Next Tuesday, we’re having a special election for US Senator from Massachusetts. This is the seat vacated by John Kerry’s nomination as Secretary of State, and for lots of reasons this could be an important seat to hold. Our excellent long-term Representative, Ed Markey, is running against a Republican venture capitalist.

Special elections hinge on ground game: you’ve got to Get Out The Vote, because no one expects an election in June. I’m doing morning food for GOTV for two towns. No catering facilities in the staging areas, and no equipment: everything’s got to be pretty much grab and go.

I’m thinking mostly scones — some savory, mostly sweet — and maybe some little brioches stuffed with cream cheese and smoked fish. I figure, any change from donuts has got to be welcome.

I started a thread at eGullet last night and it’s attracted some great suggestions, from sausage biscuits to farinata.

Here’s a fresh example of the complexity of making software simple.

Tinderbox has links to the Web (and other internet services) and links within Tinderbox. Internal links appear in Tinderbox maps as lines between notes. We have tools like the link browser and Roadmap View to examine, explore, and edit links. Today, we also use the link browser to delete unwanted links.

In the past, we’ve tried to make links selectable in the map. The would let you click on a link to select it, and press delete to delete it. But this turns out to be tricky; links are skinny creatures. They’re hard to click. In a tangled document, it’s easy to click on the wrong link.

Stacey Mason recently came up with a nice solution: add little widgets to the links that let you delete them.

To reduce visual clutter, we display only the widgets for links that begin at a selected note. The “x” widget deletes the link, and the “i” widget displays detailed information about the link. Nice, right?

Well, there’s one thing they had forgotten! Links are drawn behind notes and adornments, because in some documents you wouldn’t be able to see the notes if the links were drawn in front. But, if you click on the link widget in the figure above, you’re also clicking on a translucent adornment: which object did you intend to click? It gets worse, too, because some adornments are transparent. If you click on a clearly-visible link widget that happens to be lying underneath a transparent adornment, you probably meant to select that widget, not the adornment.

Welcome to my morning.

In general, Tinderbox follows the once-universal C/C++ convention that, when someone asks for an object that doesn’t exist, it receives nil or zero. For example, if we have a Note *note and we ask for the next note Note *next=note->Next(), we’ll get back nil if the note is the last note in the document.

This is the way C was always intended to work. Problems arise because nil isn’t really an object. We can ask a Note to draw itself, node->Draw(), but we can’t ask nil to do anything. And if we do, the program will crash. So, we habitually write if (node) node->Draw(), so that we don’t dereference nil.

The modern way to do this is to create a Null Object — a special class of Note that we might name NotANote. When you ask for the note that follows the last note, you get an instance of NotANote. If you try to draw a NotANote, nothing is drawn. If you ask for its word count, you get back “0”. You can do anything with a NotANote that you can do with a Note, and you won’t crash.

Tinderbox doesn’t use Null Object a lot. Tinderbox was written in 2002; Design Patterns dates back to 1995, but it took some time for the word to spread. Null Object makes the code simpler, and eliminates crashes.

The problem is that existing code checks for nil to know when it’s reached the end:

Note *next=start;
while (next) {
	next->Mill();
	next->Drill();
	next-next->Next();
	}

Switching from nil to Null Object means finding every place that checks for nil and replacing it with something like next->IsValid() or !next->IsNotANote(). And while Null Object is modern, the modern approach to refactoring strongly encourages incremental, testable changes, not a change that will require examining every line of code and making perhaps 10,000 individual edits, each of which must be correct, in a single leap.

C++ does provide a loophole that might help. NotANote could redefine ==, !=, !, and a bunch of casts, in order to tell white lies. For example, if we have written

if (next==nil) {….

We could arrange for NotANote to say “OK: you want to know if I’m the same object as nil. And I am! Really! Who’re you going to believe, me or your eyes? Trust me! I’m equal to nil!”

This could allow a nice, incremental refactoring. But it’s also a can of worms: this kind of chicanery with overloading has a bad reputation. It’s easy to overlook something, or to return a bool when the compiler was expecting an int — a distinction that matters only on alternate Tuesdays.

