Now and then I tell myself that I can stop whenever I want to. Then something happens to prove how ridiculously hooked I am.
There's even a test for Wikipedia addiction. I'm afraid to take it because I don't want the bad news. Although I speculated about "burnout" a few entries ago, that's only fantasy. Somebody bashes around an article, and off I go.
Last Saturday an admin with 88 gazillion edits suddenly decided the Criticism of Wikipedia article wasn't up to snuff. So he started dumping "citation needed" tags with challenging edit summaries all over the entry. If I could really walk away from WP whenever I want to, I would have ignored the tags. Maybe I would have gotten around to answering the requests after a week or four.
Instead, I feverishly hunted down references to eliminate all the tags. I slapped one reference after another into the article, anxiously trailing behind the admin's requests. Finally, I got everything cited that he wanted cited, and he even left me a thank-you note on the talk page. Which was very nice of him (honest!)
Luckily, it's all too easy to find references for every imaginable criticism of Wikipedia. The Internet is loaded with whines about the encyclopedia. Almost all those whines come from sites with Alexa rankings nine miles below Wikipedia's. Net green eyes, you might say.
A less frantic but still convincing proof of my addiction was the latest article I picked from the wikify list: A Maid of Constant Sorrow. The title intrigued me, because I wanted to know which maid was constantly sorrowing and why.
Turns out it was the title of Judy Collins' first album. I don't even like Judy Collins. Her stuff doesn't rock anywhere near hard enough for my headbanger tastes. But I plowed through many edits to raise the article to acceptability. I even uploaded an image of the album cover. And uploading a file nowadays is real proof of addiction, because you have to jump through nine hoops to dodge the WP copyright police.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
My way and the highway
After my sour japes on the begging notice, which still bugs the Hades out of me, I'll be sweeter in this entry. A few posts back I mentioned my forays into highway articles on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia offers scads of articles about those things your car rumbles over. A typical example of my efforts in this little-known patch of WP territory is Alabama State Route 21.
I don't think I've ever travelled this Alabama thoroughfare. In fact, I can't remember spending a minute in the Sweet Home state. But I couldn't resist a road that passes near the Talladega Superspeedway. Down home with NASCAR is where I wanna be - on Wikipedia, anyway.
These articles have acquired a rigid set of Wikipedia conventions. They have to be written just so, with the correct infobox and title and road symbols. Otherwise, irritated messages start turning up on your talk page. There was actually an ArbCom case about the naming of these articles. Hilarious edit wars had erupted over whether "Route 21 (Alabama)" or AL Route 21" or "AL 21" or "Alabama State Highway 21" or "Fred Flintstone's favorite road" was the proper naming convention.
Once you understand such arcane technicalities, the articles are seductively easy to write. Just haul out a road atlas and start tracing the route through its various windings and intersections. There's usually some helpful material on the web, especially from state transportation departments. Those are the people who (very) eventually fix potholes.
It's also fun to find photos of the roads on the web. For some highways you can find an entire page of down-home pictures. I found a site for AL 21 that tracked the whole route in photos, right down to the Florida border. The web gallery honestly made me feel like I'd been there and done that.
I don't think I've ever travelled this Alabama thoroughfare. In fact, I can't remember spending a minute in the Sweet Home state. But I couldn't resist a road that passes near the Talladega Superspeedway. Down home with NASCAR is where I wanna be - on Wikipedia, anyway.
These articles have acquired a rigid set of Wikipedia conventions. They have to be written just so, with the correct infobox and title and road symbols. Otherwise, irritated messages start turning up on your talk page. There was actually an ArbCom case about the naming of these articles. Hilarious edit wars had erupted over whether "Route 21 (Alabama)" or AL Route 21" or "AL 21" or "Alabama State Highway 21" or "Fred Flintstone's favorite road" was the proper naming convention.
Once you understand such arcane technicalities, the articles are seductively easy to write. Just haul out a road atlas and start tracing the route through its various windings and intersections. There's usually some helpful material on the web, especially from state transportation departments. Those are the people who (very) eventually fix potholes.
It's also fun to find photos of the roads on the web. For some highways you can find an entire page of down-home pictures. I found a site for AL 21 that tracked the whole route in photos, right down to the Florida border. The web gallery honestly made me feel like I'd been there and done that.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Begging
If you've looked at Wikipedia lately, you've seen the irritating, ugly, and utterly-without-redeeming-social-value begging notice. Wikipedia wants your money, again and again and again. These fundraisers are endless because Wikipedia won't sell a few ads to raise the few bucks truly needed to keep the site running.
