Saturday, September 30, 2006

Wikipedia Arbitration, primadonnas, and pointless measures

I made the mistake of looking at the "arbitration" case opened to review the broader circumstances related to my departure from the English Wikipedia. What a train wreck! Mostly, I'm disgusted at the prima donnas sashaying around demanding all sorts of vindictive concessions because their precious egos have been bruised. One of them even went so far as to demand that a block log entry that he finds offensive be purged from history to satisfy his tender sensitivities. Fortunately, Brion stood up for sensibility and flatly declared that that request would be denied. And the prima donnas are on both sides.

The real problem here is that we have people who believe that their contributions to Wikipedia (whether those contributions be in the form of article authorship or administrative support) excuse them from basic social obligations. I'm as guilty of this as the rest of them; the only difference is that I've agreed to stop doing it. They haven't -- and until they do Wikipedia will not get better.

I noticed statements to the effect that I was "hounded off of Wikipedia". There's some truth to that, but not a lot. I left Wikipedia for my own sanity. I was expending too much energy in negative activity, and I decided that this was bad for me. Toward the end there I definitely did things I regret having done, but what's done is done. It's as much as response to my own excesses as to those of others; I am neither totally accepting nor totally avoiding responsibility for my role in creating the current state of affairs.

In the meantime, I'm waiting on the toolserver to have valid database replicas so I can go back to generating statistics on the databases, and in the meantime I'm continuing to work on my reimplementation of MediaWiki in Java. While the latter will probably never reach fruition, I am learning a great deal about the innards of MediaWiki, which might eventually prove useful. Once I get a bit further I might put my work in progress up on an SVN server, assuming I can figure out how to put up SVN, that is....

Update: One of the anonymous trolls who likes to stalk my blog has suggested this summary of the incident. Of course, it is written by one of the rather more unrepentant primadonnas, and should be taken with at least a cowlick's worth of salt....

Thursday, September 28, 2006

A rather interesting timelapse map of dominance in the Middle East over the past 5000 years. I wish it showed more than just the primary dominances, though.

(I have a bad headache tonight, so I'm a bit short on profound thought. Sorry.)

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Anonymity on the internet

A new Arizona case involving anonymous Internet speech raises interesting questions about what minimum showing a party must make in order to be able to discover the real identity of an anonymous party on the Internet. In the matter in question, the plaintiffs were apparently not required to show any legal wrongdoing before being granted an order requiring the disclosure of an anonymous emailer's real identity.

It seems unwise to allow anyone to sue, even on a pretextual reason, and then use the mere existence of a lawsuit as grounds to breach privacy. Such a regime makes one's identity only as good as the emptiness of the pocketbooks of those you wish it hidden from. Then again, that's pretty much the way it is anyway.
Keith Olbermann's response to the media's response to Bill Clinton's removal of Chris Wallace's head.



This is a must-see must-share video. It is finally gratifying to see someone really say it how it is. Clinton's righteous anger appears to have inspired at least someone else. Let's hope it's the opening of the floodgates.

Good night, and good luck.

(From Metacentrities.)

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I wish they'd get the toolserver working reliably. We haven't had reliable enwiki replication in almost four months now. They keep promising to get it working, but they just keep on failing to do so. And now it seems that all replication is down again. And of course, nobody knows why.

I realize this is a volunteer effort, but it might be nice if we got some volunteers who could actually get the job done, or at least explain why they're not getting the job done. This combination of not-working and no-explanation-why is really tiresome.

I have a lot of interesting statistics to generate and I can't do any of it because there's no data available on which to work. Perhaps I should just download the freaking dumps and run the queries on my own box -- it would probably take less time. I'm not sure I have enough disk space, though....
Limewire has struck back against the RIAA, alleging that the RIAA is engaged in antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and "other misconduct". Limewire asserts that the RIAA's "goal was simple: to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them on exclusive and/or other anticompetitive terms so as to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers."

I'm sure everyone believes that most of the content on Limewire, like most other p2p file sharing services, is copied without regard to the desires of the copyright holder. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea. However, it's starkly clear that the RIAA is at least as much interested in killing p2p as a distribution channel as it is about enforcing its members' copyrights. There is an equitable doctrine called "unclean hands" that seems to have some application here, but of late it seems that one can wash one's hands clean on anything if one has enough money to do it.