I’m betting that I’m not the only fellow looking at this refactoring question. Fowler in Refactoring and Kerievsky in Refactoring to Patterns offer sensible mechanics for a local refactoring where you can examine and replace every null test, which is what you’d typically do. But some of these classes provide ubiquitous abstractions for Tinderbox, and replacing all those tests in one fell swoop is not a great idea. Wisdom appreciated: Email me.

Over at the Tinderbox Forum, we’re exploring ways and means for importing Lotus Agenda files to Tinderbox.

It’s an interesting puzzle.

Almost all reaction to this week’s new Apple announcements has been about graphic design. It’s literally superficial. We’ve heard a lot about font choice and color palette.

That’s the surface, and the surface doesn’t matter to you and me. It matters to Apple, because some people buy phones the way they buy jewelry, and Apple needs to impress them, too. But you and I have work to do. What matters in an operating system is, simply, how it operates. What services does it provide to your applications? Are those services easy to use? How many advanced degrees do you need to get stuff done?

And, most significantly, when someone else does something wrong, how badly will your application be hit?

The big difference between iOS and Android revolves around different philosophies of law enforcement. Apple has stringent regulations and fences off lots of risky behavior. For example, your application must always be ready to respond to the operating system police immediately, whatever else it’s doing. You’ve got three seconds, top. You’re busy? Tough. The operating system police looks at you, you answer “Hello there, officer!” right quick, or it’s off to the pokey for you.

This is often a pain in the neck. It makes some things impossible, and it makes some things difficult. But it also means that you don’t need to worry that some other app is going to swerve into your lane. That other app might be crazy, or it might be misguided, or it might be some kid at the NSA: doesn’t matter. It’s not eating your time or your battery.

The big news might not even be the new operating systems. What’s going on with that Mac Pro. It’s got an intriguing physical design. It actually exists, which is interesting itself: Apple is effectively reentering what we used to call the workstation market. Oh, and it’s going to be built in the USA.

Why build in the US? Politics, perhaps, and PR. Maybe. But I don’t buy it. Apple’s built a supply chain in China. Apple’s incredibly good at managing it.

There are two reasons to move production to the US:

• Customization
• Faster model revision

When Timbuk2 makes computer bags in San Francisco, they’re doing it to your specifications and they’re sewing it here because it’s faster to make your bag here than to send the specs to China, explain what you wanted to a Chinese seamstress, and then ship the bag back. Even there, it’s a close call: when Eastgate ordered a rush batch of custom USB sticks last month, the sales organization was in Pennsylvania and their art desk was in New York, but the sticks shipped from Shenzen. And when Timbuk2 wants a bunch of identical bags, they run them up in China, too.

The story with the Mac Pro, I think, has got to be faster model revision: getting new chips into production with less delay. Customization makes less sense: potential Mac Pro users are accustomed to doing their own customization under the rubric of “expansion.”

Hmmm.

by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, eds.

Get the book.

A Readercon purchase, this anthology collects later work of noted Cyberpunk writers and a few post-cyberpunk notables.

Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” is an intriguing first cut at the central plot of The Windup Girl. Where The Windup Girl’s Jaidee finds himself in the midst of a procedural thriller, here we have a Run To Freedom, the backstory of Neuromancer or “The New Rose Hotel.” It’s well done, though the tone is exactly like The Windup Girl and Ship Breakers.

Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth” is solid Doctorow, describing a disaster that leaves pudgy, unkempt internet maintenance people in charge of everything. Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lilly?” is close in spirit: a mega-rich inventor who is otherwise callow and feckless is forced by circumstances to get out and do things. Both try to replace the heroic punks of early cyberpunk with credible techies, and both ultimately condescend to the unfortunate characters whose failing is that they know stuff and upon whom the writer must therefore inflict suitable torments. Elizabeth Bear’s enigmatic “Two Dreams On Trains” explores the street artist’s dilemma: you can be famous, everyone knows your work, but they’ll haul you off to jail nonetheless. It’s a fine story, but Banksy lived it already: do we need spaceships?

Mainly Positive Software News.

Tinderbox is a powerful but complex acquired taste -- a taste I have acquired.

by Michael Chabon

Get the book.

This novel made a great, and greatly under appreciated, movie, and I wanted to see whether the book is equally good.

It is.

The performances do a remarkable job of capturing Chabon’s voice, and the screenplay stays quite close to the novel, especially in the crucial opening chapters. The differences between novel and film are often subtle — changing a black jacket to white, adding an extra female character, cutting a transitional episode.

