Rubénerd Blog :)

In a tip of the hat to Jim Kloss who was essentially driven off Wikipedia by trigger happy administrators as well as some recent adventures of my own, I’ve updated my Wikipedia user page.

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I know I just poked fun at Wikipedia for its unnecessary verboseness and repetition, but like the hypocrite I am I’m going to poke fun at repetition by performing a repetition of blog post topics. Here are the first three paragraphs of the Canberra article on Wikipedia:

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Wikipedia’s article on the OECD:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, in French: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, OCDE) is a Paris-based international economic organisation of 30 countries.

[...]

In 1961, it was reformed into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This blog post on the Rubénerd Blog is a blog post on the Rubénerd Blog, written and published by Ruben Schade, the creator of blog posts on the Rubénerd Blog found on the Rubénerd Blog.

Amongst all the rules Wikipedia administrators impose, at times far too strictly I may add, I suggest this one be added:

WP:IO — Wikipedia Intuitively Obvious
If the title of an article accurately and succinctly describes the subject in question, further clarification is not necessary!

So I was talking to somebody online about Taekwondo and wasn’t sure about the spelling, so I looked up the Sports section on the South Korea Wikipedia article. In hindsight I may as well have just looked up the Taekwondo page itself. You do silly things when you’re half asleep.

According to Wikipedia, as it turns out StarCraft is South Korea’s national sport. If it’s on Wikipedia, it has to be true! A WikiAnswers page corroborates this.

I learn something new every day; and forget two other things. Komapsumnida.

If you log into Wikipedia, there’s a link in the top right corner that lets you try their new beta user interface. Don’t know how long has it been there, I’ve never seen it before now.

I think the new theme does look classier despite being slightly less efficient with screen real estate. It also introduces an interesting new per-user "book" feature which you can add articles to.

UPDATE: It seems this book feature has been made available for general use in the sidebar not just for people participating in the beta.

I wonder if this new theme and new features will be made available for other MediaWiki installs? That be schweeet :D

I thought it was particularly trippy that this is the 2009th post, and the year is 2009. Just think about that for a second: from now on the number of posts will exceed the year. It’ll be as if I’ll be blogging from the future. If that isn’t trippy, quite frankly I don’t want to know what is.

To celebrate, I put the 2009 year page on Wikipedia through Wordle and got the above thing. Interesting if cryptic mix of words.

As Arnott’s is always quick to tell us, there’s no substitute for quality. That said, three million articles is still pretty damned impressive.

Unfortunately I’ve had a few too many negative experiences with dealing with some of the, shall we say terse senior editors, but that’s not to say it hasn’t become an important part of my life. For better or worse I nearly always Wikipedia something before I Google something now. Good think I got out of creating verbs out of product names. Speaking of which I need to Hoover the house and Xerox a few documents. Damn Kleenex and papercuts.

At least I don’t get papercuts from Wikipedia!

Out of interest, the article I was trying to access was government ensign. I was trying to win a bet; the guy I was talking to was adamant that a government ensign was a flavour of sorbet. I worry about him sometimes.

For those of you also living in a so called Commonwealth Realm, a jolly good, merry, happy and prosperous Queen’s Birthday to you!

Here in Australia (except for WA) we have the day off on the second monday of June which happens to be today. According to infallable Wikipedia, Canadians have the day off on the 24th of May, people in the United Kingdom have it on the first, second or third Saturday in June, and New Zealanders on the first Monday of June. I suspect many of her other realms have holidays for this:

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is the queen regnant of sixteen independent states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

None of these dates though are the Queen’s actual birthday. Don’t you just love living in a commn sense monarchy? :) I know I know, the holiday wasn’t meant for Queen Elizabeth II and is by convention not by her actual birth date, but still!

The "Aggie Bonfire"

Jim Kloss’s recent disillusionment with some of the people at Wikipedia recently made me think about my own brushes with Wikipedia’s moderators. The first was when I created articles for the terms Audio Magazine and New Time Radio to highlight the limitations of the then-new term "podcast", but both were removed because they lacked notability. I respected the decision at the time and moved on.

My opinions changed in late 2007 when I noticed the featured article for the day was about the so called Aggie Bonfire. I had seen many articles removed for not being notable, but apparently an article about a ritualistic bonfire to show rivalry between two universities was somehow deemed not only notable, but worthy of featured article status. Suffice to say, I commented on the talk page:

Very thorough and well designed article, even if the event it reports barely counts as encyclopedic material. A fire to highlight rivalry, how childish.

–rubenerd (talk) 12:28, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I received two replies. The first was from someone right underneath my comment:

Some people think wars are childish. Some people think others are childish. However these things happen and WP tries to ensure every notable person, event, and thing we can verify using reliable sources is covered. While somethings are more notable than others, the others sometimes are well documented. [...]

–spryde 12:31, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

You read that right, this user compared my calling out of a ritualistic rivalry bonfire as childish, by saying some think war is childish. Yes, I’m sure veterans and people who have lost loved ones and family members in armed conflict would agree that it’s on par with a university rivalry bonfire. Un-freaking-believable!

The streets of Kiev during World War II

He also exposed something which I think is at the heart of the problem Wikipedia is facing right now: the notability of articles isn’t based on how important they are, it’s how much material is about them online. An independent musician with a link to their own website and to a non profit website like Whole Wheat Radio is therefore less important than a… bonfire?

The second comment was posted on my own talk page:

Hello, Rubenerd. This is in regards this edit you made – please be aware of what Wikipedia is not, especially that talk pages are not forums for general discussion of an article’s subject. Your compliance with these policies would be appreciated. Thank you.

–BlueAg09 21:47, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I didn’t want to reply to the first guy, but to this person I replied with what I thought was a diplomatic answer.

I appreciate your response, however I believe my comments were in line with the legitimate questioning of a subjects notability for inclusion in a global encyclopedia. A rivalry between two universities which results in a ritualistic bonfire just doesn’t seem to be that important. I respect your opinion though and will try to adhere to Wikipedia protocols. Cheers

–rubenerd (talk) 03:36, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a valuable resource that we’re all better off having online, but it has some real problems. Or perhaps I should word that more accurately: some of Wikipedia’s editors have some real problems. Perhaps it’s time to rescue Wikipedia from some of it’s own people? Viva la revolution!