a.k.a. Shawn Honnick specializing in wonderful since 1968
*also Chipotle pictures, NYC adventures, and little known safety tactics like fake hand washing.
**If you're a disgruntled employee, do something about it (no, it's not a pyramid... THIS is the PYRAMID) or just sit around and grumble like everyone over at the disgruntled employee forums.
Posts tagged: wikipedia
I recently added a link to the “vanity plates” page on Wikipedia titled, “Plate Show is a web show about life, vanity plates and the meanings behind them” (this is the show’s tagline). I was getting pretty steady traffic from it for a few weeks and, after noticing that was not happening anymore, I went to check the page and found that my link is no longer there.
I’m wondering if this is just the expected moron factor, where someone decided my link somehow interfered with theirs and decided to remove the “competition” or if I possibly broke a Wikipedia rule that I would not have known about (since I never read anything) by posting a link to my own web site or something else I overlooked? If I add my link back, am I in danger of starting the wiki equivalent of a flame war—or maybe even breaking some other wiki rule?
I’ve already noticed that my personal collection of vanity plate images is growing beyond “Largest Gallery of Vanity Plates on The Web” listed and so titled on Wikipedia. I don’t want to go removing links… I can make mine “The Largest Individually Collected…” or something—even though mine actually will also be the largest gallery with just one more image!
So, should I just add my link again? Have I broken the law of the wiki?
What’s the deal? Please reblog or email plateshow@gmail.com with any and all Wikipedia expertise.
Thanks!
In the US, when someone threatens to sue a site like Google or Wikipedia because of postings made by its users that are defamatory, you just point them to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that makes it clear that service providers aren’t liable for what their users say — a law that makes a lot of sense. Courts have been getting faster and faster at throwing out those types of cases. Unfortunately, it sounds like Canada doesn’t have a similar law (or case history). In Vancouver, a former Green Party staff member is apparently suing Google, Wikipedia and a Canadian political website over postings on all three that he felt were defamatory. The guy is quoted as saying: “I’m determined that the people who have acted so irresponsibly will find that there are consequences.” That’s nice… but if that’s the case, why isn’t he actually suing those responsible? He’s suing the tools providers. Does he sue the phone company if someone says something bad about him over the phone? There’s simply no reason to sue the tools providers instead of those actually responsible. The end result, of course, is that he’s only going to get a lot more attention drawn to the fact that a lot of people don’t think very highly of him and expressed that opinion in online forums. That hardly seems likely to improve his reputation.
Hungarian medical student and blogger Bertalan Meskó usually works to inform the masses about how Web 2.0 can help/change/improve the practice of medicine. Recently he gave his readers a glimpse into the future of the internet’s influence on science and medicine with Wiki-Proteins, the first Web 3.0 project. Web 3.0 is marketed as the development of the “semantic web”, which is claimed to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intuitive than today’s technology.
An excerpt from the Wikipedia article summarizes what exactly the “semantic web” will be:
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “car”, to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
The mission of Wiki-Protein is to connect the scientific world’s protein resources like Medline, IntAct, the National Library of Congress, UniPort, and the GO Consortium to expedite the exploration and exchange of knowledge. Their web site is still in the developmental stages, but any scientists whose research is even remotely involved with proteins should absolutely check out the site and watch the demo.