Florence Devouard, an apparatchik appointed by Jimbo to some highfalutin position, huffs: "Advertising is out of the question: it’s a moral issue for us." Of course, morality is relative. Florence doesn't mind the obnoxious advertising for the fundraiser on top of every WP page. After all, that advertising pays her travel expenses.
And it pays a lot of other expenses. Wikipedia's budget has exploded to $4.6 million. In 2004 the budget was $79,200. Yes, the encyclopedia is bigger, but it still gets almost all its real labor for free, from saps like me. What's happened is that a sizeable bureaucracy of people like Florence has growed like Topsy. Right now the WP bureaucracy is moving to San Francisco, a ridiculously unnecessary expense that will chew up hundreds of thousands of dollars better spent on hardware to keep the encyclopedia running.
If I sound like a pinchpenny curmudgeon, that's because somebody should start pinching a few pennies at WP. The most recent audit suggested, very mildly, that the organization develop "basic year-end bookkeeping and accounting" skills. Amen, brother auditor. It might help if a green-eyeshade guy began holding down expenses.
All that said, I chipped in fifty bucks anonymously - though I guess it's not anonymous anymore. That makes $175 I've given in three different fundraisers. I shouldn't encourage them, but I do. Just don't tell me about that African kid we're supposedly writing the encyclopedia for, Jimbo. I'll pay an extra $50 if you promise to shut up about that kid forever.
Florence Devouard, an apparatchik appointed by Jimbo to some highfalutin position, huffs: "Advertising is out of the question: it’s a moral issue for us." Of course, morality is relative. Florence doesn't mind the obnoxious advertising for the fundraiser on top of every WP page. After all, that advertising pays her travel expenses.
And it pays a lot of other expenses. Wikipedia's budget has exploded to $4.6 million. In 2004 the budget was $79,200. Yes, the encyclopedia is bigger, but it still gets almost all its real labor for free, from saps like me. What's happened is that a sizeable bureaucracy of people like Florence has growed like Topsy. Right now the WP bureaucracy is moving to San Francisco, a ridiculously unnecessary expense that will chew up hundreds of thousands of dollars better spent on hardware to keep the encyclopedia running.
If I sound like a pinchpenny curmudgeon, that's because somebody should start pinching a few pennies at WP. The most recent audit suggested, very mildly, that the organization develop "basic year-end bookkeeping and accounting" skills. Amen, brother auditor. It might help if a green-eyeshade guy began holding down expenses.
All that said, I chipped in fifty bucks anonymously - though I guess it's not anonymous anymore. That makes $175 I've given in three different fundraisers. I shouldn't encourage them, but I do. Just don't tell me about that African kid we're supposedly writing the encyclopedia for, Jimbo. I'll pay an extra $50 if you promise to shut up about that kid forever.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Sad bit of editing
"Sad" is meant in the literal, not the ironic sense. Last night I noticed on a game show web page, of all places, that an actor named Lee Patterson had died in February of this year. For some reason the death wasn't widely known until just a few days ago. In the sick way I have about such things, I looked Patterson up on Wikipedia. There's nothing like the grim reaper to get me scrounging around WP.
Patterson already had a reasonable bio on Wikipedia, which concentrated on his career as a soap opera actor. The date of death was in the article, with a rather pathetic "citation needed" tag. Seeing the chance to pile up my edit count, I went to work on the entry.
All right, I'll confess to a slightly more sentimental interest. I had seen Patterson recently on reruns of an ancient 77 Sunset Strip knockoff called Surfside 6. The show surfaced on a tiny cable outlet - owned by the Moonies, of all people - which rather grandly dubs itself AmericanLife TV Network. Now and then I'll peek at the channel for nostalgic reasons. They feature TV shows from my all-too-distant youth. I've worked a lot on the network's WP entry, too.
Patterson was hardly a great actor, and he didn't fancy himself one - at least as far as my inexpert self could tell from his natural, unpretentious acting style. But he was versatile and professional, with some maturity and screen presence. Which enabled him to pile up a formidable IMDb page, spanning over four decades of work in movies and TV.
So I rewrote the WP bio with a lot more on his career besides the soap operas. One thing I wondered about was the delay is his death becoming widely known. The hints from Google indicated that he was something of a loner, never much interested in the limelight or in schmoozing Hollywood reporters. I wanted to slip a little of this personal stuff into the entry but resisted.
