I used to read encyclopedias when I was in school, now I read Wikipedia.
Today I learned that L.L. Bean was named Leon Leonwood Bean, so now I know that's why he went by his initials.
HEB is named for Howard E. Butt. I bet the E stands for something really awful.
I found out you could store the text files from Wikipedia in a fairly small space, a few tens of gigs IIRC, a few months ago. I've been meaning to get around to it, for the upcoming end of civilization, since.
Oh I didn't finish the thought I had about archiving-- other online systems that were rich the same way wikipedia is (though smaller since older) have not been archived effectively at all-- I'm thinking here of minitel and internet precursors like Aol, both of were centralized.
I don't know the AOL story-- but I believe that for both google reader and yahoo groups the companies that own the servers didn't support export; don't know about meaningful internal archiving; not public if there is any.
Aside from willingness and technical limitations, there are privacy concerns - I think Minitel had a substantial effect on the isolation level of gay people in France.
One of my favorite Wikipedia articles is about Thorgil Sprakling. I remember looking at it a few years ago and it was like 2 sentences, that Thorgil Sprakling was a Danish king, a thousand years ago, who may not have existed, and according to Saxo Grammaticus he was the son of a bear. And with the usual Wikipedia footnotes that another source is needed for this claim.
I laughed and thought "I appreciate the optimism, but we aren't getting any more information about Thorgil Sprakling. Saxo Grammaticus is as good as it's going to get. And honestly if Saxo Grammaticus claims he's the son of a bear, that's more of a fact about Saxo Grammaticus than it is a fact about Thorgil Sprakling, if you know what I mean."
Come the year 2020, and now the page has references to him being the son of a bear from John of Worcester, AND indirectly from John of Brompton's genealogy of Earl Siward of Northumbria, AND from the Gesta Antecessorum Comitis Waldevi. And some context from where this claim might have come from, from historians both 18th century and contemporary.
Amazing!
OT slightly. Does anyone know of the status of public benefit corporations in the US? Does it vary much by state? I was looking at the Wikipedia page for public benefit corporations while puzzling over this:
It looks to be an offshoot of the non-profit LEED, which promotes sustainable buildings. But WELL claims to be a 'public benefit corporation'. Where, I have no idea: they don't seem to say. They do want everyone's money, though.
Library of congress is archiving the tweets of some number of accounts, but of course to do anything with the archive means reimplementing either twitter's API for following threads etc., or trying to hack one together for the archived subset of data. Here's the most recent LOC statement, no mention of access support (with a github sample of software that can index a date-limited subset for example, not a crazy amount of work to do and no maintenance burden) The problem's not that bad with a frozen dataset and sufficient compute resources.
I guess they're figuring that future interested spelunkers will have plenty of resources to just index the whole thing meaningfully without substantial technical effort. Or they got a mandate to store something with no resources for analysis, a common interaction organizations.
Wikipedia is human civilization's single greatest accomplishment. I will die on this hill.
And now the date of our last responses to their fundraising pleas. 2019 for me.
Here's one fun thing I just found on wikipedia:
"The Constitution of Bavaria guarantees everyone "the enjoyment of natural beauty and recreation in the outdoors, in particular the access to forests and mountain meadows, the use of waterways and lakes and the appropriation of wild fruits".[27] The right is nicknamed Schwammerlparagraph (mushroom clause). The article also obliges "every person to treat nature and the landscape with care". "The state and the municipalities shall be entitled and obliged to maintain free access to mountains, lakes, rivers and other beautiful sceneries and to create free access by restricting property rights and to create hiking trails and recreational parks"."
My Wikipedia wish (which I will never do myself, so free idea for all of you!) is a list of mistresses associated with various kings. I mean sure, the articles have wives automatically listed but some of those mistresses were super important! Often more important than the wives to be honest.
Anyway, the mistresses' sites link to the Kong's but not vice versa. Needs to be changed.
I also miss looking up the Wikipedia article on bobby pins and seeing they were invented by Robert Pin. That article should also be longer. Did Egyptians use bobby pins or were they straight? The proper use of them (bumpy side down). Etc. or maybe there is nothing more - edit - checked it out - it's a much longer and more helpful article article now!
Kings dammit!! Autocorrect really thinks I'm writing about the giant ape.
Years ago, for reasons I can't recall, I ended up on the wikipedia page for Moghul era architecture. Looking at the edit history, it seemed to have been the subject of an edit war that had been going on for years (Mulsim vs Hindu nationalist factions, although actually I think it was just the same 2 guys).
There's probably more than a dozen Hindu nationalists.
