In double-blind medical tests on legal thuggery …

Via Paul Crowley: The UK Society of Homeopaths has a code of practice and rules of professional conduct, including such cautions as “Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority. No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.” When Andy Lewis of the Quackometer found a SOH-registered homeopath blatantly flouting the code and wrote about it, the SOH promptly dealt with the offender …

Well, no — they forced his ISP to take it down under the Laurence Godfrey precedent (the mere threat can scare a UK ISP). This has led to the original article being mirrored across the net. And has made the news. I expect the SOH’s press officer will have a really great Monday morning.

Any SOH members in the house?

Volunteer spyware.

  • God inducers will be included in mobile phones by 2009 as seduction devices. “Body of Christ.” *zip* *thunk*

InGimp is a version of Gimp 2.2 with instrumentation, being run by HCI at the University of Waterloo to gather data for how to improve open source user interfaces in general. Available for Windows, Linux and Intel Mac. The Windows version picked up my Gimp preferences properly. The first startup was really slow, but normal thereafter. If you use Gimp but would like it to suck less in future, you may wish to contribute your way of working.

Gimp 2.4 is nearly out — 2.4.0rc3 is in Ubuntu Gutsy, and it’s already much nicer than 2.2. So I hope they’ll instrument that as soon as there’s a release.

Getting more free images.

Durova writes a nice piece for the marketers recruiting more free images. Nice one!

I’m wondering how to do this for entertainers. Bad live shots, snapshots and so forth under a free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Many have argued the toss on this, but as things stand that’s the way things are.) I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. I suspect our really crappy examples would be a start. e.g. “Top ten site, our rules. You don’t get to have a good photo under your control. You get a crappy photo that’s under a suitable license, or you give us a good photo under a suitable license. The latter is probably a lot more to your liking and that of your artists.”

The hardest part is publishing that somewhere it would actually get read by the target audience. Ideas?

By the way: if you have decent photos you’ve taken of someone who’s got a Wikipedia article but no good free content photo, we’d love ’em. CC by-sa and GFDL both require your name staying attached to the image details page.

Corporate Credibility Car Crash?

Ayn Landers is a renowned author, philosopher and hero to millions thousands of nerdy overprivileged dweebs who’ve read too much Heinlein. She writes the famous syndicated advice column named after her. Send your letters to Ayn Landers, Objective Guidance, Uncyclopedia, Wikiality, Florida. Enclose a stamp, you lazy bum.

Dear Ayn Landers: My corporate masters have whipped up a page on our internal MediaWiki that they intend to publish on Wikipedia in the near future. It’s not terribly embarrassing, but I’m wondering what the attitude over there is regarding this sort of enterprise. — Stultified of Startupland

Dear Stultified: Depends what it is. Mostly it’s a really stupidly bad idea. Look at the reaction to people being caught with the WikiScanner writing about themselves. Whoever puts it up better be absolutely upfront about who they are and where they’re from. And be prepared for it to be zapped unceremoniously with somewhat brusque comments along the lines of “perhaps this will need an article when there’s citable evidence third parties care.” The all too frequent outcome of this sort of bug-on-windscreen impact with people who really don’t care about one’s corporate Kool-Aid is bitter ranting about those evil Wikipedia bastards, arrogant teenage nerds all of them; I’m sure you know the sort of thing. (The arrogant teenage nerds bit is accurate.)

I’ve also sent you three of my handy etiquette guides: COI, AUTO and the wisdom of Durova. We deal with a firehose of spam every day, and writing about yourself puts you at risk of being mistaken for part of it. But be good and all will be well.

When planning a cult, who pays for what? Who stands where? “The Ayn Landers Guide for Landroids” has all the answers. Send a self-addressed, long, business-size envelope and a check or money order for $3.75 (this includes postage and handling) to Collectives, Ayn Landers, Objective Guidance, Uncyclopedia, Wikiality, Florida. (In Canada, send $4.55.) And remember, A equals A!

WikiScanner media whoring.

