A thinky blog in response to the wikiblackout. So thinky I doubt it’ll top 30 comments.
Blogroll
The Unusual Suspects
- Alaskanwarrior
- Albionloveden (aka The Blue Box)
- Beeso
- Beeso’s Food Blog
- Beeso’s Wife
- Blarkon (an emperor lizard)
- BrianC (Not comicbookguy)
- Damian (not the Omen)
- DomesticDaze
- Dr Yobbo
- Drej
- Handsome Nautilus
- He’s big, he’s bad, he’s Al.
- His name is Bob. He’s a Guru.
- Hughesy’s Farm
- Incoming Havock.
- It’s good to be da Rhino
- Jennicki’s Joint
- Kittenheel
- Lobes emergency evac spot.
- Lord Bob of Nowhere
- Madoc
- Mayhem
- Moko Returns
- Mr Flinthart
- Mr Frellman, I presume.
- Mr. Barnes’s Zombiepocalypse
- Murph’s Moveable Ponderin’ Spot
- Opie
- Orin
- Patricia
- Paul Boylan #1
- Savo
- She spies, she’s Russian, she’s known as Natalia
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- Yankeedawg’s Dog House
- Yo! It’s da Wolf.
- Ysambart
Not sure if I got in ‘over there’, so insurance.
Ha, you fool. The lack of wikipedia has obviously dropped your IQ by many points. Bradbury my great Aunt Nellie’s arse.
The story was called “The Feeling of Power” and was by Isaac Asimov.
*sibeen, smug with his brilliance*
Golf clap, Sibeen. You beat me to it.
JB: If you have not done so yet, please view Mr. Judge’s fantastic (and, sadly) all-to-real look at the future: Idiocracy. In many respects, we are already in that world, and the continued dependence on electronic brains continues to eat away at our noggins everyday.
OKAY HOUSTON…WE HAVE A FKN PROBLEM, the FAIRY ATE my FKN COMENT!
As follows!
I’ll tell what WICKI does and is. Its a tool for people to use so they all look ( at least think they look ) like FKN LEGENDS or WELL EDUCATED fkn TOOLS ON-LINE.
How often any more on line, except for maybe me, do you see somebody cough up a FACT that incorrect….not that often, thats because before they open their trap the google it or head for WIKI.
“Google or WIKI regular” : A person or person bereft of one ounce of fkn intelligence, this is due to an inability to retain information in a sufficiently orderly pattern so as to be able to retrieve said info during normal discussion.
otherwise known as ARSEHATTED GIT
FKTARD
DKHEAD
MORON! and so forth. PLUS….MUPPET
insurance:
ENNO..yes!, and here’s somefin else you can neither do with the WEB, WIKI, GOOGLE or a Britannica fkn CD for that matter, but yoy CAN do with A Good OLD FKN ENCYCLOPAEDIA IN HARD BACK, you can both smack the kids or anybody for that matter across the back of their fkn scones and also wipe ya bottom as well!.
I’d like to see current GEN wipe their arses with a CD
Mr Havock, Sir, I would advise against it. It makes a terrible mess when you try to play the CD later.
lol..MM.. I can so see the youngsters trying to do it!…
Still can’t login to Blunty. Still claims I don’t have cookies enabled, even though I do. MacOS 10.7, Safari 5.1.2. Have they even tried apples on their system?
By the way, if you want to get at Wikipedia, you can still do so by turning off javascript.
The article I was going to write – this stunt of Wikipedia was really stupid. They’re attempting to convert themselves from infrastructure to power player. The problem with that is power players are also targets – and with Wikipedia’s governance structure (anarchic), it will crumble like a house of cards on the first serious attempt to gain control of future stunts like this.
Hell, I’m a dedicated Wikipedian, doing vandalism patrol and editing articles on a pretty much daily basis, and _I_ didn’t even know about this stunt until the banner showed up saying it was a done deal. That means the people who made the decision were activists who went into the argument primed to specifically use Wiki’s resources to push their agenda regardless of the larger community.
Expect to see future stunts leveraging Wikipedia to push various political agendas like birth control, poverty relief, nasty-government-spring, YouNameIt. Since the people uninterested in stunts won’t be contributing to the cesspool of political activism, the activists will legitimately contend that they held an election and got 97% (or whatever) of voters in favor of their stunt.
I put you up, Tarl.
I love Wikipedia. I thirst for knowledge – even inaccurate knowledge.
