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That's the whole article, not just the picture; for a Happy Little Family Picture, there's this one, which doesn't make me feel particularly sorry for the proud papa.

As long as we're linking Wikipedia pictures, I'm not particularly sorry for either of the war criminals shaking hands in this picture. All that's happening to the one on the left, though, is that some people are saying he should be fired.

Unless I'm missing a significant data storage project (which I may be), once the article is changed, the only remaining copy of it is in human memory and some cache files.

It is targeted at groups who have valuable information to exchange in a very flexible manner. For those people, the Semantic Web is taking off. Think mashups. Think databases.

They need to evangelize correctness, and the semantic web (plus other aspects) will follow naturally.

Seriously, it's 2006, and you're still using anything other than google and site: to search for something?

Okay okay, that is a bit of a cop-out (though it's mostly true). There are some cases where multiple articles exist, separated only by case [1]. Though in the most normal case, you're right, case insensitive search would be helpful. Don't quote me on this, but I heard that the devs might be working on it [2] [3], but that there might be some DB indexing issue that they need to figure out before they're able to do this efficiently?

Forget the 14-blade razor in the year 2100. We have a 15 blade one now.

Forget the 15 blade razor. Try the Infini-T.

On the contrary, Google loves Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides excellent content for Google's index. Why else would Google actively support them?

From the Mediawiki page:
While James Brown was in jail, the upcoming rap artists used samples of his works extensively. If you could find some pieces of modern music with such a potential for reuse, that could be great. I wonder, Michael Jackson had the rights for The Beatles music. If he has not resold them yet, could he use 100 million dollars? --The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.20.17.84 (talk contribs) .

IIRC, the value of the catalog was estimated at 250 million in one of the stories about Jackson's deterioriating financial situation.

From Popular music albums/singles with remixable elements under Creative Commoms:
I think some of this cash should go towards buying up a few well-known music albums/singles and releasing them under a Non-Commercial Sampling Plus Creative Commons license. For example, buying up some old rap records (example off the top of my head, Tupac) along with a few rock records (another random example, Nirvana) and allowing DJs and remixers to do what they please with producing mashups, reproductions, covers and so on.

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Popular music has a high visibility. It would help promote the concept of open access.

From the Mediawiki page:
While James Brown was in jail, the upcoming rap artists used samples of his works extensively. If you could find some pieces of modern music with such a potential for reuse, that could be great. I wonder, Michael Jackson had the rights for The Beatles music. If he has not resold them yet, could he use 100 million dollars? --The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.20.17.84 (talk contribs) .

IIRC, the value of the catalog was estimated at 250 million in one of the stories about Jackson's deterioriating financial situation.

From Popular music albums/singles with remixable elements under Creative Commoms:
I think some of this cash should go towards buying up a few well-known music albums/singles and releasing them under a Non-Commercial Sampling Plus Creative Commons license. For example, buying up some old rap records (example off the top of my head, Tupac) along with a few rock records (another random example, Nirvana) and allowing DJs and remixers to do what they please with producing mashups, reproductions, covers and so on.

----
Popular music has a high visibility. It would help promote the concept of open access.

A solution to your troubles is already in the works and thus the money can be safely placed elsewhere. Currently the developers are working on an embedded-media implementation of ogg theora. You can read more about the development effort at media-wiki.

It was unevitable that Microsoft would one day try to fix those mistakes

I have Wikipedia and the rest of the Web on my mobile phone, using Opera Mini. It works great, running on almost any phone with Java. Here's a screenshot., and the Opera Mini simulator can be found here.

Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).

The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)

In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.

However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:

Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.

Better native open media support would be ideal:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Ogg_Support outlines the specs for an ideal feature set.

70% of all vertebrate species died in under a million years, leaving fungi dominant. Something of a mass extinction event, eh? (In fact, Earth's worst mass extinction event.) Observe the big temperature spike at PETM. (Top right corner)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/65_M yr_Climate_Change.png

The world's worst extinction event is the Permian-Triassic extinction event (251 million years ago).

That temperature spike is the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (55 million years ago).

Wikipedia has a chart of extinction events over time. Note the lack of a spike near 55 million years ago.

