Sorry, that doesn't make sense. As other people have mentioned, nofollow is not a magic incantation that search engine crawlers have no choice but to obey. Google can do whatever it wants with any link (they could choose to completely ignore the nofollow attribute when it's on wikipedia pages, for example).
The expert should leave a comment on that wikipedia article's Talk page. Comments on talk pages are signed (and "owned") by their authors. That way, the expert goes on the record, their comment is preserved, and their view gets incorporated permanently into the article (in some form, even if it's just "professor so-and-so speaks for a significant portion of academia when he says that...") and people who try to change it are directed back to the talk page.
Whether or not the self-censorship is good for chinese people, this project will be good for wikipedia: it'll provide a testing ground for several proposals that have been floating around on wikipedia for awhile. For example, Wikipedia's entry on Baidupedia says it'll have "historical versions" -- otherwise known, 6 months ago, as stable versions, something that wikipedia should really implement (but hasn't yet -- lots of inertia).
That said, the site isn't exactly a wikipedia clone: the fact that content must be vetted by admins before being shown on the site means that it will be an entirely different animal: all the social processes that make wikipedia work as it does will be completely different (just as wikipedia is completely different from Everything2, though if you heard both described they'd sound quite similar to each other).
I wrote a whole article on that subject a couple years ago. (I'll paste it in, since I don't want to expose people to Everything2's server lag.)
There's an old cartoon, made in the 1920s, that features a character, an old woman with flowers in her hat, who smiles at a recollection of the "gay '90s". 1890s, of course. Whoever penned the script could hardly have anticipated that 30 years later, after a thorough economic meltdown and a second continent-sweeping war, people would recall the "gay '20s". And he could never have anticipated that the '90s - the 1990s - would be the very last decade, ever.
When exactly did we begin assigning personalities to decades? After all, time is a smooth sweep, not pixelated into segments that happen to coincide with the number of fingers on the human hand. Tracing steps back through the cynical and technological '90s (though every recent decade has thought of itself as technological), the yuppie '80s, the Me Decade (that's "'70s", for Gen Y-ers, who tend to "remember" it as an adjunct to the hippie era), the radical and revolutionary '60s, the clean-lined '50s, the decades of War, of poverty, of prosperity - and there the modern conception ends. Our images of the '10s and '00s (the "aughts", as they were called) consist of black-and-white bicycle riding. Historians can push the concept further, though: supposedly, the American Civil War marked a major starting point for decadedom, an event so defining that thought could not help but be regimented around it. Mark Twain wrote near the end of the 1860s that the time before the war was a time "before History was born - before Tradition had being."
So when exactly did we begin assigning personalities to decades? "Surely plague-ridden Europe was spared the indignity of town criers bellowing, 'Welcome to the Bubonic 1340s,'" commented one wit, "and students of ancient Rome have yet to uncover a text reading anything like 'Welcome to the Visigothic 410s'." Clearly, some prerequisites must be in place.
The first is a collective unconscious: a fairly universal knowledge of current events, and a fairly universal image of their effects. Before the advent of mass media, before technology rendered the distances between major centers small enough for cultural thinking differences to diffuse quickly into each other, only centuries could be personalized: historians studied events far in retrospect (decades are studied concurrently with their existence), and no great technological hurdles limited said diffusion when the scale of time was large enough - intellectuals across the European subcontinent had a fairly unified horror at the dark ages by the time the renaissance was in full bloom, for example, even if their analyses of current events differed radically.
A collective unconscious was completely impossible when most people had little connection to the world outside their farm, grew steadily as farms were abandoned for apartment blocks, and took a quantum leap (around the time of quantum mechanics, incidentally) from the development of recording technology. For the first time, auditory and visual culture could be communicated directly, across thousands of miles, rather than encrypted into sheet music (decryptable only with a musician handy) or textual description, and, similarly, pure culture could now be preserved for posterity - how many people today would know about (let alone have opinions about) swing music if it could only be read, not heard? How many kindergarteners have taken in 1950s thinking-style in the form of Marvin the Martian?
The second ingredient, and most obvious, is a tendency to think of time in blocks. Many historians have attributed this to the usual suspects: consumerism, Americanism, short-attention-span-ism, but judging from the long, clearly recorded history of century-thinking, it is well nigh universal (for those with a knowledge of history).
During the last few months of the '90s, a minor debate began over what to call the coming decade - would the '0
I haven't read it yet, but this project to make wikipedia more machine-readable might help. (On the other hand, if you're talking about repuation systems, complex article ranking systems, etc., then I'm skeptical. Investing too much structure in automated, numeralized evaluation tends to undercut the fluid nature of real human social interaction and detailed language-based evaluation.)
Getting information out of the head doesn't strike me as a serious problem, mostly becuase of neural plasticity. When the motor centers of quadriplegics are hooked up to software, they practice, and observe the effects of their efforts, and eventually their brain adapts and they're able to move a cursor around effortlessly -- in the early stages moving it "feels" like pushing against a wall; later on, it simply feels like moving a cursor. The brain, by virtue of its clever design, has little trouble interfacing with new stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that doesn't make sense. As other people have mentioned, nofollow is not a magic incantation that search engine crawlers have no choice but to obey. Google can do whatever it wants with any link (they could choose to completely ignore the nofollow attribute when it's on wikipedia pages, for example).