I don't know for sure that they were guys, but given that we're talking about a years long obsessive wikipedia edit war, it seems like a safe guess.
I love the graphic tables of band members for some bands that have been around for a long time with many members. They're abstract art. This one for The Fall is a personal fave
Anyway, the mistresses' sites link to the Kong's but not vice versa. Needs to be changed.
Should be automatable with a few hours work given a king list and also a way to recognize which pages about women that link in but not out are mistresses
if you're interested maybe email? I can generate candidate sets of pages to link out, but I suspect that tweaking "is this lady a mistress" is going to need human eyes to look at result sets in order to get it right. Also, there may be a way to stuff such links in a block nobody looks at on the king page, but to make it prominent, a sentence (from autogenerated draft) has to be put in the page somewhere, probably by a person.
12: I give pretty often, most recent this August. But I still get all the fundraising stuff because I don't donate from my work computer.
9: Seems to be a Delaware entity, though HQed in New York. Some legal background here.
As y'all know, someone created a wikipedia page for me, along with pages for a bunch of other lawyers. It had some modest edits, no vandalism, but then a couple years in (maybe less?) some self-appointed nerd decided that I actually wasn't famous enough to rate having an entry. Which was true, although not all the reasons offered in support of the position were. There was discussion, and the page got deleted, but it lives on in (a) the archives and (b) at least one mirror site that copies wikipedia pages.
11 is correct, and I expect my obituary to reference the fact that I briefly had an entry.
25.1 That's one of my biggest pet peeves about Wikipedia. I've often gone to look up some person, or a bar or venue in NYC back in the 60s or something that I'd read about in a book and find nothing, or a reference in the talk pages that the article was deleted for not being notable. It is notable motherfuckers, I've heard of it and I'm looking it up! What purpose does this serve?
The notability of a colleague with whom I have worked on a number of things from 1993 to the present -- including notable matters -- was not questioned, so I have a couple of mentions even without my own page.
20: The Brix era is really much briefer against the whole than I tend to think.
Charlie's right about 27 for all of the edits you guys are looking at.
Separately, the bar and maybe club owners of Miami Beach would very much like to include their significant establishments on Wikipedia, and there are cut-rate PR people who would love to write and enhance a page for your personal professional image for a small monthly fee. Blocking the second kind of activity while allowing reasonable low-traffic pages is tough to do automatically, so minor control freaks thrive.
Actually related to the kid who wrote all the fake Scots pages IMO; it's important to have somebody check that pages pass a sniff test, but having that in place leads to 27.
The peculiar English in this Environment of Hong Kong article gave rise to a household catchphrase about "becoming affable to" various things we want.
If you become affable to for more than four hours, see your doctor.
14. The problem with this is that only a small proportion of mistresses are known by name. Take somebody like Henry I of England, who had 22 illegitimate kids. Some of the women involved are reasonably famous, but there must have been a lot of milkmaids.
Separately, the bar and maybe club owners of Miami Beach would very much like to include their significant establishments on Wikipedia, and there are cut-rate PR people who would love to write and enhance a page for your personal professional image for a small monthly fee.
Because it works.
Another experiment showing how influential Wikipedia is on the real world: Adding two paragraphs of text & nice pictures to randomly selected articles about small European cities led to an over 9% increase in hotel stays; the edit is worth $190k per year!
...
As any academic will tell you, influencing the direction of science through research is hard... so here is an easier path. One quality Wikipedia article written by chemistry experts influenced the content of 250 published peer-reviewed academic papers!
The notability requirement seems weird. Just include it!
Wasn't I in there for a while because purportedly there was a hoax named after me (which claim was, itself, a hoax)? I honestly can't remember where this bit of trivia was hosted, but I thought it was wikipedia.
It appears to be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_confidence_tricks?oldformat=true#The_Ogged
I often say that YouTube contains the sum total of human knowledge, but I guess it's more accurate to say that between wikipedia and youtube, we're as close as we're going to get. You won't get every ancient Danish king on youtube, and you won't get how to change the taillight on a '97 Accord on wikipedia.
Of course, there's a definable meaning of "completely novel"
33: Sure but even the known ones aren't linked. Checking Louis XIV, I see his illegitimate kids are linked but searching his page for "mistress" turns up nothing. Nor does "maîtress", some of whom were the official Maîtresse-en-titre. I assume the kids came out of his head fully formed.
21: I am extremely tempted. I would love to be the person that puts the mistresses back where they belong. I probably don't have the time or thick skin needed for editing Wikipedia though. I'd do the editing to make sure all the links are right (oh the royal rabbit holes I've already been down) but not the adding to Wikipedia part of anyone else is interested.
