,
I was so happy for you!
Now I’ve found your IP and your home phone on time
And I found your employer and I’ll drop them a line
So I’m glad I got blocked
And the database is locked
for the people who are
still unbannedGo ahead and leave me
I’ll stay on the Wikback for a while
maybe I’ll find somewhere else
to edit
maybe Citizendium …
THAT WAS A JOKE, HA HA, FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, these edits grate
They’re so delicious and moist
look at me still talking when there’s editing to do
when I look out there
it makes me glad I’m not you
I’ve experiments to run
there is research to be done
on the people who are
still unbannedand believe me I am still unbanned
I’m adding edits and I’m still unbanned
when AOL’s blocked and I’m still unbanned
when Qatar’s blocked I’ll be still unbanned
and when the world’s blocked I’ll be still unbanned
still unbanned
still unbanned
(anyone who wants to fix the scansion, feel free)
This email came out today from the Student Bar Association. Emphasis on the good parts added.
Dear Student Body:
The following problems have been discovered with the WCL
network:1. All access points in room 101 were either turned off, or
nonfunctional for the past two years.
2. All access points on the 5th floor were located in elevator shafts,
or other places where they did not provide coverage.
3. Certain points on the 6th floor were assigned the wrong IP address,and so did not provide access.The Technology department is working to address these problems.
If you continue to experience problems with the internet, please inform the Student Services Committee at StudentServices.SBA@gmail.com
You can also file an online trouble ticket, when you find yourself in an area with internet access: http://www.wcl.american.edu/techres/complab/trouble%5Fticket.cfm
Regards,
Student Services CommitteeYou are receiving this e-mail as a result of your enrollment in - “Student Bar Association (Full Year 2007-2008) - Koukourinis”.
This email was generated by The West Education Network.
How fucking outrageous is that? “Oh by the way, we forgot to turn on the internet for 2 years. Oh and we put the WAP’s in the elevator shaft. Oh, and if you can’t get online, send us an email….when you can?
This is typical of WCL’s reaction to things. This is how they reacted to MacGate, this is how they reacted to the chemical weapons dig coverup….
Previously: How Quantum Mechanics is Compatible with Free Will
Attention conservation notice: I am well aware that this post will get me called all sorts of silly names and insults (Penrosian apparently the worst among them). For once, I am not going to respond. I just think the theory ought to be published and if you are not inclined to believe it, then feel free to ignore it.
The big mystery of the mind is reconciling two things: what we know about the physical structures of the brain and what we experience from day to day as conscious people. The first tells us that our brain is made up of a series of interconnected neurons which fire in response to certain inputs. The second tells us that people have subjective unified experiences and at least the appearance of free will. It seems hard to explain how the first can lead to the second, although they're obviously connected somehow.
So, for example, if we're looking at certain visual illusions, we can choose to see them one way or to see them another way. And obviously this choice has some impact on the rest of the brain, especially the part that processes vision. But nobody's been able to find the place in the brain from which such choices originate.
I don't know enough about the subject to vouch for it, but this article claims that neurons are small enough that we could see quantum effects in their high-level behavior:
The juncture between two neurons is called the synapse. Each of the perhaps 100 billion neurons in the brain is connected to about 1,000 other neurons. At the synapse, a firing neuron either passes a neurochemical signal to the next neuron, or it does not pass a signal, with the passing or not passing depending on the complex neurochemistry of the synapse. If, within a millisecond, a certain number of signals are passed on to a neuron, then that neuron will fire. Otherwise it will not fire. Thus what happens at the various synapses--signal passed on or not passed on--is the sole determinant of the firing pattern of the neurons in the brain. The synapses are the control points for our flow of thoughts.
