Wikipedia: The Agony of Delete
 |
The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. |
I have been recommended for deletion from Wikipedia. For the next five days, Wikipedians will be having a public debate about whether I am too obscure to be included in the world's largest encyclopedia.
Weak Keep: Not as important as the author seems to think ...
Delete: Writing a book itself does not mean the person should be included. I looked up the books on Amazon and their sales rankings are #30,000 and #80,000.
Ouch.
The suspicion that I wrote my own biography is correct. I've been educating myself lately about Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales, the subject of a great profile in Florida Trend magazine this month.
I was expecting Wales to be a Stallmanesque hippie in a hemp pancho who makes ends meet through the kindness of strangers and occasional hair-clipping sales to wigmakers. He's actually a millionaire former options trader who looks like an international man of mystery and runs a new for-profit wiki startup.
I contributed my biography to Wikipedia in July, and I was beginning to think it would be accepted without controversy, which was a huge letdown.
Wikipedia runs on a process that should never work -- any idiot can create or edit a page, and volunteer contributors act as white blood cells, attacking foreign invaders such as spam, factual errors, biased writing, and self-glorifying authors.
Yet work it does. As Trend points out, Wikipedia's one of the 100 most-visited sites on the web, according to Alexa, steamrolling such esteemed competition as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I tried to write my biography as objectively as possible, leaving out the fourth place I won in the national Hearst Foundation writing competition in college, my modest success in elementary school spelling bees, and the fact that seven Today Show viewers sent e-mail complimenting my looks this past April (six female, one male).
If I have not accomplished enough in 38 years to be included in such company as Gene Ray, Wendy Whoppers, and Triumph the Insult Dog, I can accept the judgment of the Wikipedia collective.
If deleted, I'll submit my biography to people.wikicities.com, a new wiki I have proposed for people who are not famous enough for Wikipedia.
As a make-work project for unemployed arts majors during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration once sent writers to collect the first-hand life stories of ordinary people, creating a significant oral history of the era.
My proposed wiki would attempt to do the same thing for the 21st century, providing a commons where everyone can describe themselves and the people of their acquaintance.
The wiki could have a symbiotic relationship with Wikipedia.
People who are not famous enough to be on Wikipedia could be moved to people.wikicities.com via the magic of transwiki.
People whose biographies receive the most traffic on people.wikicities.com are probably too famous to be included, so they would be suitable for adoption by Wikipedia.
If my request for this new WikiCities site is approved, there's a danger that I might become too notable for inclusion. I'm prepared to take that risk.
Katrina Volunteers Needed in Houston
The water overflowing through the broken levee on Lake Pontchartrain has crested, which gives officials a better chance to complete the evacuation of New Orleans and end the increasingly post-apocalyptic situation in the city.A server admin holed up in the central business district reports no increase in flooding.
The evacuees in the Superdome, who number more than 23,000, are being taken by bus to the Houston Astrodome.
The Red Cross in Houston needs volunteers to help these people. Call (713) 526-8300 to register as a volunteer with the Greater Houston Area Chapter of the Red Cross. There's also a phone bank set up at (713) 313-5480 and people can donate directly to this chapter.
The Red Cross expects the Katrina effort to be the largest mobilization in its 124-year history.
Here in Jacksonville, residents were just asked to turn up our air conditioning to conserve electricity. The shutdown of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico may cause fuel shortages.
I know there's a weird aversion to '70s-style energy conservation in this country, but I suspect that those of us in Southern states spared by Katrina can help by reducing our consumption during this crisis.
I own a Linksys WRT54G, a 802.11g wireless access point, router, and four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch that runs Linux.InfoWorld columnist Robert X. Cringley singes the praises of the WRT54G, which is an amazing little Linux device that can be hacked to function as an Internet server. I've been using it on a Windows XP network to share a broadband Internet connection over several wired and wireless PCs around the house.
As amazing as this device is, I learned something this morning: Even when you have reset the modem, tested all the cord connetions, reset the router, and set the proper Ethernet mode, the WRT54G performs poorly when it has been filled with cat vomit.
Reading this Katrina weblog entry reminded me that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was one of only three category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. in the last century.My wife M.C. Moewe covered that monster storm for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She interrupted a Disney World vacation with her parents, driving to South Florida in time to experience the eyewall passing overhead in the company of local police. For most of the three-hour trip, her car was the only one heading south.