I was on NewsTalk Dublin at 6:20pm Thursday, on George Hook again, about the WikiScanner thing. Quick four-minute segment. He mentioned his own entry, which spoke of him as a dog-lover — he can’t stand dogs. I said “click on the history tab, you’ll see everyone that ever changed it listed there — the WikiScanner basically indexes all that stuff, so you can look it up.” He liked that. I also mentioned there’d be a lot of employees whose bosses might be a little annoyed at what they’d been doing at work …

And, just now, an 11:30pm call from the Daily Mail. Apparently the Sun is running a piece on vandalism of Gordon Brown from Whitehall IP addresses. She asked a cheeringly clueful question: how long was it up there? I couldn’t find the edits, but did introduce her to the history tab, which she was most excited by. Hear that? That’s a journalistic instinct sniffing out a new source of information.

I also got to note something that’s surprised me: the public’s opinion of what constitutes a conflict of interest is far harsher than even Wikipedia’s.

In other news, have a photo of and interview with me, from the Honda public relations magazine Dream. I came into work to be greeted with an A3 colour photocopy on my desk.

Not just online.

The SOS Children 2007 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is being made available in India on CD and DVD — free for 100 schools, and burnt copies for sale at a small fee for those who can’t download it. A sort of Linux distribution model.

Compare to the German language Encarta, which is no longer doing a physical product.

Wikipedia “shows nerdy obsessive edits.”

WIKIALITY, Florida, Tuesday (UnGadget) — An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that socially-crippled geeks are heavily involved in editing entries.

The Wikipedia History Tab shows computer users with little ability to deal with human interaction made considerable numbers of edits to the Wikipedia article base. The tool trawls a list of 5.3 million edits and matches them to the “user name” of the editor and their position on the Eurocentricity of kitten cuteness. And Naruto, which is apparently this year’s Pokémon.

A warning on the “talk page” of one editor reads: “You have recently repelled a new Wikipedia user by making thousands of edits in an arrogant and self-satisfied manner, and as such you are now being asked to run for admin. This is your last warning.”

After many edits from CIA internet address ranges, a spokesman said, “I’d like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work.” When we pointed out that CIA editors had in fact been concentrating on querulous Buffy The Vampire Slayer trivia, he said he’d get back to us.

Earlier this year, Microsoft was revealed to have offered money to people not to edit on Wikipedia concerning Microsoft or, indeed, anything else.

(This afternoon, I’m on BBC Radio Ulster Evening Extra some time between 5:00pm and 6:30pm BST and BBC Radio 2 John Inverdale around 5:30pm 6:30pm BST cancelled. And BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat around 5:45pm.)

I SAW WHAT YOU DID THERE.

WikiScanner is taking the press by storm. Two calls today from the BBC and one from The Independent. The line I took:

  • We’ve had conflicted editing since the beginning, and companies getting caught out. This is just another example. We’ve told people over and over, and now this is hitting the press and the general public are up in arms about it.
  • The almost-complete edit history of Wikipedia has always been available — click on the “history” tab. And people have been caught with it before. This is another approach to the same thing.
  • We don’t try to nail companies on it, because we appreciate they sometimes just don’t know how to approach us. We don’t want people scared to talk to us.
  • The best way to deal with problems in your entry is to be completely honest and open about who you are and why you’re there. In general, getting caught out being less than utterly honest online will get you eaten alive.
  • If something’s dangerous or slanderous, of course, contact the Foundation and you can be sure it’ll be looked at seriously and quickly.

So I’m on BBC Radio 5 Live on Wake up To Money tomorrow morning around 5:55am. (There’s an MP3 podcast of it.) The things I do for Wikipedia … They got Virgil Griffiths, who wrote WikiScanner, to comment as well. Should be interesting.

By the way: I told you so.

Update: One quote! I got up at 5:45am for one quote! Mind you, I did start to waffle. MP3, 20:25 to 23:24. Pretty good.

