Friday, January 28, 2005
Heavy metal umlaut: the movie
John Udell has done a fascinating screencast on the creation and modification of an entry in Wikipedia on the Heavy metal umlaut. It's not really about this specific Wikipedia entry, it's about how entries evolve and get corrected; even surviving vandalism attempts. It's amazing.
Related to Jon's post about Wikipedia's collaborative editing, Pito Salas had mentioned that there was a pretty accurate entry in Wikipedia on Lotus Improv. He wondered who had authored the entry and noted that there were a few inaccuracies.
All Wikipedia entries have revision history. In this case it looks like most of the content was written by Maury Markowitz. I don't know Maury but it looks like he's a prolific Wikipedia author and editor.
Another cool thing about Wikipedia that's also a bit scary is that if you want to join in, you can edit entries yourself by clicking on the "edit this page" tab. If there are errors, you can fix them. There's no guarantee that your changes will stay there. Someone else can remove them later. That's the weird aspect of Wikis in general and specifically with Wikipedia. Edits are encouraged. Wikipedia encourages users to be bold. For controversial topics there's an informal way to reach consensus via talk pages. And somehow it works pretty well.
Related to Jon's post about Wikipedia's collaborative editing, Pito Salas had mentioned that there was a pretty accurate entry in Wikipedia on Lotus Improv. He wondered who had authored the entry and noted that there were a few inaccuracies.
All Wikipedia entries have revision history. In this case it looks like most of the content was written by Maury Markowitz. I don't know Maury but it looks like he's a prolific Wikipedia author and editor.
Another cool thing about Wikipedia that's also a bit scary is that if you want to join in, you can edit entries yourself by clicking on the "edit this page" tab. If there are errors, you can fix them. There's no guarantee that your changes will stay there. Someone else can remove them later. That's the weird aspect of Wikis in general and specifically with Wikipedia. Edits are encouraged. Wikipedia encourages users to be bold. For controversial topics there's an informal way to reach consensus via talk pages. And somehow it works pretty well.
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