Thank you, Wikipedia

I love that Wikipedia has an article on the Five-Timers Club among its bizillion article.



Personally, I don't think that Paul Simon qualifies since he's only hosted four times, but he has appeared as an official member of the Five-Timers Club on Saturday Night Live at least twice...

Never heard of it...

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center (the truck bomb in the parking garage, not the airplane crashes that finally brought it down). I was looking up some of the details on Wikipedia this morning and clicked through (as I am wont to do on Wikipedia) to the Bojinka plot, one of three See alsos (with the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing). all links are to Wikipedia today...

The Bojinka plot (Arabic: بجنكة‎; Tagalog: Oplan Bojinka) was a planned large-scale three phase Islamist attack by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The attack would involve a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, an air bombing of 11 airliners^[1] and their approximately 4,000 passengers that would have flown from Asia to the United States, and Murad's proposal to crash a plane into the CIA's headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia, in addition to the plan to bomb multiple aeroplanes.

The plan was obviously unsuccessful, but I don't remember hearing about this plot at all.

Does anybody out there remember hearing about this at the time?

Why don't you just take a picture then?

The wikipedia/media folks have a contest currently running (through the end of September) to find the best new photograph of a historical site/building added to their collection.

In the US that means finding a site on the National Register of Historic Places in your state (they even have it broken down by counties - mine, for example), then heading out to take a photo. Yeah, if you're hoping to win the contest (and one of the prizes), you're probably going to need a good camera, great weather, and an eye for photography. If you just want to help them take photos of historic sites before those historic sites go away, however, head out tomorrow and take a few snapshots.

The wikiwhatever foundation is really doing some phenomenal work documenting our world, and this is another example. Help 'em out, would ya?

A bit of spit and polish

Wikipedia is currently the sixth-most-visited site on the internet.

And it's ugly.

Sure it's on its way to becoming one of the great repositories of human knowledge - slowly eking its way up into the realms of the Library of Congress, the Library of Alexandria, and baseball-reference.com.

Now if only we could make it so that it were a bit prettier to look at, something that had a little color, a bit of style. Thankfully a design agency has taken the task upon itself and gotten to the following design...

I particularly like the unity of style, the chosen font, and the judicious use of color.

Take a look at their full propoal to see that they've really given the thing some thought.

Today's Wikipedia Curiosity

A student of mine asked me about a fact she had seen in a video - that there are more honors students in China than there are students in America - which lead me to the wikipedia list of nations by population. There are certainly a whole lot of people in China and assumedly a lot of honors students there.

The top of the list, however, is only of mild interest to me. I can't possibly conceive of 1.3billion people, four and a half times the population of the United States. I can't really conceive of even a million people, taking us down the list to #157 Timor-Leste, a nation that I've admittedly never heard of. Instead, I scrolled further downward to see which was the least populous nation in the world. My guess was Vatican City - which ended up third from the bottom.

The smallest country in the world - according to Wikipedia, anyway - is the Pitcairn Islands - in spite of the fact that it is listed in its own Wikipedia article as being a British Overseas Territory (a category with its own article), making it a little less a country to me, but...

The idea of four islands, only one of which is inhabited and then only by sixty-six (or -seven depending on where in the article you read) is something that I can conceive of, especially when I can use Google Maps to zoom down on the four islands, a total of eighteen square miles of land at the peaks of a ridge of undersea mountains...

...the only inhabited island, in the southwest of the above image, Pitcairn itself...

...and finally down to Adamstown, the lone 'town' in the 'country'...

That's a sight - with added in roads and paths, admittedly - that I can wrap my head around. With the inhabited Pitcairn being only 1.8 square miles and the largest island - Henderson - being uninhabited and only 14 square square miles, I struggle to understand the lifestyle, though. They apparently eat primarily seafood - spiny lobster and fish - and fruits and veg that grow on the island's slopes. The three uninhabited islands are roughly 60+miles from Pitcairn, so people aren't regularly popping over to get the food there.

I guess eighty percent of the island revenue comes from tourism, as the only available way to get to Pitcairn is via ship from French Polynesia then by smaller boat into the shallow Bounty Bay harbor - where the Bounty (of Mutiny on the fame) actually sank, leading to the island's new populating in 1790. I'm guessing that at $5000 New Zealand per-person to get there and only eight trips made a year, it's a long shot that I'll ever be standing on the coast of Pitcairn Island.

Tragic...

Things I didn't know about Mt Everest

In the past couple of weeks, I've had two separate events about climbers summitting Mt Everest come up in my daily history search, so I've been reading a lot about the mountain.

I thought I'd take a moment today to pay tribute to a recently passed anniversary of sorts, of the deadliest day in Mt Everest's history, May 10/11, 1996, when eight people died near the summit as a result of congestion along the route and a surprise storm that apparently dropped the oxygen content in the air from 33% of that at sea level to somewhere near 27%. It's terrifying that anyone could climb there without supplemental oxygen, but people have done just that.

The event has been much explored thanks, primarily, to the presence of author Jon Krakauer who was writing an article about the tendency for people to pay their way up the mountain and who subsequently wrote the marvelous - if debated - book Into Thin Air.

