This New Yorker article nails Wikipedia’s appeal.

Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about Prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can.

That’s the bloggiest part, but it’s a great article all around:

Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.

What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.

Who is responsible for this?

Why have I never seen Larry Sanger’s blog before?

Chicken sexing is the method of distinguishing the sex of chicken hatchlings, usually by a trained person called a chicken sexer.

It turned out that Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa by simply walking out the door with it hidden under his coat.

The theft was master-minded by a con-man who had commissioned a French art forger to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original. Because he didn’t need the original for his con, he never contacted Peruggia again after the crime. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to a Florence art dealer.

Distinguishing “blue” from “green”

Pediapress sells print-on-demand compendiums of wikipedia articles. Hopefully it’s the first in a minor ecosystem of companies repurposing wikimedia content: that’s what the GFD Licence specifically allows.

But wait! The name Wikimedia isn’t free; it’s trademarked. And the names of the subprojects, too (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc.). But repurposed copies have to use that name to show where the content’s from. And how’s Wikimedia going to prevent scam artists from using its name (for example) to sell articles peppered with implanted ads for real estate?

The GFDL and trademark law collided to produce this byzantine debate on the mailing list.

In semi-related news, the Library of Congress and Wikipedia might share content.

A paternoster is a doorless elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers who are agile enough can step on or off at any floor they like.

THE LONGEST ESCELATOR IN THE WORLD

(addendum: Hong Kong Island is dominated by steep, hilly terrain, which makes it the home of some rather unusual methods of transport up and down the slopes.)

The thagomizer is the arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tail of particular dinosaurs, like the famous Stegosaurus, in the clade Stegosauria. (See also: Horrendous Space Kablooie.)

The next version of Apple’s word processor (iWork) is rumored to integrate with Wikipedia. It would be nice if it plopped wikipedia text into the document and encouraged people to use it (god, I wish people would unlearn the draconian copyright rules they’re taught to refexively apply: you can use wikipedia text anywhere — even tweak it for style and accuracy, and use it for profit — as long as you say where it’s from). But more likely it’s just a search tool.