From Techdirt.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Homeland Security finally realized that it's unlikely that airport food courts will be selling explosive water, and is now letting us buy beverages in the sterile area and even take small containers of liquid and gel through security.
Looking for something different on the dinner table? Try crickets, which are now apparently a hot item in Vietnam today. Deep fried, breaded, or peppered.

Oh, and if that's not enough for you, they also have scorpions and centipedes.
Clinton v. Wallace on Fox News

Fox News offered to interview Clinton over the Clinton Global Initiative. Not a real surprise, as he was on the Daily Show just the other night for the same thing. But Chris Wallace decided to try to blame Bin Laden on Clinton. Bad move. Click above to watch Clinton tear Wallace's head off.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Election nonsense in Wikimedia

As I mentioned earlier, I was notified by email yesterday of the results of the Board election. Erik, as most everyone no doubt knows, had the largest number of votes, but not a majority. Now, it is a well-grounded principle of parliamentary law that no person may win an election with less than a majority of the votes cast; to do otherwise contravenes one of the fundamental principles underlying parliamentary law. Of course, by using approval voting, the Foundation chose an election process which is well-known not to comport with the fundamental principles of parliamentary law. But we already knew that the Foundation has, at best, a tenuous connection with sensible principles of governance. Trying to change that was one of the reason I ran for Board.

I replied to the formal notification of the results with a demand for a runoff election. Jimbo has informed me that he is not willing to do that. I'm not really that surprised. In any case, Erik lacks a mandate and his presence of the board is illegimate under any reasonable interpretation of parliamentary law. But the Wikimedia Foundation Board has always been something of a farce anyway.

The Board must not, under any circumstances, use approval voting for the purpose of electing officers; approval voting is parliamentarily invalid on several counts. I personally would recommend some form of single transferrable vote. I would also strongly suggest the use of indirect elections, with projects electing delegates to an assembly. This assembly, at the very least, should then elect the Board, and it is my preference that such an assembly should be the actual governing authority of the Foundation. I have not strongly advocated this because I know that Jimbo would strongly oppose it, in large part because it represents a threat to his intentions to maintain firm control over the Foundation. But I think this is the best way to deal with the widespread demand from Wikimedians to have a Board that is accountable and responsible to Wikimedians, without also making Board elections totally dependent on popularity (which is what happened with this most recent election).

While Erik is not the worst choice the community could have made, he is certainly not even close to the best, and I suspect that the Foundation will be, at least in the short term, worse off for it.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Turn, turn, turn...

Seeing as though I have just embarked on what I suspect will be a long break from Wikimedia, it's likely that non-Wikimedia topics will tend to dominate this blog for a while. I don't intend to say a lot about why I'm leaving Wikimedia alone for a while, but I am not going to be silent on it, either.

I left Wikipedia, and Wikimedia, for several different, interrelated reasons.

The first is that my prominence in the community and the broad distrust and antagonism held by significant (or at least loud) segments of the community has made it impossible for me to "move quietly" to deal with the "special situations" that I used to take care of for Danny and Brad, and more generally meant that everything I might do on Wikipedia was under extremely close scrutiny. I got tired of living under the microscope all the time.

The second is that there is a large political fight brewing on the English Wikipedia, and if I had stayed there I would have been in the middle of it. I don't really like politics that much.

The third is that I'm, quite simply, tired. I'm getting older, and because of the meds I take I'm not that energetic a person anymore. Wikipedia has been increasing my stress levels and interfering with getting enough sleep.

The fourth reason, which only relates to Wikimedia, has to do with the Board elections. The results have not yet been announced, but as a former member of the Communications Committee, I got to see the results a few hours early. I certainly won't announce the winner here, but from where I sit I can't see that this person's election will do Wikimedia any good at all. In fact, I expect a truly nasty power struggle starting any day now. As I noted above, I don't really like politics that much, and especially the sort of kindergarten politics that tends to go on in Wikimedia. I don't want to be around that mess as it explodes. I am putting my faith in the sane people (the few of them that are left) to pick up the bloody pieces after all the infighting is over and create the next generation of the Wikimedia Foundation. Either that, or I'll end up joining some fork created by those who are pissed off enough at the Foundation to start a new project.

