Inviting readers to mercilessly edit Wikipedia
Wikipedia reader are being asked to edit as part of a banner campaign — for the first time since perhaps 2003.
This is being done as part of the Thank You message we send out at the end of a campaign – something we can do quite early this year thanks to a successful fundraiser.
I’ve been pushing for something like this for a couple of years – I think it’s the most important thing we can do to refresh our communities of editors and change the sense readers have of what is and isn’t welcome. I want to see us do this on every project, all throughout the year (eventually combined with the new visual editor, of course; which is truly beautiful).
What do you think?
Here’s what the draft message looks like; suggestions for better wording or other variations are welcome.
Dear Wikipedia Readers: Thank You! Overwhelming support from Wikipedia users let us end our annual fund drive early. Your donations pay for the tools, infrastructure and programs that empower thousands of editors. We would like to introduce you to some of the dedicated volunteers who you empower when you donate. It is our hope that after you read or hear a few of their stories, you’ll want to join them in sharing your knowledge with the world by editing Wikipedia.
You can edit Wikipedia!
- Create articles. After signing up, you’ll be able to help Wikipedia grow by starting new encyclopedia articles.
- Add photos and video. Register an account and you can upload your freely licensed images
- and other media.
- Become a part of the Wikipedia community. Logging in means all your contributions are attributed to your username, helping you connect with other Wikipedia contributors.
Get started
Architecturale: Chile’s stunning exhibit (Venice Biennale)
The Chilean national architectural exhibit, showcasing the country’s work at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Designed by my brother:
Wikipedia gets visual editor in time for Christmas
One small step for an editor…
Huge props to the team working on this and the underlying parsoid. It’s still in Alpha, so it’s only on the English Wikipedia this week. And you have to turn it on via user prefs; and it wants good feedback, but it makes the old heart-cockles sing.
New research ventures by Curiositate aim to change the world
I’ve been talking to my dear friend Elan recently, who has been accumulating research insights — often brief incisive hacks bridging a gap or circumventing a self-imposed obstacle to some cutting-edge technique — related to renewable energy, computation, and human biology.
This is the sort of cross-disciplinary thought we should all spend more time pursuing; and that more polymaths should be encouraged to explore. “curiositate research” seems like a suitably tongue-in-cheek name for their team; I hope to see great things from them soon.
Three Copyright Myths and Where to Start to Fix it – a policy brief
Tuesday November 20th 2012, 5:41 pm
Filed under:
citation needed,
Glory, glory, glory,
international,
meta,
metrics,
Not so popular,
Rogue content editor,
wikipediaA lovely short policy brief on designing a better copyright regime was published on Friday – before being quickly taken offline again. I’ve reposted it here with light cleanup of its section headings.
If you care at all about copyright and its quirks, this is short and worth reading in full.
Every mortal thing now flame, dwell, be, tell, tumble, sing: For this I came
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for this I came.
—GMH, SJ ↬ Cowbird
Converse with the greats by trying their blindfolds on…
To converse with the greats
by trying their blindfolds on;
to correspond with books
by rewriting them;
to edit holy edicts,
and at the midnight hour
to talk with the clock by tapping a wall
in the solitary confinement of the universe.
Solving problem-sets: Improving our focus on new knowledge at scale
Realization: In academia, science has grad students to do anything known to be important but not yet automated / solved. A common goal once these are identified is automating / solving. Wikipedians have done the first part, but don’t clearly have an analogy to the second as a goal.
Software design (for wikis) has focused on making reading better or more accessible, or helping making manual work less arduous; but not primarily on identifying automatic classes of work and solving them / knocking them off. That’s been limited to bot developers and ad-hoc tools built on the toolserver. (If any tools in the wikiverse do this, they are often by Magnus, and regularly get rate limited by the limitations of default toolserver allocations when they get popular.)
Thought: I suspect that is really the primary work moving the project forward. We need to recognize that and start framing and articulating goals, tools, and infrastructure accordingly.
<update from the AI era: yes, with bells on!>
XOXO Rocked! Honoring togetherness as it transforms the world
This sounded amazing when the idea was floated months ago. And by all accounts that sound catalyzed all who felt similarly to come make the sort of ambiently generative meeting that every physical gathering aspires to be. A few recaps:
5¢ense / Decodex: Decoding Serafini from his own home town
This rambling illustrated reflection on Serafini, with translations of some of the writings in the Decodex and posted from across the street from Luigi’s house, is a perfect example of why I love 5¢ense. (Throw in some of the monomania of Kane X. Faucher and you’d have a dangerous decoding machine for all of mod society.)
Burning glory reels
Extraordinary shots of Black Rock City (w/ a Cinestar 8)
See also: A daytime tour of the city, methodical rather than artistic (w/ a homemade Ozone plane + GoPro + DragonLink)