The grimmest part of the rewrite was changing the "Living people" category to "2007 deaths". Sooner or later, we all get that category switched.
Patterson already had a reasonable bio on Wikipedia, which concentrated on his career as a soap opera actor. The date of death was in the article, with a rather pathetic "citation needed" tag. Seeing the chance to pile up my edit count, I went to work on the entry.
All right, I'll confess to a slightly more sentimental interest. I had seen Patterson recently on reruns of an ancient 77 Sunset Strip knockoff called Surfside 6. The show surfaced on a tiny cable outlet - owned by the Moonies, of all people - which rather grandly dubs itself AmericanLife TV Network. Now and then I'll peek at the channel for nostalgic reasons. They feature TV shows from my all-too-distant youth. I've worked a lot on the network's WP entry, too.
Patterson was hardly a great actor, and he didn't fancy himself one - at least as far as my inexpert self could tell from his natural, unpretentious acting style. But he was versatile and professional, with some maturity and screen presence. Which enabled him to pile up a formidable IMDb page, spanning over four decades of work in movies and TV.
So I rewrote the WP bio with a lot more on his career besides the soap operas. One thing I wondered about was the delay is his death becoming widely known. The hints from Google indicated that he was something of a loner, never much interested in the limelight or in schmoozing Hollywood reporters. I wanted to slip a little of this personal stuff into the entry but resisted.
The grimmest part of the rewrite was changing the "Living people" category to "2007 deaths". Sooner or later, we all get that category switched.
Monday, October 22, 2007
From scratch and elsewhere
It's been a while since I wrote a WP article from scratch. When I first started as a mostly anonymous nerd in 2005, I created lots of articles about Henry James' works. I also wrote various articles on baseball, highways, and other riffraff from only the blank page WP gives you for a new entry. It was sort of like writing this blog, where you get only an empty box and no particularly helpful instructions on filling it in.
Maybe I've gotten lazy in my WP old age. Now I almost always work only on articles that already meet a reasonably high standard. That's what I like about the wikify list. The articles on the list aren't in hopeless shape. They just need a little work, which is all the work I fell like putting into Wikipedia any more.
Burnout? Could be getting close. I found myself in a shouting match on the talk page for the Criticism of Wikipedia article. All right, "shouting match" is a little strong, but the argument was still more heated than I like.
Seems that censors are ripping out every mention of Wikipedia Review, a harmless whine site about Wikipedia that sometimes offers useful and valid criticism of the encyclopedia. I should just keep things in perspective and let the censors rip. I can still read WR whenever I want. But I've allowed the idiotic censorship to bug me. One admin in particular is scouring many links to WR from Wikipedia. The site has retaliated with giggles about the admin's editing of articles on porn stars.
Such silliness would never have concerned me before. I would have gone on editing articles about my areas of interest and ignored all the nonsensical wikidrama. Maybe I should start writing articles from scratch again. There are still lots of Henry James stories that need entries, and even a few highways remain article-less.
Maybe I've gotten lazy in my WP old age. Now I almost always work only on articles that already meet a reasonably high standard. That's what I like about the wikify list. The articles on the list aren't in hopeless shape. They just need a little work, which is all the work I fell like putting into Wikipedia any more.
Burnout? Could be getting close. I found myself in a shouting match on the talk page for the Criticism of Wikipedia article. All right, "shouting match" is a little strong, but the argument was still more heated than I like.
Seems that censors are ripping out every mention of Wikipedia Review, a harmless whine site about Wikipedia that sometimes offers useful and valid criticism of the encyclopedia. I should just keep things in perspective and let the censors rip. I can still read WR whenever I want. But I've allowed the idiotic censorship to bug me. One admin in particular is scouring many links to WR from Wikipedia. The site has retaliated with giggles about the admin's editing of articles on porn stars.
Such silliness would never have concerned me before. I would have gone on editing articles about my areas of interest and ignored all the nonsensical wikidrama. Maybe I should start writing articles from scratch again. There are still lots of Henry James stories that need entries, and even a few highways remain article-less.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Keep those cards and letters coming
My user talk page is pretty sleepy compared to many others on Wikipedia. Read Jimbo's talk page for a perpetual yellfest. Maybe I'm not doing enough to p.o. other editors. And I'm trying so hard! Still, enough complaints have rolled over the electronic doormat to fill several archives.
