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September 12, 2006
In a First Monday article, Tom Cross suggests color-coding Wikipedia entries to highlight different levels of textual reliability. He recommends using four colors: red (very unreliable), yellow (pretty unreliable), green (pretty reliable), and black (very reliable).
Encyclopedia Britannica editor Dale Hoiberg mops the floor with Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales in a lively and revealing Wall Street Journal email debate. At one point, Wales criticizes Britannica because it "doesn't display its rough drafts, or the articles before being checked by a copy editor." Counters Hoiberg: "No, we don't publish rough drafts. We want our articles to be correct before they are published." Hoiberg's final comment, in which he draws on the work of the great technology critic Lewis Mumford, is worth pausing on:
Long before the Web, Lewis Mumford predicted that the explosion of information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Not only would lots of information fail to make us smarter; it would actually make us dumber by overwhelming us. The solution, he thought, was not to be found in technology alone but in "a reassertion of human selectivity and moral-self discipline, leading to continent productivity." In these days of information incontinence, in order to be part of the solution rather than the problem, I think it is important to remember this.
A group of more than 100 leading U.K. teachers, psychologists, and writers, including popular author Philip Pullman, published an open letter in today's Daily Telegraph warning that our technology-saturated culture is poisoning childhood: "Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed 'junk'), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives." In an accompanying article, Britain's former "children's laureate" Michael Morpurgo "condemned the 'virtual play' represented by electronic games and internet surfing."
Ubiquitous MySpace "friend" Tom Anderson admits to being "as anti-social as they come," reports ValleyWag. That's a bummer, because Tom happens to be the only person who's friended me at MySpace. Do you realize how depressing it is to be greeted with "You have 1 friends." (That plural really twists the knife.) And now it turns out even he's a sham.
Michelle Kessler covers the Web 2.0 miniboom for USA Today.
The web site Dropping Knowledge hosts a "table of free voices" in Berlin. It's "a peculiar combination of political theater, performance art, a focus group and a corporate gala," according to Deutsche Welle, in which "112 participants launched a new Internet platform for promoting social issues through dialogue by answering simultaneously [the] 100 most pressing questions facing the world of today and tomorrow." "We are in the process of liberating knowledge," said one participant.
The latest Web 2.0 social network, GroupHoop, is "dedicated to enablevating an ideaspace for memes to prosper ... By interfacing directly with other web 2.0 content canvases we unlock the potential of diversity aggregation."
Having endured one user revolt, Facebook nervously discloses plans to open the online community, once reserved for college students, to all comers. The company seems intent on alienating the faithful and muddying its distinctiveness. “The point of Facebook is the exclusivity,” notes one observer. “If they don’t have that, what do they have that MySpace doesn’t have?"
Posted by nick at September 12, 2006 08:01 AM