wiki dot edu

Liz liked this, says I should share it (this follows on from e-mails abt Wikipedia in education), so here it is:

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Lordy, what a big topic.
Turns out that Wikipedia and Britannica are about as equally accurate on scientific topics…
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
Librarians debate this all the time, and the best bet is that we haven’t seen what Wikipedia’s going to shake out to be, yet.  Like a new housing development, it takes time to “see what the neighborhood’s gonna do.”

But for me the most important thing is not to lose sight of what Wikipedia is meant to do.  It’s not an “academic” source in any way.  It’s an encyclopedia — a general reference — with an authority problem (meaning that it’s particularly difficult to evaluate for authority, since we really don’t know who “CommanderTACO1984″ really is or what s/he really knows).  I teach the use of Wikimedia projects in info literacy classes, and I show how easy it is to abuse the projects as a warning to students not to give Wikipedia (in particular) more credit than it’s due.

All that said, it definitely has its uses… and some damn fine ones!  Besides the fact that mass-editing has the net-effect of making it more or less accurate, it’s almost always a great source for finding links to more and better info on a topic (except when spam links are added…)  For anything more than the most casual general-info uses, anything related to actual school work in any way, I think it’s best to think of Wikipedia as an extremely extensive annotated webliography.

But then, too, there’s all the broader wikification it’s causing in the culture.

Remember how Uncle Dubya mandated that the various federal spy clubs find a way to share info pan-agency?  Their solution is ” intellepedia“.  A wiki for spooks.  And it seems to be working for them.

I think it’s going to be another few (or dozen) years before the influence of “wikiness” is very widely felt, but there’s some potential for big, big, & wide, wide influence.  It’s the vanguard of 2.0 ideas: the net in fact is not a one-way channel, and there is enormous power in masses of anonymous users freely sharing what they know.

antarctic melting

“… may be speeding up.”

hexayurt models

E-mailed to the Hexayurt Google Group:

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For the last week or so, I’ve been building hexayurt models with paper & scotch tape. I started with a 1 cm to 1′ scale — a neat and sturdy little thing. I built bigger paper models and noticed that the smaller paper models are sturdier than the larger. As the size of the paper structure grows, so do the weaknesses of paper begin to manifest.

I went to the hardware store (Home Depot), and checked out their insulation panels. I was there looking for Tuff-R or Thermax sheets from Dow, but they didn’t have that brand.

I went with R-Max sheets. The R value (and I just learned this) is the ability to resist heat flow; for R-Max 1/2 ” thick sheets (4′x8′ panel), the R value is 3.2… The Rvalue increases as thickness increases (5/8” = 4… 3/4” = 5). This stuff is international building code approved and is manufactured in Dallas (local to me). Cost $7.48 a sheet.

I bought one sheet, cut it down at the store into 4 seperate 2′ x 4′ sections. Once home, I cut it down further into 5 panels of 2′x2′, and (using scrap half-isoceles) into 6 triangles for the roof. I was missing one wall panel, of course, but this works as a door way. I duct-taped all the joints and seams, once I got the roof put together and centered on the walls. Whole process of cutting and taping took about 45 minutes, and that’s with taping inside and outside.

The R-Max model stands 3′ high.

The devil is in the details. Slight variations in angle, slips of the knife, or tension variations in the tape, can all change how the roof sits on the walls and how the walls sit on the ground. Minor variations can be corrected by slapping on bunches of extra tape, but this is to the detriment of stability and the ability to bear (its own) loads. In a larger structure, I can see how this could easily spiral into more significant problems and seriously decrease stability.

Other notes:

The thing is a friggin kite. It was an average, breezy, North Texas day — winds at abt 15 mph — and the hexayurt was trying to take off. Worse problem with full-sized version?

Tape tape tape!! tape!. The more the better, I reckon, but this duct tape looks like it’s already lost some of its adherence due to dew overnight… Moisture v. tape… But tape can work to make the thing tight as a drumhead.

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Vinay responds: “…if the devil is in the details, salvation is in the tape!”

parenti’s rome

Assassination of Julius Caesar : a people’s history of ancient Rome / Michael Parenti

Here’s a little quickie review I did for an on-campus library promotion thing. Was a good book. Tell you what — it was that HBO show Rome that got me interested again. Now I’m wanting to go back to I, Claudius and the rest. Still resistant to reading that Gibbons history (see below)… but I’ll get to it, I reckon. All viewpoints and all that.

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Michael Parenti presents a challenging and unorthodox view of Roman society and politics in the Late Republic. He challenges the view that has been handed down to us by aristocrats, that Roman commoners were a just a stupid and blood-thirsty mob. Indeed, in light of Julius Caesar’s rise to power against the likes of Pompey, Cato, and Cicero, he paints the aristocrats controlling the Senate as blood-thirsty and elitist, abusing their Constitution whenever it suited their needs. Cicero is shown as a right-wing opponent to popular reform, and a shameless self-aggrandizer. It was in this environment that Caesar, a bulldog for the rights of farmers and peasants, was murdered by the elite. Parenti’s book is very lively, though sometimes long-winded. He brings real energy to the story of Rome, enlivening even the details of parliamentary procedure with the outrageous personalities of these historical figures. Even though Caesar’s sins are held to light alongside his virtues, I come away endeared to Caesar. After all, I’m left saddened that the Roman citizenry were so terribly squeezed by their powerful overlords, and reminded that we must all be vigilant if our fate isn’t to be the same as Rome’s.

google myth

Recently read Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe by Jean-Noel Jeanneney. Not bad, not bad.

A few thoughts –

Right, Google’s out to make money. If they were really interested primarily in “organizing the world’s info” above and beyond profit, they’d be some kind of NGO. But they’re a publicly traded corporation beholden to their shareholders. That should be primary in librarians’ minds.

Anybody who organizes “the world’s” info is a cultural gatekeeper — and as Frenchy points out in the book, your profit motive will skew your impartiality when it comes to selling access to cultural artifacts.

Google is a very American company. I love Google. I was talking with the wife the other night and she actually used the words love and trust in the same sentence in ref. to Google. That stunned me. Stunned? B/c I somehow feel that way too — I really want to believe that Google is a force for good. That they really will not be evil. Why is that? What the hell kind of excellent marketing is that? I don’t think it’s entirely intentional on their part… they have a hella fanbase that tends this hearth.

Google’s cultural gatekeeping will be Americanified. It will not be neutral.

But wait.

Google (as one example) is doing what libraries haven’t gotten off their asses to do. They’re actually succeeding at organizing the world’s information (or at least taking bold, staggering, toddler’s steps in that direction). Libraries, as HeavyD points out frequently, are way too busy talking about the fact that they’re now mostly bun-less (and goodness gracious wouldn’t it be nice if the teevee shows showed librarians with cool haircuts and yadayadayada). Librarians are conservative — and that’s good. They conserve and preserve info to make it available to folks — good! Great! But libraries are not equipped for this new game, obviously. Cry in their milk all they want to, they’ve missed it.

If we (librarians) see Google-fication as a set of challenges we must rise to, there’s still hope.