[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Architectuul looks back at some highlights from 2019.
• Bad Astronomy looks at the gas cloud, red and green, of RCW 120.
• Crooked Timber looks at the dynamics of identity politics, here.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a NASA statement about the importance of understanding dust dynamics in other solar systems to find Earth analogues.
• Far Outliers looks at the problems pacifying the Chesapeake Bay area in 1813, here.
• Gizmodo looks at the most popular Wikipedia articles for the year 2019.
• io9 shares a video of images from a 1995 Akira cyberpunk computer game that never got finished.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the United States tried to “civilize” the Inupiat of Alaska by giving them reindeer herds.
• Language Hat links to an online atlas of Scots dialects.
• Language Log reports on a 12th century Sanskrit inscription that testifies to the presence of Muslims in Bengal at that point.
• Marginal Revolution notes how much Tuvalu depends on revenue from its .tv Internet domain.
• Drew Rowsome looks at the Duncan Ralston horror novel Salvage, set in small-town Canada.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the strong relationship between wealth and life expectancy in France.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, in a hypothetical supernova, all life on an Earth-like planet would be boiled alive by neutrinos.
• Strange Maps links to a graphic interface that translates a word into all the languages of Europe.
• Understanding Society looks at the structures of high-reliability organizations.
• Window on Eurasia shares a suggestion that Homer Simpson is actually the US’ version of Russia’s Ivan the Fool.

[NEWS] Twenty news links

• NOW Toronto looks at the Pickering nuclear plant and its role in providing fuel for space travel.
• In some places like California, traffic is so bad that airlines actually play a role for high-end commuters. CBC reports.
• Goldfish released into the wild are a major issue for the environment in Québec, too. CTV News reports.
• China’s investments in Jamaica have good sides and bad sides. CBC reports.
• A potato museum in Peru might help solve world hunger. The Guardian reports.
• Is the Alberta-Saskatchewan alliance going to be a lasting one? Maclean’s considers.
• Is the fossil fuel industry collapsing? The Tyee makes the case.
• Should Japan and Europe co-finance a EUrasia trade initiative to rival China’s? Bloomberg argues.
• Should websites receive protection as historically significant? VICE reports.
• Food tourism in the Maritimes is a very good idea. Global News reports.
• Atlantic Canada lobster exports to China thrive as New England gets hit by the trade war. CBC reports.
• The Bloc Québécois experienced its revival by drawing on the same demographics as the provincial CAQ. Maclean’s reports.
• Population density is a factor that, in Canada, determines political issues, splitting urban and rural voters. The National Observer observes.
• US border policies aimed against migration from Mexico have been harming businesses on the border with Canada. The National Post reports.
• The warming of the ocean is changing the relationship of coastal communities with their seas. The Conversation looks.
• Archival research in the digital age differs from what occurred in previous eras. The Conversation explains.
• The Persian-language Wikipedia is an actively contested space. Open Democracy reports.
• Vox notes how the US labour shortage has been driven partly by workers quitting the labour force, here.
• Laurie Penny at WIRED has a stirring essay about hope, about the belief in some sort of future.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• The Big Picture shares adorable photos of baby animals.
• Multi-planet system K2-138 is one of the systems found via crowdsourcing, Centauri Dreams notes.
• I did not know that David Bowie and Brian Eno visited the Gugging mental health clinic in Austria in 1994. Dangerous Minds has the photos.
• Hornet Stories notes that Mike Pence has tried to defend himself from Adam Rippon’s criticisms by lying about his past.
• Information is Beautiful shares an infographic depicting the edit wars last year on Wikipedia.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Northern Ireland may get a referendum on marriage equality, giving it a chance to catch up to the Republic of Ireland and to the rest of the United Kingdom.
• JSTOR Daily links to a vintage article noting that trying to apply the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which could unseat a sitting president if the president was disabled, could cause a constitutional crisis.
• Language Hat notes a study suggesting that, as humans become more sedentary, linguistic evidence suggests smell becomes less important.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money wonders: how many films, how many novels, have been about _women_, not men, who are difficult geniuses? Where is the female equivalent of House?
• The NYR Daily examines the Afro-futurism of 20th century novelist George Schuyler and his Black No More.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what someone would see as they descended into a black hole.
• At Towleroad, Steven Petrow tells how HIV/AIDS doctor Mathilde Krim saved his life.
• Window on Eurasia notes one, militant, response in the Donbas republics to the breakdown of the Minsk Accords with Ukraine.