SummerFest is turning out to be a huge success. It’s only on for two weeks; don’t miss this chance to get some terrific artisanal software at the vineyard gate.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia left me wanting to blow stuff up. So I’ve been playing Borderlands, a now-classic first-person role-playing shooter.

As usual, the art is extraordinary. The writing is less good, but it’s actually been fairly clean so far.

While this is supposedly set on distant planet, the terrain is clearly the post-apocalyptic American South. Yes, there are some nods to Mad Max and therefore to the Outback but this isn’t Australia and these aren’t Australia’s problems: this is Ruined Dixie from the swamps of Louisiana to the mesquite and pinyon sands of New Mexico. It’s conveniently depopulated save for some Colorful Characters™ and a lot of bad guys who shoot first and talk Southern afterward. I suppose that a game about guns and ruins fits naturally into the South — see Joss Whedon’s Serenity — but it’s interesting how our imagination runs in this channel 149 years after Sherman.

I fancy some of my colleagues in the eLit world know this work. Suggestions for the best way to read it — remember, I don’t have infinite time! — are welcome.

New translation: Designing A Conference: Details, in Russian.

SummerFest: The 2013 Festival of Artisanal Software for Writers has kicked off.

Six great tools from six small teams of dedicated craftspeople. Your chance to buy from the vineyard door.

• Tinderbox
• Scrivener
• Nisus Writer Pro
• Bookends
• Movie Draft
• Aeon Timeline

Outstanding prices on outstanding software for a very limited time.

Wikipedia can’t get out of its own way. Crowds may be wise, but they are also clumsy.

Recently, Wikipedia’s User:Qworty was identified as the novelist Robert Clark Young. Young had spent at least eight years surreptitiously enhancing his reputation and exacting Wikipedia revenge on his rivals. A group at the Web site “Wikipediocracy” unmasked the deception.

Wikipedia’s response: the Wikipedia page for Wikipediocracy has been nominated for deletion because it’s insufficiently notable. The debate has already passed the 11,000 word barrier. And over on the Wikipediocracy page, people are seriously planning to plant stories in the press that are critical of Wikipediocracy, in order to justify a Criticism section on the page should it survive the deletion debate.

Of course, the optics of this are horrible: Wikipedians, embarrassed by a revelation, seem eager to punish their critics by deleting their page. The impulse is natural enough, I suppose. Other large organizations might flirt with a response like that for a minute or two until cooler heads (or professional advisors) pointed out how petty this would appear. In Wikipedia, everyone is free to contribute to making the project look mean and foolish.

Wikipedia was intended to be written collaboratively by the people who use it. Its underlying assumption is that, on average, people are fairly honest and fairly smart.

In some corners, that’s worked well. But these are precisely the corners where USENET worked: specialized and esoteric topics pursued by serious communities that already possess effective disciplinary mechanisms.

Wikipedia’s coverage of abstract algebra is reportedly fairly good. The article on Nero is extensive and detailed, though it relies far too heavily on Suetonius and makes little effort to weigh recent scholarship. But if you ask a random graduate student for a simple but technical opinion in their field, you’ll likely receive a sane and sensible answer. Who else is going to answer questions about Hermite Polynomials or Julio-Claudian policy?

When we move to more accessible areas, things become more difficult. We now know, for example, that Robert Clark Young systematically ensconced himself in Wikipedia to enhance his reputation and to diminish his rivals. He seized on a minor flap about his one novel in order to insert himself into national controversies. Writing on the Wikipedia page of the National Endowment for the Arts on 22 January 2005, he mentioned recent controversy:

However, in 1996, Congress slashed NEA funding to $99.5 million (see Chronology of Federal Support to the NEA) as a result of increasing pressure from right-wing groups such as the American Family Association, who have criticized the agency for funding artists as diverse as Robert Clark Young, Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

That’s a diverse list indeed: it contains two famous photographers and a very obscure novelist. It was almost certainly inserted by that novelist, and it stayed in in the lede for the NEA’s article for more than eight years. During that time, the author became User:Qworty, a dedicated and prolific wiki-lawyer, editing thousands of pages and consigning many more to the dustheap of deletion.

Qworty was effective because he was dedicated. He had lots of time on his hands and lots of scores to settle. Eventually, almost by accident, he was caught and banned.

