This is a serious problem. Rendering a complex page on en:wp can take several seconds on the reasonably fast WMF servers. Third-party processing of wikitext into XML, HTML or other formats is not reliably possible. You can’t drop in a faster parser if you happen to have access to gcc on your server. Solid WYSIWYG editing, as opposed to the many approximations over the years (some very good, but still very approximate), could really do with a formally-described language to work to. (That’s not all it needs, but it’s pretty much needed to make it solid.)

Actually describing wikitext is something many people have attempted and ended up dashing their brains against the rocks of. The hard stuff is the last 5%, and almost all of the horrible stuff needs to work because it’s used in the vast existing body of wikitext. Wikitext is provably impossible to describe as EBNF. Steve Bennett tried ANTLR and that effort failed too.

If you’ve ever spat and cursed at the MediaWiki parser, you may care to glance at this month’s wikitext-l archives. (That’s the list Tim Starling created to keep us from clogging wikitech-l with gibbering insanity.) Andreas Jonsson has been having a good hack at it, and he thinks he’s cracked it.

This won’t become the parser without some serious compatibility testing … and being faster than the existing one. But this even existing will mean third parties can use a compiled C parser instead of PHP, third parties can process wikitext with blithe abandon without a magic black box MediaWiki installation, dogs and cats can live together in Californian gay marriage and the world will be just that little bit more beautiful. Andreas’ mortal shell, mind destroyed by contemplation of insanity beyond the power of the fragile human frame to take, would be in line for the Nobel Prize for Wikipedia. Could be good. Should be in the WMF Subversion within a few days.

Update: Svn, explanation. Performance is actually comparable to the present parser. Not perfect as yet, but not bad.

The Wikipedias get waves of activists and are used to dealing with them. The ones who don’t take the time to understand Neutral Point Of View, their stuff gets removed. The ones who do, their stuff stays and their cause gets accurately described and represented. Best case, we get more good new Wikipedians.

This applies to any activist for any cause whatsoever and has applied at least since I started on en:wp in 2004.

The advice I have for activists is: strict neutrality with excellent citations will do your cause justice. Everything else will be removed.

The broader advice is: there is no plausible attack on the integrity of the encyclopedias themselves that is not already something we are quite used to dealing with on a daily basis for many years.

I wonder if the presently prominent group of activists have taken in this one in the quest to have their stuff stick.

What happens if the Pentagon manages to nail Julian Assange? Maybe, just maybe, Wikileaks posts the key to the file tagged “INSURANCE”.

In the meantime, US military are banned from looking at Wikileaks. I’m sure that’ll seal all leaks just fine. The Taliban can still read it, of course.

The old media aren’t happy either. I bet the RIAA wishes it had thought of calling in military strikes on Napster.

And to be on-topic: Wikileaks reveals US Army Intelligence cribs from Wikipedia, too. (Cache.)

My sympathy goes out to the poor sods charged with the study. I’d be hard put to think of a more poisoned chalice. No matter what they come up with, they will be called Nazis and worse. And whatever they come up with will change no minds whatsoever and be hideously distorted — if they said “the best thing for Wikimedia is a goatse at the top of all pages,” someone would say “yes, and this is why anyone advocating images purporting to be Muhammad should be beheaded.”

The meta talk page has already been swooped upon by the usual participants and reduced to somewhat worse than uselessness.

I can reiterate my basic argument, as father of a three-year-old and stepfather of two teenagers.

The Wikimedia communities are sufficiently painstaking in making sure everything is educational and in context that I’d happily let my daughter in front of Wikimedia unrestricted. Anything sexual or horrifying would be informative and in context.

The community works incredibly hard to make the contentious stuff good. Any kid who looks up “fuck” on English Wikipedia will come away considerably educated, for example!

The last shock I got from Wikipedia was when I followed a link on another site to Cock ring, and was confronted with a large, shiny, erect penis. With, of course, a cock ring on it. Not something I’d care to have pop up on the screen at work … on the other hand, I have no reason to be going to an article on cock rings at work. I think the article was entirely reasonable and the use of the picture was entirely reasonable.

Then there is the issue of important photos of war and so on that are absolutely horrifying. They should be in the encyclopedia, even if merely describing some of them makes my stomach do flip-flops.

I think experience shows that the Wikimedia communities take their responsibility to educate seriously enough that “Wikipedia is not censored” is sufficient in practice. I have seen no cases that would lead me to think otherwise.

As noted in the most recent foundation-l reiteration of the Muhammad image discussion, Wikimedia has a firm bias to more information rather than less. It’s right there in the mission statement. Increasing, not decreasing, knowledge is why the community is here at all. If you go against the statement and expectation that more information is better than less information — even if the information is horrible and shocking — the community will not accept it. If the Foundation forces filtering on the community, the community will get up and leave. As Milos Rancic noted, implementing any of the recommendations on that meta talk page will promptly lead to a fork. As it should — insulting your community in such a manner is an excellent way to get rid of them.

