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A workshop teaching Zionists how to edit Wikipedia pages to be more favorable towards Israel. This is just one of many Israeli projects to manipulate Wikipedia, social media, and the Internet in general.
The speaker in the video is Naftali Bennet, a high tech millionaire and a right-wing Israeli minister close to the settler movement.
In 2010 two Israeli groups began offering a course in “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia entries. The aim was “to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups.” A course organizer explained that the use of the word “occupied” in Wikipedia entries “was just the kind of problem she hoped a new team of editors could help fix.”
Again in 2013, there was evidence of pro-Israel tampering with Wikipedia. Israel’s Ha’aretz reported that a social-media employee of NGO Monitor edited articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an allegedly biased manner. “Draiman concealed the facts that he was an employee of NGO Monitor, often described as a right-wing group, and that he was using a second username, which is forbidden under Wikipedia’s rules,” according to the paper.
Such actions have had an impact. A website critical of Wikipedia said in 2014 that there were “almost ten times as many articles about murdered Israeli children as there are articles about murdered Palestinian children,” even though at least 10 times more Palestinian children had been killed.
Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported: “The organizers’ aim was twofold: to affect Israeli public opinion by having people who share their ideological viewpoint take part in writing and editing for the Hebrew version, and to write in English so Israel’s image can be bolstered abroad.”
There was to be a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”—the person who over the next four years incorporated the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. The winner would receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
How Israel and its partisans work to censor the Internet
Israel and partisans of Israel have long had a significant presence on the Internet, working to promote the lsrael narrative and block facts about Palestine, the Israel lobby, and other subject matter they wish covered up.
Opinionated proponents of Israel post comments, flag content, accuse critics of "antisemitism, and disseminate misinformation about Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists. Many of these actions are by individuals acting alone who work independently, voluntarily, and relentlessly.
In addition to these, however, a number of orchestrated, often well-funded projects sponsored by the Israeli government and others have come to light. These projects work to place pro-lsrael content throughout the Internet, and to remove information Israel doesn't wish people to know.
One such Israeli project targeting the Internet came to light when it was lauded in an article by Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news organization headquartered in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The report described a new project by Israel's "New Media desk" that focused on YouTube and other social media sites. The article reported that Israeli soldiers were being employed to Tweet, Share, Like and more."The article noted, "It is well known nowadays that what happens on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has great influence on events as they occur on the ground. The Internet, too, is a battleground." It was"comforting," the article stated, to learn that the IDF was employing soldiers whose job was specifically to do battle on it.
Full article here
Imma put Wikipedia/Warhammer wiki in the Warhammer universe, open it to the lore and factions, make it publicly available, and see what happens
This may be the greatest Wikipedia page I’ve ever encountered.
First, there’s the content. This is from the page on Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders, a movie which is probably best known as the last episode of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 to air. The synopsis is enough to make this a distinctive page. After all, it’s not in every film that a lady suddenly gets both freedom from her jerk husband and the baby she always wanted when he accidentally turns himself into a baby using dark magic.
Then there are the links. In addition to the clearly relevant links to “Merlin”, “Ernest Borgnine”, and “The Monkey” by Stephen King, there are links on “benign”, “infancy”, “birthday”, “cat”, “goldfish”, “dog”, “car”, “storm”, etc. “{C}ymbal-banging monkey toy” is divided into two links: “cymbal-banging monkey” directs to “cymbal-banging monkey toy” and “toy” directs to “toy”.
Whoever wrote it had a sense of humor: the part describing the ending, when Merlin “suddenly appears” to save the day, directs to “Deus ex machina”.
Long live obscure Wikipedia pages and terrible movies.
Would you rather get a million dollars or go to dinner with the Wikipedia Letter Puzzle Piece Orb
An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.
*putting the exact same sources from wikipedia into my little school project, sweating nervously*
“Okay but what if hbomberguy finds out”
Whenever I can’t do my work, but I can’t find a way past my writers block, I make a new Fandom Wiki for one of my fics.