The expert should leave a comment on that wikipedia article's Talk page. Comments on talk pages are signed (and "owned") by their authors. That way, the expert goes on the record, their comment is preserved, and their view gets incorporated permanently into the article (in some form, even if it's just "professor so-and-so speaks for a significant portion of academia when he says that...") and people who try to change it are directed back to the talk page.
What's with the constant /. misspelling of newcomer?
Whether or not the self-censorship is good for chinese people, this project will be good for wikipedia: it'll provide a testing ground for several proposals that have been floating around on wikipedia for awhile. For example, Wikipedia's entry on Baidupedia says it'll have "historical versions" -- otherwise known, 6 months ago, as stable versions, something that wikipedia should really implement (but hasn't yet -- lots of inertia).
That said, the site isn't exactly a wikipedia clone: the fact that content must be vetted by admins before being shown on the site means that it will be an entirely different animal: all the social processes that make wikipedia work as it does will be completely different (just as wikipedia is completely different from Everything2, though if you heard both described they'd sound quite similar to each other).
I own a mac mini, but now that I've seen that commercial I feel way too uncool to actually use it. *opens apple menu*
I wrote a whole article on that subject a couple years ago. (I'll paste it in, since I don't want to expose people to Everything2's server lag.)
There's an old cartoon, made in the 1920s, that features a character, an old woman with flowers in her hat, who smiles at a recollection of the "gay '90s". 1890s, of course. Whoever penned the script could hardly have anticipated that 30 years later, after a thorough economic meltdown and a second continent-sweeping war, people would recall the "gay '20s". And he could never have anticipated that the '90s - the 1990s - would be the very last decade, ever.
When exactly did we begin assigning personalities to decades? After all, time is a smooth sweep, not pixelated into segments that happen to coincide with the number of fingers on the human hand. Tracing steps back through the cynical and technological '90s (though every recent decade has thought of itself as technological), the yuppie '80s, the Me Decade (that's "'70s", for Gen Y-ers, who tend to "remember" it as an adjunct to the hippie era), the radical and revolutionary '60s, the clean-lined '50s, the decades of War, of poverty, of prosperity - and there the modern conception ends. Our images of the '10s and '00s (the "aughts", as they were called) consist of black-and-white bicycle riding. Historians can push the concept further, though: supposedly, the American Civil War marked a major starting point for decadedom, an event so defining that thought could not help but be regimented around it. Mark Twain wrote near the end of the 1860s that the time before the war was a time "before History was born - before Tradition had being."
So when exactly did we begin assigning personalities to decades? "Surely plague-ridden Europe was spared the indignity of town criers bellowing, 'Welcome to the Bubonic 1340s,'" commented one wit, "and students of ancient Rome have yet to uncover a text reading anything like 'Welcome to the Visigothic 410s'." Clearly, some prerequisites must be in place.
The first is a collective unconscious: a fairly universal knowledge of current events, and a fairly universal image of their effects. Before the advent of mass media, before technology rendered the distances between major centers small enough for cultural thinking differences to diffuse quickly into each other, only centuries could be personalized: historians studied events far in retrospect (decades are studied concurrently with their existence), and no great technological hurdles limited said diffusion when the scale of time was large enough - intellectuals across the European subcontinent had a fairly unified horror at the dark ages by the time the renaissance was in full bloom, for example, even if their analyses of current events differed radically.
A collective unconscious was completely impossible when most people had little connection to the world outside their farm, grew steadily as farms were abandoned for apartment blocks, and took a quantum leap (around the time of quantum mechanics, incidentally) from the development of recording technology. For the first time, auditory and visual culture could be communicated directly, across thousands of miles, rather than encrypted into sheet music (decryptable only with a musician handy) or textual description, and, similarly, pure culture could now be preserved for posterity - how many people today would know about (let alone have opinions about) swing music if it could only be read, not heard? How many kindergarteners have taken in 1950s thinking-style in the form of Marvin the Martian?
The second ingredient, and most obvious, is a tendency to think of time in blocks. Many historians have attributed this to the usual suspects: consumerism, Americanism, short-attention-span-ism, but judging from the long, clearly recorded history of century-thinking, it is well nigh universal (for those with a knowledge of history).
During the last few months of the '90s, a minor debate began over what to call the coming decade - would the '0
Seriously, this changes the story completely.
Dvorak isn't a shitty writer of technology journalism. He's a brilliant writer of technology fanfic.
I haven't read it yet, but this project to make wikipedia more machine-readable might help. (On the other hand, if you're talking about repuation systems, complex article ranking systems, etc., then I'm skeptical. Investing too much structure in automated, numeralized evaluation tends to undercut the fluid nature of real human social interaction and detailed language-based evaluation.)
Wikipedia is an adhocracy. It's also anarcho-syndicalist, or libertarian, or communist, depending on what filter you apply. Co-founder Larry Sanger called it a polity; I'd say that's accurate (though the stakes aren't as high as in real polities -- nobody can get shot at through the monitor).
Getting information out of the head doesn't strike me as a serious problem, mostly becuase of neural plasticity. When the motor centers of quadriplegics are hooked up to software, they practice, and observe the effects of their efforts, and eventually their brain adapts and they're able to move a cursor around effortlessly -- in the early stages moving it "feels" like pushing against a wall; later on, it simply feels like moving a cursor. The brain, by virtue of its clever design, has little trouble interfacing with new stuff.