No maps for these territories

(NB: or you could just watch this Clay Shirky video) I wrote this for a science librarians mailing list, and in lieu of having time to write another post (today is a big day for us at Wikimedia) reproduce it here. —- I’m a science librarian at UC Davis and sit on the board of [...]

Today there is a hearing in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on a bill that is being called the “Stop Online Privacy Act”, or SOPA. It is the House companion to the PROTECT IP bill that came through the Senate earlier this year. Both bills are fundamentally flawed, and dangerous for all kinds of Internet [...]

A new part of the WikiSym conference launched yesterday — the first ever WikiViz visualization contest. This is super cool — details below or here. If you know any great viz teams encourage them to participate! WikiViz 2011: Visualizing the impact of Wikipedia This year Wikipedia turned 10. Since its birth we have witnessed an [...]

These are extraordinary times for the Middle East: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen. Al Jazeera’s live coverage is the best: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/ and they have many Creative Commons licensed clips up now: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/ (Al Jazeera’s use of Creative Commons is groundbreaking and wonderful; thank you to everyone involved in this). At the very beginning of yesterday, the internet [...]

The curiously brave people, who, in the face of the dire threat of DisRuption, nonetheless post BrilliantProse (and, sometimes, PatentNonsense) on [[Wikipedia]]. This description of Wikipedians comes from early 2001, when the project was just getting started. It is one of the best descriptions of Wikipedia editors I think I’ve ever read. This description, and [...]

Sometimes — generally when I should be doing something more productive, like sleeping — I like to think about big systems at scale, and the difference large numbers of people taking small actions would make on any given problem. It’s true that big systems can be made through small actions, a truth that has not [...]

There are about a million topics that I have considered writing about in this blog the last three months, things I made notes on and never quite finished. I’ve been, you might say, a little overwhelmed this quarter; but mostly with trying to process lots of ideas and information. I have been trying to dig [...]