The article was definitely not "carefully chosen". In fact there were tens of contributors who were attempting to get "their" story to be number 1,000,000. The logs are open for all to see, so this is quite a baseless accusation.
I didn't mean to say the featured article process is cude. In fact I think it is very thorough. What I meant is that there is no easy way to vet a number of articles related to some subject area. If Wikipedia wants to move to a 1.0 stable version, articles will need to be verified on a much larger scale than is happening with the featured article process currently.
In the interview I asked a question about the article validation tools. We've been waiting for these tools for some time, since the current methods we have for validating articles are rather crude. Some efforts from within the community to perform more detailed article assessment have also recently sprung up. This is besides the already existing Featured article process and Peer review.
Great, government regulation of video games. Just what the world needs. If there's anything that the Hot Coffee Mod fiasco has made clear, it's that the media and the public are doing a pretty good job at being a ESRB-watchdog. Rockstar has felt the results in its bottom line. What's the problem? More info:
The Family Entertainment Protection Act would basically make it mandatory to enforce the ratings. You're right of course, any kid with older friends can get around this with extreme ease.
Sample chapters
on
Smartbomb
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The article on WP has some links to sample chapters.
Somehow, I doubt Google would do this. Vint Cerf is Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist". He is one of the "founding fathers of the internet" who were wise enough to create the Internet as an End-to-end network. I doubt he would change his mind now. says it better than I could:
In 1964, a Rand Researcher named Paul Baran proposed to the Defense Department a design for a telecommunication network that was very much like the design of the current Internet. It was not quite the architecture of the Internet, and Baran was probably not the first to propose such a design. But the idea was radical and important enough that the Defense Department asked their network experts to comment on the design.
Their experts were AT&T. AT&T didnt like the plan. As AT&T executive Jack Osterman said of a plan "First it cant possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves."
The telephone network had a particular architecture. That architecture embedded certain principles. Those principles werethat the network owner AT&T got to decide how the network would be used. The network centralized that decision, and this centralized design as supported by the regulations of the FCC. Until the late 1960s, and partially continuing until the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the network owner had the power to decide what kinds of innovations would be allowed on the telecommunications network. The architecture embedded this power to decide.
This principle affected innovation. Innovators knew that before their ideas about how a telecommunications network should-be-used would be adopted, AT&T would have to approve their ideas. They knew their ideas would need the permission of someone else before they would run, and they knew that this someone else had an interest in the existing model of telecommunications. Some new ideas would be consistent with that model; no doubt they would be embraced. But other new ideas would be inconsistent with this model. They had a nowballs chance in hell. Any rational innovator or at least, those with a bottom line to support would turn their innovative energies elsewhere.
At the core of the original design of the Internet is a different architectural principle. This principle has a different effect on innovation. First described by network architects Jerome Saltzer, David P Reed, and David Clark in 1981, this principle, called the "end-to- end" argument, guides network designers in placing intelligence in the network at the ends, and to keep the network itself, stupid. Stupid networks, smart applications.
Some would disagree with you that the tragedy of the commons applies in this case:
"When people reflexively apply this model to open-source cooperation, they expect it to be unstable with a short half-life. Since there's no obvious way to enforce an allocation policy for programmer time over the Internet, this model leads straight to a prediction that the commons will break up, with various bits of software being taken closed-source and a rapidly decreasing amount of work being fed back into the communal pool.
In fact, it is empirically clear that the trend is opposite to this. The trend in breadth and volume of open-source development can be measured by submissions per day at Metalab and SourceForge (the leading Linux source sites) or announcements per day at freshmeat.net (a site dedicated to advertising new software releases). Volume on both is steadily and rapidly increasing. Clearly there is some critical way in which the ``Tragedy of the Commons'' model fails to capture what is actually going on." -- Eric Raymond
Don't worry, Big Media still wins at being "evil" (make sure to read the follow up comics, it's a series). Still, the news of Google censoring its search engine in china does seem to bring into question google's philosophy of not being evil (anyone else notice that the google cache always seems to have "66" as the first two digits of it's IP;)...
Clearly a libelous entry. The Ostrich was clearly jealous over all the attention the Penguin was getting from geeks, so decided to start a FUD campaign on Wikipedia, claiming that penguins are flightless. That's the problem with letting anyone edit!
See the article on Internet censhorship in China too. It's probably articles like this that have the Chinese Govt annoyed. However, I would agree with the article that by blocking off access they are pretty much ensuring that articles such as this will have a more western-oriented tilt. Of course, Wikipedia has a policy of NPOV, which should allow both criticism and supporting viewpoints. If there's one thing I've learned about the Chinese govt from seeing how they handled SARS and the recent factory disaster, it's that this kind of transparency is something they cannot get to grips with.
