Britannica Editor Throws Book at Wikipedia

The Guardian newspaper asked several experts to evaluate a Wikipedia entry in their area of expertise, including the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, who critiqued encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's a moving target, which makes it tough to criticize. Errors cited by the Britannican were corrected by Wikipedians before his review saw print:

It is clear that the critic is commenting on an earlier version of the article -- for example, the typo he takes pains to note was already corrected, and more importantly the article seems to have been substantially revised since he read it.

I'm becoming addicted to Wikipedia as both reader and writer. I would not compare it to a print encyclopedia's quality (yet), but there's unique value in an open database of knowledge that accumulates in real time. Wikipedia operates on the principle that the more people care about a subject, the more likely its entries will be accurate and useful. I don't know that Wikipedia can survive spammers and sloppy editors -- critics are lining up to write it off -- but it's a good first stop when you're doing research in your pajamas.

I recently contributed a new entry on the Baby Richard custody case, which I wrote to supplement a sentence I added to the biography of journalist Bob Greene.

Writing in the authoritative voice of an encyclopedia is fun, but it was tough to avoid bias. That child never should have been in a position to be ripped from his home at age 4, especially in front of a media circus. He was only three months old when his biological father informed the adoptive parents he had been misled about the child and wanted custody.

Wikipedia · 2005/10/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Nude Dancer Denudes Wallet

Today's New York Times has an op-ed defending the right of strip clubs to rip off their clientele:

With many customers, fawning is key. What a stripper sells is not her ability to dance or take off her clothes, but her ability to suspend the customer's disbelief.

If she is doing her job right, his bald spot and his mortgage cease to exist, and he enters an adolescent fantasy of sexual prowess, temporarily transformed into James Bond, Han Solo and Hugh Hefner all rolled into one. The dancers keep cooing and flattering until the money runs out. It's not duplicitous; it's what the patron signs up for.

The author of the essay is Elizabeth Eaves, a former stripper who has turned the experience into a work of scholarship: Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power.

There's something poetic about a stripper who hates her customers so much she believes her job is to bankrupt them, since there isn't a lot of respect coming in the other direction of the "shake your moneymakers" business.

Eaves has an extremely low opinion of the men whose wallets she used to lay bare:

I don't have a lot of respect for these men. I don't think they're evil people, but I think that they're weak. I see visiting strip clubs as a form of cheating; I'm bothered by the idea that women are for sale, and I see this in many aspects of our society.

2005/10/25 · 38 COMMENTS · Link

Stuart Smalley: Bush Needs Therapy

Stuart Smalley made his first appearance on Al Franken's radio show Friday, venturing into politics to discuss tabloid rumors that the president has returned to the bottle (attached podcast).

I'm surprised it took so long to hear from the caring nurturer, who believes the president should get into an anonymous recovery group, regardless of whether or not he's drinking:

Right away. Imagine the stress. There but for the grace of God go I. If I were president, I'd be a complete wreck. I'd be doing a worse job than him, I really believe that. If that's possible.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/10/24 · 47 COMMENTS · Link

Harriet Miers is a Bear Market

The steady pace of bad news for Harriet Miers appears to have accelerated within the last 24 hours, based on the prices at an Internet gambling site trading on her nomination to the Supreme Court.

Tradesports, an Irish betting service that provides a system for speculating on current events, has a contract on the confirmation of Miers that has plummeted.

Prices in a bet like this range from 0 (no chance) to 100 (absolute lock), and Miers hit an all-time low of 11 today. The current price of 20, 30 percent below yesterday's price, means that only 1-in-5 bettors believes she'll make it to the Supreme Court (more graphs).

A skim of ConfirmThemButNotHer.Com shows recent events that might have prompted the drop, from the Wall Street Journal editorial calling her nomination a "blunder" to the bipartisan request to redo her questionnaire to an embarrassing factual gaffe in an answer about the Equal Protection Clause.

My money's on a story that ran yesterday in the Washington Times:

Harriet Miers -- whose courtesy calls with senators in their Capitol Hill offices have been more chaotic than courteous -- has finished the tour, the White House has told congressional aides.

Miss Miers will spend the next two weeks cramming for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Republican Senate staffers working on the nomination told The Washington Times yesterday.

The meetings have been fraught with misunderstandings and disagreements, giving ammunition to detractors, both liberal and conservative, that Miss Miers is in over her head.

I can't recall a Supreme Court nominee who stopped making courtesy calls to senators like this -- Miers has met half as many members as Roberts did. If the Bush administration can't get her safely through a private, generally cordial process, the confirmation hearings must be scaring the stare decisis out of them.

Politics · 2005/10/21 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school has dropped its football program midseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned 13 starters from last year's 0-11 team, still had the toughest part of the schedule to come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.

Florida · Sports · 2005/10/19 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs

I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank. SportsFilter jumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.

A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins with www and one that doesn't -- for the same site.

Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at either mydd.com or www.mydd.com.

When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of "301 moved permanently," which indicates a permanent move, rather than "302 found," which may be temporary.

If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links to www.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links to mydd.com, giving it PR 6.

The site's hosted with Apache, so if mod_rewrite is installed, a two-line .htaccess file in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:

To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it at Buzzword and am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs on Technorati, only Dooce and Kottke.Org aren't giving up some rank.

Publishing · Manila · Google · 2005/10/19 · 35 COMMENTS · Link

Hysteria is Contagious

An article on the 50-year effort by scientists to revive the 1918 Spanish flu virus reads like a Michael Crichton novel:

He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza.

The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918.

Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. At the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer believes it's more of a Steven King:

We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.

Though he cites New Scientist, Krauthammer omits a few facts from the magazine's flu coverage that are worth considering before completely freaking out, as do Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who call this flu's published genome a "recipe for disaster."

The laws of probability suggest that if Earth sticks around long enough, scientists will eventually stumble upon a discovery that wipes out humankind and gives the rest of the universe one less thing to worry about. That's why we must colonize other planets as soon as possible. Our genes need places to store backups.

But I'm not ready to hit the panic button about the return of the killer of 1918. Most people have been exposed to milder descendants of that flu or vaccinated against them, both of which provide natural protection. Existing antiviral drugs also are likely to offer resistance.

The more pressing concern is the next pandemic flu, which hasn't been filtered through survivors and weakened by the collective might of antibodies and evolution. Learning from the publication of the Spanish flu's genome also may enable researchers to devise an effective response to the next killer flu or biological terror attack.

Besides, if hiding information from bad, bad people is Earth's best hope, we might as well max out the credit cards and stock up on beer, medicinal marijuana, and fatty foods, because we're screwed. As technologists like Kurzweil and Joy must realize, security through obscurity never works.

Politics · 2005/10/18 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

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