" . . . [Essjay] was described in the piece as 'a tenured professor of religion at a private university' with 'a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.'

"Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia's management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page. . . . Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a 'community manager'; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions."

"What argument or evidence can you offer to support this silly claim that I wish to establish 'centralized content control'?"

"I'm surprised that you have jumped on the bandwagon of those who say, 'Oh my gosh, if there are experts involved, it must be Nupedia all over again!'"

"The Citizendium has editors who can weigh in as "resident experts" as necessary. . . . To suggest . . . that they simply insist on their views without argument--is in essence to malign a whole bunch of people you don't know at all."

"[C]redentials are necessary for being an editor. Not for being an author, of course, and most of our registered contributors are authors. But, yes, you have to prove that you're actually an expert."

"Frankly, we put out on their ear far faster than Wikipedia ever did anyone who actually acts like a jackass. Your own intemperate post, for instance, is the sort of mean-spirited, vicious personal attack that would get you excluded."

"Many experts who have left, or otherwise have expressed dissatisfaction with Wikipedia, fall into two categories: Those who have had repeated bad experiences dealing with jackassses, and are frustrated by Wikipedia’s inability to restrain said jackasses; and those who themselves are jackasses."

"Most Wikipedians support Citizendium, but, having had experience with Larry, most old-timers are somewhat sceptical[sic] about a project controlled by him. Given a choice, he will nearly always choose a solution which involves top-down control. . . . Another problem, he does not so much respect expertise, as credentials. . . ."

". . . Wikipedia's reach is now enormous, and if indeed it has gained a reputation, whether deserved or not, as a source of reasonably reliable information, and it defames someone for any significant length of time, such defamation can do very real harm to a person’s reputation. . . .

"[ . . .]

". . . Ethically, and probably legally, Wikipedia’s managers must face up to it, because the injustice the current situation perpetrates is completely and obviously intolerable.

"Zoeller's attorney, Scott D. Sheftall, said he filed the lawsuit against a Miami firm last week because the law won't allow him to sue St. Petersburg-based Wikipedia."

"Articles that contain defamatory remarks are not 'objectionable comments' on a 'message board'; they are presented to the world and typically accepted as fact, which is something Jimmy himself encourages by saying, as he does, that Wikipedia is actually pretty reliable."

"It is reprehensible, moreover, to react to this situation lackadaisically, regarding false claims that are personally and professionally damaging as in effect 'collateral damage' that society must bear as the price of having such a wonderful project as Wikipedia. That reaction is reprehensible because it assumes that Wikipedia's managers cannot improve the way that it deals with this sort of problem. They could, without completely breaking its system; but they choose not to."

"[Citizendium] will have a zero tolerance policy toward any even possibly defamatory remarks: to say something that might tend to impugn someone’s reputation, even if true, will require extremely good documentation. If no such documentation is offered, or if it does not check out, the person who makes such claims will be "escorted to the door." We simply won't tolerate it."

"There are two key things here: the use of NLP and the disruption to the search interface. Finally, information retrieval will actually mean information retrieval, not document retrieval. One of the fundamental models of search that may be challenged . . . is . . . that search engines are designed to take people to pages. The more we can understand and summarize the information on those pages, the weaker this model becomes. . . ."

"The computation for each query has quantifiable costs and benefits. The costs include R&D, computing infrastructure amortization, energy, rent, maintenance. The direct benefit is advertising revenue from the query response; indirect benefits such as market share gained from greater search quality are harder to measure, but can still be estimated. Search engine success is ultimately given by the efficiency with which it delivers advertising revenue given these factors."

"DMOZ and Wikipedia share much in common - other than Wikipedia isn’t completely useless. Yet.

"[ . . . ]

. . . You build something that looks open, and appears to be open, but in reality, is locked up tight, and run by a small group of people making ever more insular decisions.

". . . [T]hey’re under-resourced for the task, and as the task grows, the more under-resourced they become. In response, they compromise the very thing that made them valuable - accessibility."

"Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.

". . . A few months ago, in the wake of controversies about the quality and reliability of the free encyclopedia's content, the Wikipedian powers-that-be - . . . tightened the restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an "official policy" of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, "semi-protection" to prevent "vandals" (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia."

". . . I'm . . . basing this prediction on the experiences of ODP. I think it's fair to say that (1) in its heyday, the ODP did an amazing job of aggregating free labor to produce a valuable database, and (2) the ODP is now effectively worthless."

David, if you think this is too 'out there' then please chop it.  It's good
brain fodder I thought....

Many of you who have On-Star subscriptions and older analog-only On-Star
equipped GM vehicles already have received or will soon receive a letter
from OnStar telling you that your analog-only On-Star system will go
irretrievably dark sometime in early 2009.  They go on to say (quite
humorlesly) that if you want to continue with On-Star, you will have to
replace you Whole Vehicle.  They will not be retrofitting the older GM
vehicles with the new digital On-Star equipment.

On a different but directly related topic:

Anyone utilizing off-air signals to view television will also 'see' those
analog signals disapear as the new government regulations governing the
'digital transition' go into effect in early '09.  To give everyone with an
analog-only TV an option other than having to go out and buy an HDTV
receiver, they have developed a box that will receive HDTV and spit it out
either in composit video or on channel 3 or 4 like many VCRs have done for
years. Here is one such announcement:

Don't Pitch That Analog TV, AV ToolBox Has a New HDTV Receiver

As of Feb. 19, 2009 the analog to digital transition will take effect, so
AVToolBox has a product, the
ATSC-100, that will provide a high quality way to view local, off-air HDTV
Stations on a non-HD TV Set.