Wikipedia ties itself into hoops in order to keep axe-grinders like Qworty at bay. Everything has to be attached to a Reliable Source, and that source must almost always be tied to print. That something is true is no defense, and if something is false but supported by a “reliable source” it can be incredibly hard to correct. A byzantine array of rules and review boards and disciplinarians tries to manage all this, but it’s never been very effective and is perpetually exposed to the risk that the cranks and Pajamas will capture the apparatus.

A community that tries to govern itself through consensus must have a mechanism for addressing those who, through error or stubbornness, cannot or will not accept any consensus. The Wikipedia of myth has Jimmy Wales, but Jimmy hasn’t scaled and Wikipedia has nothing beyond the vague hope that people of good will can outsmart the fools. Unfortunately, in the Qworty affair and many parallel situations, one side of the argument employs zealous ideologues who have years of experience manipulating wiki-law. The other side may be right, but in the new Wiki way, that’s beside the point. The institutional structures favor zealotry over good will and advantage unemployed cranks (who have all the time in the world) over sensible people (who have other things to do).

We can wreck the long tail in precisely this way; this is precisely the scenario for destroying the Web that I identified in my 2011 Web Science paper. Drive lots of traffic to wikipedia, and let a million weblogs wither. Then, let a scandal (or chance) dent Wikipedia and all that’s left are the old broadcast networks and the cable companies and the spammers and the Government of Syria.

Indeed, this is one reason Facebook has been out-competing the open Web: for all its flaws, Facebook does have a good mechanism for letting you check up on your nieces and nephews without having the trolls and spammers and Pajamas in your face. Until Google and Bing turn down the traffic to Wikipedia, Wikipedia is unlikely to change. If we wait for a major scandal to occasion this, the damage to Wikipedia may be irrecoverable.While we wait, the damage to the Real Web continues daily.

Wikipedia’s problems are serious. Some of them are subtle. Some are simply caused by a jury-rigged system of governance, but others are deeply embedded in the Wiki Way and the ideology of crowdsourcing. Let’s look at how hard things can become.

Categories are a good idea that lie at the heart of efforts to build a semantic Web. They’re also very helpful for finding stuff, and finding stuff is one of the core problems of building a reference work that works. It’s easy to imagine that faulty categories in Wikipedia, like the notorious Filipacchi mess in which writers being systematically deleted from “American novelists” and relegated to “American women novelists,” are the result of idiots who weren’t paying attention.

But it’s harder than that. Let’s take an example that has caused endless grief, that appears to be intractable, and yet must be faced somehow.

Jew tagging. It’s not unreasonable to mention religion in some biographies. This is obviously true of notable religious leaders and philosophers and for people who are notable because of their religious beliefs. I think it’s also clear for people whose public role was shaped by their religious affinity. Hank Greenberg, Hall of Fame first baseman for the Tigers, was a Jew and that was important to understanding his position in American life. And sometimes it’s simply interesting and fun to know that Cary Grant, Theda Bara, Winona Ryder, Edward G.Robinson and Lauren Bacall were or are Jewish.

Perhaps as a result of this, some Wikipedia editors systematically seek out every mention of a person who might be Jewish in order to mark them as Jews. This is extremely creepy.

Windows into mens’ souls. If we are going to label all the Jews, one presumes we will also want to label adherents to other religions. But some religions require belief; how can we know what someone once believed? We’re left to rely on the testimony of “reliable published sources,” but often these sources have no idea, either.

Dirty Data. A misfiled page is a lost page; it’s important to classify correctly. So, all we need to do is to decide who is and isn’t a Jew, a question that has perplexed wise people for millennia. Is the Pope Polish? Is Aix-la-Chapelle French? Is Kipling a 20th-century author? Is Pluto a planet? Borges nailed this one: your categories are bound to be arbitrary and incomplete, and you still won’t know where things belong.

Cui Bono? If we’re building indexes and taxonomies to provide access to knowledge — and we should — we need to make lists . Making a comprehensive list of Jews raises awful echoes. So should we skip the Jews? That raises echoes, too. Should we stop categorizing religions? Then we lose information we need to understand Hank Greenberg and that’s fun to know about Cary Grant, and we have the same sort of headache when we use race, or ethnicity, or language, or nationality.

