David Bilek@51: "Xopher: okay, how about when BB criticized Digg for pulling down the AACS key in response to DMCA notices? Digg was "disappearing" any post referencing the AACS key in much the same way that BB has "disappeared" any posts referencing V.B."
BB never ever criticized Digg for doing this. You're making stuff up.
Abi, you are my hero -- that is JUST BRILLIANT!
Bakka was originally across from Metro Ref on Yonge St, north of Bloor. Then they moved into their long-standing (decades!) location at 282 Queen West, near Soho; then, in the late 90s, to Yonge Street north of Wellesley, underneath Glad Day Books; then, a couple years ago, to Queen St West, west of Bathurst!
Kevin@148: Death and Life of the Great American Cities, for sure.
Jim@99: LB will indeed go live as a free download in early May, at craphound.com/littlebrother . I'm in Toronto to see the family for Passover and introduce the little baby around, so it's very much a +/- a few days situation.
Lee, you're basically saying that the attack that this security measure prevents is the dedicated but easily discouraged pirate: the kind of guy who would take a photo and ramp up an entire factory's worth of production and marketing, putting the original artisan out of business; but who is so easily discouraged by having to buy whatever he's cloning that he shrugs his shoulders and walks away.
Do you really believe that such a person exists?
When I was in school, there was a popular kid whose surname was "Cox." No one made anything of it (despite the rich opportunities presented by the homynym, "Cocks"). There was an unpopular kid whose surname was "Greene" whom the alpha girls called "greener" and made mericless fun of, making horking snot noises when she went by.
Whether you get made fun of, and what they choose to make fun of, is entirely dependent on your social confidence and popularity, not what your name is. You could be named "Motherfucker Tinydick" and if you were the big man on campus, they'd call you "M-man!" You could be called "Lisa Smith" and if you were the unpopular kid, they'd call you "Lezzie Shit."
We're over the moon this morning, folks. She's just over 24 hours old at this minute. A million thanks to everyone who posted -- especially the poetry and photoshops (I cried at the former, laughed hysterically at the latter). She slept in our room last night, in a bassinet and sometimes on us when she was fussing. I nodded off this morning around 6AM with her chuffing like a railroad engine, nuzzled in my throat.
Jim, I just sang that all the way through for Alice and we both, quite literally, ROFLed. GENIUS!
Dave@21 -- in this case, the takedown notice was sent in a personal email written by SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt, acting on behalf of SFWA, later affirmed in subsequent correspondence.
Thanks for that, Patrick. You said it.
JP@77 -- I think you're mistaking the first approximation for the final sum. One easy way to figure out if someone is a "Wikipedian in good standing" is to look at how many edits she's made. Similarly, you could guess at how popular an author is by counting his publications.
But in both cases, people who look beyond the surface have a means of weighting those numerical measures that is highly qualitative. And in both cases, the members in good standing, the cognoscenti, and the smofs know *exactly* what the person's contributions mean, without making recourse to the numbers. TNH knows when she sees a covering letter that lists 40 "books published," all from crummy rip-off vanity presses, that this means "-40 books published." She has Fingerspitungefuehl -- fingertip feel -- for the industry and the community.
Wikipedia's heavy hitters -- not people with high rank, but people who are widely listened to and afforded a great deal of benefit of the doubt -- have this too.
I think that Jules@43 and Jacob@57 have done a really good job of explaining why this problem -- as deep, troubling, and frustrating as it is -- isn't the whole story, and isn't fatal.
My view is that Wikipedia -- and much of the world -- succeeds to the extent that you Don't Let Assholes Rent Space In Your Head.
By which I mean that Wikipedia threw away all of NuPedia's strictures on editing -- intended to stop bad people from doing bad things -- and replaced them with a set of systems designed to reward good people who do good things. The outcome was, to my mind, unalloyed good -- the first giant rush of Wikipedia articles was like watching entropy run backwards -- almost spooky.
Wikipedia's main defensive mechanism against bad people doing bad things seems to me to be not having a set of rules, but rather having a group of people who have a common goal and a stake in the project who work to further their common goal. They use large amounts of transparency to make it easy to migrate from "user" to "participant," depending on your commitment and interest.
