“groovy mother...”

Clay Shirky’s talk from web2expo, which was by far the best of the keynotes. “Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

“Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?”

Simon Willison knocks out a quick prototype showing Wikipedia articles related to your current location, a masterpiece of mashuppery.

I’ll take “Companies that have died on the vine” for $400 please, Alex.

Your guide to what’s currently getting the most edits on Wikipedia. Non-gay congressmen and videogames are popular, and it appears that The Moon’s entry is a prime target for vandalism and reversion.

Tool to find astroturfing on Wikipedia. Sadly, the site that powered this article is overloaded and down currently.

Wikipedia page for the guy at the front of the line for the iPhone in New York. He’s quite the line-sitter!

Browser which makes it easier to retrace your steps as you delve through Wikipedia.

“A Schroedinbug is a bug that manifests itself apparently only after the software is used in an unusual way or seemingly at the point in time that a programmer reading the source code notices that the program should never have worked in the first place, at which point the program stops working entirely until the mysteriously now non-functioning code is repaired.” I’ve coded a few of these in my time.

[Three Hours of Fascinated Clicking]

Colbert defends Wikipedia as a great bastion of Truthiness — So long as a majority of people believe it, you can include it as “fact” in Wikipedia. Currently, about 20 elephant-related articles are locked down!

“Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG***…”

At the time of writing, this has 202 up-votes on Reddit. Hooray for democratized media.

Watch and see what’s getting deleted from Wikipedia. Fun to see just who thought they were important enough to justify adding a vanity page.

“Wikipedia is a new paradigm in human discourse. It’s a place where anyone with a browser can go, pick a subject that interests them, and without even logging in, start an argument.”

Best! Wikipedia category! Evah! Everything you need to know about Bat Bombs, Anti-tank Dogs and the Oregon Exploding Whale. Suck it, Brittanica!

The kind of attention to trivia that Britannica can never hope to beat. A detailed analysis of whether 1980s transit policy in Boston would have allowed Charlie to deboard the train.

Wikipedia download for iPods, built on top of iPodLinux. We’re not quite there yet, but I guarantee by the end of the year we’ll see some killer apps running on iPodLinux.

Great post by danah boyd about what Wikipedia is and isn’t good for — Make sure and read Jimmy Wales’s steak-knife metaphor. My equation: Full correct information > incomplete information > incorrect information > no information. Wikipedia is nowhere near perfect, but as a free resource it’s fucking amazing. And I’ve read it more than I ever touched the full Britannica collection my parents had when I was a kid.