[NEWS] Five links about technology and culture: Android, Firefox Quantum, dark web, music, brain

• This Techcrunch report noting the collection of location data by Android, even if location services are disabled, is alarming. (I’m mostly joking when I say I want the drones to be able to find me.) More here.
• This Wired report on Firefox Quantum makes this browser sound interesting, here.
• News of a dark web version of Wikipedia is good for those who are concerned about Internet freedoms. More here.
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation sounds very much like one of those experiences I would like to experience first-hand. More here.
• The destructive impact of streaming not just on the income of musicians, but on their creative projects–often transcending single songs–is something raised in this Noisey article, here.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• D-Brief shares rare video of beaked whales on the move.
• Dangerous Minds notes that someone has actually begun selling unauthorized action figures of Trump Administration figures like Bannon and Spencer.
• Language Log looks at a linguistic feature of Emma Watson’s quote, her ending it with a preposition.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen considers, originally for Bloomberg View, if Trump could be seen as a placebo for what ails America.
• The New APPS Blog takes a Marxist angle on the issue of big data, from the perspective of (among other things) primitive accumulation.
• The Search reports on the phenomenon of the Women’s History Month Wikipedia edit-a-thon, aiming to literally increase the representation of notable women on Wikipedia.
• Towleroad notes the six men who will be stars of a new Fire Island reality television show.
• The Volokh Conspiracy finds some merit in Ben Carson’s description of American slaves as immigrants. (Some.)
• Window on Eurasia argues that Belarusians are beginning to mobilize against their government and suggests they are already making headway.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the advanced microelectronics that might last a space probe the two decades it would take to get to Proxima Centauri.
• Dangerous Minds links to a 1980 filmed concert performance by Queen.
• The Dragon’s Gaze reports on the discovery of potassium in the atmosphere of WASP-17b.
• Language Hat looks at the Carmina of Optatianus, an interesting piece of Latin literature.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the shameless anti-democratic maneuvering of the Republicans in North Carolina.
• The LRB Blog reflects on the shamelessness of the perpetrators of the Aleppo massacres.
• Marginal Revolution looks at what Charles Darwin’s reading habits have to say about the man’s process of research.
• North!’s Justin Petrone looks at the elves of Estonia.
• The NYRB Daily praises the new movie Manchester by the Sea.
• The Planetary Society Blog shares a recent photo of Phobos.
• Peter Rukavina argues that the Island’s low PISA scores do not necessarily reflect on what Islanders have learned.
• Savage Minds shares an essay by someone who combines academic work with library work.
• Torontoist notes the city’s subsidies to some major water polluters.
• Window on Eurasia notes the anniversary of some important riots in Kazakhstan.
• Arnold Zwicky reflects on the penguin-related caption of a photo on Wikipedia that has made the world laugh.

[LINK] “A Wikipedian Explains How Wikipedia Stays Reliable in the Fake News”

Vice‘s Mike Pearl interviews Wikipedia editor Victor Grigas to examine Wikipedia’s strategies for exposing fraud.

VICE: How’d you get into writing about fake news?
Victor Grigas: Chicago stuff is what I write about, and I had all these friends who were like, “This is bullshit, man!” when Trump got elected. And I was like, “Send your [protest] photos in!” I had one friend who did, and I uploaded them. [So] I’m pretty happy with where [Wikipedia’s articles about Trump protests have] gone. But in the process of researching it, if you type in “Trump protests,” you’ll find these fake news articles that say there were people paid, and it’s crazy! If you actually read the fake news articles, they’ll cite this one YouTube video of a dash cam camera driving in Chicago past a bunch of buses. So it’s like, “Oh, because these buses are here, they’ve bused in protesters from everywhere!”

