JOHO: Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right:

Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn’t cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt. (One Wikipedian suggested to me that such a disclaimer ought to be on every page; I agree.) The media are acting as if this is a humbling confession when in fact it’s been what Jimmy and Wikipedians have been saying from the first day of this remarkable, and remarkably successful experiment in building an inclusive encyclopedia together.

The media literally can’t hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media – amplifying our general cultural assumptions – have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance1 : If you claim to know X, then you’ve also been claiming that you’re right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline … those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.2

With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.

Wikipedia is obviously not the first and only instance of this type of knowing in our history. But the balance of heroic individual knowers and persistent, pseudonymous social processes is sufficiently different that the media generally have gone wrong with this story. After all, reporters are held accountable when they get something wrong, so why shouldn’t Wikipedians?

A: Because Wikipedia isn’t a newspaper and newspaper practices aren’t the only way to knowledge.

Is it all good? Nah. But it is.

Shelley Powers: Discussion of latest security flaw in Windows. The more I think about this one, the more I worry. Update from Kevin Kean at Microsoft.

It gets downright addicting to change color schemes.

Walk away Karl…. walk away….

Philly Future may have outgrown its hosting for the second time in six months. Now it is going to incur a far greater financial commitment from me. Dreamhost’s support has been fantastic, they have been very patient with us, but I know they cannot continue to host us with the continuous CPU warnings we get from them.

Here goes the stats for the 29th.. a relatively slow day I think:

13,350 total page requests, 349.79 MB of bandwidth, doing 7246 database connects, doing 607,236 MySQL queries. That comes to about 45 queries per request. Believe it or not – that’s about right for site with features like PF’s. The database stats are still troubling. The math shows that Drupal’s caching isn’t operating as it should. I think I’ve figured out the cause, and may have a fix (yes – this is what I’ve been doing during my holiday), but that doesn’t eliminate the traffic/bandwidth/cpu demands. They are unacceptable to all shared hosting providers I’ve contacted – so it’s time to go dedicated.

Anyone out there want to sponsor our hosting? You’ll be helping us continue to provide a service to our community. 1 & 1’s Managed Server II package sounds about right for what we need.

Whomever decides to step up – we will be in your debt and will make sure to mention you promenently on the site for as long as the sponsorship is in effect.

Contact me at kmartino at pobox dot com if interested.

Minimalist. I admit I am more than a little influenced by Black Flag’s logo. Add a 1k Flash widget for some wisdom, and remove the 100k header graphic for some speed. I think I’ll stick with this for a bit.

Now I need to get around to doing a write up on the widget and release it. Some techniques used:

It has a transparent background and is resizable without scaling its display, so I can place it wherever I want.

It uses an external CSS style sheet for the text.

It uses an external XML file to define the quotes.

I extend MovieClip and link the class to a library item symbol for maxium re-use and to enable managing code outside the Flash IDE. In fact, I could, with little work, move to use an open source Flash compiler and development model.

Kinda ugly… but will do for now. I’ve incorpoated my quotes widget into my header. Let me know what you think.

The clearest post I’ve seen on the subject.

A test… this should show a different quote everytime you load the page:

They seem hard to do, since Flash has automatic scaling, which, in the case of a liquid layout, distorts your design in an undesirable fashion. It’s actually very simple to deal with: this tutorial explains how to turn off scaling and to set a listener for the stage to handle window resizing.

Niall Kennedy of Technorati: Exclusive: Google to offer feed API: Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling….Google’s new offering is direct competition to NewsGator’s synchronization APIs but are easier to code against (no SOAP required). Google currently does not have the same reach across devices as NewsGator but an easy-to-use API from the guys who brought you the Blogger API and “Blog This!” might really shake up the feed aggregator ecosystem.

Robert Scoble of Microsoft: Google announces feed API:Here’s another note to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie. Hey, I asked you guys to acquire NewsGator three months ago. If you had done that you would have taken the wind out of Google’s sails. But now that Google has a feed API, we’ll need one too and right now NewsGator looks pretty good

I was writing a tool that would have used Newsgator as a feed update service for Philly Future. Would have saved considerable bandwidth. Lets see where Google goes with this. Bloglines could and should release similar functionality. It would have been my first choice as a stable platform to build from if it were already available.