I’m very fond of the explanatory diagrams in your entry Boylan. I didn’t think it was possible to accomplish that with a tentacle, an accordian, and potato salad – but instead I was proven wrong.
“but instead I was proven wrong.”
A rare event, Emperor lizard dude.
BTW, I am in the process of marketing a bottled malt beverage with a tropical fruit infusion entitled “Donkey Punch.” Do you reckon there is a market for it?
@PNB
if the Donkey Punch is a chaser for a Teaser Pony I reckon you’re on a winner. Or should it be the other way around
I thought it was a Vonnegut story? It is also the basic plot device for the movie Idiocracy which actually had some very funny bits…
Paul, if it is infused with fruit then you will have an instant market at Chez Havock. He just loves the fruity gear.
- off topic
I resist coming here, and I resisted buying the new novel until today – pure bloody envy – then I found a table at the ballina rsl, a diet coke …….and baNG ….!!!!!
75 pages gone …..
its the FKN LIST for yopu THERBS MY MAN!
PeteB..you had me until DIET COKE…FKN HELL MAN, ya at the RSL for FK SAKES!
30 comments max eh?
Sir, you disunderestimatorise us.
& a brief lesson in content & meaning
google: Map of public hunting areas colorado
yeah NBOB..he has NO FKN FAITH!..NONE..thats what separates the men from the boys…the internal faith and fortitude we men have….playing with toddlers I fear NBOB!….fkn TODDLERS!..sheeez!
Donkey Punch. Brilliant. You’d never find that on wiki.
Wiki, pfft- chokkas with inaccuracies and “requires source” types of notes every 2 sentences. Having said that, Mark Dapin’s wiki entry is pretty amusing: he encouraged his readers to break in and make up his biography.
I didn’t know they were missing till they were walking back in the door. they’ll have to take my cultural / social/ lit anthologies from my cold dead hand. Mind you, PH D students, ten years later, will say “Everything I wrote is now utter shite” No thesis , no book is infallible; stuff changes all the time. Wiki is wing and a prayer –for humanities things, at least.
Per Encyclopedia Britannica, didn’t they used to pay their people to write those articles and entries?
Yet wikipedia can get someone like Tarl, very capable and intelligent, to do it for free.
Somehow that seems wrong.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
Abigail – I admire wiki because it does include a detailed entry on “donkey punch” that you would never have been available through anything prior to Wikipedia. And it has an animated illustration. Top that, Britannica!
apologies havoc, the only place to light a spliff was busy with outdoor bingo -
Havsy -FKN LIST indeed! FKN GENIUS LIST that’d be, and I was already FKN on it!!
95 comments by my current observation. Not so “thinky” after all, eh?
Herr Doktor Professor Boylan … you forgot to factor in those comments taken from a wiki or other source and presented as original content – take those out and you are down to the 13.5 range. The .5 was Havsy’s missing comment.
I really don’t use wikipedia … I’m more of a Google Orthodox guy and express my faith via the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. My god will guide me to the answers that I need.
I once relied on something called a “magic 8 ball” to provide me with all of the answers I needed.
couldn’t seem to navigate my way to Blunt Tool yesterday. It’s ch-ch-ch..changed. (Figured it out now)
If I can make one suggestion: Could they perhaps make font for names bolder? They now print everyone’s names in extra fine font so you’ve got no hope of seeing whose comment you’re liking. Wouldn’t want to mistakenly agree with a few of them ;) Nor they, I :p
Bolder typeface, helping maintain our prejudices since the advent of the newspaper.
Above comment applies to over 40 yr olds with poor elasticity in their optics.
Rhino..has the fkn AUTHOR done anything about the missing fkn comment!!!!..NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
put him on the fkn LIST with FKN THERBS!
The interface is a bit annoying, the quotes issue, and the formating of waht I posted changes. Where I make spaces in my text so it is easier to read when it gets posted it is all bunched together.
Makes it hard to read all the comments.
Perhaps the point is not to read the comments but just to comment, if so it is a short sighted view since the articles that result in the most comments usually involve the back abd forth between the commentors.
Mr Barnes, I did a piss take comment at Blunty on that formatting shit. Its just farked.
Havsy the same applies – FKN GENIUS FKN LIST OF FKN GENIUSES !!!!!
Rhino – back in the day we had to write/type out our ‘borrowings’. These days they just cut and paste with a few clicks. Born too early.
Prof Boylan – I prefer using a ‘magic’ highball. Whiskey included.