The first time I did so it went from procrastination to hyper-fixation on learning how to source code my wikis.
Has anybody else procrastinated so hard you learnt how to code?
Wikipedia just turned 20!!!
[ID: Origami W, a gift for wikipedia END ID]
[ID: Origami models of arabic numerals two and zero, symbolizing wiki’s 20th birthday END ID]
send thanks and love to wikipedians.>>>
have a looksie at the birthday celebrations(twas on 15th), and confetti are still around.>>>
[ID: gif of puzzle globe(wiki logo) bursting, metaphorically the burst of knowledge and joy wiki gives, a gif from the creative commons bday stash of wikipedia END ID]
“Wikipedia started as an ambitious idea
…to create a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, for everyone in the world. It seemed impossible.
Over 20 years, Wikipedia has become the largest collection of open knowledge in history. How did it happen? People, like you.
Made and sustained by humans.
Meet the movement.”
[ID: Graph,WIkipedia: citability vs helpfulness of articles on academic timescale .helpfulness increases from elementary academia to graduate academia as wikipedia articles are stuffed with knowledge from archives and enthusiasts, but elitist academic institutions have created a situation wherein the citability of these articles drops down from elementary levels to graduate studies. END ID]
graph is taken from this aptly named article, “time to stop wikipedia shaming”
It is as if the main theme of wikipedia “ is edited by everyone” is taken as a flaw. the fascist and elitist gate-keeping control is not more evident anywhere but when wikipedia is shamed. Articles are locked, users banned and multiple people editing it makes it much more reliable than papers and books written by bigoted academics and reviewed by bribed editors (case in point- Sigmund Froyd’s theory of female sexuality, cough cough)
It is “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” - Michael Scott - The Office
This dialogue was used to identify Michael as an idiot, but it has the opposite effect, as this is truly the most beautiful missions of all time.
The thing about wikipedia is it is a macrogasmic entity of knowledge. Edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and it still is a matter of superiority complex in academic gate-keepers to state that Wikipedia is a blog and encyclopedias are more trustworthy etc etc, that wikipedia is not a source, and similar shaming tactics, when actually wikipedia is, in fact a tertiary SOURCE and, a more frequently updated encyclopedia.
Wiki is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10 most used sites , and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising(it could, but it doesn't, just to make it a comfortable and easily comprehensable resource), intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling, and still broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike the other top social platforms , it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?
Wikipedia is not perfect. The problems that it does have—and there are plenty of them—are discussed in great detail on Wikipedia itself, often in dedicated forums for self-critique with titles like “Why Wikipedia is not so great.” One contributor observes that “many of the articles are of poor quality.” Another worries that “consensus on Wikipedia may be a problematic form of knowledge production.” A third notes that “someone can just come and edit this very page and put in ‘pens are for cats only.’” Like the rest of the tech world, the site suffers from a gender imbalance; by recent estimates, 90 percent of its volunteer editors are men. Women and nonbinary contributors report frequent harassment from their fellow Wikipedians—trolling, doxing, hacking, death threats. The site's parent organization has repeatedly owned up to the situation and taken halting steps to redress it; several years ago, it allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a “community health initiative.” But in a way, the means to fix Wikipedia's shortcomings, in terms of both culture and coverage, are already in place: Witness the rise of feminist edit-athons.
The site's innovations have always been cultural as well as computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on LOVE. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David's “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. It is one of the reminders, that the internet is a wonderful space.
In 2000, around a year before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger cofounded Wikipedia, the pair started a site called Nupedia, planning to source articles from noted scholars and put them through seven rounds of editorial oversight. But the site never got off the ground; after a year, there were fewer than two dozen entries. (Wales, who wrote one of them himself, told The New Yorker “it felt like homework.”) When Sanger got wind of a collaborative software tool called a wiki—from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, or “quickly”—he and Wales decided to set one up as a means of generating raw material for Nupedia. They assumed nothing good would come of it, but within a year Wikipedia had 20,000 articles. By the time Nupedia's servers went down a year later, the original site had become a husk, and the seed it carried had grown beyond any expectation.