The crazies. If you watch a page about any famous Jewish person — living, dead, or even a fictitious character — you’ll see the crazies from time to time.

Seventeen-year-old James Gatz, hailing from rural San Diego, California, where he was born to a poor Jew farming family in 1890, despises the limitations of poverty so much he drops out of Stripclub school.

Some editors, for example, try to change the first sentence of every possible Democratic politician to read, “____ is a Jewish-American politician”. The crazies often get reverted quickly, though in aggregate this takes an enormous amount of work and distorts the entire Wikipedia administrative process. But putting Rahm Emanuel and George Soros on your watch list for a few months is bound to alarm you about resurgent anti-Semitism.

I suspect that some of the people most interested in tagging all the Jews in Wikipedia dream of a time when those lists might be of service to the police. Other might be interested in establishing who Israel can exclude, or keeping their rivals outside the pale. Some simply want to recruit for their team. It’s a sordid mess.

The Pajamas. Then, there are people with axes to grind, people seeking an edge. Did someone’s parents have a connection to the Irgun? Then they’re “the son of terrorists”. Did someone grow up in occupied Europe? Then they’re “collaborators”. Did someone emigrate from a disputed territory – someplace in the Balkans, for example? Be prepared for endless turf wars between ethnic factions of whom you’ve never heard. Did someone once allude in print to their silly schoolboy prank? Expect a full section of encyclopedic coverage.

Some of this is silliness, but some is consequential. Just walk into the wikipedia bar and start a nice conversation about whether Turkey is European. Remember to duck.

The pajamas are worse than the crazies. Many are dedicated: they have lots of time and they have cause and they know their right-wing cause is true. Plenty, like the just-banned Qworty, have years of experience gaming the administrative system. One Qworty can, over time, plant bad categories or remove good categories from hundreds of papers. Many of the Pajamas are terribly eager to justify things like Creation Science, things about which they care deeply and which most people find idiotic distractions. So, bit by bit, the tinfoil hats keep planting cruft throughout Wikipedia. And one by one, sensible editors stop trying.

Crowds make things worse. Lots of conventional taxonomies — from natural languages to library classification schemes — use conventions that seem absurd. In Japanese, for example, I understand that different words are used to count different kinds of things. But you count rabbits in the same way as sparrows; rabbits are counted like birds.

The Dewey Decimal System shelves books geographically, allocating space according to the 19th century canon. This causes little harm because we know it’s just a convention. Ancient Greek Literature gets 880-888 (and modern Greek gets 889), while all of East and Southeast Asia for all of time gets crammed together in 895. It’s silly, but we know it’s just a convention that some guy cooked up one afternoon and just as meaningless as “rabbits are birds.”

But if you start to believe the wisdom of crowds, it’s not a convention any more. And if you’re confident that the sensible people will eventually bring good sense and taste to the table, I’ll remind you again of that little unpleasantness we had during the short 20th century. Crowds can be spectacularly unwise; the great state of Wisconsin, home of Progressivism and land of La Follette, sent us Joe McCarthy.

Wikipedia classifications don’t evolve. A combination of primitive tools, uneducated classifiers, and plentiful ideologues means that it’s very hard to change schemes and, when a change (like “American women novelists”) doesn’t work, it’s very hard to undo.

It takes too long. The world has idiots, ideologues, tinfoil hats and pajamas aplenty. Each of them is eager to plant their harpoon wherever they can. Try to stop them, and you’ll spend all your time at AN/I and ArbCom and Lord Knows Where trying to tell it to the judge. It can take years to chase away even the most egregious offenders, and the true believers can, once banned, be back the next day with a fresh account from a new ISP. Sure, if they’re insane they’ll grind the same axe and be caught, but any intelligent troll will simply find a new harpoon.

The appetite of the tinfoil hats and the crazies to indulge in anti-Semitic claptrap is alarming. Wikipedia’s tolerance for talented trolls can be great, especially if the trolls know how to frame their case.

There’s plenty of good in Wikipedia. But you can’t trust it – not without checking. The good is constantly under attack, and the amount of work required simply to avoid letting an article deteriorate increases with the interest in that article. There are lots of routes to enforce policies, but they all consume time and they all are slanted heavily in favor of practiced hands with plenty of time, which is to say that the pajamas and the crazies are likely to prevail as long as they keep their heads. The ones who don’t are often so consumed with rage over esoterica (the use of the digamma is one fellow’s bête noire) that they’re easily smoked out. Like Qworty, a sane troll should be able to persist for years.