If you have an illusions about climbing Mount Everest or simply want to read a white-knuckle account of what that could be like, give his book a try. It's a brilliant read.

Take a listen to Ken Kamler's take on the event. He was there that day.

Wikipedia: the cause of and solution to so many of our problems

Each day I look up some date in history and write that year as today's date on the board in my classroom.

Today, for example, was 12 March, 1912 in honor of the founding of the Girl Scouts. I then draw a stick figure representation of the event and encourage my students to guess the event. Especially considering my limited art skills, they do pretty well.

It helps me that Wikipedia has an article of every day's significant (by whatever definition the Wikipedia community chooses to define that word) events, births, and deaths. Check out March 12, for example.

I also tend to check the History Channel's Today in History as another source of events and today found that the 1888 blizzard that hit NYC and dumped 40" of snow happened on this date. In the History Channel's article on the blizzard, I found this sentence...

Even "Leather Man," a fixture of New York and Connecticut history who had walked a circuit of 365 miles every 34 days for three decades, was reportedly delayed four days by the Blizzard of 1888.

Clearly, I had to head to Wikipedia to find out about this "Leather Man". I quote from their article here...

The Leatherman (ca. 1839–1889) was a particular vagabond, famous for his handmade leather suit of clothes, who traveled a circuit between the Connecticut and the Hudson River from about 1856 to 1889. Although of unknown origin, he was thought to be Canadian, or possibly French, because of his fluency in French, his broken English and the French Language prayer book found on his person after his death. His identity remains controversial, and unknown.

How fascinating is that? He apparently made his 365-mile circuit around Connecticut every thirty-four days like clockwork, regularly enough that when the blizzard delayed him, people noticed.

I love...Love...LOVE that Wikipedia has documented Leather Man (or Leatherman or Leather-Man).

Could such a person exist in today's world? They could, right? It would be weird but not unheard of, I would guess.

Wikiing a wiki

I'm a narcissist, I'll admit it.

I've thought about putting myself on Wikipedia. 

I've thought about setting up a wiki for my classroom so newbies could have some sort of guidance - from students, not from me - as to what my class is actually like and what they need to do to succeed.

Or maybe a wiki about Princeton High School - or the whole Princeton district - to gather all the info we can before the info goes away.  (Though, honestly, the info I want is held by the people least likely to use a wiki - oldsters.)

I haven't actually done any of these, but not necessarily because I think they're bad ideas...more because I don't actually know how to set up a wiki.

Thankfully, Wikia now lets anybody set up a wiki using their site.

Anybody wanna give the princeton or Dusch wiki a try?

There but for fortune, go you or I...or I...

I know I've thrown down with Tiny Ghosts before, but I just had to throw this one out there and follow up with a solid and befuddled what the frick?

Seriously, our gubment had two nuclear bombs drop out of a plane over North Carolina in the 1960's and was totally unable to recover one of them - the one which successfully went through five of its six safety systems and was fully ready to arm and detonate itself?

Holy broken arrow, Batman.

Check the details out at Wikipedia, ibiblio, or UNC's library.

Seriously?

We've got to stop making crap like this before some nutcase goes all Jack D Ripper on us.

Wikipedia this week

From 12/16 through 12/23...here's what I looked up on Wikipedia...in case you were curious...

• In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
• the Carry On... films
• Spitting Image
• Spoonerisms
• Brit shows made into American shows - Steptoe & Son?
• The Escapist
• The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
• Stikfas
• Wizards of Waverly Place
• CSI
• The World is Not Enough
• Bobby Bowden
• Frank Beamer
• Pete Carroll
• Charlie Weiss
• Bill Belichick
• Trainspotting
• Kelly McDonald
• Shallow Grave
• Bone
• Natalie Wood
• Kristin Wells
• Joan Collins

As to why I looked each of them up? I'll never tell...though some of you were probably involved in the conversations that lead to them...

The weirdness that is

I love Wikipedia. If it weren't for the most awesomest user-edited encyclopedia in the world, I wouldn't know things like these...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a linguistically correct sentence.

There have been hundreds of fictional US presidents including my favorite.

Some teams at the University of Hawaii (listed as Hawai'i) are still the Rainbow Warriors.

Prince has a lot of pseudonyms.

Only five albums were in the #1 spot in 1984.

Simon & Garfunkle were - I think - the last act to replace themselves on the Billboard #1 album chart.

The Monkees owned 1967.

Neil Young was not inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame three times like I'd thought. Apparently it's just CSN not CSN&Y in there.

"Rainbow Connection" was ripped off in 1979.

Bryan Derksen liked Wikipedia, too.

Coloring my opinion

Sure, color does make up a big part of our world, so it's probably important enough for an encyclopedia article, but Wikipedia's entry on colors links to a list of colors which just proves yet again that Wikipedia is either the most impressive collection of knowledge our species has ever gathered or a giant mess of minutia that has so much crap as to be effectively useless.

Sure, there are the pretty standard colors like red, blue, and green - even those aren't exactly without debate - but then we get into the slightly less well-known colors like...