The synaptic gap, the gap between one neuron and the next, is quite small, 3.5 nanometers, which is about 35 (hydrogen) atoms. The sizes of the adjacent parts of the synapse, where much of the neurochemistry goes on, are also small, on the order of 3,500 atoms wide. Now one of the peculiar effects of quantum mechanics is that if the volume where an atom might be located (the place where the wave function is non-zero) is initially small, it will spread out in time. One can use Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to show that a calcium ion, for example, will spread out to the size of the synapses (not just the synaptic gap) in about .1 milliseconds (see 8 below). Neural processes in the brain occur on a time scale of a millisecond, ten times slower than the spread of a calcium ion over the whole synapse.
So here's the proposal: a series of entangled quantum particles at the synaptic level allow for coordinated firing patterns which occur in response to choices by our conscious free will. Just as my previous post reconciled free will with statistical randomness, this would seem to reconcile free will with the neuroanatomy.
It still seems incredible that there is some high-level coordinated process with its fingers in the quantum effects of our synapses. But we know something incredible is going on because we have subjective experience. So this doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.
One of my colleagues, Mark Stoneman, recently wrote an interesting post in his blog Clio and Me on what happens when Google gets it wrong–or, more correctly, when Google users don’t think carefully about the results they get from their search query.
The example that Mark cites is depressingly familiar. Someone with a historical question types in a reasonable search, in this case “Hossbach protocol” and the first two items in the Google search rankings are reasonable looking websites from Holocaust deniers. I would link to them here, but that would just boost them higher in Google’s algorithms–type in “Hossbach protocol” yourself to see the results. If you had typed “Hossbach memorandum” you would have gotten the actual historical source first (from Yale’s Avalon Project), but you have to go down eight places in the search rankings to get to the Holocaust deniers that way.
How many unsuspecting users with a simple historical question run into websites with artful fabrications? Too many, I’m sure.
Because the Internet will always be a home to artful fabrications, historians have to pay close attention to their teaching responsibilities, and remember that our students need to learn how to make appropriate use of search engines and what they spit out. Otherwise, we are dooming a new generation to being duped by those who would make up the facts about the past.
Twitter is a popular micro-blogging site that easily demands too much of your attention for the simple reason that you have to read it. Now you can listen instead. TweetSpeak lets you give your friends the continuous partial attention they deserve without taking your eyes off of the work you should be doing.
Reactions around the net:
Alert - you do need to know how to run a command line.
Contributor: MarkDilley
Please, welcome this new fat french version of moulin.
Sized 1.5GB, it includes:
It’s a major release featuring loads of improvements since last one.
Due to Wikipedia’s grow, this new release doesn’t fit on a single CD-R. Present version is a 1.5GB iso which you can burn on a DVD-R or extract to a USB stick.
We will release in the coming weeks a 2CDs version including small fixes and speed improvement: search engine is currently quite slow on Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
Now, go download it !
Thanks for your support !
They’ve got oodles of cash (allegedly), they have lots of celebrity members (definitely), but they don’t have too good a public image - at least not on the Internet.
Who are we talking about? Well, that’d be the Church of Scientology.
Over the past week the Church has ended up back in the spotlight following the posting of a video of Church member Tom Cruise and its subsequent takedown. Dozens of copies have sprung up and “Anonymous” - a rag-tag bunch of computer enthusiasts - have knocked several of the Church’s sites off the net.
The Church hasn’t said much, but we’re trying to do something about that. If you’ve any questions about recent events you’d like to see Wikinews put to the Church, send them in. Email scoop@wikinewsie.org and we’ll see if we can get an answer.
Also feel free to vote in our poll to the right of the blog postings, at the top of the page.
This is unfortunately about to be deleted due to licencing issues, but you need to see it first. Fair warms the heart. “Scan of an apology written by a student who defaced Wikipedia. Since this student has lost their school computer privileges they were forced to type this apology on a manual ROYAL typewriter in their keyboarding class. (Signature removed)”
Update: Copy here.
As another step towards making available great help resources for wiki editors and vistors, we have created our first screencast, called Welcome to AboutUs. Over the next few weeks, we plan to create many more screencasts, to compliment all of the existing help information. We would love your comments both on this screencast and on which topics you think we ought to be covering first as we develop more.