Many similar sites have languished. They came up against a simple and apparently insoluble problem, the same one that Nupedia encountered and Wikipedia surmounted: Most "experts" do not want to contribute to a free online encyclopedia.
This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many "experts" and large volumes of material to draw from. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, is the subject of tens of thousands of books. There are probably more dedicated historians of the Corsican general than of almost any other historical figure, but so far these scholars, even the retired or especially enthusiastic ones, have been disinclined to share their bounty. Citizendium's entry on Napoleon, around 5,000 words long and unedited for the past six years, is missing events as major as the decisive Battle of Borodino, which claimed 70,000 casualties, and the succession of Napoleon II. By contrast, Wikipedia's article on Napoleon sits at around 18,000 words long and runs to more than 350 sources.
The Wikipedia replacement products revealed another problem with the top-down model: With so few contributors, coverage was spotty and gaps were hard to fill. Scholarpedia's entry on neuroscience makes no mention of serotonin or the frontal lobes. At Citizendium, Sanger refused to recognize women's studies as a top-level category, describing the discipline as too “politically correct.” (Today, he says “it wasn't about women's studies in particular” but about “too much overlap with existing groups.”) A wiki with a more horizontal hierarchy, on the other hand, can self-correct. No matter how politically touchy or intellectually abstruse the topic, the crowd develops consensus. On the English-language Wikipedia, particularly controversial entries, like those on George W. Bush or Jesus Christ, have edit counts in the thousands.
Wikipedia, in other words, isn't raised up wholesale, like a barn; it's assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. The smallness of the grains, and of the workers carrying them, makes the project's scale seem impossible. But it is exactly this incrementalism that puts immensity within reach.
The stars of Wikipedia are not giants in their fields but so-called WikiGnomes—editors who sweep up typos, arrange articles in neatly categorized piles, and scrub away vandalism. This work is often thankless, but it does not seem to be joyless. It is a common starting point for Wikipedians, and many are content to stay there. According to a 2016 paper in the journal Management Science, the median edit length on Wikipedia is just 37 characters, an effort that might take a few seconds.
From there, though, many volunteers are drawn deeper into the site's culture. They discuss their edits on Talk pages; they display their interests and abilities on User pages; some vie to reach the top of the edit-count leaderboard. An elect few become administrators; while around a quarter of a million people edit Wikipedia daily, only around 1,100 accounts have admin privileges. The site is deep and complex enough—by one count, its policy directives and suggestions run to more than 150,000 words—that its most committed adherents must become almost like lawyers, appealing to precedent and arguing their case. As with the law, there are different schools of interpretation; the two largest of these are deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists favor quality over quantity, and notability over utility. Inclusionists are the opposite.
Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist, are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter. (Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term.) Their knowledge of trains is quite different from an engineer's or a railway historian's; you can't major in trainspotting or become credentialed as a railfan. But these people are a legitimate kind of expert nonetheless. Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines. Wikipedia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous locomotive the Flying Scotsman is 4,000 words long and includes eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the train's working. (“It was deemed that the A4 boiler had deteriorated into a worse state than the spare due to the higher operating pressures the locomotive had experienced following the up-rating of the locomotive to 250 psi.”)
Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human quality would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. That 1974 article in The Atlantic presaged this concern well: “Accuracy, of course, can better be won by a committee armed with computers than by a single intelligence. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction. And they are not qualities we associate with committees.” Yet Wikipedia has eccentricity, elegance, and surprise in abundance, especially in those moments when enthusiasm becomes excess and detail is rendered so finely (and pointlessly) that it becomes beautiful.
