Professor and the mad people
Rum seems to be winning by a landslide. Interesting.
In other news, I see that what I like to call the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet--and what everyone else calls Wikipedia--is tightening its rules with regard to submitting articles. SAN FRANCISCO - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations.
Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday.
The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler Sr., who was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, wrote an op-ed article revealing that Wikipedia had run a biography claiming Seigenthaler had been suspected in the assassinations of the former Attorney General and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
Wikipedia, which on Monday offered more than 850,000 articles in English, has grown into a storehouse of pieces on topics ranging from medieval art to nano technology. The volume of content is possible because the site relies on volunteers, including many experts in their fields, to submit entries and edit previously submitted articles.
Seems like a good balance to me. What I like about Wikipedia is the citizen journalist sort of aspect to it, where people who know (and more importantly care) what they're talkin about submit material. It also, of course, can lead to inaccuracies, sometimes deliberate. I tend to take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt, but it's such a damned useful tool that I'm glad to see that it doesn't look like it will be changing toooo much in its scope and mission.
BTW, have ya'll seen the wiki entry on The Bronze.The Bronze is a nightclub in Sunnydale, the fictional setting for the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As the lead characters of Buffy are in high school during the first three seasons, The Bronze is a coffee bar that hosts live music and serves as a nightclub. While the drinking age in the U.S. is 21, it's generally ignored in the show other than when it's needed as part of the story. There have been a couple of references to underage drinking in the Bronze, and one particular where Anya asked for alcohol and the bartender kept insisting she provide an ID until she gave up and settled for a Coke.
The Bronze seems to have an unlimited refurbishment and furniture-replacement budget and, throughout all seven seasons of Buffy, serves as the venue for most night-time social settings. It does seem to possess a liquor licence, but the main characters are more usually seen drinking cappuccinos or hot chocolate. As can be seen from the episode "Beer Bad", the programme does not encourage drinking.
That The Bronze plays live music is not only used as a plot device for Oz's band Dingoes Ate My Baby but also as a subtle means for the production team to showcase new bands from the Los Angeles area, as well as more well known artists and bands such as Aimee Mann, Cibo Matto and Nerf Herder.
The Bronze is also the name of an internet forum for fans of the show and of other shows created by Joss Whedon such as Angel and Firefly. It was begun a few months after the show was first aired, and grew to be one of the largest single-show oriented forums on the web. In late 2001, when the WB Network stopped hosting the forums, the majority of users moved to the Bronze:Beta, while the official posting board became a threaded affair hosted by the show's new home, UPN. Despite all three of Whedon's shows having been cancelled, the board remains a thriving community for fans.
They go on to mention that this is simply a stub article and that there is a WikiProject Buffy that is working on putting together the Buffy info on Wiki. Are any real Bronze historians working on this? paperdol, datawhorevoyeur, jaanquidam, jungleeyedgirl?
Incidently, the title of this post comes from a book that I have not read but am meaning to: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. liv_a_little recommended it to me with her highest reviews. The creation of the OED was also a community effort that took decades to complete. No one had tried to a) find, b) agree on the spelling of and c) tried to define all of the words in the English language before. One of the regular, prolific contributors for the effort was a man who had been in an insane asylum for years. There's also The Meaning of Everything which is Winchester's follow up book about the OED.
In other news, I see that what I like to call the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet--and what everyone else calls Wikipedia--is tightening its rules with regard to submitting articles. SAN FRANCISCO - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations.
Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday.
The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler Sr., who was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, wrote an op-ed article revealing that Wikipedia had run a biography claiming Seigenthaler had been suspected in the assassinations of the former Attorney General and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
Wikipedia, which on Monday offered more than 850,000 articles in English, has grown into a storehouse of pieces on topics ranging from medieval art to nano technology. The volume of content is possible because the site relies on volunteers, including many experts in their fields, to submit entries and edit previously submitted articles.
Seems like a good balance to me. What I like about Wikipedia is the citizen journalist sort of aspect to it, where people who know (and more importantly care) what they're talkin about submit material. It also, of course, can lead to inaccuracies, sometimes deliberate. I tend to take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt, but it's such a damned useful tool that I'm glad to see that it doesn't look like it will be changing toooo much in its scope and mission.
BTW, have ya'll seen the wiki entry on The Bronze.The Bronze is a nightclub in Sunnydale, the fictional setting for the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As the lead characters of Buffy are in high school during the first three seasons, The Bronze is a coffee bar that hosts live music and serves as a nightclub. While the drinking age in the U.S. is 21, it's generally ignored in the show other than when it's needed as part of the story. There have been a couple of references to underage drinking in the Bronze, and one particular where Anya asked for alcohol and the bartender kept insisting she provide an ID until she gave up and settled for a Coke.
The Bronze seems to have an unlimited refurbishment and furniture-replacement budget and, throughout all seven seasons of Buffy, serves as the venue for most night-time social settings. It does seem to possess a liquor licence, but the main characters are more usually seen drinking cappuccinos or hot chocolate. As can be seen from the episode "Beer Bad", the programme does not encourage drinking.
That The Bronze plays live music is not only used as a plot device for Oz's band Dingoes Ate My Baby but also as a subtle means for the production team to showcase new bands from the Los Angeles area, as well as more well known artists and bands such as Aimee Mann, Cibo Matto and Nerf Herder.
The Bronze is also the name of an internet forum for fans of the show and of other shows created by Joss Whedon such as Angel and Firefly. It was begun a few months after the show was first aired, and grew to be one of the largest single-show oriented forums on the web. In late 2001, when the WB Network stopped hosting the forums, the majority of users moved to the Bronze:Beta, while the official posting board became a threaded affair hosted by the show's new home, UPN. Despite all three of Whedon's shows having been cancelled, the board remains a thriving community for fans.
They go on to mention that this is simply a stub article and that there is a WikiProject Buffy that is working on putting together the Buffy info on Wiki. Are any real Bronze historians working on this? paperdol, datawhorevoyeur, jaanquidam, jungleeyedgirl?
Incidently, the title of this post comes from a book that I have not read but am meaning to: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. liv_a_little recommended it to me with her highest reviews. The creation of the OED was also a community effort that took decades to complete. No one had tried to a) find, b) agree on the spelling of and c) tried to define all of the words in the English language before. One of the regular, prolific contributors for the effort was a man who had been in an insane asylum for years. There's also The Meaning of Everything which is Winchester's follow up book about the OED.