Bird’s Eye: Wikipedia is so useful that I’ve come to take it for granted. I trust it, and when I hear of a new craze and want to know how it works, or find a great short story and want to know what else the author has written, or disagree about what extra-virgin olive oil really is… it’s got the answers. Always. Almost always right. And just a click away… what a gift to the world! Happy birthday, Wikipedia. Thank you, Jimmy Wales, and all the other contributors.
* Wikipedia – an unplanned miracle Clay Shirky The Guardian
Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in the world. That statement is both ordinary and astonishing: it’s a simple reflection of its enormous readership; and yet, by any traditional view about how the world works, Wikipedia shouldn’t even exist, much less have succeeded so dramatically in the space of a single decade.
The cumulative effort of Wikipedia’s millions of contributors means you are a click away from figuring out what a myocardial infarction is, or the cause of the Agacher Strip war, or who Spangles Muldoon was. This is an unplanned miracle, like “the market” deciding how much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free; even the servers and system administrators are funded through donations. That it would become such a miracle was not obvious at its inception and so, on the occasion of its 10th birthday, it’s worth retelling the improbable story of its genesis.
* A decade of Wikipedia: lesser-known miracles - Boing Boing
It’s no secret that I love Wikipedia, which I consider one of the grandest and most radical social experiments of our time, and the very best example of what the free culture movement offers for the world’s future…..
In the past I have discussed Wikibumps (like the spike of a million readers who checked out the Salvia article in the week after the Miley Cyrus bong video) and the Click to Jesus game, where you see how few links it takes to get from a random Wikipedia article to the Jesus article. Here are a couple of other good reasons to love Wikipedia and its sister projects which you may not have seen:
• Best of Wikipedia Tumblr page
• Commons Picture of the Year contest winners
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008
• 2009
* Scunthorpe problem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared by an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules will result in a false positive, causing innocent phrases to be blocked.
The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL’s dirty-word filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL…. In June 2008, a news site run by the American Family Association censored an Associated Press article on sprinter Tyson Gay, replacing instances of “gay” with homosexual, thus rendering his name as “Tyson Homosexual”.