ERLANGER, KY, February 21, 2007-The analog to digital transition can be
simple thanks to the new AV ToolBox ATSC-100 HDTV Off-Air Receiver. It can
also be affordable by letting consumers keep their current televisions. The
ATSC-100 will receive all US Terrestrial HDTV Signals and accommodates both
Component and Composite Video outputs as well as Stereo Audio. The unit is
extremely affordable with a suggested retail price of $199 and they are
in-stock and ready to ship.


Finally, no one is talking about FM radio.  I wonder if it too will be
forced to go digital and all analog FM receivers will go dark
forever.........?

"[Y]ou could . . . use a wikipedia reference to indicate the semantic concept that you are writing about. Thus, . . . you could use the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome to indicate that you are refering to the city of Rome, the capital of Italy."

"Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. . . . An encyclopedia should contain references to other articles in that encyclopedia, but doesn’t nescessarily have to have external links. A directory’s major purpose (at least the ODP’s major purpose) is to contain external links, chosen by editors to be of high quality.

"[ . . . ]

"On some articles, editors have linked to DMOZ, and removed almost all external links. That, to me, looks very good. The links in DMOZ have been checked, and should be of high value, in Wikipedia, this is impossible to do, as anyone can add his [or her] own link."

"Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.

"So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose).

"dmoz doesn't exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. . . ."

"Are concepts really a hierarchy? I’ve heard cognitive scientists think so, but I disagree. And I think that trying to make all the concepts conform to this artificial hierarchal structure has turned WordNet into a much less useful resource.

"[ . . .]

". . . [Some] groups of concepts . . . actually have a hierarchical structure for an unrelated real-world reason. . . .

"[ . . .]

"But this hierarchy completely breaks down for more conceptual things. Is respect in the sense of 'respect for my Father,' a type of 'attitude'' or 'politeness' or 'filial duty' or 'affection?' Clearly it’s all these things. But the guys making WordNet didn’t want to believe that, so they make respect as a type of attitude one semantic category, and respect as a type of politeness another, and so on, until there are ten separate senses for respect."

". . . The human had to be satisfied with the instrument of speech given to him by nature. This is why we use while speaking a linear and rather slow method of acoustic coding of the information we want to communicate to someone else.

"[ . . . ]

"While the information contained in the text can have a very complicated structure, with many relationships between its elements, the text itself has always one-dimensional, linear nature, given letter by letter. . . . [A] text represents non-linear information transformed into linear form. What is more, the human cannot represent in usual texts even the restricted non-linear elements of spoken language, namely, intonation and logical stress. . . .

". . . A text consists of elementary pieces having their own, usually rather elementary, meaning. This meaning is determined by the meaning of each one of their components, though not always in a straightforward way. These structures are organized in even larger structures like sentences, etc. . . . Such organization provides linguistics with the means to develop the methods of intelligent text processing."

"Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, will announce Friday it has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google.

"The technology, developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, seeks to understand the meanings between words, akin to the way humans understand language — and is thus called 'natural language. . . .'

"The deal is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google. . . .

"[ . . . ]

" . . . Powerset could possibly steal a lead if it improves search results by a significant measure with natural language and simultaneously incorporates a near-equivalent to Google’s existing capabilities. Powerset has been hiring lots of Yahoo search experts and others, to help it do that.

"[ . . . ]

". . . Negotiations on the deal, just completed, were so secretive that Powerset’s executives hid a Xerox PARC scientist, Ron Kaplan, in a back room when VentureBeat stopped by for an interview last year. Kaplan, who has led the 'natural language' group for several years, joined Powerset as chief technology officer in July. This is a coup for Powerset, because Kaplan did not respond to some early probes from Google. In an interview, Kaplan said he didn't believe Google took natural language seriously enough. 'Deep analysis is not what they’re doing. Their orientation is toward shallow relevance, and they do it well.' Powerset, however, 'is much deeper, much more exciting. It really is the whole kit and caboodle.' While natural language has been a vexing problem for decades, Kaplan said he believes it is ready for prime-time."

"I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though."

"We are not a links directory which is one of the problems with various ideas to selectively turn off no follow[sic]. If we do that we are basicaly[sic] admiting[sic] we are a links directory and we would gain very little for doing so."

"I'd like to hear any and all other ideas that people have about the possibility of life after ODP and the future of the Open Content movement."

"Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, -- are all with thee."

". . . [T]he cheery invitation at the top of the opening page of Wikipedia [reads]: 'Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.' Those words do suggest to the general public that anyone is welcome to edit the content, without regard [to whether] the article is about you, your business, or something that you make your living from knowing the details about. . . . [I]s this invitation only open to some people -- or is it open to everyone?"

". . . [U]nless you want to abide by Jimbo Wales' advice that one should just edits[sic] the Talk pages, it really isn't clear what one should do."

"If you are an ethical person, and see a mistake or omission in a Wikipedia article that you can correct and you would make the edit whether or not you had a conflict of interest in the article -- go ahead and make the edit."

" If Wikipedia is truly open to anyone -- or at least eveyone[sic] who is reasonably civil and demonstrates a minimal amount of common sense -- then this ought to work."

. . . I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.

I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see.

Greetings All,

   A revitalization is beginning for Wikiasari, the open-content,
open-source search engine project envisioned by Jimbo Wales, the
founder of Wikipedia.

   A wiki regarding the project is available at http://search.wikia.com
and a page about the current status is at
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/search:Future_of_the_Search_Wikia .
Please come look around and join the discussion on the Discussion page.

   I also posted more information about the history of Wikiasari to
this mailing list in April; you should be able to find it in the archives.

Thank you,

Charlene
Administrator, Search Wikia http://search.wikia.com