One strategy of this "soft security" is to co-opt trolls and bad actors, to coax from them their best behaviors and make them part of the project. This is a good strategy, but it means that people who aren't very good at making peace and cooperating end up with some social authority that they can use to become pseudo-official Parking Lot Nazis.
I think that the recent crackdown on pop-culture material and the emphasis on citation come under the category of letting assholes rent space in your head. The people who poo-pooed Wikipedia as unserious, un-encylcopedic, and doomed to failure have gotten under the skin of some Wikipedians, so much so that they are attacking the thing that makes Wikipedia greatest -- its expansiveness and its ability to solve debates by finding common ground. It's like an allergic reaction, the immune system attacking the body.
But I don't think it's surprising or fatal that some defensive mechanisms will overshoot their mark. Wikipedia culture has changed a lot since its inception, moving towards and away from institutionalism and authoritarianism, creating new technological solutions to fights (for example, semi-locking pages as a way of creating a more free version of the locked pages), and forming and abandoning new procedures for resolving conflicts.
An example is the smoothing away Alter@24 references. The finely honed, efficient means by which Wikipedia assimilates and professionalizes content by casual contributors was an evolutionary innovation that made it easier for people to contribute to Wikipedia. This mechanism makes it unnecessary to steep yourself in Wikipedia formatting conventions before adding some text -- you can just drop it in there and a Wikipedian of more depth will come by shortly and fix it.
And as Alter notes, this, too, requires a defensive mechanism, because it means that it will often mindlessly make silk purses from sow's ears. The current mania for citations and deletions is, IMO, an attempt to correct for this problem. It's not a good strategy, but I also think it won't be the last strategy that Wikipedia emerges to cope with this.
Complaining about Wikipedia can help. As the current backlash against pop culture topics demonstrates, Wikipedians are sensitive to criticism about the project. But complaining is slow and indirect.
A more direct way of making change is to participate in the less-visible negotiations about Wikipedia. We tend to think of the main action in Wikipedia editorial as being on the article pages, or possibly on the talk pages. But the meaty stuff is deeper in the smoffy bowels where people have the long, sometimes dull, very time-consuming debates about what's going on up there on the surface. These are public, or semi-public, but participating in them requires a lot more participation than most of us can afford to get into (myself included).
But Wikipedia doesn't require that we *all* participate in order for all of us to reap its benefits. Some brave and reasonable people will carry the torch for this inside Wikipedia, and they will find Wikipedia filled with other brave and reasonable people who just haven't made these issues their priorities. But these people can be counted upon to make common cause, because they're not the co-opted trolls, they're the people who co-opted the trolls.
You can see this for yourself in microcosm. When some officious prick on Wikipedia reverts your entry and cites some regulation, thrash it out in the Discuss page. A lot of the Elder Gods have tripwires that go off when Discuss pages have sustained thrashes. My own experience was that when they show up and make peace, it works -- it arrives at an equitable solution that we can all agree is reasonable, even if it's not ideal.
I know that this requires effort that isn't within the scope of the energy that many casual Wikipedia contributors have to donate to the project, and I'm not suggesting that everyone should have to do it always. I'm just saying that this is a good way to see the Wikipedia conflict resolution system -- the one that produced astonishingly great entries on controversial subjects like Israel/Palestine -- in full swing.
Three other things I want to mention:
1. Editing your own bio. Jimmy Wales edits his bio. So do I. We both get shit from Wikipedians for it, and we both argue about it with them. Two widely adopted creeds for Wikipedia are "don't be a dick" and "there are no rules" -- which means, basically, "we, the community members of good will, don't have a codifiable code of conduct, but we are willing to work together to resolve conduct that disrupts the project we've all roughly agreed we want to do together." So Jimmy doesn't "get away with" editing his bio, he just does it. The biggest advantage he has over Patrick in doing this isn't that he can abuse his position to overrule dissenters, but rather that he has devoted his life to forming rough consensus with these people, while Patrick (reasonably) only wants to fix a mistake, not join a commune.