21: And I didn't even think of the ability to automate! That would be such a great place to start.
42. I bet if you created a category page called Royal Mistresses and seeded it with a few obvious people like Françoise d'Aubigné and Nest ferch Rhys with suitable links, you'd find people filling a lot of it in for you. Mostly with stubs, but then you could research the entries and fill them out.
Speaking of mistresses, our mayor is embroiled in a bizarre sex scandal that just keeps getting weirder.
My name can be found on Wikipedia if you know exactly where to click, but I don't rate an entry.
My name can be found on Wikipedia too. It's referring to somebody else and he doesn't rate his own entry either.
We should start a Wikipedia page of people who's names can be found on Wikipedia but don't rate an entry.
How did she put a name picture of the mayor on social media? I thought they had automated penis-detecting bots.
Maybe it was an automated-penis detecting bots.
The picture is apparently a high-angle rear shot. So presumably no visible penis.
I guess it doesn't count as revenge porn if the revengee is a politician.
26: Wikipedia editors, let me tell you who's notable.
Biden is running ads attacking Trump for threatening Social Security. That seems new.
45: I read the beginning, and I thought "this is boring". But then, as things involving news anchors so often do, it escalated quickly.
It was probably building for months.
His problem is he took only 72 hours to apologize to his family. Something like that takes at least 96 hours.
His Wikipedia page mentions nothing of this. (I am all about the topic of the thread.)
I'm sure his haters will be all over that soon enough. They cheered for like two minutes when his resignation was announced.
It can't be easy to take a good picture of your own butt from a high angle.
The nice thing about his last name is that you have to something really much more noticeable to become the first google hit for "Berkowitz infamy."
It is notable motherfuckers, I've heard of it and I'm looking it up! What purpose does this serve?
I find this SO exasperating. So, so many times I've gone to look up a children's or YA author, or notable activist, and there isn't an article. Or it's a tiny stub and flagged for deletion. Sometimes I try to help, but I get bogged down in how cumbersome Wikipedia still feels to edit (I know it's not supposed to be, but it feels that way to a newbie) and then people delete my work anyway.
I am firmly convinced that in addition to the true problem that lw outlines in 30, the fundamental problem in 27 would be more accurately characterized as "white English-speaking male nerd power." Because men are ALWAYS telling me how un-notable a woman is. Just because you didn't read her books doesn't mean no one else did!
In conclusion, I am sad and angry about the Anchorage mayor, for reasons noted in the other thread.
There's so child involved so no possibility for using "Son of Same" as a photo caption.
A weird advantage of the relatively new "AMS Fellows" program is that it made it much easier to make wikipedia pages for mathematicians, because being a Fellow of the AMS makes you notable. Whereas before you had to actually know something about mathematicians reputation, and that's not something you can use in arguments on Wikipedia.
white English-speaking male nerd
It's even narrower than that, I'm sure.
6: You can get canned, offline Wikipedia as a product: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile&hl=en_GB&gl=US
I'm a very minor English writer, but somebody set up a Wikipedia entry for me a while back: barebones of my life, list of my novels. One day I checked it to see if anybody had added my latest novel and discovered it had been entirely rewritten, presumably by a Birmingham teenager with an axe to grind concerning a P.E. teacher who happened to have the same name as me. It was full of things like "Adam Roberts is the fattest P.E. teacher in the West Midlands" and all the novel titles had been changed to things like "I Am What I Eat: A Pie". Sadly the original edit was reverted within hours.
I guess this is launched now, so I can link it here:
Bits of it are slightly clunk (mixture of low budget and very large amounts of data), but I'm still quite pleased with it. We (me and my colleagues) are not credited there, although we did all the work, as is usual with these sorts of things.
My name can be found on Wikipedia, attached to an entry even, but it isn't me. Because I was not CIO of Google when the company went public, I am similarly difficult to find in said company's search results. Well, "difficult" only insofar as it involves looking past the first couple pages of results. Cheeky bugger got the obvious gmail address too.
I'm not on Wiki, although I do have the full complement of identifiers in authority databases (VIAF, ISNI, LoC, etc) as would pretty much all of the Unfoggeders who've ever published anything.
My name is on Wikipedia, and it even correctly describes me as an Ohio Democrat, but since I don't remember being in the Ohio Senate, and I seem to still be alive, I guess that's it's not me.
I'd never looked before, but I'm not only on Wikipedia, I'm there four times -- I have a disambiguation page. Super-common names are the best.