In the article on the sexual revolution, there was a line, since deleted, that read, “For those who were not there to experience it, it may be difficult to imagine how risk-free sex was during the 1960s and 1970s.” This anonymous autobiography in miniature is an intriguing piece of editorializing, but it's also a little legacy of the sexual revolution all by itself, a rueful reflection on a moment of freedom that didn't last. (The editor who added “Citation needed” is part of that story as well.) In the article on the anticommunist intellectual Frank Knopfelmacher, we learn that “his protracted, usually freewheeling, invariably slanderous late-night telephone monologues (visited alike upon associates and, more often, antagonists) retained a mythic status for decades among Australian intellectuals.” The Hong Kong novelist Lillian Lee, we are told, seeks “freedom and happiness, not fame.”
Pedants have a reputation for humorlessness, but for Wikipedians a sense of humor is at the core of the good-faith collaboration that defines the project. There is probably no need for an exhaustive history of a giant straw goat erected in a Swedish town each Christmas, but the article on the Gävle Goat chronicles its annual fate fastidiously. It is prone to vandalism by fire, and the article centers around an exacting timeline that lists the date of destruction, the method of destruction, and the new security measures put in place every year since 1966. (In 2005, it was “burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat.”)
Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site.
This is why the meta side of Wikipedia—the Talk pages, the essay commentaries, the policies—is suffused with nerdy jokes. We're so used to equating seriousness with importance that this jars at first: It's hard to square the encapsulation of all human knowledge with a policy called “Don't be a dick” (since revised to “Don't be a jerk”). But expressing the directive that way carries a purpose. It's the same purpose that drives Wikipedians to collect and celebrate the site's “Lamest edit wars,” which include long-running skirmishes on Freddie Mercury's ancestry, the provenance of Caesar salad, the proper pronunciation of J. K. Rowling's surname (“Perhaps it rhymes with ‘Trolling’?”), the wording of certain captions (“Is the cat depicted really smiling?”), and the threshold of notoriety required to appear on a list of fictional badgers.
Few architects of a world encyclopedia would think to include a forum for jokes, and in the unlikely event that they did, no one could anticipate that it would be important. But on Wikipedia the jokes are very important. They defuse tensions. They foster joyful cooperation. They encourage humility. They promote further reading and further editing. They also represent a surprise return to the earliest days of Enlightenment reference works. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, compiled in 1755, gives one definition of “dull” as “not exhilarating; not delightful: as, to make dictionaries is dull work.” Perhaps the most important encyclopedia of the late modern period, the Encyclopédie, is barbed with satirical and anticlerical quips: The entry on “Cannibals” cross-references with “Communion.”
Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere. It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire. And that's what's awesome about it. It realizes that in as a society, we don't have to work to sustain ourselves, that's something we built the society for, we work to collect what we like, and that's our earning from the labour. Wikipedians work for curiosity and satisfaction and collect knowledge and joy.
The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have. When you ask Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa a question, Wikipedia helps provide the answer. When you Google a famous person or place, Wikipedia often informs the “knowledge panel” that appears alongside your search results.
These tools were made possible by a project called Wikidata, the next ambitious step toward realizing the age-old dream of creating a “World Brain.” It began with a Croatian computer scientist and Wikipedia editor named Denny Vrandečić. He was enthralled with the online encyclopedia's content but felt frustrated that users could not ask it questions that required drawing on knowledge from multiple entries across the site. Vrandečić wanted Wikipedia to be able to answer a query like “What are the 20 largest cities in the world that have a female mayor? The knowledge is obviously in Wikipedia, but it's hidden. To get it out would be huge work.” .
Drawing on an idea from the early internet called “the semantic web,” Vrandečić set out to structure and enrich Wikipedia's data set so that it could, in effect, begin to synthesize its own knowledge. If there were some way to tag women and mayors and cities by population size, then a correctly coded query could return the 20 largest cities with a female mayor automatically. Vrandečić had edited Wikipedia in Croatian, English, and German, so he recognized the limitations of using plain English semantic tagging. Instead, he chose numerical codes. Any reference to the book Treasure Island might be tagged with the code Q185118, for example, or the color brown with Q47071.