So my plan is to spend the next few months catching up on my reading list and spending time with the people in my life, something which I hadn't been doing as much as while being so active in Wikipedia/Wikimedia. (I have a long reading list right now: several novels, John Dean's recent book, and the Jared Diamond books, at the very least. I am presently finishing the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, after which I intend to read the Game of Thrones series up to current. I think that's three books, but might be four.) So my posts for the next few months probably won't have a lot to do with Wikipedia or Wikimedia. If you were reading this blog for that, sorry.

I've set myself nomail on all of the Wikipedia/Wikimedia related mailing lists I was on (I think; if I missed one I'll fix it when I find it), except for the ArbCom and Oversight lists, which I've unsubscribed from entirely. My mailbox is really quiet now, which is the strangest thing. Kinda nice, actually.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

On Wikipedia, geek culture, and culture conflict

Right now, there is a significant-sized group of people calling for my head on Wikipedia. I've been trying to understand why these otherwise sensible people are being so viciously nasty about things. And I had something of an insight about this in the car.

Wikipedia is, primarily, an instance of geek culture. This means, amongst other things, that standing within the culture is largely based on merit: the more effective you are at accomplishing whatever you're supposed to be doing, the higher your standing will be. This is rather atypical in broader culture, where social status in a community is more likely to be based on nonmerit things like affability, appearance, or class distinctions.

The problem occurs when people from nongeek culture -- who are used to obtaining social status through socializing -- come to Wikipedia and attempt to gain social status. One of their creations -- Esperanza -- is widely reviled by geek Wikipedians, because it seems to serve no real function. But for nongeeks, membership in this sort of organization, dedicated to Sharing Warm Fuzzies, is essential to gaining social status in the world these people come from.

So, these nongeeks, who have been drawn to Wikipedia in larger and larger numbers, including significant numbers of people who are seeking higher social status. And they go through the usual motions they've learned in the larger world for gaining social status. And here's the key: they don't work. Wikipedia's geek meritocracy ignores, or in some cases actively disdains, such efforts to gain social status.

This leads to frustration for many of these interloping status seekers. Having failed to obtain the status they expect, they start looking for explanations for why they have failed. And here, again, they are caught by the culture clash between geek culture and nongeek culture. In geek culture, if you have failed to obtain status, it's because your worth have been measured and found wanting. In nongeek culture, if you've done all the appropriate things, and have failed to obtain status, it's because someone has put the kibosh on you through a backchannel. And so these nongeeks, upset at their failure to obtain status, start blaming the backchannels for their failure to obtain the status they feel they deserve. Their failure to appreciate geek culture causes them to blame the wrong thing for their failure.

In fact, there are backchannels all over Wikipedia. But, at least on the geek side of Wikipedia, those channels are used simply to discuss things that need to be discussed in a quieter environment. We don't use them to decide who is a good person and who is not. Most of the discussions that even come close to this sort of topic are reactive, responding to some move for power made by another person and how to react to it. Very little discussion centers on arbitrarily deciding who is to be "in" and who is to be "out", except insofar as people have earned such status through their actions. If one were to start arbitrarily fucking around like that, the logs would get out real fast and whoever tried to do it would lose status REAL fast.

So the nongeeks are attacking geek backchannels, which the geeks rely on as a way to communicate without having to deal with what they view as (a) stupidity from nongeeks and (b) all the silly social posturing that nongeeks do. In short, nongeeks are attacking a geek "safe space"; small wonder the geeks don't like that.

Best I can figure is that people like Geogre are nongeeks who have, in the past, earned respect from geeks for their contributions (which are quite meritorious), but don't realize that it's their contributions that have earned them their status, not their adept social maneuvering. A brief examination of their talk pages evidences that they are engaging in social maneuvering as well as editing, and it's clear that they are also using backchannels for social purposes. The conflict occurs when one of the members of one of these social groups does something to lower his claim to merit. The geeks will drop that person just like that. The nongeeks don't understand that, because they compute social standing on a nonmerit basis, and so they get upset because their social standing has been changed without them doing anything that should have affected it. Again, the temptation is to blame backchannels.

A geek, on the other hand, who fails to achieve social standing will often assume that her work simply isn't good enough, and will either become frustrated and leave (or, possibly, become a troll, which on Wikipedia materializes primarily as vandalism), or else will work even harder to please. The former is easy to identify and the latter (if successful) will eventually lead to social success. A geek in nongeek culture who works harder to achieve social success through merit will, of course, fail, because merit is not how one achieves social success.