Not everybody writes to whine. I once got a very large flower (okay, a very large picture of a flower) for removing some goofball hoax articles from the encyclopedia. And most of my tag-team partners on the talk page have been cordial even when they disagreed. The orange bar announcing that I've received a new talk page message is usually a pleasant change from the monotony of editing article after article.
The latest note on my talk page, for instance, was an excruciatingly polite discussion about, of all people and things, Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm still not comfortable with the "alleged" in front of "assassin" for Oswald, but the quibble wasn't worth fighting over. Which is why most of my talk page disputes die quickly. I just don't want to holler back-and-forth for very long.
Makes for a boring talk page...and for significantly lower blood pressure.
Not everybody writes to whine. I once got a very large flower (okay, a very large picture of a flower) for removing some goofball hoax articles from the encyclopedia. And most of my tag-team partners on the talk page have been cordial even when they disagreed. The orange bar announcing that I've received a new talk page message is usually a pleasant change from the monotony of editing article after article.
The latest note on my talk page, for instance, was an excruciatingly polite discussion about, of all people and things, Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm still not comfortable with the "alleged" in front of "assassin" for Oswald, but the quibble wasn't worth fighting over. Which is why most of my talk page disputes die quickly. I just don't want to holler back-and-forth for very long.
Makes for a boring talk page...and for significantly lower blood pressure.
Friday, October 19, 2007
It's all about the...something
Remember those vaguely creepy ads for Overstock.com? The ones with the brown-haired girl cooing, in a glazed-over spacey way, that "it's all about the O"? The ads have mostly vanished now because Overstock.com has run into rough financial waters. But it a weird and wonderful way, it's still all about the O...on Wikipedia.
Seems that Overstock.com's worst enemy is a financial reporter named Gary Weiss. He's constantly bashing the company, which oddly enough has seen something of a recovery in its share price as its fortunes have improved.
So how does Wikipedia get into this corporate picture? A Wikipedia account called Mantanmoreland, considered by some though by no means proven to be Weiss himself, supposedly forged an alliance (sounds like Survivor, no?) with powerful people on Wikipedia. Weiss' critics charge that the alliance enabled Mantanmoreland to gain at least some control over the Wikipedia articles on Weiss himself and on naked short selling, a stock-market practice that Overstock.com's chief exec alleged was used to bash his company's share price.
Meanwhile, Weiss' enemies at Overstock.com were exiled from WP for various crimes and misdemeanors. They retreated to whine sites like Wikipedia Review and Antisocialmedia.net, where they complain about the unfairness of their treatment by the encyclopedia. In particular, Judd Bagley, an Overstock.com official who runs Antisocialmedia.net, has played some cute tricks on the Wikipedia hierarchy in revenge. Much of the recent BADSITES hoohah was about Bagley's site and how aggrieved the Wikipedia poobahs feel about it.
Yes, it's a hilariously tangled web. Which happens to be the title of this blog entry from an observer who seems slightly inclined toward the Gary Weiss side of the spat. As the entry points out, the New York Times took note of the dispute but didn't fill in many of the details about Wikipedia. Now you know the rest of the scrambled story.
Seems that Overstock.com's worst enemy is a financial reporter named Gary Weiss. He's constantly bashing the company, which oddly enough has seen something of a recovery in its share price as its fortunes have improved.
So how does Wikipedia get into this corporate picture? A Wikipedia account called Mantanmoreland, considered by some though by no means proven to be Weiss himself, supposedly forged an alliance (sounds like Survivor, no?) with powerful people on Wikipedia. Weiss' critics charge that the alliance enabled Mantanmoreland to gain at least some control over the Wikipedia articles on Weiss himself and on naked short selling, a stock-market practice that Overstock.com's chief exec alleged was used to bash his company's share price.
Meanwhile, Weiss' enemies at Overstock.com were exiled from WP for various crimes and misdemeanors. They retreated to whine sites like Wikipedia Review and Antisocialmedia.net, where they complain about the unfairness of their treatment by the encyclopedia. In particular, Judd Bagley, an Overstock.com official who runs Antisocialmedia.net, has played some cute tricks on the Wikipedia hierarchy in revenge. Much of the recent BADSITES hoohah was about Bagley's site and how aggrieved the Wikipedia poobahs feel about it.
Yes, it's a hilariously tangled web. Which happens to be the title of this blog entry from an observer who seems slightly inclined toward the Gary Weiss side of the spat. As the entry points out, the New York Times took note of the dispute but didn't fill in many of the details about Wikipedia. Now you know the rest of the scrambled story.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)