Vrandečić assumed this coding and tagging would have to be carried out by bots. But of the 80 million items that have been added to Wikidata so far, around half have been entered by human volunteers, a level of crowdsourcing that has surprised even Wikidata's creators. Editing Wikidata and editing Wikipedia, it turns out, are different enough that they don't cannibalize the same contributors. Wikipedia attracts people interested in writing prose, and Wikidata compels dot-connectors, puzzle-solvers, and completionists. (Its product manager, Lydia Pintscher, still comes home from a movie and manually copies the cast list from IMDb into Wikidata with the appropriate tags.) ANd wikipedia is amazing because it isn't bothered by the possoibility that AI does sort of take over, or that there is canabalistic editing, its an evolving landscape, with its freedom to exist.
As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together. The system still results in errors sometimes—that's why Siri briefly thought Bulgaria's national anthem was “Despacito”—but its prospective scale is already more ambitious than Wikipedia's. There are subprojects aiming to itemize every sitting politician on earth, every painting in every public collection worldwide, and every gene in the human genome into searchable, adaptable, and machine-readable form.
The jokes will still be there. Consider Wikidata's numerical tag for the author Douglas Adams, Q42. In Adams' book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyperintelligent beings build a vast, powerful computer called Deep Thought, which they ask for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” What comes out is the number 42. That wink of self-awareness—at the folly and joy of building something as preposterous and powerful as a world brain— is why, with Wikipedia, you know you are getting the best possible information.
Na mais absoluta profundidade da dimensão espacial, que aparentemente é plana e sem nenhuma ruptura, ocorrem os mais terríveis frenesis (turbulências) e isso impede uma conciliação amigável entre a Relatividade e a Mecânica Quântica.
Wikipédia
Judo Intellectuals
The crowd was going wild as the two combatants social circled each other ready to pronounce, if the chance presented itself. They began to chant the name of the younger fighter, an artist who was given the public tested nickname of Sugar Man Ray Leonard. Thing is he was called that because he was boxing clever. But that would do him no good. This was judo. The more experienced fighter was dubbed the Obscure as he had a plethora of knowledge that served him well in his previous matches. He had swiftly defeated Thesaurus Rex and the Hip-Ocrite was no match for his peerless learned off references and his relentless posturing. He bristled at his nickname, fearing some people would assume a thematic link to the band The Cure, a musical outfit far too well known for this individual to associate himself with. His coach stood on the sidelines, chewing on his stereo-gum mouthing the lyrics from a million Japan only released b-sides. He had prepared his fighter well but you never know where a heated conversation could go. In this world of Wikipedia as the ultimate training tool, fighters had it tough. Everyone was so well informed these days. As Sugar Man Ray unleashed a shaky but compelling treatise on the disestablishment of outdated draconian governmental ideals the Obscure felt his intellectual mettle take a bit of a knocking. Politics was a weak area and he had made the mistake he always did. He wasn't holding a liberal arts magazine in front of his face as protection. He began to sweat and looked towards the timer. Was it really the same round? It had felt like this particular period of time was stretching on as long as a contemporary art installation. The polymath just didn't add up. Following another well timed satirical swipe from Sugar it was clear he was struggling with his topics and lazily slurred a passage from Franny and Zooey in an attempt to steady himself. "That's as deep as you go Salinger-wise buddy? Pathetic!" his opponent taunted him. "Let me introduce you to my little friend Seymour.." Another direct hit. The Judgemental corner began scribbling in their moleskins and this fight seemed to be ready to Finnish like it was Apocalyptica. To be fair, in traditional judo punching isn't allowed but the other fighter had gotten in his punchy prose before anyone was talking about getting punches in. Things hadn't always been this way. He had loved to absorb cultural touchstones as a child for the sake of proper learning but it was when a teenage desire to "take on the system" had mutated into a smug 