The solution? I don't have one. Geek culture was predominant in Wikipedia in 2003. Over the past three years, it has been grossly diluted by an influx of nongeeks, and geeks may actually be the minority. Geeks don't cope well with nongeek social ordering systems, and nongeeks are so trained to use their social ordering systems that it's hard for them to adapt to meritocracy.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Federal judge declares boating illegal in all US navigable waters

If we're to believe this (and I'm not sure if I am, given that this was published by a boating advocacy group, so it's necessarily biased), then some uppity federal judge has tossed out 200 years of development of water rights law.

We spent at least a week on water rights in my property class back in law school. Water rights in the US are complicated, and are very much state-by-state. This is because water in the east is plentiful (like it is in England), and so more or less follows English law on the matter (with some exceptions). Water in the west, on the other hand, is scarce, and totally different rules apply.

This ruling seems to ignore two centuries of nuanced water rights law in favor of creating a maximum property right interest. I wonder how Posner will react....
Zune’s Big Innovation: Viral DRM

Microsoft's Zune player supports wireless sharing of media, with a catch: anything you share gets DRMed with a three plays or three days limit. This is phenomenally stupid. First, it violates the copyright of any content licensed under a Creative Commons license, since those licenses prohibit DRM which interferes with permitted uses (including, for example, redistribution). Second, it permits (limited) infringement on the copyright of content not licensed for redistribution at all. Microsoft might have the RIAA's approval for the latter, but they certainly do not have the Creative Commons' approval for the former.

Give Zune a pass. Say no to viral DRM.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

What's Next: The Idiocy of Crowds

Interesting article (setting aside the swipe at Wikipedia at the bottom, which is not entirely unearned) about the pitfalls of collaborative process.
The War Over Salt

This irritates the hell out of me. I am on medication that causes me to waste sodium. As a result, I need extra salt in my diet -- and absolutely must avoid potassium-based salt alternatives. I use a lot of salt in my food, and (conveniently) I like it that way, too.

Why should my diet be altered because of someone else's medical condition? Make people be responsible for their own dietary management; stop trying to do it for them. I don't want to have to get a prescription for salt.
India in low caste marriage plan

India is trying to up the benefit for intercaste marriage in order to further weaken the caste structure. People who agree to marry anyone from the two lowest castes are entitled to up to 50,000 rupees (about $1100) in benefits in some states; India's national government wants this made the same across all states.

Oh, and if your friends and family refuse to show up at the wedding because you married someone downcaste, you can always hire guests to come to your wedding -- and at a highest price of 600 rupees each, that 50,000 incentive will make up for quite a few missing family members.

Frankly, anything that helps to destroy the caste system is a good thing.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Seven Wikipedia Fallacies (from LawMeme) is one of the best articles I've read in recent memory about Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia is ... not 'the free encyclopedia that edits itself.'" And it gets better from there. Do read it, and share it with people. This is the sort of thing people need to be reading about Wikipedia, not the usual tripe that the media are constantly spewing forth.
My thoughts on Wikimania 2007 bids

My main concerns in choosing venues include that the venue should be consistent with Wikimedia's core principles, that the venue not be located in a place likely to be hostile to Wikimedians for religious, political, or social reasons (and more specifically due to GLBT discrimination), that the venue be otherwise interesting to visit, and that the venue is affordable for most Wikimedians to get to and to be at. I am also concerned about long-term diversity in venue.

Regrettably, these principles do exclude a significant portion of the world, for a variety of reasons. To people who live in areas excluded by these principles, please change your legal and social practices, then reapply.

I have several principles regarding diversity: first, that we should alternate English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries; second, that we should not hold Wikimania on the same continent two years in a row; and third, that the relative frequency of each continent should be roughly proportional to participation. Based on recent data, that means that, out of any given six years, Europe should be about three, North America about two, Asia one, and one in Australia, Africa, or South America.

So, on to the individual bids:

Alexandria

While I like the appeal of having it at the reborn Library of Alexander, and the connection with archive.org is doubtless appealing, I am not thrilled at the idea of holding Wikimania in a country rated "very dangerous" for GLBT individuals. I'm also concerned that there will be little to do other than at the venue itself; and I'm reasonably certain that I won't be able to sit at a bar and drink with Danny. I'm reasonably certain I will not attend if we hold Wikimania here.