So we’re not going to get a useful classification system from Wikipedia. Not even for access to the Wiki, but certainly not for the semantic Web.

More urgently, the survival of the Open Web might depend on convincing Google and Bing to consider deweighting wikipedia pages in some circumstances. I’d suggest looking at the edit history; if a page has lots of recent edits, put it in the penalty box and demote its page rank until things calm down. That would limit the incentive for the crazies and the pajamas, and perhaps help cut down the funding I expect they receive from the right-wing noise machine.

Wikipedia is always about to collapse. Over the years, it’s shown remarkable resilience and has proved far more useful than many observers expected. This fortunate era may now be over.

First, the Filipacchi mess ends any real hope that Wikipedia could play a meaningful role in formalization of the semantic Web. Wikipedians love to make lists and categories, and this has long been the last best hope for people who believe in folksonomy and the wisdom of crowds. But giant categories are unwieldy, and “American authors” is a very large category: why not split it into a deeper taxonomy? “I know,” some bright bunny said, “let’s split out all the female authors! Then we’ll have more compact categories!”

Right.

But if you can’t get this right, you can’t get any of your folksonomy right. You just can’t expect a sound taxonomy to emerge magically from a site that’s increasingly dominated by cranks. After this, no one is ever again going to simply trust Wikipedia taxonomies as “good enough.”

Amanda Filipacchi pointed out the problem with this idiotic taxonomy in the New York Times. Wikipedians responded, as wikipedians will, by fouling up her own Wikipedia page.

One expert at using “Wikipedia policy” to throw out any hint of praise for the author and to add in any rumor of controversy or derision is a former Wikipedian named “Qworty,” who soon was making lots of deletions at Filipacchi’s page. His attentions went out to the author’s father, and the firm the father manages.

The fact is that this author has had four articles about her on Wikipedia for years, and all four of them have been primarily WP:PROMO WP:PEACOCK WP:ADVERT. Where are the admins who are eager to clean that up? Then she has the gall to complain about her articles, when Wikipedia has been providing free advertising for her for years, in violation of Wikipedia policies. She doesn't understand how Wikipedia works. But like a lot of people who've tried to use Wikipedia to promote themselves over the years, she is learning fast. Qworty (talk)

Unfortunately for Wikipedia, it turns out that Qworty is actually Robert Clark Young, a writer who has been wiki-warring for years — with over 6000 article-space edits — to wreak revenge on literary rivals. Young was identified when, after initially denying that he was Qworty to Salon writer Andrew Leonard , he started typing in the wrong chat window and accidentally sent revealing information to the journalist.

So, we now know one specific editor who has been abusing hundreds of Wikipedia articles for years to get revenge for old slights at workshops and writers’ conferences. He was a master of using wikipedia policy to get his way. Ultimately, the accident of his exposure got him banned. But even that was a close thing: here are some comments from that final discussion:

Oppose block and site-ban This is purely a punitive measure as Brad already left a comment saying Qworty would be on an indefinite BLP restriction if he continues editing, and Qworty has indicated that he would not.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 18:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Oppose siteban. These are serious allegations, and Qworty's admitted that they're true, but why can't he edit other things instead? I'd say the best course of action is a ban from BLP editing with a guaranteed indef block for the first ban violation, but we should unblock him at the same time as we impose the BLP ban and the indef guarantee. Nyttend (talk) 21:18, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Tentatively oppose as punitive. I really don't wanna see someone wiki-lynched out of mere spite, no matter how well-placed that spite may be. I don't know much about Qworty's editing history here (I've seen his name tons of times, but never formed anything of an opinion), so if someone can present evidence of abuse in areas other than biographies, I'd consider supporting. But the existing BLPBAN, perhaps along with a formal one-account limitation, enforced by periodic CheckUsers, seems sufficient at the moment. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 03:19, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Meanwhile, there are thousands and thousands of damaged articles to review. If there’s any formal or informal plan to do this, I haven’t been able to find it. Is anyone responsible for the job? Who knows?

While Qworty has been banned, Wikipedia is filled with others like him and, for that matter, Robert Clark Young could change ISPs and start editing again tomorrow.