30 Years Ago Today: Jimmy Wales Kills Andrew Orlowski’s Pet Puppy.

Drunk on the outside, crying on the inside. Andrew still tears up a little when he thinks of his long-lost companion.
Drunk on the outside, crying on the inside. Andrew still tears up a little when he thinks of his long-lost companion.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, Friday (UnGadget) — On this day in 1977, a young Jimmy Wales viciously and brutally murdered the beloved canine companion of Manchester schoolboy Andrew Orlowski, beginning a lifelong collaboration of mutual publicity and featherbedding.

The boy’s pride and dog, a South Somerset Atrocity Terrier named Soberhill Black Medik Markenbrow Beatrice Vraibleu, was viciously murdered by Wales reciting to it John Galtboy’s speech from Fountainhead Earth while Wales was high on crack received for his eleventh birthday a few days before.

“It was unspeakably brutal,” Orlowski said years later. “That he could possibly think a properly brought-up British socialist animal could tolerate his Hayek–inspired gibberings on collectivism. The very idea that you could produce a vast collective enterprise without a strong central authority! Fuck!”

A boy's best friend ... in a manly sense, of course.
A boy’s best friend … in a manly sense, of course.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Wales from the Arbitration Committee yacht, anchored off Bono’s private island in the Caribbean. “Any eleven-year-old with a decent education would have been quite able to teach his dog enough about political systems to cope with such ideas.”

“Well, he would say that,” said Orlowski, “he was home-schooled, so he probably learnt to read and stuff instead of getting his head flushed every lunchtime like all the future computer nerds round our way did. My hair never recovered. Fucker. Wikipedophile!” He noted that the flushing was, however, the perfect training for IT journalism, which certainly beat working for a living.

Wales notes that the collaboration has been vastly productive, producing continued press coverage of Wikipedia and a specialist expert topic for Orlowski to rent quotes on. “Andrew wasn’t keen on the arrangement at first,” he said, “but then … well, you should have seen what I did to his cornflakes.”

Product of the year!

On eBay, no less. (Courtesy Walter.)

Wikipedia Homepage + 12 Permanent Text Links SEO

First of all these text links and content will be “permanent.” We can list your site in the US or across the global Wikipedia pages.

Want more traffic? Who doesn’t.

Regular text links on random sites and in directories, no one looks at, may help a little with link popularity but don’t you want some traffic? More traffic = more conversions.

Last month over 40 million people looked at Wikipedia.org. #10 most trafficked website according to Alexa. And Wikipedia.org shows up in Google and Yahoo! results. A traffic gold mine.

But how do you take advantage of this? How do I list my website on Wikipedia without it getting deleted?

That is where we come in. We have an extensive SEO background, we have knowledge of Internet User behavior, we know how they search and what they search for. We will get more people to see you on Wikipedia and work with the Wikipedia guidelines to increase the amount of text links to your website. More people will see your website, they will click your text links, hence more traffic.

We will build one homepage for your website on Wikipedia.org and 10 text links from other Wikipedia.org pages to your Wikipedia.org page and 2 external links to your Website.

Let us show you the Wikipedia traffic gold mine.

The feedback mumbles “haxx0r3d account” to me. You?

Alternately, Durova has better ways. (Precis: don’t be a dick.)

How to get more interest in Citizendium?

I approve of Citizendium. More free content is a win for everyone in the world, and there’s got to be more than one way to do this wiki-based encyclopedia thing. The people are good and thoughtful and the community is enthusiastic.

However, Sage Ross notes that the edit rate is going down, suggesting it’s failing to reach critical mass. (He doesn’t give numbers, nor does CZ:Statistics, though Citizendium does have a graph of active users in each month.) He has a draft article for the Signpost.

Citizendium still hasn’t picked a licence for those articles not originally from Wikipedia. Some editors seem to want to clean all Wikipedia prose out of Citizendium articles; I can’t say this is a bad idea, in that it would free them from the GFDL, which is a horrible licence for a wiki. (The first Creative Commons licences weren’t out yet when Wikipedia started.)

