Tag Archives: wikipedia

Wikpedia Sucks

April 22, 2010
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I finally have to agree with the many Internet Posts carrying the same name.

I once thought it was a great initiative, unfortunately… it has become for a large part a very weird place. A lot of bad information. Any changes that are valid are removed for weird reasons or because someone with enough time wants to promote his own stuff or alternative stuff, definitions in many places are more like personal dont-have clue-but-I-have-an-opinion like pieces of text.

And so on and so on.I’ve went back to many changes I contributed but I see most have been removed, complete paragraphs of writing all wasted time to be replaced with either nonsense or very biased information by persons who really don’t have a clue on a certain topic. It is like that some fool with a geocities page on topic X rules topic X, if then a professor on topic X makes a contribution it is removed because it is either against the belief of an editor or he pretty much doesn’t have a clue.

I could give hundreds of examples but in general it feels like the man in the bar with an opinion on whatever topic, grumpy, not really well informed rules this place.

I really hope we get some kind of replacement.

Very good examples can be found on topics which have a niche amount of followers meaning: religious topics, paranormal hocus pocus topics, open source fascists topics, specific areas which attract a lot of hobbyists who then claim to be the world expert, areas with emotional feelings for one person or a little group of persons, and so on.

Whatever effort you make to improve pages, it is pretty much useless since contributions get either deleted (no longer recoverable) or changed in such a way that they again nonsense, biased or pretty much non professional.

Proposal for TAG handling in WordPress for TAGs that mean different things

November 2, 2008
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As inspired by the Wikipedia Handling.

mother tags for tags that have multiple meanings

The big difference between the TERMS in wikipedia and the TAGS in WordPress is that a tag in itself is a word that is unique. However, you may find that a certain tag actually is used in the same way in your weblog. If you write a lot about science and have given lots of posts the tag “science”. you may one day buy a magazine called “science” and start writing about it. In that case you will have to label these posts with “science-magazine” or something alike.

However, for YOU that may seem a good solution, for your user (both a human and aggregators) that is not a good solution. If you are the editor of that magazine I may expect when I clicks in your tagcloud on “science” that I get information about your magazine, not on science in general!

That’s where the disambiguation starts.

A much better solution would be to make “science” your “mother tag” with the sole purpose of being the group under which the different tags “humanities.science” and “magazine.science” fall. When that is the case WordPress is able to handle these ambiguous tags with either referring to a primary tag page or by giving the user a choice on which tag page he wants to see.

(mother tags are not the same as related tags, related tags are simply tags which you have defined as being related).

redirect tags for alternative names

Another thing that can happen is if a user expects a certain word but your posts are actually tagged under another word. E.g. maybe a user expect to see a tag page “risk” on a site on the game of risk. However all these posts are tagged “game”, in that case the user might want to redirect the user automatically to the correct tag page.

Next part: how to implement this in the datamodel and tag page handling within WordPress:

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Above you see how tags are part of the broader TERM taxonomy within the WordPress datamodel along with relationships between the tags. A quick look reveals that it should be possible, at least on database level, to define the type of things we need.

The trouble may start at the “relationship” since we might require TYPES of relationships…

.. to be continued …

Heavy Weather!

March 1, 2008
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There is heavy rain, Lightning and the wind rushing by, 7 on the scale of Beaufort, which is a pretty normal storm, but still it’s heavy WHHOOOOEIE around the house!

I can’t even imagine a Typhoon with 17 on the scale of Beaufort (we only measure until 12). Basically everything below 10 is safe (on the mainland), so no worries.

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Let’s lookup a picture of Super Typhoon Chancu, which was 17 on the scale of Beaufort for comparison (you can click it and enlarge it to get scared). The winds gained speeds up to 250km/h! (nature still cant beat the Bugatti Veyron at 408km/h though…). This was a real monster and caused more than 100 deaths and billions of dollars of damage.

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The Geologic Time Scale is mind boggling

May 19, 2007
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I stumbled on this smart drawing showing our shared history (it’s from the Wikimedia). By using a shape like this it makes it somewhat clearer how the different periods relate.

When I was in school (a LONG time ago) I learned about these periods but somehow I forgot most of it during the years. Therefore I am grateful that we have Wikepedia nowadays which shows everything I want to know again about the Geologic Timescale.

If I look at the past 4.5 billions years of our planet it still amazes me what has happened during these years. The most amazing is the tiny little last tidbit in which we, humans, actually play a part. There are so many thoughts coming up that it’s probably food for millions of years to blog onwards :) I wonder if we are the first wave of self-conscious intelligent creatures and that we are followed in the millions of years to come by other creatures even more evolved in this aspect.

The drawing on the left shows the same 4.5 billion years, transformed in a 24 hour clock. The Quaternary period is the last 17 seconds or the last 2 millions years. Within this last part we arose about 60.000 years ago. Which means that if we see the history of earth as 24 hours we only appear in less than the last second.

If we then look at the things we remember in our cultures, let’s say the last 4000 years, it means absolutely nothing. You wouldn’t even notice it if you were watching earth.

Then again, if you look at the history of our Universe, the same goes for the history of our planet.

It makes we wonder why some humans think that they are special in any way.

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