Taipei

The main problems with Taiwan as a host country are (a) high travel expense for European and North American travelers (who make up probably three-quarters of Wikimedians) and (b) the possibility of negative political consequences with respect to the negotiations regarding China's firewall.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong has similar expense issues as for Taipei. There are also immigration issues for Mainland China and Taiwan to deal with. Hong Kong is arguably an English-speaking "country", although not entirely and I'm willing to count it as being non-English-speaking for this year. HK does not have the political consequences that Taipei might have.

Singapore

I have concerns about Singapore from a GLBT standpoint as well; homosexual conduct carries a maximum life sentence there. Furthermore, the country's draconian anti-free-speech policies might actually result in a significant proportion of Wikimedians being nominally subject to arrest because their contributions to Wikimedia projects violate Singaporean law. I think that it would be a mistake for Wikimedia, an organization dedicated to open, uncensored content, to support the economy of a state so opposed to it.

Istanbul

The main problem I have with the Istanbul proposal is the ability of the local community to support the bid. As far as I can tell, this bid is being forwarded mainly by a single proponent whose connection to the rest of the community is rather tenuous. Travel expenses from North America are also quite high. Istanbul is also expensive. Not a bad idea, though. Turkey, while not as problematic on GLBT issues as several of the other suggested venues, is also not the most open of nations.

Torino

Torino looks to me to be an excellent bid. The operational and attendee costs look to be extremely low. Italy does not present very many political difficulties, and is extremely convenient for most Europeans and not too difficult for North Americans.

London

London is likely to be very expensive; in any case it is excluded from my consideration, at least, because England is an English-speaking country and is therefore excluded from consideration in a year following a United States location.

Orlando

Orlando, aside from being just a pathetically terrible place to visit in August, holds no appeal at all to me in any case. In particular, Orlando's main tourist appeal is Walt Disney World, an entity which is actively repellent to me. Disney's business practices and attitudes toward intellectual property law are irreconcilably inconsistent with Wikimedia's principles; we should not support them in any way. The bid is also very sparse on details, and in any case this venue is triply-excluded (repeat country, repeat continent, repeat primary language).

Conclusion

At this point, I favor the Torino bid for 2007. It really stands above the others in my eyes. My second choice would be Hong Kong, with Taipei a close third and Istanbul a distant fourth. The remaining bids I deem unacceptable.

Monday, September 11, 2006

It is depressing how bad Wikipedia's content on computer-related content is. Tonight's exemplar is MOV (x86 instruction), an article on an entire category of instructions in the Intel x86 instruction set. The article has just about the ugliest formatting possible in MediaWiki, and does an excellent job of imparting information only to those who already know it. Finally, it's entirely unsourced.

I frequently find myself, after reading computer technical articles in Wikipedia, left with the impression that they have all been written by students who have just learned the material themselves; they are written with only the most superficial of understanding, and with none of the rich connections to related topics that one would hope for in a general-audience encyclopedia.

This page is not an encyclopedia article; it is a page out of a quick reference handbook, and a bad one at that.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Apparently very littled happened in 773. More specifically, nobody was born or died this year. This despite the fact that Charlemagne crossed the Alps and invaded the Lombards -- surely not something one would think took place without any deaths!

Although, sadly enough, if you look at the births of 773 and deaths in 773 categories, you'll find that, in fact, some people were born in 773 (although apparently nobody died -- even though we got a new King in Connacht, according to the list of state leaders in 773) -- we just don't feel like telling you about them.

Clearly this is a space where some improvement could be had. And even more a space where we could use the ability to generate content from metadata instead of having to do so manually.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Sprankton: A disease you get by chewing too much.

This gibberish has been deleted from the English Wikipedia twelve times since May of 2005. It persistently reappears, and is therefore currently bolted down in its current (uninteresting) state.

It's amazing that people are so persistent in inserting such useless nonsense into Wikipedia. I can understand the people who are aggressively reinserting their business or their garage band or whatever; fame and fortune are obvious motivators. But who stands to benefit from "sprankton" being defined as "a disease you get from chewing too much"?

Well, apparently it's a rather lame flash video. You can't tell this from the lame attempts at an article on Wikipedia, mind you, and there's no reference to it. I'm not going to link to it here; it doesn't need my publicity. But I still find it fascinating that there's some kid out there who is so entranced by this that, a year later, he's still willing to insert this nonsense definition into Wikipedia.
Gimli Glider: "While they attempted to restart the engine and communicate with controllers in Winnipeg for an emergency landing, the warning system sounded again, this time with a long 'bong' that no one present could recall ever hearing before. The sound was the 'all engines out' sound, an event that was never simulated during training."