Covering the story was my suggestion. Back in Fort Worth, I told her Andrew was becoming humongous and she'd be asked to report on it if she told her editors where she was. Her mother was not happy about my idea, as I learned the next time we met. I am fortunate that she is not predisposed to violence.
I didn't know anything about hurricanes at the time, having lived my entire life in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metromess. Now that I'm an eight-year Floridian, I am known for premature evacuation. I was the first person to leave for Hurricane Frances last year, taking off 24 hours before TV news channels began covering the exodus, and I went one state more northward than anyone else.
In retrospect, sending the future mother of my children into this wasn't the best idea I've ever had.
Hurricane Katrina: 'Do Not Call 911'
LiveJournal business manager Mark Kraft is gathering information for Gulf Coast residents bracing for Hurricane Katrina, collecting reports from several LiveJournal diarists who are fleeing or preparing to ride out the storm.Kraft passes along a grim prediction from meteorologist Jeff Masters:
I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70 percent. This scenario, which has been discussed extensively in literature I have read, could result in a death toll in the thousands, since many people will be unable or unwilling to get out of the city. I recommend that if you are trapped in New Orleans tomorrow, that you wear a life jacket and a helmet if you have them. High rise buildings may offer good refuge, but Katrina has the potential to knock down a high-rise building.
The 4 p.m. National Weather Service warning for New Orleans was equally foreboding:
Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks ... perhaps longer. At least one half of well constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail ... leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.
The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rising apartments will be destroyed. Concrete block low rise apartments will sustain major damage ... including some wall and roof failure.
High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously ... a few to the point of total collapse.
Government officials did their best to scare the hell out of residents all Sunday morning, hoping they'd leave by any means possible. One told holdouts to make sure they had a hammer or some other tool that's strong enough to break through an attic roof. "You don't want to drown in there when the water comes," he said.
Several parishes in Louisiana have closed emergency services, giving their residents a discordant bit of advice: Do not call 911.
In January, the PBS series Nova broadcast a 12-minute segment that illustrates the nightmare scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans: 50,000 dead, one million homeless, and a new lake where New Orleans used to be.By my estimation, the water level would be high enough after a levee overflow to put this Bourbon Street webcam underwater -- even though it's 20 feet off the ground.
Sven Latham found more New Orleans bloggers in a latitude/longitude search of Blogwise, including one who feared being trapped there before neighbors offered a ride out:
There are about one-hundred thousand people in New Orleans with 'no place to go and no way to get there'. I'm one of those people.
Bloggers Run From Hurricane Katrina
Looking around New Orleans with GeoURL, I've yet to find a blogger sticking around for Hurricane Katrina.New Orleans TV station WWL is in 24-hour hurricane news mode, which is incredibly unnerving to experience, as I learned in Palm Coast, Florida, during Hurricane Floyd. A direct hit of a category 4 storm would cause Old Testament flooding in New Orleans, which averages eight feet below sea level and survives only because of levees. Residents have lived for years in dread of a storm that would demonstrate why this is terrible engineering, turning the city into Atlantis:
New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers this was the wrong place to build a city. It is wedged precariously between the mighty Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and most of it was once swampland. Aggravating the problem is the fact that much of New Orleans is below sea level, so that after a good rain, the water just settles in. There is now a decent pumping system, which helps. Old-timers, however, still talk of the days when, after a bad storm, bodies washed out of the cemeteries.
Jeffrey Masters, a meteorologist who was on a plane that nearly crashed in the eye of Hurricane Hugo, is covering the storm for Weather Underground:
A stretch of coast 170 miles long will experience hurricane force winds, given the current radius of hurricane force winds around the storm. A direct hit on New Orleans in this best-case scenario may still be enough to flood the city, resulting in heavy loss of life and $30 billion or more in damage.
The closest blogger who's sticking around appears to be T.C. Byrd, providing updates on the storm's approach from Hattiesburg, Mississippi:
On the Coast, if you are not following the mandatory evacuations, they are coming around and making you sign a waiver stating your vital stats and that the city can dispose of your body. There's already some flooding. Katrina ain't playing.
Update: An episode of Nova on PBS described New Orleans' nightmare scenario.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,495 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