The number of active Wikipedia editors has been in decline for years. Many of the most active editors, like Qworty, work chiefly by deleting details, links, and entire pages. It can be fun, I suppose, to wipe your enemy’s page off Wikipedia with the judgment that they’re not notable enough to deserve a wikipedia page. But Aaron’s study showed that most of the intellectual work of Wikipedia is done not by the wikilawyer crowd but by specialized contributors, and I suspect those contributors are getting rarer, younger, and worse.

Studies of Wikipedia are declining, too. It looks like there wasn’t a single wiki paper at Hypertext ’13. There was hardly anything at Web Science. And it seems that Web Scientists seldom look at Wikipedia; here’s how the goals of Web Science are defined there:

Web science has a multidisciplinary base.[2] Being the largest human information construct in history, the Web can be seen as the brain of the man kinds. One can draw an analogy between Web Science and Technology (WebST) and Brain Science and Engineering (BSC) as they both tackle complex network structures at different levels of abstraction and deal with data/information/knowledge flows internally as well as in conjunction with the surroundings.

That’s been unchanged for two months.

Wikipedia has pretty much turned its back to the Web. Links to the Web from Wikipedia are relegated to footnotes, and even these are frequently wikilawyered out of the encyclopedia. Links within Wikipedia are encouraged (traffic! profit!) but used unimaginatively for random annotation. Landow’s 1987 paper on the rhetoric of arrival and departure would be revolutionary among wikipedians. I’ve been pointing for years to the fundamental rhetorical problem of wikis — that making the link target and the link label the same, as Ward’s Wiki did, moves all links to nouns and noun phrases with disastrous impact on the link structure. Wikipedia no longer uses WikiLinks, unfortunately, but almost every link remains anchored to a noun and almost no editors use links intelligently or creatively.

They’re too busy being dragged to AN/I and AN/3 and dozens of other Wikipedia noticeboards over interminably wrangles on “Wikipedia policy” brought by the legions of Qworty.

I think Wikipedia’s about over. To say, “some of this book’s footnotes are just links to Wikipedia articles” is universally understood to be withering. We don’t edit Wikipedia anymore. We don’t consult it for things that matter. It’s merely a good resource for finding odd facts no one cares much about. What was the name of Alexis Denisof’s character on Buffy? Was Pride and Prejudice 1812 or 1813? Is Jimmy Wales still paying attention?

by Dorothy L. Sayers

Get the book.

The best of Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries and among the best mysteries of all time.

The Oxford of Gaudy Night is a wonderful wish-fulfillment fantasy where all smart people have read one’s books, have discussed them with their friends, and have intelligent questions about them at their fingertips.

The Aaron Swartz page of Wikipedia is heating up again, alas.

One guy is determined that Wikipedia calls this an alleged suicide. Because who knows? Besides, all the secondary sources refer to primary sources, and we’re supposed to depend on secondary sources, so Wikipedia has to refer to the event as contingent or suspected.

Hint: the flaws of induction are not our fault. The sun also rises.

Another editor is determined about something. Very determined! But nobody can figure out what he or she is getting at. (He’s got two accounts, one of which must be addressed as “he” and the other as “she,” and no, I don’t know what that’s about either. Whoever they are, they seem to have great affection for the MIT Crime Club and they seem to detest Harvard, but even that’s hard to know for sure.)

This recalls the old mishaps at Dave Winer’s page. That page was contested for years over a host of issues and by a bunch of editors. But it turns out the whole controversy arose from a single editor, someone Winer had slighted once many years ago. That editor and his sock puppets kept the thing in turmoil for ages. When he was ultimately banned, everything immediately settled down.

Consensus rule requires good will and discipline. You can’t do without either. Wikipedia is a magnet for cranks and crackpots and the pajamas crowd.

When Wikipedia pages stay far from controversy, they can be useful. But I don’t see how you can keep any page safe from the crackpots forever while maintaining the Wiki Way.

Let’s face it: wikis are for coherent communities with shared values and possessing some mechanism, explicit or implicit, to sanction bad behavior. Wikipedia has tried to evolve its own community through Wikisym and WikiFest and its own sanctions through its disciplinary process, but neither is entire convincing and both require a huge expenditure of effort in which smart and talented people spend exorbitant amounts of time policing petulant children.