Man, why do people like you just draw random assertions out of a hat and pretend that's the divine truth. Let's actually look at the science, eh?

Here's a crowbar. You might need it to extract your foot from your mouth. ;)

Man, why do people like you just draw random assertions out of a hat and pretend that's the divine truth. Let's actually look at the science, eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_exti nction_event

70% of all vertebrate species died in under a million years, leaving fungi dominant. Something of a mass extinction event, eh? (In fact, Earth's worst mass extinction event.) Observe the big temperature spike at PETM. (Top right corner)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/65_M yr_Climate_Change.png

Thank you and goodnight.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/McMi llan_as_Harkonnen.jpg

Here is a map showing the location of Sudan.

I can't understand the people who complain about windmills being an eyesore. Sure, they're noticable, like just about any other structure. But they're also a reminder of our thirst for energy, and a symbol of our civilisation. They're something we should be proud of
I have seen much mor offending things than a few windmills in the scenery

I suppose they'd complain about these too.

Sony's rolling these out in 2008. They're apparently going to use a compressor coupled with a lquid like ammonia and an expansion contraction combination to keep the space at a regulated temperature.

They've leaked pictures to a couple key insiders, and I managed to get a link to them. You can find it below.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cf/Moni tor_refer.jpg

Very sweet, eh! But does it come in black is my question.

-rt

I think that the most commonly accepted theory is that the Finns are descendant from the Mongolian Huns who conquered a lot of Asia and Eastern Europe.

See, even before Jonathan Ive, the Woz knew how to build a non-beige-box design! Apple truly was ahead of its time when it came to industrial design! *fapfapfap*

Already done here and specially here.

Let's hope they picked Ingrid Swede and Scarlet Johansson.

You didn't hear that it was Dustin Diamond and Paris Hilton representing the physical emobdiments.

Also why are the people on the Pioneer Plaque white?

You mean like one of these?

So how's that different from Firefox? Firefox has the official-use logo (fox humping the Earth), and the open-use logo (Earth unmolested by giant wildlife). So Debian complains about the Firefox logo policy, when they have the same policy themselves? PKB.

Orange? Or Green?

Orange? Or Green?

Kinda like this?

Indeed. A small, single die. For perspective, the small gold dot in the corner is actually the top of a construction worker's hat as he proudly admires the finished product.

Looking at this, one might suspect that the idea of investing human efforts costing $trillion$ in order to effect (at best) a couple degrees of temperature is, well, ludicrous.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/65_M yr_Climate_Change.png

Personally, on an epochal scale, I find it credible that Humanity only exists because of a brief cooling and a fortunate spin of the every-so-often mass extinction roulette wheel. Let's be honest: crying about animal extinctions is stupid; several times in earth's history it's suffered a nearly-total die-off of extant species. Hell, our existence is almost assuredly predicated on it.

To get back to the point, I'm still not sure where global-warming (advocates? what would I call them? Cassandras?) get the idea that (human optimal climate) = (climate now) = (some sort of static point at which the Earth's climate should stick)?

Finally, like *any* creature on earth, Humans seem programmed to breed until the local carrying capacity is exceeded (through exhaustion of food resources for example, or in our case, eventual fouling of our living area), and then suffer a mass die-off.

You claim humans are somehow endowed with "intellect", and thus should be able to break the cycle? Unless you're willing to impose an enviro communism that determines breeding allowances per person, and rip resources by force from one person to give to another, I'd argue that you're simply being naive.

Yup.

I'd hit it.

...I wish that they had got people to design a better UI for the main app though, it just looks so much like it was designed on the cheap in 1997 ( see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Nt3_ 51-word97.png ). I know that people will say functionality should take precedence but I will not be able to convince anyone who is a casual user to switch when they will be presented with a mass of grey and cheap looking icons.

I hope that they have some money saved back to do that soon.

things like people believing legitimately long lines or legitimate road construction are actually parts of a carefully coordinated conspiracy to prevent people from voting

One little thing: in your manifesto you write that editors will have the right to place articles in an "approved" category. I think you should say: editors will have the right to declare particular article versions as "approved". After all, later editing of an approved article may make it worse. There are patches for the Mediawiki software which add a feature to mark article versions as approved, see Article validation feature. Once an article version has been marked as approved, the article remains open for editing, and you have to decide whether readers will by default be presented with the approved version, or with the most up-to-date version, carrying a prominent link to the approved one (I prefer the latter approach).

