When ya done ransackin' his room, grabbin any damn thing that shines.

[reddragdiva]

My Gudangs have arrived! \o/ And I didn't get stung by Customs and Excise. Three cartons, £45.57 from mykretek.com. I am never smoking a Djarum again if I can help it.

The UK media has discovered the Wikipedia US Senate/House vandalism controversy. I did an interview with the Guardian today, to appear tomorrow in paper and online editions. I expect much more of this. We are currently ridiculously popular — today's Alexa rank is no. 17, which is to say the seventeenth most popular website in the world, and our reach is 32,000 per million, which means 3.2% of all Internet users today visited Wikipedia. That's on a donation-funded site run by a nonprofit with one paid technical employee. Holy Fucking Shit.

Wikipedia's competition is not other encyclopedias, though we'd love to be good enough. It's other websites. You can dredge through Google looking for a useful summary of something amidst the ad-plastered shopping portals, or you can look on Wikipedia first. So the more bad press we get, the more curious hits we get and the more people realising it doesn't suck. This leads to a 50% rise in page hits in January alone. And 50% more readers means 50% more editors, which means 50% more somewhat brittle editors, which means 500% more wacky stupidity as we're flooded with unenculturated newbies. On Sunday night there was a brief wiki admin war (now jargonised as "wheel war") which Jimbo resolved by temporarily desysoping five people personally. Which is what you get when you admin people who haven't quite got the culture either. Every moment of every day is Interesting Times. I am so very glad not to be playing Judge Dredd any more.

I wonder if we will fall out of fashion before we're bigger than Google. Except without any fucking money.

Update: The Guardian article is up now: Doctoring the past - Wiki style. Not too bad at all, and my quote is accurate.

Comments

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

I'm down to about 3 1/3 packs of mine. I don't want to reorder yet though, since mine was a sampler selection and I haven't sampled them all yet. So far Ultra Specials are my faves.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

In my research these days, I use wikipedia about as often as I used Google -- more often, if I know exactly what I'm looking for by name, or if I need a lot of detail.

[reddragdiva]

I am pleased and amused to have lured cavalorn in to LART the fluffybunnywiccans.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Though my local cigar shop does not, I have located one that does, carry Gudangs. I'm sticking with Sampoernas.

[vampwillow]

the Grauniad piece was trailed / commented upon on News 24 just before 11pm. Most annoyingly, the main newsreader commented "so if you want to improve your résumé do it in Wikipedia, seems to be the answer" ... grr ...

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

Internet has untrue information on it, film at 11.

Except without any fucking money.

Money will be useless under the dictatorship of the proletariat comrade, but the revolution requires funds, please sign here.

[rosefox]

Is there a wiki dictionary (which I assume would be called the Wiktionary) out there? I'd love to see the equivalent of the OED in scope, except constantly updated to reflect modern usage.

[reddragdiva]

http://en.wiktionary.org/

There are actually plans for a multilingual cross-referenced word definition database, under the working name Ultimate Wiktionary. (Presumably to be updated as Ultimate Wiktionary II.) This requires writing an entire new database backend, which is in progress.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I did my first Wiki editing in the last week. The person who set up the Classics Portal is enthusiastic, but had a couple of incorrect facts in there (and also can't tell the difference between "its" and "it's"), so I have quietly gone in and corrected a few bits.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Some people do get through RfA - but that's hardly surprising as the days when you'd recognise a name and know whether they were dodgy or not are long passed.

Articles for Deletion is worse - I can't imagine anyone having the time to check each and every one of them - and those that do can't be doing anything else.

The only way to keep your sanity is to specialise - I have been doing random UK stuff and going "WTF?" on the Administrators' Noticeboard. So you've ranged blocked an entire country because someone did something you didn't like - I don't think so..

Oh and all the userbox wankers need shooting.