Filtering should be left to third parties. The SOS Children Wikipedia for Schools is an excellent example, and it’s quite popular and won’t get a teacher fired. Other than that, I’ve seen no evidence of actual demand for a filtered Wikimedia from end users — only from people who want to filter the projects themselves at the source.

One perennial proposal is for images in given categories to be hidden from view for logged-in users. This is an idea I like, as it puts control in the hands of the viewer rather than third parties. All it requires is someone to code something that passes muster with Tim and Domas as unlikely to melt the servers.

This is terribly sad. What went wrong?

With the invaluable assistance of unnameable contributors from the communications committee. Wait until a media frenzy, take one shot per square. Fill the card and drain the bottle. Post further suggestions below.

So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share.

Can you explain the obvious to people it isn’t obvious to? With references?

The family went to the V&A today. I didn’t have cash on me, so I didn’t put money in the boxes. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll donate on the website when I get home, I have my card.” Except I can’t see a way to do that.

I want to give you £20 from my Switch card just as if I came in today and put £20 into the boxes with “suggested donation” on them. I can’t find a quick and easy way to just casually give you money! Do you have one?

I took a few photos, of course, with the insanely-high-ISO F70EXR (and next time I want a DSLR with me). I’ll see how they come out. The V&A asks that photos be kept non-commercial except with permission, but they get along very well with Wikipedia, so it’s worth a try.

Museums: please include a quick, simple and hassle-free “just give us money!” option on your website.

Update: Buried deep in the site they have this form to donate online to one particular funding appeal via RBS WorldPay. I’ll wait on their response as to whether there’s a more general method, though.

Update 2: As of 3rd February, no response from the email and no response from their Twitter. I’ll have to assume the V&A has all the money it needs and doesn’t want mine.

That said, Wikileaks is well worth supporting. They’re pretty radical about freeing information and will, from what they’re doing, overstep the mark from time to time (as in the case of the pager data release). I know Julian Assange slightly — he was the sysadmin at suburbia.net and he and Mark Dorset tirelessly defended my critic-of-Scientology website against baseless legal threats over several years. He’s got titanium balls, he really has. He’s a personal hero.

And Wikileaks is in trouble. They have less than a month’s operating budget left.

After you’ve donated to Wikimedia, those of you who think Wikileaks are a net win for democracy, as I do, may feel inspired to help keep them alive. I just donated £50. Tell your friends as well: http://bit.ly/savewl

@jeamland mr landeryou has some history on wikipedia. (i did the sockpuppet investigation.)

Mr Landeryou saw fit to send me a threat for this:

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dgerard@gmail.com

Mr Gerard,

I am told you made reference to me in your musings on Twitter. I don't know
you, would rather not have to become familiar with who you are and what on
Earth possessed you to comment so freely about me or to edit Wikipedia to
say absurd things about me.

Your entitled to your opinion of me but I think it might be best for you to
discuss claims you make about me with me first. If you don't, I'll promise
to return the favour after an investigation into exactly what ails you. And
that really would be a waste of time for me and a very unpleasant outcome
for you, so I urge you to Twit more carefully in future.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Landeryou

I look forward to an exchange involving pie charts.

p.s.: if you don’t want your months-long-running Wikipedia shenanigans remembered, it helps not to have done them. Oops, too late.

What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live immediately left me wondering just when it would — five minutes? An hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki — it felt like I’d submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at their leisure. (That it actually went live in just a couple of minutes doesn’t change this.)

Don’t take my word for it — go typo-fixing on Wikinews and tell me how it feels to you.

I remain a big fan of flagged revisions for those times when we need it — as a less-worse alternative to protection or semiprotection — but, as per its detractors, it really does kill the wiki motivational buzz dead.

German Wikipedia has, of course, had flagged revisions on all articles for quite some time. Can anyone from de:wp tell me how it felt there?

(en:wn statistics; de:wp statistics. en:wp having times like de:wp would be an utter failure.)

Attention paid across the volunteer contributor base to trying to top search engine ranks: somewhere around negligible.

If you focus on giving people really good web pages they want to go to, you’ll get the Google rank Wikipedia has. If you make “SEO” your express goal, rather than actually being, you know, good, you’ll get what you deserve.

(The last occasion I recall anyone at Wikipedia caring about search engine rank was around 2005, when mirror sites of Wikipedia would occupy the first thirty results ahead of the original page; I think someone got in touch with Google and said to them “dude, we should at least rank ahead of our own mirrors.” I presume they decided that automatic sites outranking the human-created originals was silly and did something about that.)

Palo Alto Research Center reported that only 1% of edits by random users were kept. “They were all unspeakable shit,” said burnt-out administrator WikiFiddler451. “All of them. No, I’m not exaggerating. Go to Special:Newpages and read a day’s entries some time. You’ll start by deleting the whole database, before you get onto plotting the doom of humanity. Christ, why go on?”

(Read more …)

(They have announced a 2010 edition. Let’s see how many photos in it are from Wikimedia Commons.)