Sorry - I couldn’t resist the title. Those were the 4 most popular queries made at Wikia Search at the time of our pre-alpha launch in January.
Wikia Search relaunched today (see the press release). Our search team have made some amazing improvements since January. Not only does it “suck less” but it’s actually fun. Which isn’t something I usually find with search engines!
It’s unrecogniazble from the versions early in the year so do check it out again. And try clicking the header on any search results page for something unexpected…
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Tim proposed to me on Saturday night in a romantic setting outside the Sydney Opera House overlooking the Harbour Bridge.
We’re planning to get married in NSW this year, around the time of our three year anniversary.
Here’s a picture of the ring. It’s white gold with three Moissanite stones. I wanted an alternative to diamonds to avoid mining, cartels, conflicts, and marketing. Photographed sitting on the red roses Tim bought me.
And the picture below shows the location of the proposal. (Photo by Diliff, cc-by-sa)
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I love the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest. The 2007 results were recently announced. I voted for Henri Camus’ storm at Pors-Loubous.
Here are top 22 images. The width is proportional to the number of votes each received.
Hover over the image for attribution, or click the image for full details.
See also my post on the previous year’s contest.
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
January
I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
February
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing - 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” - something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
March
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
April
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
May
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
June
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
July
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
August
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
September
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
October
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
November
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
December
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
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It’s 2 years today since I first arrived in Australia. I was here for the X|Media|Lab conference in Melbourne and I thought it might be the only time in my life I would visit Australia, so I decided to take a few days off and visit Sydney while I was here.
This was before Wikia had its first round of investment, and more than a year since I’d last had a job that paid a proper salary, so I stayed in the cheapest hostel I could find in the not-so delightful area of King’s Cross. The next day, I met the Sydney Wikipedians for what is still my best ever Wikipedia meetup. They took me on a great tour of the city, seeing the Town Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge.
Two years later, I’m still here! So much for it being my only visit. I’ve now arrived in Australia 10 times and I’m living in Sydney. I came back to Australia a couple of weeks after the conference and moved in with Tim Starling. We’re now renting a house in Hornsby Heights with beautiful bushland views and wallabies in our garden.
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What do the Wikia sites on events, POV editorials, photography, the Polish RPG Wolsung, and the Fallout series of games have in common?
Add a guess in the comments.
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Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, we’ve started a draft Code of Conduct on Wikia’s Blogging Wiki. Brad Stone reported on this in the New York Times today in “A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs“:
“The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.”
“Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.”
The draft is a starting point which may evolve into more than one set of guidelines, with logos that bloggers can use to display which set they aim to follow (like the new buttons developed for the Definition of Free Cultural Works) .
I encourage you to read the draft and join the discussion on the wiki or mailing list. Like all Wikia sites, the Code of Conduct is open to editing and to creation of alternative versions, so please get involved and help us to reach a consensus on what should be included in these guidelines and how we might define “civil behavior” in the blogosphere.
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Happy Easter!
Here are a few Easter Wikia pages I found testing out Wikia’s new cross-wiki search tool.
Find out about Easter on the Christianity wiki, religion wiki, or the Churches of Rome wiki. The calendars wiki describes the controversies around the date of Easter. Easter in literature and fiction can be found on the Muppet wiki or on the Harry Turtledove’s Literature wiki. Wikiality and Uncyclopedia have Easter parodies. Easter Bunnies can be found in many of Wikia’s gaming and comics sites, including Penny Arcade, Creatures, Runescape, and Gaia Online. Find out about Easter eggs in Star Wars or discover a different type of Easter egg on the Easter eggs wiki.
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If you’re in either London or Palo Alto on April 4, be sure to attend Wiki Wednesday. The London event is starting at 6.30pm at Microsoft House, 10 Great Pulteney Street. The Palo Alto one is from 6pm at 665 High Street following on from Socialtext’s Wikthon the same day.
The Wiki Wednesday Wiki decribes the event as one where “people get together to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort.”
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A few wiki bloggers are reporting the misleading statistic that 97% of vandalism is done by “anonymous” users when they actually mean users who are not logged in to Wikipedia. Logging in doesn’t mean you are no longer anonymous since there is no requirement to use real names on Wikipedia.
The small scale Wikipedia Vandalism Study showed that out of 31 instances of obvious vandalism across 100 actively edited articles, 30 of the edits were by users who were not at the time logged in to Wikipedia. I’m not convinced the single occurrence of vandalism by a logged in user was vandalism or an edit made in good faith which may or may not have been accurate. The edit involved changing “Daisy Murdoch Cortlandt” to “Daisy Murdoch Cortlandt Cortlandt” which looks wrong, but is how IDMb have the name.
I carried out my own study looking at vandalism made to my user page. My page has had 182 malicious edits since I joined Wikipedia in February 2003. 47% of the vandalism was done by registered users. See my write up on the wiki for more details.
Even if most vandalism is done by unregistered users, I don’t see this as evidence that a wiki should force editors to register. Forced registration doesn’t prevent vandals logging in. The only difference such a rule would make is that you would then have 100% of vandalism made by registered users, which makes it much harder to spot. Vandal fighters can filter out edits by registered users when they look at recent changes, and anti-vandal bots can be programmed to watch for unregistered users. Removing that distinction only makes it harder to find vandalism - it doesn’t stop it happening. Vandals will sometimes log in if they have to. And genuine users sometimes won’t. I’m assuming vandals have more time to waste than the average Wikipedia reader, so there’s the danger that more vandals than normal people will have time to register, changing the balance of good users to bad.
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