wikipedia
stoat | March 1, 2009Well I have been listening to Slim Shady recently:
I don't speak, I float in the air wrapped in a sheet
I'm not a real person, I'm a ghost trapped in a beat
I translate when my voice is read through a seismograph
And a noise is bred, picked up and transmitted through Royce's head
Trapped him in his room, possessed him and hoist his bed
Till the evilness flows through his blood like poisonous lead [1]
But no, I mean The AGW party line at Wikipedia (thanks Roger). I'll leave it to you to decide whether I'm bad or evil; maybe this will help [Update: its moved. Try http://www.heliogenic.net/2009/…
stoat | February 7, 2009So there I was, happily settled in Heffers with a nice large cup of coffee, looking forward to reliving the Newton-Leibnitz controversy via "the system of the world" when I thought I'd have a quick browse of "The Cult of the Amateur" by Andrew Keen, since it was on a nearby rack. It's the std.rant about how the internet is killing our kulture, which drowns its few good points in hyperbole. And indeed, in gross error. So naturally I waded through till I got to the wikipedia bit, and lo and behold, there is my name! (I'm sure I've heard this before, but only online, which isn't quite the same…
stoat | September 10, 2008More than a year ago, I thought Citizendium was cr*p. And it still is: see its GW article. The top bit is a fairly sane cp of wiki; the bottom half is a fairly insane mix of septic tripe. If you know what you're doing, you can separate out the two. But as a resource for those who don't already know, its hopeless.
Anyone know any interesting CZ articles that are better than the corresponding wiki ones? I mean, it doesn't even have a page on stoat, not even a badly mangled copy of wiki's. How sh*t* is that?
BTW, since I'm here: I hate window$, especially the auto-restart-update bit, or "please…
stoat | September 1, 2008Atmoz complains about this version of the WAIS article. As he says, it was full of cr*p.
So why didn't he just fix it? I have now.
Sadly, that article comes into the not-very-prominent article class, which means few people watch it, and no-one competent was writing it. It even features Rappers "slumbering giant" sound bite.
stoat | August 13, 2008A fine, although minor, example of wikisuicide comes from discourseur. Be sure to check the talk page and contributions if interested in the details.
Oh, and Abd has done the same, but at truely interminable length. Read it and... weep? Laugh? Recoil in astonishment at the mindboggling waste of electrons?
stoat | July 10, 2008 As an antidote to recent postings, I shall point out that wiki is also fun. There must be a site devoted to inspired wikipedia vandalism. But I don't know where it is. In the meantime, you can make do with my own modest contribution (and I forgot this one, thanks M), or (thanks to Paul) this inspired diff wherein someone is taking the p*ss out of paganism (BTW, don't omit the last 4 digits of the URL, as I accidentally did, or you will discover something you didn't want to know. Don't try this at home, or more importantly at work).
More seriosuly, since I'm on wiki, you could try Durova's…
stoat | July 2, 2008Gosh, you wait for one piece of insanity and then two come along at once. But this time its personal. So those interested in wiki's inards can wade through the gore at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#Wheelwar regarding User:Giano_II. If you need a user guide to the process, I'm sure I can provide more details.
[Update: now transmogrified into Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Geogre-William M. Connolley -W]
stoat | August 29, 2007Have a look at this edit, where Lumidek loses his rag.
Slightly less wacko, but not losing touch with the septic, the AAPG seems to be coming closer to reality whilst being careful not to get there.
Meanwhile someone calling themselves SFredSinger, who may or may not actually be Singer, tried this on for size but it didn't work. [Oops, and I missed the connection with item 1].
stoat | August 23, 2007From The Onion, Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not. Sadly the actual article is boringly factual (or it was; I've had a go at improving it but I doubt it will last. I like the way my version ends with an impassioned yes yes).
My first go didn't last long, but then the punctuation was distracting. I think its better with the punctuation removed entirely before the sort. But should the sort be case sensitive?
stoat | February 21, 2007Coming back from the pub, I find the edit comment Someone added a bunch of none sence. First of all, it's not a giant beaver the creates the wind. Second, it's impossible that the people you mentioned knew about beavers. If that makes no sense (and should it?) this is the edit in question.
