Forking the Wikipedia

Larry Sanger forks the Wikipedia reports on an initiative by one of the founders of the Wikipedia to create an alternative by taking the content and setting up an editorial system with more control by expert editors. The alternative would be called the called the Citizendium.

The Wikipedia is an important example of a social knowledge network that has stirred up a lot of controversy this year. There is a literature now about the Wikipedia and its discontents. See, for example the Request for Comments (RFC) by Alan Liu about student use of the Wikipedia. He sees 2006 as a threshold year when students started using the Wikipedia like never before.

Is it a sign of maturity when web phenomena like the Wikipedia don’t just get reported with that “gee whiz, isn’t this neat” tone, but are being really debated?

Unicode 5.0.0 is almost out

Unicode 5 CoverUnicode 5.0.0 is about to be released by the Unicode Consortium.

For those of you who don’t know about Unicode, it “provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no mater what the language.” (My emphasis) In other words it replaces ASCII as the standard for character encoding to support multilingual computing across platforms.

For more information see What is Unicode? or Useful Resources.

I also note that the Unicode site has a Chronology Of Unicode Version 1.0 along with information about contributors/members over time. Xerox, for example, seems to have been a major player in the early years, but is no longer a member. I also note that there are two governments that are institutional members, India and Pakistan (they joined a year apart) and one university, Berkeley. What a strange trio of institutional members.

U of Illinois: Gaming Collection

Gaming Screens

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has started an inspired UIUC Library Video Game and Gaming Collection to support courses and gaming research. I like how they have created a one-stop page to connect together the library resources with classes, groups, research and news. Note also that they are asking for donations of games.

Thanks to Jeffrey for this.

Montreal attack and video games

Another horrible shooting at a school and once again there is a reported connection to a mix of blogs, goth culture and videogames. The Globe and Mail has a story about how the Blog of accused killer reveals dark character (Scott Deveau). The blog, which is still (as of posting) accessible, now has 233 comments on the last entry posted an hour before Kimveer went.

As for the videogame connection, Montreal gunman called himself ‘angel of death’ is the title of a CBC story that quotes the blog,

“Work sucks ‚Ķ School sucks ‚Ķ Life sucks ‚Ķ What else can I say?” he wrote. “Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime.”

The Globe and Mail article quotes more from the blog on the subject of videogames,

Among other things, he says his likes were: “First Person Shooters” and “Super Psycho Maniacs roaming the streets.” He also says he likes his knife, guns, and “Crushing My Enemies Skulls.”

Among his favourite video games are several first-person shooting games, including Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which has players mimic the infamous high school killings in Columbine, Colo., the morning of April 20, 1999, through the eyes of the teenage killers. The shootings at Dawson College on Wednesday are a chilling echo of those events.

Mr. Gill also lists Postal as another of his favourite games. The purpose of that game is to get through as much of the game as possible without going berserk and gunning people down, or, failing that, to avoid getting caught and being thrown in jail.

He also complained that Postal 2 was “too childish.”

‚Äúi want them to make a game so realistic, that it looks and feels like it’s actually happening,‚Äù he wrote in his blog.

Setting aside the question of who would create a game like “Super Columbine Massacre RPG”, I find it hard to believe that videogames didn’t let Kimveer model his violent fantasies.

Now I’m going to go back to the 233 comments on that last post. A snapshot of reactions from anger to concerns about how goth culture will be portrayed.

MITH – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) is one of the leading digital humanities centres in the USA. They have a new Director, Neil Fraistat, and a new look to their web site.

From the Flick photos it looks like they have a agreat speakers series and a new paint job in their CoffeeHouse.

CiteULike: Social Networks and Collective Action

TouchGraph of Social Network ArticleCiteULike has been evolving nicely as place for social networking around bibliographic references. It sounds dry, but look at a reference like Social Networks and Collective Action: A Theory of the Critical Mass. III. One can click on a link to generate a TouchGraph of the article in a network of related articles.

McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future

McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future is a blog by a Transformation Team of librarians at McMaster (the university I teach at) around the (long overdue) transformation of our library. It’s great to see organizations like our library opening up their thinking to their clients. Open administration – where groups negotiating change expose their thinking to their stakeholders – is a trend that should be encouraged.

It’s interesting that both the Transformation Team and the Chief Librarian Jeff Trzeciak’s blog are on wordpress.com rather than on McMaster servers.

Live coding: Impromptu

Live coding is coding as performance. Matt alerted me to a Impromptu which is a programming language designed for sound coding performances. There is a gallery of sound performances and code at the site to give an idea of what the live coders might be typing to get what effects.

Live coding would seem to be connected to realtime coding competitions like live coda when the coding challenge is performative and the competition environment can be witnessed as a performance.

Pedagogically I wonder if live coding is more effective than write-compile-run coding. Certain languages like Ruby have live coding environments that let you type commands and see the results immediately. What is different here is the idea of language created for live coding in a performative context.