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It's fun to watch the cascade effect of a big (as far as the Web is concerned) announcement like the Revolution's new name. These sorts of things have unintended consequences. My favorite so far is that while the Wii is not yet for sale, people have already staked out gmail, hotmail and yahoo e-mail addresses with "wii" in them and are selling them in ebay auctions. I never would have thought of that.
I just found out that the Nintendo Revolution is actually going to be called the Nintendo Wii. Pronounced "we."
I guess it could have been worse. It could have been called The Phantom Menace.
Did you know there was aPope Lando? He was Pope for just six months, but he left behind a possibility for some good jokes involving Bespin.
Once upon a time I created a little online toy called the Drug Slang Translator. It was a simple thing, dashed off in an afternoon, which took supplied text or a supplied Web page, and replaced words which are ostensibly used as drug slang with the actual drugs. So for instance, if you entered "Put the horse in the pot" it would spit out "Put the heroin in the marijana."
I liked it okay, but it's not something I'd put on a short list of my best work. That's why I was surprised when I looked at the Brunching stats a while back and found that the Drug Slanger was one of the most popular pages. As it turns out, it all has to do with Google. You see, Brunching has a sort-of high Google PageRank, and when you enter a URL into the Drug Slanger, it spits back a permanent URL for the Drug Slanged version of that page. Direct Google to that URL, and it appears as if Brunching is linking to the page in question. Instant PageRank.
Recently someone took exception to their site being the subject of the Drug Slanger. Now, generally I try to be a good neighbor, and block sites that ask me to. I think it's just polite, the equivalent of respecting robots.txt. It miffs me when someone wheels up the Lawyer Catapult in their first e-mail, but I comply anyway, because I like to be a good neighbor even to people who decide to be surly about it. But, that's time and energy and tsuris I just don't want to deal with. It's like having the register a car that's up on blocks in your garage.
So, for the moment I'm just shutting the page down. Later on, I may reinstate it without the URL option, but frankly I'm a lot more excited about doing stuff in the future than modifying stuff from the past. But if you or someone you love wants to take up the Swedish Man's Burden, I'm making the source code available for free. Honestly, it's crap, I never really worried about efficiency or readability, I was just chasing a deadline. But it does contain the word list I used, so feel free to take that part and re-write it, use it as-is, whatever. I'm hereby putting it into the public domain. I'd LIKE to be credited if you use it, but if I'm not going to put it up myself I'm certainly not going to chase down and hassle people who don't mention me.
[Edit: Changed the link. The gz file wouldn't download correctly.]
Early on in my Brunching days, I learned to live with the fact that some people consider humor to be a personal attack on the things they love, and by extension on themselves. Over and over I'd write an article about something I actually liked, for instance Star Wars or Dungeons and Dragons, and I'd get all sorts of mail based on the assumption that because I made fun of it, I must hate it. To the contrary, while I do sometimes mock stuff I don't like, most of the time I can't be bothered to do the research. That's why, for instance, I never wrote an article about Britney Spears. I never got into Britney Spears or her music, so I never really knew enough about her to go a good job of making fun of her.
Wikipedia is kind of like that. I can't say I adore it, but I certainly find it interesting enough to have read a lot about it, and that's why I have enough packed into my brain to get a humor column out of it.
I don't usually do this, but I'm going to talk about about how I actually feel about Wikipedia, so that you can compare and contrast with the humor article.
First off, let me say that I use Wikipedia a lot. Most of the time when I have a question, it's not something terribly important to me. I mention Battlestar: Galactica in the article, and that's a good example, but it could even be about, say, the American Civil War. If I'm thinking about Gone With the Wind, for instance, and I'm wondering how much time there was between the fall of Atlanta and the end of the War, Wikipedia is a fine place to find the answer. It's certainly one of the easiest ways, and when it's just a random question, ease of use is more important to me than rock-solid credentials.
From an end user point of view, I think of Wikipedia as the rough equivalent of the Yellow Pages (the actual physical books they drop on your doorstep). Pre-Web, the Yellow Pages were incredibly useful, and often the best way to find out about a business. The ads often include information about location, hours, sometimes there's even a menu. At the same time, though, you'd be a fool to take the Yellow Pages as gospel. Businesses close, hours change, mistakes are made. I'd happily call a pizza place based on an ad saying "We deliver," but I certainly wouldn't drive five hours to visit a business at a certain time and location without confirming the hours and address from a different source, preferably the business itself. But if you refused to use the Yellow Pages because they sometimes contain mistakes, well, that's self-defeating fanaticism.
