75 posts tagged “wikipedia”
2008
GiantBomb.com. Launched today, powered by Django—a combination of (mostly ex-Gamespot) quality editorial content and a massive structured wiki of every computer game ever released. This is going to be a lot of fun—all of the crazy detailed content that Wikipedia tends to reject.
Comet (programming) on Wikipedia on 4th June 2008 (via) The last useful version (which I had pointed many people to) before it was gutted down to just a couple of paragraphs by infuriating deletionists.
The fatal flaw of deletionism is the mindset of deciding what someone else should find interesting
Wikipedia:Canvassing (via) Apparently it’s considered bad form to tell people about debates occurring on Wikipedia (such as votes for deletion). Looks like a policy designed to discourage the participation of subject experts in favour of the participation of Wikipedia process gnomes.
There are two [Wikipedias]: One is the public-facing reliable-enough-on-average encyclopedia that people read every day, which makes for nice fluff pieces in the media about "these new Web thingamajigs that the kids are building, aren't they neat?". The other is the insular behind-the-scenes bureaucracy, which reads like an improvised performance of the collected writings of Clay Shirky.
Google Maps now shows photos and Wikipedia articles. Click the “More...” button. My first thought was “how do they get so many photo markers on the map?”—Firebug shows that they’re generating tiles on the server containing multiple photo markers, then when you click on one an Ajax call checks which photo is in that particular spot.
MediaWiki API. Wikipedia’s best kept secret?
wikinear.com, OAuth and Fire Eagle
I’m pleased to announce wikinear.com. It’s a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It’s designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones.
[... 1,190 words]Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft's Office monopoly [...] but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google's growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
2007
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (via) See also: Wikipedia’s “List of linguistic example sentences”.
Wikipedia trust colouring (with demo) (via) “The text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text, as well as those who edited the text.”
List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations (via) See anonymous edits from CIA IP addresses, Fox News and more.
dbpedia.org. They scrape Wikipedia and extract useful information from it so you don’t have to.
Encyclopedia of Life. Ambitious, well funded project to create a professionally maintained Wikipedia for species. I really hope they get their URL design right.
Wikimedia Grid Report. Wikipedia’s Ganglia monitoring page.
Wikipedia internals (PDF) (via) A gold mine of scaling tips.
The basic concept here is given the ongoing dramatic drop in the price of bandwidth and hardware, they cost very little. I looked at the bandwidth bill for Wikipedia, for instance, and it is actually substantially lower in the last year than the year before, despite traffic growing by a factor of 4.
Wikipedia nofollows links. Wikipedia’s high PageRank means this is likely to have a noticable knock-on effect on the rankings of many other sites.
2006
Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. Holy cow, when did this start? 50,000 articles and counting.
Comic Sans—Wikipedia. The Comic Sans euro symbol has a little face.
Wikipedia citation feature. I don’t know when they added this but it’s really nicely done.
2005
List of British English words not used in American English (via) Wikipedia’s essential guide to confusing Americans.
Manhole cover on Wikipedia (via) Way more interesting than it should be.
London
My heart goes out to all those affected by yesterday’s terrible attack on London. I think it’s safe to say that here in Britain we are shaken but not stirred—the response here from both the emergency services and the Great British Public has been inspiring. To my knowledge, my friends and relatives are all safe. Thanks to all who asked after me.
[... 85 words]Wikipedia: 2005 London transport explosions. I’m OK (I’m not in London), as is everyone I’ve been in touch with.
Tweaking Wikipedia
Does anyone know why Wikipedia displays a redirected page at the same URL rather than using a proper HTTP redirect? Case in point: Topics in human-computer interaction actually displays the content from List of human-computer interaction topics (that’s my next exam topic)—the same content appears at two different URLs. Yuck. Here’s a Greasemonkey script to fix it: wikipedia-redirect.user.js.
[... 125 words]Representational State Transfer. As usual, Wikipedia has a superb take on a complex and frequently misunderstood topic.
April 1, 2005—Wikipedia. The definitive list.
Wired: The Book Stops Here. Truly excellent, in-depth article on Wikipedia from Wired.
Gamma correction—Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Mac users: activate expose on this page for some trippy alisaing effects.