In a letter to the NY Times, Elizabeth Daniel asks how we can expect people to cook.

Try getting home at 6 or 7 with children weary from after school, starting your fresh-cooked dinner and supervising homework at the same time. By the way, when did you buy those veggies and that salmon?

I don’t have children and I don’t supervise homework. But still: I don’t see the problem.

I’ve got a 40-minute commute. That’s a nuisance, but it can’t be helped. On a typical day, I’ll knock off work around 7. I stop off at the grocery on the way home, and often I’ll grab a hunk of salmon and a lettuce or a handful of asparagus. That takes ten, fifteen minutes. So, I’m home sometime after eight. I can do something easy with the salmon in half an hour, including a fifteen minute marinade. Then grill it, or maybe coat it in thyme and sesame seeds and sear it, drizzle some balsamic on top. Hell, go wild and try a Hollandaise or a sauce Gribiche; it’ll take five minutes and if it doesn’t work the first time, you didn’t need it. Set the table, open a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, light a candle, you’re good to go.

OK: most nights I skip the candle.

But, seriously, what’s the big deal? Sure, some dishes take a lot of work, but plenty of them are fast and you don’t need to make coulibac for the kids. That’s why we sauté — to make things jump. (“Sauté” is French for “hop to it!”)

In the NY Times, Ellen Ullman recalls her youth.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men.

Grace Hopper wore shoulder boards rather than shoulder pads, as naval officers will. While Ullman was working at her first programming job, the president of the ACM was Jean Sammet. Adele Goldberg was about to be the top name on the most important and influential computer science book of the decade, Smalltalk-80. Irene Greif was working on shared calendars, Janet Walker was working on LISP machines. There had always been some women in computing and there had never been a professional effort to systematically exclude women, as there had been in medicine and journalism. I don’t suppose anyone thought twice about sending Quinn Norton to cover Anonymous, but I can remember the storm over Lisa Olsen’s assignment to the Patriots. And I still raise an eyebrow whenever I turn to the Yankees broadcast and hear Suzyn Waldman.

Things today are not right. They haven’t improved as quickly as we wanted or expected. But I’m not sure it helps to render invisible the generations of women who had already made vital contributions to programming.

Michael Ruhlman loses his temper: America Has A Serious Eating Disorder.

The disorder, broadly speaking, is that we use food as the occasion of guilt. We worry about food. We shouldn’t. Worry about your friends and your family and the girl who was expelled for fooling around with chemistry. Don’t worry about your food.

Specifically, our eating disorder is that some of us get stuck in a rut when we don’t need to. Salt might be good for you or bad for you, but it’s pretty clear that a varied diet is a good thing. Don’t eat only french fries, and don’t eat only lettuce. Don’t have steak and potatoes every night. Don’t live on rice and beans. Eat different food, not all of it “healthy.” You’ll last longer.

For most of history, almost no one had a choice. Orwell visited Wigan Pier in 1937, where he saw plenty of little kids who are alive and well today. But those kids couldn’t vary their diet much because nobody could. If you were prosperous, you might have meat once a week for Sunday dinner. If not, you might have meat for Christmas. Lots of people still have too few choices. But if you can choose, mix it up.

And don’t forget the pie: stress cannot exist in the presence of pie.

Meanwhile, Tony Maws loses his temper too over some kids from Culinary Institute of America who dropped into Craigie on Main during Spring break and were too busy dissecting the food to have a good time.

In an article incredible even for Yahoo’s low standards, Yahoo urges parents to discourage their children from the following majors, which offer relatively poor employment prospects:

• Architecture
• Fine Arts
• Philosophy and Religious Studies
• Anthropology and Archaeology
• Film, Video, and Photographic Arts

Instead, Yahoo recommends:

• Accounting
• Elementary Education
• Finance
• Business Administration and Management
• Health Care Administration

When your child is old, do you really think they’ll be happy that they studied Health Care Administration when they had dreamed of building wonderful buildings or studying lost civilizations?

Each of the five recommended majors has a stock photo picture of a happy graduate. The accountant, teacher, finance major, and health care admin are all women. The young manager is not.

Whatever Danielle Bundell was paid to write this, it wasn’t enough. (She has a fresh degree in journalism, not accounting.)