On Citizendium’s Alexa daily reach chart, you can see the bursts of publicity. Publicity gets viewers and presumably editors, then the rate tapers off. Mike Johnson has previously noted that criticising Wikipedia is the quick way to publicity for Citizendium, though doing so just for publicity would be distasteful. And would distract from writing an encyclopedia. What else can be done to lure people to it? (I have a login but I think I’ve made two edits … I barely edit Wikipedia of late.) Many people like the idea of a participatory encyclopedia, but have a strong distaste for the more obnoxious bits of the English Wikipedia community – but do they actually then write anything on Citizendium? Or anywhere else?

The perils of a contact link.

I got a call today from someone looking for a number to call Yorkshire Television. “I put ‘Yorkshire Television’ into my computer, and your number came up! Why-kee-pedia.” Which means he put Yorkshire Television into search, got their Wikipedia article, went through the “Contact us” link in the sidebar until he saw a UK phone number (presumably on the Foundation press page) and called me. Wouldn’t believe I had nothing to do with them.

(One of my co-workers used to be in network infrastructure for the BBC. A call got through to him from someone asking him “I want you to make me a website … You’re the BBC, aren’t you? … I pay my licence fee!”)

We get contacts like this quite a lot. The link in the sidebar on English Wikipedia has been changed from “Contact us” to “Contact Wikipedia” so as to minimise people thinking it’s a way to contact the subject of the article, suggested by Guillom because they did that on French Wikipedia for the same reason.

What does winning look like?

Freeculture.org asks us to share our vision of the future: what free culture looks like in five years.

Imagine your life after five successful years working on your free culture projects. How is your day-to-day existence different? What does a city look like? How have the lives of your parents and friends changed? What does it feel like to live in a more free culture? Does it smell different? Sound different?

They have a wiki page for the collected results. Let’s assume Moore’s Law, by the way: you’re typing your response on a 32-core Opteron with 16 gigabytes of memory on your lap. And it’s not even warm.

And, for that matter, what do the Wikimedia projects look like in 2012? When did we leave Google in the dust? Do governments cower at our name and public broadcasters release everything under CC by-sa? How did we get there? Show your working.

Edit: Dammit, the deadline was July 12! Bah. WRITE ONE ANYWAY.

The expertise problem.

English Wikipedia is allegedly anti-expert. This fails to explain why you can hardly move on the wiki without bumping into someone with multiple degrees, or how it got tagged “unemployed Ph. D. deathmatch.”

I submit that English Wikipedia does not have a bias against experts (although there are editors who clearly do), but that massive collaboration is hard. The main problem is how to work with idiots you can’t get rid of, who consider you an idiot they can’t get rid of. “Assume good faith” is not a platitude, it’s a warning that someone really can be that clueless and that sincere idiocy is ten times as hard to deal with as knowing trolling; it’s a nicer way of phrasing “don’t assume malice where stupidity will suffice.” Summary of the summary: people remain the problem.

Academia has evolved mechanisms to deal with antisocial idiots (throw them out) and antisocial experts (put them to work in a locked room and keep them away from humans); wikis are still working on the problem. Antisocial experts on a wiki — unquestionably expert, unquestionably unable to collaborate on a wiki — are really special. Thankfully they’re usually too weird to then go blogging about it …

How do other wikis cope with this? Other Wikipedias? Citizendium doesn’t seem to have had this yet that I know of, but that could just be early days. Ideas?

Edit: You’re allowed to comment, you know. The same post on my LiveJournal is going great guns!

Gay Pride.

“A lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one’s sexual preference.” — Quentin Crisp

“Disco’s out. Techno defines my sexuality now.” — Random raver on Quentin Crisp

“Your superlative aesthetic sense reminds me that I am happily married with two children.” — Oscar Wilde on gay pride

The gay pride, or simply pride, campaign of the gay rights movement has three main premises:

  • that all people of all sexual orientations should be proud, not ashamed, of being young white middle-class gay men;
  • that sexual diversity is a gift to young white middle-class gay men;
  • that sexual orientation and gender identity are inherent and cannot be intentionally altered, unless of course you are bisexual and therefore only fooling yourself.

Remember: just because you have a personal creative output of zero doesn’t mean that you can’t take full credit for creative genius for a lifestyle of disco, drugs and sodomy.