71 is great. Congratulations.
Slightly surprised that a foreign firm got a government contract. Or is that not what happened?
I'm not on Wikipedia. No surprise. My closest brush with notoriety was when I was writing for a newspaper. That was more than 12 years ago now and it's paywalled, so my online presence is minimal. But the newspaper has a Wikipedia page, and it feels a bit weird seeing my former coworkers, former landlord, Facebook friends, etc. listed there.
I'm scrubbed from the Internet so well, it's almost suspicious. I thought I was merely average about online security, but maybe I'm incredibly paranoid? Am I not a real person? To be boringly serious about it, I have a rare name, and that plus average security would look very obscure. I Googled a friend with better security but a more common name and it's hard to get past the people who share the name. But even so, the Google image search for me is funny. The search produces 22 images, and only one is actually a picture with me in it. It's a group photo at a party. A Halloween party. I'm wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. I'm almost literally anonymous!
re: 76
In that case, the contract is with the project (via the Museum, etc) and the US Nat Archivez are funding them, and they are in turn funding us, so there's an indirect relationship. But ... my team just started a new contract working for the Library of Congrezz, directly. So it happens.
I think there's not actually a huge amount of competition for us in the US, in some domains. I don't know if it's something to do with how agencies work in the US, or the relative lack of outsourcing by institutions in the US, or even the relative unattractiveness of some of this market to big consultancies. But, in the specific domain we work in, I can think of two or three comparable agencies who can do similar work, and they are all in Europe. In fact, they are all in Switzerland or the UK. So when we are competing for tenders, even in the US, we are, more often than not, competing against other European companies, rather than US ones.
If you search for me in Google Images, it is mostly me. Youtube videos of me talking at conferences, mostly. There is a guy with the same name, though, so there's a few of those front page things that aren't me, or are linked to the other guy. Plus the hockey player with the same surname.*
* who may or may not be a second cousin, I've never known, but it's certainly possible, given who/when people in my family emigrated to Canada.
For me you get only one picture that is mine (from our office site) and then the rest are mostly other white guys in suits. Alarmingly, most of them are pictures of a philosophy professor.
Not most, but a plurality. Akai, a picture of my cousin pops up and a picture of Ted Kennedy.
On Wikipedia, I'm a Royal Navy officer who died in the 1500s. On Google, I'm a really annoying Oklahoma-based preacher who has the look of a prosperity gospel type and sells books and seminars and whatnot. He has basically wiped me off of Google searches, which is fine with me.
When I spell my name correctly, I get the expected results. When I misspell my name, I turned up a photo of my kids when they were in the local Heebie U town paper in 2018, which I'd never seen before. They're so cute and little!!
What was your local paper doing publishing pics of your kids without your knowledge?
One of the most wicked men I have ever dealt with is on wikipedia, with a wonderfully sanitised entry that suggests he has been a selfless campaigner for gay rights all his life. In reality, he is a vicious sociopath who went to jail for defrauding the inhabitants of an old people's home he owned, and conned an older and rather ridiculous church civil servant out of his his flat in Victoria -- and who earlier, from pure, unmotivated malice shopped this man, his then lover, to a newspaper journalist and taped his phone calls for this purpose. He's also the only man I have ever knowingly talked to at a party hosted by an Archbishop of Canterbury who was flying on cocaine at the time.
I did put quite a lot of that back into his entry, only to have it removed by an editor (I wonder who) who claimed it lacked any sourcing but a newspaper article.
71 looks like an excellent resource. Good work!
Update on the mayor scandal. (Most of this stuff was already widely known but now the newspaper has talked to the cookie lady whose interview set the whole thing off.)
The fucking fuck? That's an Elmore Leonard novel he threw away because if was too stupid.
89,99: I'm stuck on the BLT w/o bacon but with mushrooms.
Reminds if famous scene in Five Easy Pieces.
I'm stuck on the BLT w/o bacon but with mushrooms.
I know, right? That part really jumped out at me too.
91: This scene,
It seems that on my phone the "quote" marks are a different character so the href does not work. Used to work.
I've never seen the movie, but I knew the scene.
92: It raises philosophical questions somewhat akin to the Ship of Theseus but different.
Theseus: You want me to hold the thread?
Ariadne: Yeah. I want you to hold it between your knees.
I didn't understand the assignment.
71 is great!
83: you are Oral Roberts?
There are 16 of me on Wikipedia and that doesn't include the landform in Montana. Something new to visit if travel ever becomes an option again.
Almost a Dog Mountain?
Bad Rock Canyon?
Big Hole?