• Davy's Grey - which is described as being a greeny grey colour
• amaranth - a reddish-rose color that is a representation of the color of the flower of the amaranth plant
• carmine - a particularly deep red color that apparently has seven different named sub-carmines
• tenné - a "stain", a rarely used tincture, an orangish brown colour
• zinnwaldite - a color that resembles the mineral zinnwaldite
• gamboge - a rather transparent dark mustard yellow pigment
• cosmic latte - the name assigned to the color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers
• cerise - a deep to vivid purplish red

I'll admit that I guess it makes sense to have some names a little more individual than just "a deep to vivid purplish red". And if we have the names, we might as well compile them somewhere, and I guess Wikipedia is about as good a place as any for it.

Plus they also have a list of every Crayola crayon color ever.

Image courtesy of BombaCarta.

How to win at life

I'm generally grooving to WikiHow.com. They've got loads of fun stuff to teach each of us.

I guarantee that they've got something on there that you could learn...how to blacksmith...how to follow written instructions (which seems very odd to put in writing)...how to tell between downy and hairy woodpeckers...how to add bullet points to a WikiHow article...how to get free coffee at Starbucks..how to win Monopoly...how to beat anyone at any two-player game...how to cure and prevent getting itchy after a haircut...how to imagine what your new chat room friend might look like..

How to do darn near everything...

Except how to grow up...

Wait, nevermind..

More wikipedia issues

Ah, the ignorance of the legislature seems, at times, to be boundless.

Senate bill 49 - sponsored by Senator Ted Stevens - is an updated version of legislation introduced last year known as the Deleting Online Predators Act - or DOPA. Last year's legislation - and this year's similar Senate bill - look to restrict all institutions that receive federal funding or subsidies for internet access - including most schools and public libraries - to block social networking websites or chat rooms as defined by...

the Commission [which] shall take into consideration the extent to which a website--

`(i) is offered by a commercial entity;

`(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;

`(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;

`(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and

`(v) enables communication among users.'.

Now I can't disagree with the other portion of the bill that states that

(1) sexual predators approach minors on the Internet using chat rooms and social networking websites, and, according to the United States Attorney General, one in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet;

(2) sexual predators can use these chat rooms and websites to locate, learn about, befriend, and eventually prey on children by engaging them in sexually explicit conversations, asking for photographs, and attempting to lure children into a face to face meeting; and

(3) with the explosive growth of trendy chat rooms and social networking websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to monitor and protect minors from those with devious intentions, particularly when children are away from parental supervision.

but I certainly can disagree with the option of simply blocking all of those sites from the eyes of school children and library users - particularly of library users.

School children typically are blocked from most of those website already. My school, for example, doesn't block Blogger, but we do block LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, Facebook and many other sites. But the blocking of these sites at libraries does mean that adults - typically adults of more limited socio-economic means - will be blocked from performing totally legal actions.

Senator Stevens - from my limited knowledge of him - doesn't seem like a man whose heart is in the wrong place, but he does seem like one who should, perhaps, restrict his actions to areas where he doesn't come off sounding like a complete and total boob.

---

Of course, it looks like at least one of the folks at Wikipedia are doing something to shift the concept of Wikipedia - a website that many have theorized might fall under the jurisdiction of Stevens's legislation - from one that is editable by anyone anywhere with complete anonymity into a slightly more formally-lead online encyclopedia, something that teachers might even start allowing as a citation for scholarly research.

The new project is called Citizendium.org and will see all content overseen by a series of subject-specific experts. The website is just getting started, and it's at the point where there is little enough information that it's not yet ready to nearly be what it could become, but it'll be interesting to watch as it begins to grow...

Good luck, folks, with your continued use of the magical, tube-filled interweb.

Nixon...Jefferson...Muffley...Luthor...

I love Wikipedia so very much.

Today's thrilling Wikipedia find is this list of fictional US Presidents. Sure there have been more concerns of late as to the veracity of Wikipedia's information (seems some kids being trained to evaluate information sources decided to write that Saddam Hussein had stinky feet), but let's be honest, where else can you look up lists of Lilo & Stitch experiments, fictional music groups, made up words on the Simpsons, companies in Atlas Shrugged, or any of a hundred other fictional things.

Wikipedian issues

There's been a bit of a flap over Wikipedia in the news of late. Seems that an biography of John Siegenthaler, Jr. was posted saying that he had been involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. The poster of the article claims that it was posted as a prank that seems not to have been caught by Wikipedia's typically reliable article policies. There have always been some concerns about the site's open-source editing and possibilities for abuse, and Wikipeidians are aware of such concerns.

A number of websites express their problems with Wikipedia. Various media outlets have also done stories about Wikipedia - NPR, USA Today, cnet.com.

Wikipedia has made changes of late to make things a little less open source, requiring registration for editing of their articles.

I've been a fan of Wikipedia since I first heard about it about a year ago, and I'm happy to see that a recent study suggests that science articles in Wikipedia is not significantly less accurate than those in Britanica.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably point out that I have written article on Wikipedia and am a registered member.