Pride parades

Pride parades are held worldwide on whatever is likely to be the most hideously hot day of summer. Young white middle-class gay men of all colours, ages, gender identities and backgrounds freely walk down the centre of the main street of their city wearing three leather straps and a peaked leather cap to pick up guys show that they are proud to be who they are. (And pick up guys.)

Many celebrities and hangers-on attend marches, such as Gandalf, Gloria Gaynor, Sandi Toksvig, and that guy from Eastenders. This is not specifically because they are gay, but to gather free publicity the pride, love and respect that can only come from the gay community.

Gay is normal!

The most important message of a pride day is that gays are just normal people. This is clearly demonstrated by the act of prancing down the middle of the main road of a major city dressed only in a silver jockstrap that leaves one’s pasty white arse hanging out. Exposing one’s breasts or penis, or indeed, both, is also a highly effective way of emphasising one’s typical nature and empathy with mainstream culture. Comical papier-maché ones work too.

Busloads of tourists are the best people to direct this demonstration towards. Japanese tourists in particular will obviously come to understand and fully appreciate the “guy-next-door” nature of homosexuality when they see five men in full drag having a public orgy in the middle of Old Queen Street.

The rainbow flag

“I must say I have met a few queer bashers in my time. A good time was had by all.” — Noel Coward on Gay Pride

The homosexual contribution to aesthetics and culture is vast and undeniable. Homosexuals throughout history have been responsible for such massive quantities of artistic output that present-day proud gays need only vaguely allude to their predecessors’ efforts to take full credit for possessing the creative genius nature, whether or not they are in fact airheaded twinks taking amyl and Ecstasy five nights out of seven and with the personal creative output of an insufficient number of monkeys with typewriters. And if you don’t think so, you’re clearly a homophobic queer-bashing Nazi.

The inherent gay aesthetic sensibility reached its public peak with the spread of the rainbow flag, designed such that no matter what it is placed against, at least one colour will clash jarringly. The flag contains all six colours of the rainbow, bisexuals being represented by the seventh colour that does not exist.

Openness to diversity

“Oh, we got all kinds. We got disco and techno. What? No, none of that ‘offbeat electronica.’ Freak.” — Gay club owner

Diversity is a fundamental and deeply respected principle of the gay subculture, and it is highly accepting of all varieties of young, pretty, cute-arsed, nice-dicked males who have never had a sexual thought toward a woman ever, not even after six drinks and when they think none of their friends will find out.

Lesbians, and particularly their prodigious drinking, are absolutely welcome at gay clubs, provided they have the common decency to know their place in the pecking order and not try to get in on a Friday or Saturday, when fag hags are the only women permitted entry. Otherwise the venue would have to install a womens’ toilet, which would spoil the architectural clarity of the building. Or something. That’s the only reason. Lesbians are reminded that the dance floor is not a bumper car arena, and may be asked to leave if they pick a fight.

Middle-aged gay men who lack fabulous bodies may come to the event; they are warned to stay in the bears’ pit and not drool over, or lust after, the bronzed young Gods of Pride. Those caught doing so are knighted with the dreaded title of troll by the Gods, who can bestow this title freely because they are young, beautiful and certain that they will never become trolls themselves.

The respect for diversity is such that the common abbreviation for queers is “LGBT”, which stands for “Lesbians, GAY GAY GAY MEN W00T BOYS GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY UH-HUH UH-HUH and tr*ns.” (Look, the women are listed first! Bisexuals, of course, don’t exist.)

Fag hags are diverse too!”

Each Pride event concurrently hosts Fag Hag-A-Rama, a celebration of big beautiful women with big beautiful love for gay men. Though never formalized as its own celebration per se, it gives the straight, overweight woman friend of every gay man at Pride a chance to get out in the sun, wear a “cute” tube-top and a pair of “fabu” sun glasses. She may even get swept-up in the moment and take to splashing in the fountain where she will have a whale of a good time.

Always supportive, fag hag brigades (and bisexuals, who are allowed to exist at this time) will stay behind after the party moves to the bars and assist with the Pride clean-up, because cleaning up the messes left behind by gay men is the fag hag’s purpose. When finished, they too will go to the Danceteria, where they will sit alone all night at the bar, sipping grasshoppers and waving at men on the dance floor.