Is that claim backed up by any sources Wikipedia considers reliable?
It’s total nonsense with no basis whatsoever! But they’re writing this to feed whatever beast. I don’t know if they’re writing it just to make money, or if there’s a political incentive. I have no fucking clue, but it’s obviously not reliable. But for some reason it’s coming up near the top of my Google searches, which is really infuriating. So I want to make sure that when people read about these things, they know they’re not there.

Does the existence of this fake news merit its own inclusion in well-sourced articles?
At the bottom of the page about the protests, there’s one or two lines about [fake news]. And I got into a little bit of an editing conflict about that because I tried using the fake news site as a source about the fake news. They deleted what I wrote, and I think the line was “awful reference!” and it got deleted right away, automatically without reading or trying to understand what I was trying to do about it.

So when veteran Wikipedia editors aren’t around, what happens when an article shows up based on fake news?
There’s a lot of policing that happens on Wikipedia, which people see as a real barrier to entry to get started, because there’s a huge learning curve. One of the aspects of that learning curve is what you’re allowed to write, basically. And it takes a little bit of patience to figure out how to make it work. So one of the things that happens is you start editing and stuff gets deleted like that.

What kind of stuff do you mean?
If you start [sourcing] like a blog, or a personal site, or something like that, it’s gonna bite the dust real fast. People are gonna take it out, and they’re gonna point you to the reason why they took it out, usually.

[NEWS] Some Tuesday links

• The Inter Press Service suggests climate change is contributing to a severe drought in Nicaragua.
• Reuters notes China’s plan to implement sanctions against North Korea.
• Atlas Obscura explores the now-defunct medium of vinyl movies.
• Science goes into detail about the findings that many pre-contact American populations did not survive conquest at all.
• CBC notes evidence that salmon prefer dark-walled tanks.
• Universe Today notes the discovery of a spinning neutron star in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Vice’s Motherboard notes how Angolan users of free limited-access internet sites are sharing files through Wikipedia.
• MacLean’s notes how an ordinary British Columbia man’s boudoir photos for his wife have led to a modelling gig.

[LINK] “At 15, Wikipedia Is Finally Finding Its Way to the Truth”

Wired‘s Cade Metz notes Wikipedia’s evolution in recent years, for good and for ill.

Today, Wikipedia celebrates its fifteenth birthday. In Internet years, that’s pretty old. But “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is different from services like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Though Wikipedia has long been one of the Internet’s most popular sites—a force that decimated institutions like the Encyclopedia Britannica—it’s only just reaching maturity.

The site’s defining moment, it turns out, came about a decade ago, when Stephen Colbert coined the term “Wikiality.” In a 2006 episode The Colbert Report, the comedian spotlighted Wikipedia’s most obvious weakness: With a crowdsourced encyclopedia, we run the risk of a small group of people—or even a single person—bending reality to suit their particular opinions or attitudes or motivations.

“Any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true,” Colbert said, before ironically praising Wikipedia in a way that exposed one of its biggest flaws. “Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn’t, that’s my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it’s also a fact. We should apply these principles to all information. All we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true.”

Fifteen years on, Wikipedia is approaching an equilibrium.

To prove his point, Colbert invited viewers to add incorrect information to Wikipedia’s article on elephants. And they did. In the end, this wonderfully clever piece of participatory social commentary sparked a response from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and figurehead-in-chief. At the 2006 Wikimania—an annual gathering of Wikipedia’s core editors and administrators—Wales signaled a shift in the site’s priorities, saying the community would put a greater emphasis on the quality of its articles, as opposed to the quantity. “We’re going from the era of growth to the era of quality,” Wales told the The New York Times.

And that’s just what happened. The site’s administrators redoubled efforts to stop site vandalism, to prevent the kind of “truthiness” Colbert had satirized. In many ways, it worked. “There was a major switch,” says Aaron Halfaker, a researcher with the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-profit that oversees Wikipedia. Volunteers policed pages with a greater vigor and, generally speaking, became more wary of anyone who wasn’t already a part of the community. The article on elephants is still “protected” from unknown editors.

[LINK] On the potential decline of Wikipedia

Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen linked to the preprint of an upcoming paper, by Halfaker et al., “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System:
How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline”.

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.