It would be interesting if Google did start supporting MITs $100 laptop. Subsidising the profileration of these devices throughout the world is probablz ultimatelz a good thing for Google. Given that the devices will be built around Linux, it is likely that Google will be the default search engine. Even if Google doesn`t help out financiallz, I`m sure their techncal expertise could be used. I`m still quite sceptical about whether MIT will be able to build a software system that lives up to the requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that Nach0king got the article, as it is part of a series he is working on, not simply an article written specifically for the occasion.
The article was definitely not "carefully chosen". In fact there were tens of contributors who were attempting to get "their" story to be number 1,000,000. The logs are open for all to see, so this is quite a baseless accusation.
Well, it's better that is was anticlimactic than what would have been if the 999,999th user would have made it ;)
I didn't mean to say the featured article process is cude. In fact I think it is very thorough. What I meant is that there is no easy way to vet a number of articles related to some subject area. If Wikipedia wants to move to a 1.0 stable version, articles will need to be verified on a much larger scale than is happening with the featured article process currently.
In the interview I asked a question about the article validation tools. We've been waiting for these tools for some time, since the current methods we have for validating articles are rather crude. Some efforts from within the community to perform more detailed article assessment have also recently sprung up. This is besides the already existing Featured article process and Peer review.
For those who don't know already, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program ever.
ROTFL, you're right.
Great, government regulation of video games. Just what the world needs. If there's anything that the Hot Coffee Mod fiasco has made clear, it's that the media and the public are doing a pretty good job at being a ESRB-watchdog. Rockstar has felt the results in its bottom line. What's the problem? More info:
ESRB, Video game controversy, Family Entertainment Protection Act.
The Family Entertainment Protection Act would basically make it mandatory to enforce the ratings. You're right of course, any kid with older friends can get around this with extreme ease.
The article on WP has some links to sample chapters.
That quote should be attributed to Lawrence Lessig, somehow that got garbled when I posted.
Speedrun, Major League Gaming, Electronic sports
Wikipedia has a decent overview of the history. Man, I remember playing Duke3D when I was still in Highschool ;)
The wikipedia article also has some good general info, and some decent external links.
Some would disagree with you that the tragedy of the commons applies in this case:
"When people reflexively apply this model to open-source cooperation, they expect it to be unstable with a short half-life. Since there's no obvious way to enforce an allocation policy for programmer time over the Internet, this model leads straight to a prediction that the commons will break up, with various bits of software being taken closed-source and a rapidly decreasing amount of work being fed back into the communal pool.
In fact, it is empirically clear that the trend is opposite to this. The trend in breadth and volume of open-source development can be measured by submissions per day at Metalab and SourceForge (the leading Linux source sites) or announcements per day at freshmeat.net (a site dedicated to advertising new software releases). Volume on both is steadily and rapidly increasing. Clearly there is some critical way in which the ``Tragedy of the Commons'' model fails to capture what is actually going on." -- Eric Raymond
Don't worry, Big Media still wins at being "evil" (make sure to read the follow up comics, it's a series). Still, the news of Google censoring its search engine in china does seem to bring into question google's philosophy of not being evil (anyone else notice that the google cache always seems to have "66" as the first two digits of it's IP ;)...
Try this
Right. See: DMCA, Software patents. Maybe your step 3 is not such a bad idea afterall.
Clearly a libelous entry. The Ostrich was clearly jealous over all the attention the Penguin was getting from geeks, so decided to start a FUD campaign on Wikipedia, claiming that penguins are flightless. That's the problem with letting anyone edit!
I agree, so saying that either Britannica or Wikipedia has better fact checking is pretty much a baseless claim.
While the parent was probably just flaming, you haven't exactly "checked your facts" either. ;)
See the article on Internet censhorship in China too. It's probably articles like this that have the Chinese Govt annoyed. However, I would agree with the article that by blocking off access they are pretty much ensuring that articles such as this will have a more western-oriented tilt. Of course, Wikipedia has a policy of NPOV, which should allow both criticism and supporting viewpoints. If there's one thing I've learned about the Chinese govt from seeing how they handled SARS and the recent factory disaster, it's that this kind of transparency is something they cannot get to grips with.
See the article on Internet censhorship in China> too. It's probably articles like this that have the Chinese Govt annoyed. However, I would agree with the article that by blocking off access they are pretty much ensuring that articles such as this will have a more western-oriented tilt. Of course, Wikipedia has a policy of , which should allow both criticism and supporting viewpoints. If there's one thing I've learned about the Chinese govt from seeing how they handled SARS and the recent factory disaster, it's that this kind of transparency is something they cannot get to grips with.
It would be interesting if Google did start supporting MITs $100 laptop. Subsidising the profileration of these devices throughout the world is probablz ultimatelz a good thing for Google. Given that the devices will be built around Linux, it is likely that Google will be the default search engine. Even if Google doesn`t help out financiallz, I`m sure their techncal expertise could be used. I`m still quite sceptical about whether MIT will be able to build a software system that lives up to the requirements.