20110624

Test post reacting to something at d4t4.org

What the heck is going on at http://d4t4.org/taxpercent.html ?

Those guys must be smoking crack.

Actually this is just a test of the DISQUS system.

trackback: http://disqus.com/forums/d4t4/data_collective_us_taxes_as_percentage_of_personal_income/trackback

20110623

Review of "The Wikipedia Revolution"

The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih

I thought I knew everything worth knowing about Wikipedia already. Of course, I was wrong.

More importantly, I learned things about the rest of the internet:
* Slashdot pioneered meta-moderation, a powerful tool for self-policing a comment-driven community (pg 68)
* Japanese internet culture is much more anonymous; the canonical example is a site called 2channel. (pg 145)
* Chinese writing was simplified after WWII, but not in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A Wikipedia user built a system to automatically translate Wikipedia pages back and forth between the simplified and traditional systems, which was not trivial (pg 153).
* Spanish wikipedia broke off and started their own non-wikipedia wiki encyclopedia after Larry Sanger suggested that wikipedia might carry advertising.
* Larry Sanger strongly regrets that Wikipedia did not give experts a greater role in the system. His attempt to build such a system is called Citizendium. As of June 23, 2011 they have ~16,000 articles, ~160 of which are expert-approved.

Bottom line: if you're interested in understanding how the wikipedia miracle happened, this will give you some insight.

20110601

Inflation Chart 2

Inflation, consumer prices (annual %), United States from Timetric


I wish timetric.com would let me upload my own data. Couldn't get http://www.timetric.com/create to work.

Inflation Chart 1