The Onion lists and discusses 12 surprisingly controversial topics at Wikipedia. [Tags: wikipedia onion]

Fred Stutzman writes at TechPresident about WikiDashboard, from PARC, that provides a visualization of who has been editing an article with what frequency. Very cool and sometimes revelatory.

They ought to make this deliverable as a sound, so when you go to a page, you can tell the shape of the edit history by the pitch, quaver and number of voices. [Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations parc fred_stutzman]

There’s a fascinating discussion at Wikipedia about whether lists of loosely associated items should be kept or deleted. in this particular case, a list of song titles that contain first names was deleted.

I don’t feel I have standing to have an opinion — this is a discussion among people who spend a good chunk of their lives building and maintaining Wikipedia — but (nevertheless) I do tend to favor including articles rather than deleting them. Wiki is not paper. As you’ll see in the discussion, there are lots of criteria at play, but some of the arguments for deleting such lists seem to me to be based on a desire to keep Wikipedia dignified. That argument I don’t buy. Other criteria adduced for deleting “silly” lists are far stronger. And in the discussion you get to see Wikipedia continuing to figure itself out through a process of suggesting criteria, interpreting settled criteria, appeals to precedent, and personal persuasion. [Tags: wikipedia encyclopedias everything+is+miscellaneous lists ]

Since we’re all getting tired of hearing Wikipedia used as an example of this or that — although I’m sure you’ll find the discussion of Wikipedia in Everything Is Miscellaneous to be minty fresh! — here’s a reminder that before the estimable Wikipedia, we were making knowledge social using humbler forms.

Knowledge has always been social, even though our metaphysics has led us to say that knowledge is a type of belief, and thus is a mental state, and thus is something inside a head. If the belief is true and justified, then the mental state gets stamped with a big, official K, preferably in some gothic-teutonic font. If not, it gets marked with a red X and your soul loses 2 points (4 if it is an essay question). Something like that.

When Wikipedia works, however, (and I think it works remarkably well remarkably often), the knowledge it contains results from a social process. Expert opinion gets rendered expert-er and more neutral by being negotiated in public.

But forget Wikipedia for the moment. Think about the mailing lists you’ve been on for years. Some of them are just for fun, but others are our best source of information, knowledge and opinion about topics that matter to us. Over time, experts emerge on the list. Their posts are listened to, but also usefully challenged and extended. The mailing list as a whole is a better source than any of the individuals on it. Mailing lists embody social knowledge — knowledge that arises through conversation and that thus is not contained in any single head. Social knowledge is among, not in.

And not just at Wikipedia.

[Tags: knowledge epistemology wikipedia listserv]

Matthew Burton has developed a site — ReadableLaws.org — as a thesis (under the estimable Prof. Jay Rosen) where we can translate legislation into understandable English and discuss its implications. The first bills posted include one to broaden Fair Use, one that criminalizes hiding information about video games to skirt the ratings, and an expansion of Internet monitoring to prevent child pornography.

I can see the implications pages getting bogged down because the site has no built-in way of handling disagreements, but the translation-into-understandability pages look like a great idea. (And maybe the implications pages will work out, too.)

This is all part of Jay's NewAssignment.Net project. [Tags: laws wikis media legislation matthew_burton jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous]

A study by Communispace (which, as an online community developer has a horse in the race) says that while big communities necessarily have lots of "eyeballs,"

Results indicate that 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or "lurk."

By contrast, on public social networking Web sites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, as the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.

The long tail lives!

A different study by Melcrum says that 55% of corporations already have blogs or are planning to within the next 12 months, and 63% plan to be distributing videos on the likes of YouTube. 73% have no plans to use SecondLife. 70% have no guidelines or policies for blogs and other social media, and only 26% were "sure how to monitor what was being said about" them.

[Tags: social_software blogging long_tail marketing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” says Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, to a reporter for Wired News. That’s why Ms. MacKensie’s library, like many others, put employees through a training process called Learning 2.0. The project, a primer on interactive Web tools conceived by a public-library official in North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, gives library staffers a list of 23 tasks to complete over a period o f about nine weeks. Learning 2.0 starts by teaching participants how to create blogs, and it then asks trainees to use those blogs to record their thoughts on a bunch of other tech tools — like folksonomies, wikis, and podcasts — that they also try out. The primer was designed with public libraries in mind, but a decent share of college libraries have also used it, according to Wired News. For librarians wondering how Web 2.0 will alter information-literacy training, it’s worth a look, at the very least. –Brock Read

Fuzzzy.com from Roy Lachica at the University of Oslo is a "web2.0 organic collaborative ontology socio-semantic polyscopic web research project." Got it!

But seriously, it lets you tag bookmarks and maintain a social network. The big words come in because Fuzzzy lets you position a tag in an ontology. Here's how the About page explains it:

When bookmarks are assigned a meaning using a standard like the ISO 13250 Topic Map then people as well as other computer systems can make use of the embedded knowledge in a more meaningful way. This way of categorising content is a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo directory and the more recent social tagging (folksonomy) approaches.

I'm interested to see how this experiment works out. There's no question that the metadata it collects — in addition to classifying the resource according to a taxonomy, the site lets you check some boxes to indicate the resource's "mood," knowledge type, and details level — would be useful, but experience teaches us — until it confounds all teachings — that people generally resist attaching explicit metadata.

There are exceptions, and Metaweb's freebase may well turn out to be one. Because it's an invitation-only beta, the best place to learn about it is Tim O'Reilly's post about it. Paradoxically, because freebase is about metadata, users may pitch in to build it. It's sucked in a bunch of the openly available sources of information, including Wikipedia and musicbrainz , and it has a user-extensible (via a wiki) set of metadata fields for the various types of entities in the world — so an entry for a business has a "headquarters" field but an entry for a CD does not.

Why would anyone fill in these fields? Because there's probably one "anyone" interested enough to do so for each of the listings. Tim O'Reilly, for example, might be interested enough to fill in the form for O'Reilly Media. It only takes one person. This is the other side of networked, distributed projects: Not only can lots of people do tasks together that would be too big for any individual, but a single person can sometimes do a task for the entire group. If only 2% of the world tagged, 98% of the world's stuff would be tagged eventually. (I totally made up those figures.)

Freebase will be fascinating to watch. If we do in fact build it, we'll have a publicly accessible (Creative Commons licensed) ontology populated with tons of stuff we care about that will do much of what the Semantic Web is trying to do: Draw implicit connections, discover context, search better, and just in general be smarter users of a smarter Web. [Tags: tags tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy metadata fuzzzy tim_oreilly freebase metaweb ]