… in 1993, CERN put the Web into the public domain. See the original document here.
Category Archives: Web
US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia
Interesting story…
Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.
Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret campaign to influence certain articles on the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. Just days later, the DoJ’s IP range was used to edit the site’s entry on the Pro-Israel “media-monitoring group,” lifting a new section that detailed the controversy.
The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia’s ban on the department’s IP is due to be lifted today…
The earliest days of the Web
Fascinating video by Robert Scoble in which Ben Segal, who had been network manager at CERN during Tim Berners-Lee’s time there, talks about the invention of the Web. For all CEOs of large companies, and all Directors of large institutions, there’s a very important message roughly six minutes into the tape.
The Charms of Wikipedia
Nicolson Baker has written a lovely piece about Wikipedia in which, as usual, he makes fascinating use of his own compulsiveness. Excerpt:
It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.
And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder. And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called “deletionists.”
Well worth reading in full. Pour some coffee, pull up a chair, and enjoy.
Update: TechCrunch is reporting that
The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia – a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard.
Never heard of him — until now. That’s Wikipedia for you.
Wikipedia gets $3m donation
Hooray! From The Register…
Wikipedia, the people’s encylopedia, has trousered a $3m donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to be paid in equal chunks over three years. Which is nice. Even nicer, the money hails from a charity, and not from philanthropic venture capitalists, who may or may not have commercial designs upon Wikipedia’s ads-unsullied pages.
Wikipedia is the world’s eighth biggest website, but it has a measly 15 full-time employees, up from last year’s even more measly 10. It will use the Sloan cash to fund quality improvements and to up staff levels to 25 people.
The battle for Wikipedia’s soul
Thoughtful piece in the Economist about the internal struggle in Wikipedia.
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors’ enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries…
Encyclopedia of life launches, then crashes
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
If your new site crashes under heavy traffic at launch, even when you’ve prepared for a surge, that’s a sign that you may be on to something. And by that standard, the Encyclopedia of Life got off to a healthy start Tuesday. The encyclopedia has set itself a modest goal — it simply wants to be a single, comprehensive collection of everything we know about every species on Earth. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 1.8 million known species and an estimated 10 times that many yet to be cataloged. To fill the pages, the encyclopedia is using customized software to extract information from all manner of scholarly sources and display it in a standardized format. The data is then vetted by experts. The site hopes to have entries for all the known species within a decade, but for its public debut, it offered starter pages for 30,000 species, mostly plants, amphibians and fish. Still, that was enough to draw a crowd that exceeded the organizers’ optimistic estimates, bringing the site to its knees for a while. To give folks an idea of what a more fleshed out version of the site will look like, some demonstration pages were created, and of these, the one most viewed so far is about the death-cap mushroom, which founding chairman Jesse Ausubel whimsically attributes to society’s deep underlying homicidal tendencies.
eBay overhauls its feedback system
From Nicholas Carr’s Blog…
EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more “non-public” communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers…
This is an intriguing — and sobering — moment.
So is it really a big deal?
A Newsnight journalist rang me on Friday evening, just after we’d arrived in deepest Suffolk, to see if I’d be interested in coming on the programme to talk about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. I declined gracefully on the grounds that (a) I like being in deepest Suffolk, and (b) I wasn’t sure the story was such a big deal anyway. Now, it looks as though I’m not alone in thinking that. Here’s John Markoff of the NYT on the subject:
SAN FRANCISCO — In moving to buy Yahoo, Microsoft may be firing the final shot of yesterday’s war.
That one was over Internet search advertising, a booming category in which both Microsoft and Yahoo were humble and distant also-rans behind Google.
Microsoft may see Yahoo as its last best chance to catch up. But for all its size and ambition, the bid has not been greeted with enthusiasm. That may be because Silicon Valley favors bottom-up innovation instead of growth by acquisition. The region’s investment money and brain power are tuned to start-ups that can anticipate the next big thing rather than chase the last one.
And what will touch off the next battle? Maybe it will be a low-power microprocessor, code-named Silverthorne, that Intel plans to announce Monday. It is designed for a new wave of hand-held wireless devices that Silicon Valley hopes will touch off the next wave of software innovation.
Or maybe it will be something else entirely.
No one really knows, of course, but gambling on the future is the essence of Silicon Valley. Everyone chases the next big thing, knowing it could very well be the wrong thing. And those who guess wrong risk their survival….
Update: Newsnight ran a piece with Charles Arthur and Robert Scoble. See it on YouTube here.
Gutenberg 2.0
This morning’s Observer column…
Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.
Occasionally, we get a fleeting glimpse of what’s happening. One was provided last week by the report of a study by the British Library and researchers at University College London…