A very entertaining read.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse

From Secrets of the south (which will hopefully be deleted some time soon, although hopefully not until after Jimbo gets a chance to see it): "The interview is a one on one interview between someone and the interviewee."

Yes, it really does say that.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Random Article of the Day: Cislunar space

Find some way to improve this article. Note: this might simply be a matter of removing the stub tag. For all I can tell, this article says about all there is to say.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Woman dies, man jailed in road death

It is times like these that I'm glad I don't live in Mississippi. I just hope that this guy wasn't after her because he thought she was me.
Aaron Swartz: Why is he getting so much attention?

I'm sure we've all seen Aaron's blog entry about contributors to the Alan Alda article. For those of us who went to Wikimania, this is old news: Seth's study not only reported on this, but in more detail (as finally Ross Mayfield has noticed on his blog).

The community has long known that edit count is a poor measure of contributions, although at the same time the community is also quite addicted to edit counting. Aaron's letter-counting metric also incidentially heavily rewards people who revert pageblanking vandalism (which is actually quite common on high-traffic articles). Aaron's metric is better than edit count, but isn't that good.

Quite simply, we need a way to classify edits. This isn't that easy; if it were we'd have the software do it automatically, and reject those that fall into the classifications of "edits we don't want". That would be really nice -- and certainly requires natural language processing that doesn't exist and won't for a long time. Greg and I discussed (after Seth's presentation) the idea of a research portal that would present edits to research assistants who have been trained to classify them and store the classifications in its database. Mechanisms could be added to facilitate quality checking to ensure classification is being done correctly. This portal could then be made available to researchers interested in this sort of thing. The problem is that it takes from 5 to 30 seconds to classify an edit, and there are currently 76,732,244 of them on the English Wikipedia alone. Classifying all of them would take over 50 years of full-time labor -- or in dollar terms, about three quarters of a million dollars in labor value (and that assumes 5 seconds per edit classified and no allowances for quality issues). Furthermore, classifying edits is boring: it's not going to be easy to incent people to do it, and certainly not in large volume.

I appreciate Aaron bringing this issue up -- again -- but I think he needs to work more on talking to the people who are already in the field instead of trying to use his unoriginal discovery as a justification for his own board candidacy -- which is quite clearly the real reason for his blog post. I'd be very curious to know how many more votes he got after his blog story got picked up by the media. I can't imagine it's none....
Wikipedia trialling new editing rules - Computeract!ve

Yet another site gets it wrong about the German revision flagging solution on Wikipedia. "However, these edits won't show up in the live version of the site until a site editor approves the changes." No! Edits will show up in the live version of the site immediately upon being made, same as always. They just won't be the default revision shown to anonymous readers; readers will have to request to see the "draft" revision if they want to.

It's getting really tiresome reading the same misinformation over and over again, despite all efforts to correct the press on this. For as much as the press complains about how notoriously unreliable Wikipedia is, you'd think they'd make more of an effort to check their own facts once in a while before they hit publish -- especially since their sites don't have "edit" buttons, either.

The real facts on the German proposal can be found here. It might be nice if journalists would read it before publishing anything else... not that anyone will listen to me about this.
Law.com - Wikimedia's First GC Prepares to Tread 'Legal Minefield'

Interesting interview with Brad Patrick. I may need to start reading law.com more now.
Attorney for "My-Space" Attacker Claims Constitutional Protection

In this, the latest of bizarre legal arguments, this guy is claiming that he has a constitutional right to have sex with whomever he wants, regardless of age.

Good luck with that argument, sir.
Evolution News & Views: Putting Wikipedia On Notice About Their Biased Anti-ID Intelligent Design Entries:

Oh, lovely. Just what we need: someone encouraging people to write to us to complain about content on Wikipedia. It's not like we don't already have more emails than we can possible answer; let's get even more mails.

Yes, the intelligent design articles leave quite a bit to be desired. But the people who answer info-en aren't going to be the ones to fix it; we'll either throw out your mail or reply with some pithy template that won't make you happy anyway. Lot of good that'll do anybody.

So, yeah, please don't write us about the intelligent design articles; it won't make a difference and it'll just reduce the time we have to deal with people who want to say that stingrays eat Steve Irwins for breakfast.