Who’s Messing with Wikipedia?

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This diagram summarises the editing activity on the wikipedia page about Global Warming. I produced it by running the entry through an intriguing new web service described by Technology Review.

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia’s popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia’s most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as ‘controversial’ or warn that it ‘needs sources.’ But in practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia’s many million pages.

This is a great idea.

The sound of serious money

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This morning’s Observer column.

At this point, those of us who have been watching Mr Jobs strut his stuff for decades began to yawn. Then something happened that made your columnist sit up. On to the stage strode John Doerr, the driving force behind Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers of 2750 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California – the world’s premier venture capital firm. Mr Doerr said that he was so taken by this apps store idea that he was setting up a $100m fund to invest in people who were interested in developing software for the iPhone.

In retrospect, it may have been a pivotal moment in the history of the computing industry. Doerr, you see, has great judgment and a long history of spotting winners before anyone else. Companies he backed in their early days, for example, include Amazon, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Lotus, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems. So if he thought there was something in the apps store idea then perhaps Jobs’s hyperbole might be justified.

And so it has proved…

‘Digital Britain’ filleted for commenting

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Here’s a terrific idea — a version of ‘Lord’ Carter’s Digital Britain Interim Report chunked in such a way as to make commenting easy. Find it here.

Warning: before reading some paragraphs of the Interim Report’s text (esp the stuff about IP protection) it might be wise to have a sick-bag handy. What you have to remember that this is a document composed mainly by guys who have been conditioned in the old push-media world. And who think that calling for universal 2mbps broadband coverage is an enlightened forward-looking vision.

(Interesting also that the image used on the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s website announcing the Interim Report — reproduced above — is a gif. Clearly IP madness runs deep.)

Flickr now has over 100 million geotagged photos

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From the Code: Flickr Developer Blog.

Over the weekend we broke the Hundred Million geotagged photos, actually 100,868,302 at last count, mark. If we remember that we passed the 3 billion photos recently and round the figure down a little that means does calculations on fingers that around 3.333% of photos have geo data, or one in every 30 photos that get uploaded.

In the last two and a half years there have been roughly as many geotagged photos as the total photos upload to Flickr in its first two years of existence.

Thanks to Brian for the link.

Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters

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Brisk NYT column by Maureen Dowd.

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.

Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.

“They woke up pretty quickly,” says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit. “Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.”