The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits

http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

by sp332 • 16 years ago

191 71 16 years ago

booktwo.org

ritonlajoie• 16 years ago

Where to buy this book , if that's not a joke ?

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

He made them himself.

danw2• 16 years ago

Printed by LuLu

hvs2• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

camiller2• 16 years ago

I don't think book creator grabs history pages.

7a1c9427• 16 years ago

I too would be interested in purchasing the(these) book(s).

araneae• 16 years ago

It's the history of history!

die_sekte• 16 years ago

It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers is recursion.

mkr-hn• 16 years ago

It's the iteration sensation.

illumen• 16 years ago

10 PRINT "It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

20 PRINT "is the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

30 GOTO 20

polynomial• 16 years ago

If you mean consistently amusing recursion, then yes.

sammyo• 16 years ago

"To iterate is human, recurse devine" -Anon

fizx• 16 years ago

In some sense, it's what makes us unique. Is CS the only discipline that deals with recursion on a regular basis?

oiuygtfrtghyju4• 16 years ago

What about writing about the history of histography?

Would that be histography-histography or histography-histography-histography?

forensic• 16 years ago

It's SO true. I always laugh the hardest at recursive jokes.

mcyger• 16 years ago

Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like Geocities?

jerf• 16 years ago

Historians. Historians who aren't yet terribly interested in this sort of thing because the Iraq war still isn't very "historical", nor is Wikipedia.

Fortunately, the historians of tomorrow will probably have better tools for analyzing this stream of text than we do, too. Sure, no human is going to simply read the changelog of Wikipedia, but I absolutely think historians will be able to extract a lot of data from it even so, things we can only dream of extracting from our historical record. (We're lucky to figure out what color something a thousand years old is.)

celoyd• 16 years ago

This is why it annoyed me that so many people were outraged (or mock-outraged) that the Library of Congress would archive Twitter. It’s exactly the fact that Twitter tends to be topical, ephemeral, trivial, and faddish that make it worth a special effort to save.

In our time, historians are obsessed with the relatively few sources we have for casual thought in the ancient world – graffiti and so on. Knowing what ordinary people were thinking on ordinary days is important. For various reasons, our time is one of the first that will be able to leave that to later times.

camiller2• 16 years ago

I sometime go back and look at edits, especially if it is a controversial topic that someone might have vandalized. Of course I don't mean blatant vandalization but the more subtle kind.

oiuygtfrtghyju4• 16 years ago

Isn't subtle vandalism what's commonly known as 'history' ?

ErrantX• 16 years ago

Wikipedia; without the edit history the license of the information becomes problematic.

abrahamsen• 16 years ago

Yes. Apart from the editorial aid mentioned by camiller, I use the history tab to get a quick sense of the trustworthiness of the article as a whole, and of individual claims.

watt• 16 years ago

There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.

Estragon• 16 years ago

I've certainly found them useful and interesting.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

I hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page.

Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/

oiuygtfrtghyju4• 16 years ago

Would you like to have Napoleon/Wellington's thoughts of Waterloo minute-by-minute during the battle. Or only memoirs written 20-years later?

danw2• 16 years ago

The audio recording of the talk is certainly worth listening to http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/25256

DannoHung• 16 years ago

Man, reading this and the linked-to Gibson talk just gave me some sort of weird sense of like... not-deja vu. Like, remembering something that happened tomorrow.

chewbranca• 16 years ago

Minor annoyance, but in those pictures, book IX as after book XII rather than before X.

oiuygtfrtghyju4• 16 years ago

So ? - it's wiki, edit it.

JacobAldridge2• 16 years ago

I saw that as a feature, not a bug - a subtle wink to the subjectiveness of historiography in general, and recongition that even this effort is not without flaws.

njharman• 16 years ago

The whole truth, is not necessarily the real truth.

sp3322• 16 years ago

It's all the truth we've got.

dalore• 16 years ago

Reminds me of the heavy metal umlaut video. Props to who ever can find it.

pohl• 16 years ago

http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html

redacted• 16 years ago

http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html

[beaten]

jlees2• 16 years ago

I stumbled upon this infographic of Wikipedia edit wars yesterday, coincidentally also a dConstruct speaker: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/wikipedia-lamest-...

sophacles• 16 years ago

Cool infographic. Most of the little boxes seem to describe the conflicts in a way to make them seem sad and trivial. I'm fine with this, except it made one little box really stand out as extremely funny:

Hummus: Should hummus be in the "Israeli Cuisine" category, or is it a purely Arab food the Zionists have illegally occupied?

frossie• 16 years ago

Funniest box in that graphic:

Arachnophobia: Appropriate to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page about fear of spiders?

antirez• 16 years ago

it is interesting how source control systems like Git are making this process happening for source code: now that everybody getting the project will fetch the full history it will be very hard to lost the changes that happened in the full history of a given piece of code.

nazgulnarsil• 16 years ago

history is composed not only of what our best guess is of what happened, but how that guess came to be and changed over time. my experience of studying modern history is that the biggest missing piece seems to be knowledge of where intellectual and political trends originated from and how they propagated. the information is there, but it is buried among many primary texts and largely ignored by "story centric" history. I don't blame historians for doing this, they must make history sexy or risk being considered irrelevant.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

The first linked page, http://2010.dconstruct.org/ is strongly reminiscent of that other d_____ project...

surlyadopter• 16 years ago

"I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily."

Geocities was the first digital Iram of the Pillars.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Yes,

In any controversial topic or whenever a page doesn't seem to make sense, I go to the edits.

One cool app would be an editor with the ability to let you select a phrase in on MediaWiki page and then jump to the first edit in which that phrase appeared.

nl• 16 years ago

I find the destruction of written history very disturbing. While the examples given (Library of Alexandria, Yo La Long Dia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq) were dreadful, the worst was the destruction of the written Mayan records by Diego de Landa.

During the mid 1500's, Landa conducted an organized campaign to destroy every single written text in the Mayan language. He was mostly successful - only 3 complete text survive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

tokenadult• 16 years ago

I was puzzled by that spelling error: Yong Le Da Dian was the Chinese work, and the history I have read has always said that the complete work was lost before the time of the Boxer Rebellion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia

Wikipedia seems to agree with my recollection in part, and with the link in the submitted article in part.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

That does suck - but I still argue that the Mayan where less important for us than the Greek and Roman writers.

So I would claim that the Library of Alexandria is a greater loss than the Mayans.

shadowfox• 16 years ago

Since the bulk of Mayan writings were lost, you would never know anyway.

The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits

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