That's how I see Wikipedia. I use it to answer questions all the time, but if I'm writing a serious news article or the answer is very important to me, I'll be darn sure to confirm the information I find there from other sources.
This is not an unusual opinion, this idea that Wikipedia is very useful but not infallible. It's actually kind of astounding that there's as much argument about it as there is, which is the source of the first three questions in my humor article. I don't consider that Wikipedia-bashing. It can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. Me, I think it's entertaining, but doesn't change my opinion on the utility of Wikipedia itself.
The fourth question, about Wikipedia jargon, is more a mockery of arguments on Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself. And, in the end, it's a mockery of human nature. Anywhere you find an argument, you'll find people who believe that their own point of view happens to be the most neutral, unbiased point of view. Wikipedia's "NPOV" mantra just brings this tendency out more than most.
The fifth question, about who can edit Wikipedia, is my attempt at a wry dig at the site's Libertarian ideals. And again, this isn't limited to Wikipedia. You'll find lots of places on the Web where "freedom" has a big asterisk attached. I think in a way Wikipedia illustrates both the best and worst aspects of this sort of thinking. On one hand, I think it's astonishing that so much utility can come out of so much anarchy. On the other hand, I think it's a little disingenuous to bill Wikipedia as an encyclopedia anyone can edit, when it's actually an encyclopedia that anyone can edit unless, you know, Jimbo Wales says they can't. But as the Simpsons pointed out, this is a paradox. It's only the ability of Wikipedia admins to lower the hammer on the worst miscreants that makes it possible for the vast majority of Wikipedians to have as much latitude as they do.
The sixth question, about experts being scum, is probably where we first come to a genuine, Wikipedia-specific criticism, although I certainly did my best to make it funny. The culture of Wikipedia is such that the expert is given no more credence than some guy who heard something somewhere. To some people this is actually a virtue, to others it's a fault. I lean towards "fault," but at the same time it hasn't stopped me from finding Wikipedia to be a useful tool.
The question about "some guy" shooting Kennedy is also something of a specific criticism, but more of a criticism of fanatics than the site itself. One of the common defenses of Wikipedia in general, and the Seigenthaler incident specifically, is that if you find a mistake, and don't immediately fix it, then you yourself are at fault. I don't think this is anywhere near a majority opinion of Wikipedia editors, but it seems to come up in every argument about Wikipedia. This is where I have to call bullshit. Sites are the responsibility of those who choose to contribute to them. You can't pick a site and declare it to be everyone else's problem. In the end, though, this isn't Wikipedia's fault. Last I checked, there's nothing on the site saying "Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia You're Obliged to Edit." It's just that some of the people rushing to Wikipedia's defense are overzealous.
Finally, the last question was mostly just an excuse for a Battlestar: Galactica callback. In truth, I think at least ninety percent of the time the system works when it comes to deleting articles. If you look at the Articles for Deletion pages, most of the sites that get deleted are bands that may or may not exist, transparent advertisements for products, sites, or points of view that haven't achieved any level of notoriety, and suchforth. On the other hand, the exceptions can be infuriating.
Looking back over the article, most of my jokes are about Wikipedia fanatics rather than Wikipedia itself. I could have included more material about anti-Wikipedians, such as something about how encyclopedias don't even cover a lot of material that Wikipedia does, or that a mistake in an encyclopedia can't be instantly fixed, but you know what? Encyclopedias are boring. The information in encyclopedias can be fascinating, but as a concept there's little that's less ripe for humor than a shelf full of fat, nearly identical books with obscure facts in them. Wikipedia is many things, bad and good, but it's vibrant and new and controversial and full of human nature in all its ridiculous finery, and that more than anything is why I wrote the article.
My favorite news photo caption of all time:
Picured here is a fresh placenta just taken out a woman's womb. It could have been big meal for Cruise. (file photo)"
This week's column is about carrying your microtech.
Sailing the Sorry Sea of Nausea
I'm continuing to try out different essay types. This one isn't tech-oriented at all, it's based on personal experience. I should point out, before Oprah endorses me, that I have no allegiance to truth in these essays. As far as I'm concerned they're humor essays that may or may not draw on personal experience, not actual autobiography. Having said that, I'm still dealing with the effects of that damn flu.