Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, thinks the wiki is mostly run by a Gang of 500 active editors, which I refer to as “bots” because of their annoying tendency to over-edit without any sense of substance or context.
So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”
But, it turns out, Wales is wrong. The Wikipedia bots mostly do formatting. They add very little editorial content.
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And that is why it’s so frustrating for outsiders to provide content: as soon as they do, super-active editors (“bots”) come along and makea myriad of minor changes. So, best strategy for submitting content to Wikipedia: put a big chunk of relatively neutral text up there and forget about it. Lose that sense of ownership, and let the editorial bots do what they want with it. via Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought).
Zdenek Burian art at auction
A beautiful illustration from a book on auction at Illustration House.
The megafauna sure look charismatic as they’re getting ready to be cooked.
An ibex drive provides a band of Neanderthalers with enough food for several days. The stronger animals clear the chasm but weaker ones plummet to the bottom where they are slain by waiting hunters.
Book illustration: Early Man, by F. Clark Howell; Publisher: (Time-Life Books), 1965, p. 134: The Neanderthal Epoch.
Wow — I just learned there is a Windows XP PowerToy from Microsoft called TweakUI that lets you prevent apps from “stealing focus,” i.e. jumping to the top of screen no matter what you are doing in another window. This is a huge productivity gain for me! I hate the way XP allows apps to steal focus by default.
As usual, Scott Adams is more than a cartoonist with this dead-on observation.
Google Reader
Over the past 15 years I have received amongst my bit-piles of appreciative fan e-mail approximately one per week saying in effect, “You used to be funny. But something has gone horribly wrong.” This e-mail, written by a different person each time, is long, and passionate, and often detailed in its argument. These helpful critics make it clear that their tough love is intended to snap me out of whatever steaming hole of mediocrity I have shoved my head so that I can get back to my past ways of excellence.
100% of these e-mails are from males who seem – based on their well-written letters – above average in intelligence. That’s 780 nearly identical messages from men, and zero of this type from women. I call it the Helpful Critical Guy Syndrome, HCGS for short.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to High-Paying Google AdSense Keywords (the PIG book  ) will contain between 100 and 1000 text entries commenting fearlessly about the concepts underlying the highest-paying Google AdSense keywords. The text will be published in electronic format as an Amazon e-book and for 100% on-line access via Google Book Search. The basic observation is that most of the content that currently surrounds high-value keywords is credulous, self-interested bumpf. The publication date, and the number of entries, for the first edition of the PIG book will depend to some degree upon the extent to which my AdSense statistics support my theory that contrarian content about high-value transactions can cut through the clutter.
Taschen: publisher of beautifully produced but crassly pornographic “art” books.
Nimble Books readers seem to enjoy buying paraphernalia related to Diana, Princess of Wales. My review page about the Taschen book has generated more AdSense clicks than almost any other article on my website.
Brave New World of Books observation #001: books with paraphernalia are better than just plain books.
Gee whiz … according to the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator, AdSense clicks related to Enterprise Rent-A-Car yield between $6.38 and $10.52 a click! Maybe I should be spending more time working on my Politically Incorrect Glossary of High-Paying AdSense Keywords! I am still determined to figure out a way to publish AdSense-sponsored books.
What do I have to say about Enterprise Rent-A-Car? Well, the local Enterprise Rent-A-Car here in Ann Arbor, Michigan has been a great help to me and my family on numerous occasions. The local Enterprise Rent-A-Car on Washtenaw is the first place we go when we have car trouble that sends our van to the shop, and we’ve found that the staff there is generally young, responsive, and pleasingly nimble. They live up to their reputation as energetic and well-managed.
Woof (n)
1. vocalization uttered by dogs when waiting plaintively outside a door to be let in. Generally, any plaintive cry of putative helplessness.
2. vocalization uttered by dogs just prior to biting the hand that feeds them. Generally, any act of ungrateful and unwarranted hostility.
I love charismatic megafauna and follow news about them with great interest. I want to see them preserved. But the discussion is not going to get very far until people on the conservation side acknowledge a fundamental truth. To farmers and to parents with small children, food or 2)dangerous pests who fully deserve the immediate death penalty. Peaceful co-existence ain’t gonna happen.,
it’s this line of thought that leads me to support Pleistocene rewilding.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Authors respond to the recent banning in Thailand of their book, “Bangkok Inside Out”:
“On November 22, Thailand’s prominent daily newspaper Kom Chad Luek ran a front page story quoting a senior Thai government official, Ms Ladda Tangsuphachai, Director of Cultural Monitoring at the Thai Ministry of Culture, alleging that Bangkok Inside Out taints the image of Thailand and its people. The article states that our book “discusses negative subjects such as fake goods, gambling, gay performances, touts and scams, and places such as Patpong, Nana, and Khaosan Road,” and singles out a photograph that shows a bar girl on farang’s (foreigner’s) lap. Ms Ladda is quoted as saying that “according to the Constitution, the press has freedom to publish. So, all we can do is to take the problematic books off the shelf.” This is the author’s response.
(PRWEB) December 2, 2005 — We are surprised and deeply saddened by the sudden focus in the Thai press and by the Thai Ministry of Culture on our book, “Bangkok Inside Out”. For the past 10 months it has sat prominently on the shelves of bookshops across Thailand and overseas, has sold briskly and has earned rave reviews from numerous respected publications such as the Asian Wall Street Journal and Thailand’s The Nation and Bangkok Post.
On November 22, Thailand’s prominent daily newspaper Kom Chad Luek ran a front page story quoting a senior Thai government official, Ms Ladda Tangsuphachai, Director of Cultural Monitoring at the Thai Ministry of Culture, alleging that Bangkok Inside Out taints the image of Thailand and its people….
Bangkok Inside Out has clearly been misunderstood. It oozes enthusiasm for Bangkok and Thailand, and repeatedly encourages readers to visit and explore the city. It depicts Bangkok as a hip, trendy place that has shed much of its seedier side and become far more attractive and cosmopolitan than most other travel books suggest. What mystifies us is that bookshops in Thailand are packed with publications devoted in their entirety to bar girls and prostitution.Our book – for all its humor and playful banter – is consistently respectful and thoughtful towards the Thai people and their culture, and written out of almost unconditional admiration.
Our book actually criticizes and mocks foreigners who glamorize Thailand’s sex industry, and repeatedly makes the point that there is far more to Thailand than the negative stereotypes so often used by others. The book also includes many sections on traditional topics like alms giving, fortunetelling, amulets, traditional markets, dining, Lumphini Park, the Sky Train, and shopping. As journalists who take their trade and their subject – Bangkok – seriously, we saw fit to also address everyday urban phenomena like pollution, street dogs, gambling and piracy. All of these topics, for better or for worse, are realistic parts of Bangkok’s landscape, and do not reflect in any negative way on the Thai people or on Thai culture.
Clearly a LMU.
Mark Hanusz, the publisher, is an honorable man.
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