Minh’s Notes

Up-front values: At least Conservapedia makes no attempt at hiding its colors. (Based on Wikipedia logo under fair use for non-profit commentary.)

A new free, online, collaboratively-written encyclopedia – sound familiar? – claims that Democrats have “a true agenda of cowering to terrorism [and] treasonous anti-Americanism”. At least it did last Sunday.

Conservapedia describes itself as an answer to the “increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American” Wikipedia. You’ll notice that its front page features a red, white, and blue color scheme. Guided by six commandments – “I give you ten – six, six commandments!” – the project takes hard-line stances on pressing issues like the use of BC and AD (as opposed to BCE and CE) and American English (as opposed to the Commonwealth varieties). Wikipedia has more of a “status quo” guideline, suggesting the use of whatever is already being used or whatever makes sense for the topic.

The project’s description of Democrats is somewhat less provocative now, framing cowardice and anti-Americanism as claims by “right-wing critics”. Wikipedia would advise against the use of such “weasel words” unless “accompanied by a citation that supports the claim”. Well, at least there are citations. Conservapedia backs up its claim of “cowering to terrorism” with a link to an Associated Press article about opposition to the TSA’s passenger databases:

For four years, the government has used a computerized system to give a risk assessment to nearly everyone entering or leaving the country by land, sea or air. Homeland Security intends to keep the files for 40 years.

Leahy is also outraged that people on the list have no way of knowing they’re on it, can’t see the information, and can’t challenge it. Leahy said there need to be privacy safeguards in place.

Its claim of “treasonous anti-Americanism” cites a CNN transcript about the party’s opposition to tax cuts. Nowhere in either of these articles are cowardice or treason mentioned, much less alleged; these articles are used merely as “examples”. At least they recognize the legitimacy of CNN.

My hope is that Conservapedia will remain nothing more than a novelty. There’s no problem with creating a fork of Wikipedia, but you can’t eliminate bias by promoting the opposite bias. That just gets you two equally biased, equally wrong, and equally disgusted camps. Calling themselves an “encyclopedia you can trust”, the project’s creators believe they’re doing students a favor, by educating them. But if a part of that service consists of convincing a student that China’s One-Child Policy is fundamentally Communist support of abortion, what they’re doing is a travesty.

Thanks to Neil Turner, who got the scoop from The Guardian.

Entry №1099, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 5:20 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Gems, Politics, Wikipedia | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Every day, nearly everyone at Stanford must travel through the campus’ most successful linear particle accelerator. No, not SLAC; I’m referring to the “Intersection of Death,” the infamous spot where Lasuen Mall meets Escondido Mall at the Clock Tower (MapGuide, Google Maps). At peak times when classes have just ended or are about to begin, the bicycles, skateboards, golf carts, scooters, electric scooters, construction vehicles, delivery trucks, and intimidated pedestrians mirror a scene straight out of New York City, sans the yellow taxicabs. To get through this gauntlet of hurried commuters is an inhuman feat of skill and bravery. Sometimes there’s just no way around the intersection, since the five minutes from one class to the next certainly isn’t enough. So you try weaving in and out of the stalled bicyclists, who are as stunned as you at the sheer volume of traffic. Sometimes you make it.

Wednesday I didn’t. I thought I saw a clear path through the intersection, one of those rare moments in life that makes your day. My day surely was made when someone attempted to turn left onto my rear wheel, sending me flying towards the pavement. Now my bike’s in the shop for repairs, and I’m stuck walking a full 15 minutes to some classes. This is exactly the kind of mishap that the Department of Public Safety and PT&S have been looking to prevent with their still-confusing ban on biking in the Arcades and their wonderfully quaint “Slow Down” signs posted as you approach the intersection.

Unfortunately, these measures only force people to look both ways when crossing the Arcades – watching for police, not for pedestrians – and slowing down at the Intersection of Death – only because of a traffic jam, likely caused by the influx of former Arcade users. Passing through the busiest intersection in a one-mile radius is still a major gamble.

The University should’ve taken a cue from the d.school students who successfully turned the intersection into a roundabout for a day. Unlike the students, the University has the clout necessary to make such a change permanent. As far as I can tell, the intersection has just enough room to make a traffic circle that could handle the peak volumes around lunchtime and provide enough room to maneuver around.