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and _forks :

The appropriate way to run a mirror is to download a dump of the compressed 'pages-article' file and the images from http://download.wikimedia.org/, and then use a modified instance of MediaWiki to generate the required HTML, along with above mentioned copyrights information.....

just another amused wikipedian.. (Forks&mirrors are good; forks with different policies are better; most things which experiment are good. )

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Syntax_Highlighting _Extension

There was also an extension that would show who made a change (somewhat like svn blame).

The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly

If that's the biggest difference, then I think most *nix users are fine in not caring. But obviously, the fact that OSX looks marginally prettier than Ubuntu really is the make-or-break of the fact.

Out of the box X11 isn't ugly compared to OSX - you're just a fanboy.

The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly

If that's the biggest difference, then I think most *nix users are fine in not caring. But obviously, the fact that OSX looks marginally prettier than Ubuntu really is the make-or-break of the fact.

Out of the box X11 isn't ugly compared to OSX - you're just a fanboy.

I wonder how business in europe will manage to live without the new important features in windows vista!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/Long horn_RSoD.png comes to mind as one of the more important features we need to get to market asap!

Amen. Or my favourite example.

I love open source, and would dearly love to help the developers by submitting detailed, accurate, complete bug reports[1], but fly-by-night dillettante trivialising attitudes like this make me want to pack the whole thing in and turn back to a Microsoft-only existence. MS crapware may be buggy as hell, but at least they don't pretend they're interested in bug reports only to get the hairy arsehole when you try to submit one.

[1] I'm a developer too, just one without the free time to spend hacking OSS code.

Gambling is the denial of God. The Ten Commandment clearly says there should be no God for you other than YHWH. Gamblers are adoring the Satan when they put their faith in the dice rather than trust in God. Gambling can be tolerated only and even then just bvarely when it is used to support public good, like state lottery.

Look at Jerome van Aken's art and you will understand what awaits avid gamblers in the eternity. Look in the lower left corner:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17 /Hieronymus_Bosch_-_The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights _-_Hell.jpg

About edit counting

Editcountitis

Edit count does not reflect value

Also, the richest 20% of Americans hold 49% of the wealth in 1999, so how is that any different than what was shown on Wikipedia?

We had a session about it at Wikimania 2006. It confirmed my own experiences as founder of WikiFur. I rarely get the time to make content edits, as "management" issues take priority.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.

In other words, there's a HUGE difference between permitting edits from the general public, and inviting edits from the general public.

I'm a member of the "general public". Wikipedia folks, bless their kindness, made me an administrator. I guess we have a slightly different definitions of "general public" here.

My point was that Wikipedia is still permitting edits from anonymous users but restricting the anonymous users in places where they're making nuisance of themselves under the guise of anonymity. That happens on a tiny fraction of the pages.

In my view, Wikipedia wouldn't get anywhere without rules. If there weren't any rules, we wouldn't have anything but vandalism and copyright violations. Even the name of the project limits the stuff: We're Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. That alone limits the scope of the project. We have a policy that says vandalism is most annoying, we have a policy that says copyright infringements must be removed and people should write their own stuff. From early on, Wikipedia has had its rules that limit its "wiki nature".

And specifically, Wikipedia has had, and will have, rules that are supposed to deal with personal bias, with stable versions or not. I don't think it will be the Wrong Version mk. 2.

I think they need to take a vote within the ranks, and let the editing community decide

As we at Wikipedia are painfully aware, there are vandalbots designed specifically to attack Mediawiki installations, create sleeper accounts to wreak havoc a month later, etc., etc. It's amazing just how creative complete dicks can be sometimes.

It will actually help the recent-changes patrollers a lot. See the actual proposal - it'll give the recent-changes patrollers a handy list of newbie edits to deal with first. It's not watertight, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to help.

Bill Thompson got it completely wrong, even given the correction. The internal FAQ on the matter gives a better picture.