Kind of puts RP's problems in perspective :-) Although its a possible new avenue for tornado research!
More thought provoking is The Coriolis force does not affect insects or ships since its clearly false; but in the case of insects its negligible. And for supertankers? I'm not sure.
stoat | October 17, 2006Why is a Stoat like a Bus? Because you wait days for a post and then 3 come along at once :-)
Its been ages since I've posted any wiki stuff (ahem: apart from Citizendium, tangenitally). Mostly because the climate side of wiki is very quiet and I spend my time merrily blocking people for 3RR.
But in a vaguely climate-related issue, the 2nd Ed Poor RFA (oh how the mighty are humbled; which is sad, and I'm not crowing, I mean it) I am explicitly recognised as an "Expert" (its in findings of fact #4, if you really want to know). Not that its going to get me anywhere on my annual appraisal, since…
stoat | September 19, 2006And you can read about it at http://citizendium.org/. Predicatably enough, wikipedia already has an article on it. Will it fly? Who knows...
[Update: Nature has an article on this, featuring a brief appearence by yours truely... I don't get to say anything exciting though. Or perhaps more precisely, I *didn't* say anything very exciting]
stoat | August 1, 2006I made it into a recent article in The New Yorker. Predictably enough its not about science, but about wikipedia. Whats interesting about it is how hard internal wiki "politics" are for outsiders to understand. Despite talking to the author several times, and a fact-checker, the overall tone of the piece is wrong, as it concerns my bit. I doubt I can explain...
So... I wasn't a victim of an edit war, it was various articles that were the victims. Curiously enough, it was the greenhouse effect article that ended up as the chief battleground, and quite bizarrely not over any kind of…
stoat | June 21, 2006[[Global Warming]] became a "featured article" on wikipedia about a month ago (long tedious arguments about the stylistic wording, and about the reference format) and today was the "featured article of the day" on the front page. Which has lead, of course, to an enormous edit count for today (many of them vandalism) - check the page history. The actual sum of changes kept on the page is tiny, unsurprisingly, since its been argued over for so long already.
stoat | March 23, 2006A while ago, Nature did a study comparing wikipedia to Britannica (you can read my take on it here - oh, just look at the title I used :-).
Now it seems that Britannica weren't very happy about the results, and have responded: We discovered in Nature's work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results. And so on.
First off, they whinge about contrary to the usual practice of making all data freely available in order to facilitate a study's replication by others, Nature declined our repeated requests…
stoat | March 17, 2006The Economist has a survey on Open-source business (subs req). The usual suspects - apache, linux - come up, and of course so does wikipedia. And naturally enough (since this is a pile of econ journos who know b*gg*r all about wiki) they make the traditional mistakes...
Saying that the George Bush article is edit-locked. It isn't. Go visit it and confirm that for yourself; check the edit history to see that it has been unlocked for a while (though I think it was semi-protected (i.e. no anon edits) for a bit).
Misunderstanding policies: A blunt new policy was promulgated: "Don't be a dick…
stoat | March 12, 2006I was invited to give a talk to CHASE - Cambridge Hi-tech Association of Small Enterprises - nice people even if they haven't quite got round to updating their web site yet :-) The subject was to be global warming - no problem - and wikipedia. The later I've never tried talking about, and found it a bit of a puzzle as to what they wanted and what to say. The talk-in-two-halves is here, and to buff up my rather tarnished open-source credentials I've put it up as a .sxi only. As you can see, the GW bit is only slightly altered from before (apart from a dramatic and startling new paper by…
stoat | March 1, 2006Wikipedia reached its one millionth article today, and I was there on IRC watching as it happened... although actually I'd popped into the kitchen to do the washing up at the crucial moment.
Predictably enough the millionth article itself is not very exciting: Jordanhill railway station.
My own minor attempt to get article 1M was to create Ray Bradley and Phil Jones. But was then astonished to find myself in a delete-undelete war over the RB entry, on the grounds that he wasn't notable... unlike Jordanhill railway station. Sometimes wiki is a bit odd. To be fair, if you follow the RB link…