But, as usual, there’s no silver bullet. Even a roundabout would only solve one part of the problem – the current lack of a right-of-way system. There’s more, though. For instance, some people still find it sane to bike while talking on the phone, even though it’s going to be illegal to do the same while driving a car (arguably an easier thing to do). And some still find it cool to bike with both hands in their pockets, wearing a smug face until they realize the need for brakes.

Of course, they didn’t cause my accident. What happened to me on Wednesday was just poor timing, compounded by poor road planning. Instead of promoting traffic distributors to ease the load on this one intersection, the University has opted to funnel everyone through a 50-square-foot logjam. Rather than finding reasons for an arbitrary ban, can we please do something about this much-maligned intersection?

Entry №1070, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 10:01 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: College, Frustration, Gems | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

As you might be aware, I’m an avid contributor to various Wikimedia projects, including the English Wikipedia and the Vietnamese Wikipedia, where I’m one of a handful of administrators.

To my amusement, I found out the other day that, as of March, I’m ranked the 889^th most prolific contributor to the English-language edition. The thing is, I consider a great majority of my nearly 7,000 edits there to be very minor ones: correcting typos or grammatical errors, adding special “interwiki links” to other language editions, assigning articles to categories, and so on. Plus, I always notice issues with my own edits only as soon as I hit the “Save page” button, so I have to go back and correct things over and over again. Few of my contributions to the English Wikipedia could be considered actual writing, although I am proud of the Adobe Atmosphere article that I pretty much authored on my own, and I think I’ve done a decent job of maintaining the constantly-vandalized article on St. X.

But I feel a bit awkward claiming such a high spot in a project that has a total 1,325,781 users at the time of writing, as many of my edits are just polish – adding a period at the end of a sentence, for instance. Many less “active” editors have, on the other hand, contributed well-written articles on topics much more important than an abandoned piece of software. As I said, I’m an administrator over at the Vietnamese edition, so I naturally contribute quite a lot there. I never really kept count of it, but I’m responsible for having translated many articles from English there. I’ve basically used the Vietnamese Wikipedia has a practicing ground for learning the language, so many of my translations are… pedestrian.

And that’s why I’m going to pay extra close attention to my computer science class this week. I’m taking CS201 to get my Writing in the Major requirement out of the way. Because the class discusses “Computers, Ethics, and Social Responsibility,” we’re going to start talking about Wikipedia.

The professor has made it more or less clear that she’s not a big fan of the site. Regarding the claim that, as general-purpose encyclopedias go, Wikipedia is not responsible for being the authoritative, completely correct reference on every subject, she observes that what she got from reading the site is what the individual authors are interested in, not necessarily what’s important about the subject. And that’s an argument that I especially buy: as I explain on my user page at the English Wikipedia, I basically disagree with founder Jimmy Wales’ description of Wikipedia as “the sum of all human knowledge.” We have, after all, a “List of representations of Seattle in popular culture,” and a “definitive” list of hoaxes on April Fools Day 2006. That doesn’t belong in an encyclopedia, no matter how much Wiki is not paper.

I’d imagine that my professor is going spend this week discussing how Wikipedia fails as a reliable source. But that discussion’s been done to smitherines. What I find more important – and at times disturbing – is how little utility (quality) matters at Wikipedia when the project stands to gain quite a bit of quantity. It is, after all, supposed to be a reference work. But someone apparently thought that it would be cool to keep a separate, “definitive” list of 2006 April Fools jokes. And as an organizer of a relatively tiny edition of Wikipedia, I’ve often felt the temptation to write a bot that’ll generate mountains of “stubs,” in the egotistical interest of inflating our article count. But there’s a lot to be said about maintaining a standard, one that sacrifices a bit of ego for a bit of reputation. It means a lot to a newcomer when they arrive at Wikipedia’s doorstep looking for answers and find a well-written, actually informative piece of writing. How appreciative would you be if you visited an encylopedia article about Comoros that only told you it was a country? Or how about an Albanian-language article on the year 1849 that only told you this particular year had twelve months? (Let’s assume you speak Albanian; this happens a lot on the small- to mid-sized wikis.)

The reason I have qualms about Wikipedia’s mass of trivia and stubs is the same reason I feel a bit guilty about my artificially-inflated edit count: what will the encyclopedia’s readers think of these hardly-useful pages, and how can we expect them to view us as an encyclopedia? Apparently my professor can’t take Wikipedia as a serious reference work, and I know she’s not alone. If we want to build this project that supposedly “democratizes knowledge,” we need to do better.

Oh – and you can help.

Entry №1013, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:33 PM | Edit | Permalink
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