20-something hubris did he realise he had lost his way. What was once a Scott Pilgrimage for him had now become just another Ghost World of thwarted ideals and expressionistic graphic novels. And the fighting industry wasn't the same either. The "Psuits" had it all sewn up, in both meanings of the phrase. Obscure wasn't ready to just fade into obscurity that easily and with a well planted zinger on his opponents moniker. "You should be called Sigur Ros Leonard!" he got his second wind. But it was probably the first wind most of the crowd had heard of. He stepped up his game, readying his signature move, a complicated maneuver his critics had called "The Pullman". It was just an elaborate name for back-Philip that he'd poetry slam on Sugar but the timing was very important. It was his turn to taunt. "Stop hitting your Will Self! Stop hitting your Will Self as he spun his way around Sugar Man Ray he began spouting film reviews of of French New Wave cinema, adding some bland platitudes about a cultural Renaissance. His mixture of classicist film critiques before a swift super(upper)cut of famous film quotes and insults proved too much for his once formidable foe. "I always said I'd hurt you,"The Obscure said in a moment of faux sincerity to his enemy. " I told you I'm a fuck up who would mess you up in the long run." Sugar Man Ray conceded defeat, reasoning that he had a mean Left Agenda. "But then I lean on my left a lot too," he consoled himself. Retiring to his library just outside the ring he began to lick his wounds and apply for unrealistic environmental drives. The Obscure had won the day and perhaps garnered too much acclaim. He knew his career was over but he was going out in a big cult classic way. The Referee/Lecturer held up his hands to the build of an ecstatic crowd cheer. This was the crowd who had just minutes ago wanted Sugar Man Ray to truimph but they had quickly changed their minds. I think it's called backlash. "Well Educated Ladies and Thoroughly Well Researched Gentleman. I present to you The Obscure who is our new Noam Chom-pion!!"
Czech Wikipedia about Gerard Way has it right 😁 (Husband/Wife: Frank Iero And the patience)
"I can't sleep. I feel like I should do something productive, but what?" *looks around at clothes-strewn room* "What could I possibly do in the wee hours?" *Walks past exercise gear to put another plate on the pile* "My only option is to fuck around on the computer."
For today’s daily doodle I played a self-administered drawing game a teacher taught me ages ago which is perfect for getting over doodler’s block, so I decided to share the game here as well.
The original game used a paper encyclopedia or dictionary (which were things people had back then) flipped to a random page, I updated it for the Wikipedia era.
Once you master doing this in ten minutes, try for five!
there's someone on Wikipedia who writes articles about Cantonese opera but constantly names paragraphs after generic figures of speech. For example, they titled a paragraph about the economic threats facing the opera as "All for Naught."
Here's an example from the article on the actor Yam Kim-fai (who is really good, btw):
I wonder if this is translated from Cantonese... maybe the original sounded very poetic
There may be a copy of Wikipedia somewhere on the moon. Here’s how to help find it.
If you’ve ever worried that humanity will ever wipe itself out so completely that they’ll be no record of our civilization for aliens to discover, you can now rest (somewhat) easy.
Even if we blow everything on Earth to smithereens tomorrow, there will likely still be a library of 30,000 books, 5,000 languages, plus a complete copy of Wikipedia, somewhere on the moon.
The only problem: We don’t know exactly where.
The library is a project of the Arch Foundation, the same company that gave Elon Musk a test copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy to put aboard his spacebound Tesla Roadster.
The Arch Lunar Library contains 100GB, or 30 million pages of text and pictures, literally embedded in 25 nickel disks in the tiniest type you can possibly imagine. You don’t need anything more specialized than a microscope to read it, and the etchings should survive for billions of years.
This library was supposed to be delivered to the surface of the moon — specifically, the Sea of Serenity — by Israel’s Beresheet Mission last week. The bad news: After a glitch that turned its engine off and on again at the worst possible moment, the Beresheet lander smashed into the moon at 300 miles per hour.
The good news: Those disks were designed to be indestructible. And the Arch Foundation is all but certain its payload survived the crash.