Yes, I have to agree with Barnes, here, that is makes it hard to read the commnents. I’m not sure why, precisely, it just is more difficult.
Sorry to sound like Jean from Melba who likes to complain to the ABC about small errors. “The Great War ended three microseconds before you said it did”
Disco Ball – for a thinky Blunty. Not bad.
Random thought:
As war looms in the Straits of Hormuz, and economists hide behind the sofa shrieking about GFC 2, how will our nation cope with Yellow-Wiggle-gate?
And the comments have gone again….
Some time back I ran a high school library for a few years (I think because that’s where the servers were & they were desperate). We thought we were pretty flash because I’d found a way to make an image of the Encarta disk (1 CD) and share it across the Novell network! Prior to that the kids drove me nuts during assignments by asking for “the book” that would tell them all. Then they switched to the Encarta article. Now I guess it’s Wikipedia. Hopefully teachers still tell them what we did then – that is NOT research, read the bleeding How-To booklet, go away and do it again! But I’m sure that for non-monitored purposes, Wikipedia would be used for about 90% of all queries.
Have to say though that we did do the whole research thing well. Students would come back after some uni experience quite grateful for their preparation and sniggering at those from the schools where they’d been spoon-fed. Gawd, the memories. Anyone remember Altavista?
Why not just make up the “facts?” We historians get accused of that all the time, especially by politicians.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
All of the facts I make up are absolutely true, or I believe them to be true, which is more or less the same thing. Perhaps a bit less.
+++back in the day we had to write/type out our ‘borrowings’. These days they just cut and paste with a few clicks+++
Hah, who goes to that much trouble? I’m hearing stories these days of students being given an essay to write and simply printing out and handing in the relevant Wikipedia article, complete with banner, sidebar, the works.
And the latest news in Birmo Spotting
http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2012/01/del-rey-announcement-more-john-birmingham.html
2014! Dammit, I’m too old to wait that long. Two years for the Hobbit movies and more for even the first one of those. Maybe it’s time to try the virgin’s-blood baths again. Or the Monkey Gland injections. Lacing my snuff with telomerase just made me sneeze harder.
The Dwarves (BP?) delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm (Well #27?): Shadow and Flame.
Well pickle me in scotch and call me a Balrog if that doesn’t sound promising.
Murph says: … wikipedia can get someone like Tarl to do it for free… that seems wrong.
The thing is I do it for fun. I use Wikipedia as a starting point in researching things, and any time I find something broken, I fix it (and add it to my watchlist).
The first article I wrote was one time I was researching the Energia, and couldn’t find information about its LH2/LOX engines. I eventually dug up the information I wanted (thank you Amazon :-), and having done that, added an article on the RD-0120. Damnit, if I worked that hard to find it, someone else might find it useful. I screwed up the format, which someone else noticed within a few weeks and fixed, and others have fixed other minor issues.
Another time I was curious what had happened with the titles Hernan Cortes was granted. I eventually tracked down a web page from the Pignatelli family which claimed Niccolo Pignatelli as the 16th Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, and presented a genealogy leading from Cortes to him.
I committed the cardinal Wiki sin of effectively importing it straight, and indicating where I’d found the information. A couple of months later, someone noticed and corrected it, tracking down Spain’s official Bulletin of State where law 19397 in 2001 granted Alvaro de Llanza the title of 15th Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, as successor to his father Jorge, the 14th Marquis.
Further research found that the original line (which does appear to lead to the Pignatellis) had allowed the title to go fallow, and a cadet line requested the title be assigned to them. Since the title has no meaning beyond social posturing, there are not likely to be any legal battles to resolve it. Just for completeness I dug up that the original documents granting the title to Cortes require his successors to swear loyalty to the King. The Pignatellis are Italians, the de Llanzas are Spanish, which pretty well solves that.
In any case, it’s been a eye-opening experience into both the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia. You can’t blindly trust the text, you have to follow the references and judge them (and whether they actually say what the article does). But the strength is that outside of certain politically-active cesspools, false claims are likely to get noticed and corrected. And the ability to follow references makes it an excellent starting place for researching a subject.
What Tarl said.
I double check any of the references from an article which I find vaguely bemusing. I suppose that means I basically use it for a relevant reference source.
That and Google Scholar, but that is a whole different urination contest.
BTW Tarl, that was a fascinating tangent. Ta muchly.
Barnesm, good pick up.
You think someone else who frequents this blog might have clued us in.
All I can say is cthulhu, cthulhu, cthulhu.