Strange but true, apparently:

  • Oscar Wilde was completely homosexual.
  • Kylie Minogue is much more gay than Bob Mould will ever be.
  • If you sense any undercurrent of misogyny in the gay scene, you are a homophobic queer-bashing Nazi, particularly if you are female.

The lessons gay pride has to teach us all

The ultimate message of gay pride is that gays are normal humans just like everyone else: ignorant, bigoted and stupid.

Originally written last year for Uncyclopedia; CC by-nc-sa 2.0.

Car bomb in Reichstag, London.

LONDON, Department of That’s A Bit Bloody Convenient, Friday (UNN Scaremongering) — A car containing a detonator, a gas cylinder, nails and sixty litres of petrol was driven into the Reichstag today, shutting down Central London. Since it was two in the morning and the suicide bomber was English, he was drunk and so forgot he had to detonate the bomb before leaving the car.

The government promptly announced exciting new protective measures, including stop-and-beat powers for the police, cavity searches for all travellers on planes, trains or coaches, penalties for being caught in possession of insufficiently light skin and a removal of the right to silence upon arrest. Oh wait, the last lot already took that last one away.

The Prime Minister, James Brown, said Britain faced “a serious and continuous threat. The first duty of goverment is to ensure the security of the populace,” he added, “rather than, e.g., promoting the general welfare of the citizenry. We must keep you safe! Look! Terrorists!“

One journalist who pointed out that “sixty litres of petrol” just meant the car’s tank had been filled is now under house arrest a confinement order an ASBO guest hosting.

“International elements” were believed to be involved with the bomb, Whitehall sources told UNN. New Home Office minister Commissioner Servalan urged people to “be alert, be vigilant, behave!” and to report any suspicious behaviour, signs of life, skin colour or facial hair to the Department of Benevolent Authority. She told a press conference that it was too early to say who was responsible but the incident “resonated” with previous terrorist plots.

The Muslim Council of Britain urged people to help the police in any way possible, except refraining from murdering Salman Rushdie.

The Prime Minister, who was crowned Wednesday, has promised “change, change, more change and all change. Look, I’ve put a completely different selection of New Labour cronies in. And departments have new names!”

Were you in the area? Were you perhaps drinking like a fish and partying in an atmosphere of between-the-wars Cabaret decadence? Had you had enough pintage to ignore the hideous face of the sole remaining single person of the appropriate sex in the building and just stare at their arse and crotch? Did nails screech down the blackboard for you? Did you get some shakycam footage on your mobile phone that we can use, because it’s much cheaper than paying actual journalists? Did you perhaps just completely fail to give a shit and go “oh gawd, another bloody terrorist attack in London, make us a cup o’ tea love, when’s the tennis on”? If you have any information you would like to share with UNN, you can do so using the form below.

  • Oar Georgewell “Vegetable Farm“. Down and Out in Baghdad and London, June 29, 2007

Wikimedia UK update: we’re affiliated at last!

Wikimedia UK is go! Alison Wheeler has posted an update to wikimediauk-l. Precis: we had to have a quickie AGM so as to have had one within eighteen months of forming the company, but we’ll have a proper General Meeting in September and there will be a way for people to become members of the chapter, and we can actually start doing things as “Wikimedia UK.”

Said you were smart, said it would just take a day of your time.

No-one will ever start a serious general encyclopedia again on the “one smart person writes the whole thing” (Aristotle, Pliny the Elder) or “a bunch of smart people write the whole thing” (Britannia, Brockhaus) models — they’ll use wikis and massive collaboration.

In fact, no-one will ever start a serious specialist encyclopedia on the one-smart-person or bunch-of-smart-people models again, because wikis already do the job much better, much faster.

For general encyclopedias the earlier models are already economically unviable; for specialist encyclopedias they’re not only unviable but just can’t produce as useful results nearly as quickly.

(I haven’t posted this month because Freda has been keeping me busy. No, she doesn’t have a Wikipedia login yet.)