2. While the inclusion of the "tone" notice on the Kibo post is ridiculous and qualifies (to my mind) as vandalism, the notices themselves are incredibly powerful. Doyle@53 is on the mark here. These same bodies are buried in every single reference work, but you never see a NYT article that says, "Three people in the newsroom thought that this was a really biased presentation of the facts." I'd read the NYT a *lot* more if it did include those notices. The point of a reference work should be to tell you enough to make up your own mind, and pointing out the landmines is a great help in accomplishing this.
3. I'm not sure what I would do about the printed citation problem. I understand its reasoning: if someone comes along and says, "Uri Geller designed the logo for *NSYNC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uri_Geller&diff=128657252&oldid=128268950
(to pick a deliberately trivial example)
it's hard to know what to do. It's the kind of outlandish claim that just might be a quirky truth, like Hedy Lamarr inventing the core technology in cellular telephony. OTOH, it might just be garbage.
So it's reasonable to want some confirmation of this. "I was NSYNC's manager" has the same problem as "Uri Geller designed NSYNC's logo." How do you know it's true?
And even if it *is* true that the information was added by NSYNC's manager, how do we know he's not bitter and trying to screw NSYNC, or Geller, or both? I know -- this is letting assholes rent space in your head. It's letting the bad guys set an agenda that scares off the good guys.
It can lead to some pretty weird outcomes. Say someone wrote on my Wikipedia page that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom didn't sell well and that proves that Creative Commons licensing doesn't work (this actually was written on my entry). Discussion breaks the assertion -- the fate of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom doesn't prove or disprove Creative Commons licensing.
But this leaves the canard about D&OITMK's sales figures hanging out there. We can all agree that selling 300 copies would be bad, and selling 2,000,000 copies would be good. But what's the threshold for "selling badly?" I think it sold well -- Tor keeps going back to the presses for more copies, always a good sign, and I get royalty checks twice a year.
So say Patrick goes to Wikipedia and changes it to "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has sold very well and pleased Doctorow's publisher, Tor Books, a great deal."
It's likely that this would be deleted in the current climate. However, if Patrick were to blog the exact same statement right here, then add the same sentence to my entry, citing his blog post, it would probably stand. It would be cited to the Tor senior editor's blog, after all -- a credible source for the assertion.
I've had this explained to me as a future-proofing mechanism. Today, in the heat of the argument, we might say, "if the senior editor at Tor says the book sold well, it's true enough for the encyclopedia." But in five years -- as Wikipedia expands and expands -- this might come into contention, and figuring out who PNH is, whether he made that edit, whether the real PNH had that account, etc, will be a major forensics exercise. But a cite to Making Light will be preserved forever (at least if the Internet Archive has anything to say about it). The forensics task is much simpler.
This makes a kind of sense to me -- but it also makes my head hurt.
In any event, I think that whatever merit this policy has, it's about to go up in a puff of smoke. Print sources are now starting to cite Wikipedia. Wikipedia can't have a policy that says that things are only true enough to appear in Wikipedia if a newspaper reporter copied them from Wikipedia and published them in the newspaper so that they can be included in Wikipedia.
Christ, poor Michael. I don't know what to say. This is just awful. Evil is so goddamned banal.
"The last time we followed a talking Bush into the desert we got stuck there for 40 years."
Are you sure this is still a live issue? I thought that LJ had apologized, agreed that breastfeeding pics were OK, and promised to make sure everyone who worked there knew that:
http://community.livejournal.com/boob_nazis/1763041.html
It's not true that trademark requires defense against all infringers or lose it. Trademark requires that you defend it against enough infringers that it remains non-generic. IOW, Disney could probably have let that daycare center paint Mickey on the walls without losing the Mickey trademark.
But in Marvel/DC's case, even the "trademarks have to be defended or they are lost" defense is pointless. "Superhero" is ALREADY generic. Marvel/DV are attempting to take a word in the public domain and enclose it by getting the world to treat a generic term as a proprietary one.
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