The landing was a little bumpier than expected, but airplane black boxes survive stronger impacts, and our disc is less breakable. Small, light objects, like our 100 gram library, do better in impacts. It was probably thrown a few km away – a 30 million page frisbee on the moon.
— Arch Mission Foundation (@archmission) April 12, 2019
“We have either installed the first library on the moon,” says Arch Mission co-founder Nova Spivack, “or we have installed the first archaeological ruins of early human attempts to build a library on the moon.”
Some other items in that library for future alien archeologists to pore over: David Copperfield’s magic secrets, the Bible, an Israeli time capsule, and a queso recipe from a cafe in Texas.
The Foundation isn’t giving up on its lost moon library — and it wants your help in locating it. Spivack’s team has put together an open Google Doc with all the technical specs of the library alongside all details of the crash provided by SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit behind Beresheet. (SpaceIL collaborated with aerospace manufacturer Israel Aerospace Industries and Israel Space Agency, Israel’s NASA, on the lander.)
It’s a math problem, basically, though one unlike any you ever encountered in school: If a spacecraft carrying a 100 gram object crashes on the moon at 300 miles an hour, how far away will that object land?
As the saying goes, “never let a crash on the moon get in the way of a great treasure hunt”
— Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) April 14, 2019
Already one aerospace engineer has suggested that the impact crater should be large enough for the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to spot — though it’s unlikely to be able to pick out anything as tiny as the little library that could.
SpaceIL has already announced that a second Beresheet mission will be attempted, perhaps with another library on board. In the meantime, as Spivack notes, “when you look at the Moon from now on, realize there is a lost library there containing Wikipedia, 30,000 books, 5,000 languages, and the history of the world.”
Not to mention a recipe for some pretty good queso.
Source: http://bit.ly/2ZO3BFn
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Wikipedia is a life saver!
hey i know a lot of you cannot donate, but wikipedia NEEDS money to keep functioning. AO3 was able to surpass their fundraising goal in days, but wikipedia has been trying to get donations for months now to no avail. that’s not a “don’t donate to AO3”, that’s a “also donate to wikipedia” or “donate to wikipedia instead, because AO3 is doing good”. if any of you can donate, please do. wikipedia is one of the best things to happen on the internet, and i would hate to see it with tons of ads or worse.
donate to wikipedia!!
reading wikipedia pages is fun.
death by vending machine, the gay and lesbian kingdom of the coral sea islands, kirk/spock…
i recommend it
Did anyone else see this weird Wikipedia bug?
It seems that the preview is different the what is written on the page, having a different font, with the preview text being in italic, and the bolded letters being reversed.
Does the same happen to all of you with this page, or just me?
I just found out the void rivals wikis are like pretty behind (for the tf wiki) and the gijoe wiki is like less then 100 words
They deserve sm better I need to start working immediately
Eight (8) is a natural, cardinal number, preceded by 7 and followed by 9. It is the cube of the number 2, and is reckoned by some to the the first etymologically composite number, with its Proto-Indo-European root oḱtṓw potentially being the dual form of a stem meaning ‘four fingers’. Alternatively, both Proto-Turkic and Finnic had forms for 8 meaning ‘2 before 10’ or ‘without 2’ (as in fingers). It is the first number to be neither prime nor semi prime, and is the only non-trivial Fibonacci number to be a perfect cube.
The numeral 8 is Arabic in origin, which in turn came from the Brahmi numeral └┐. The infinity symbol (∞), whilst superficially similar, is unrelated, but likely comes from the Roman numeral CIƆ, meaning 1000. This system of writing, known as Apostrophus, is less widely known than the standardised M, which is usually taught to children as the only way Romans displayed the number 1000. Alternatively, ∞ could be derived from the final Greek letter, Omega (ω). In either case, it is unrelated to the numeral 8.
I miss the world before AI image generation
Secondly, I also miss the world where AI image generation was just incoherent blobs and obvious fakes
Thirdly, I miss when I had a spark in my eye
HAHAHAHAAHHAAHAHHAHAAHAHAA