The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #144: Cathy Linh Che
“I think a safe space is one of deep listening and deep caring.”
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Posts Tagged: wikipedia
What Do I Do With My Fear?: A Conversation with Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra discusses her new essay collection, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, fear, privilege, and the intersection of politics and everyday life.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Rosalie Moffett
Rosalie Moffett discusses her new collection June in Eden, writing humor in poetry, using contemporary references, and trying to understand the world.
...moreWiki One Percent
Jennifer Ouellette reports on recent studies of Wikipedia’s editorial hierarchy. While the site was founded on democratic ideals, the reality has turned into something quite different: Their analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia is actually quite conservative from an evolutionary standpoint: it preserves those aspects that worked early on. As the community added new members and grew […]
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Total Noise and Complete Saturation
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested, in a clinical way, in silence.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Bad news from the free-Internet fight is also good news in the war on Google. A bit of sexist schadenfreude. Are psychologists who study morality evil? Want to make things really scary? Here’s how to do it. How do we work together?
...moreTell Don’t Show, Like Wikipedia
Do not make me decipher your intent. Do not assume allegorical common ground. Do not make me pay attention to your god damn motif. Tell don’t show, like Wikipedia. A blunt argument for the straight story in fiction, over at The Toast.
...moreAll of Wikipedia, In Print
We all know the rise of Wikipedia and its always-accessible treasure trove of information was the decisive nail-in-the-coffin for those dusty, hardcover encyclopedia sets. But for the people behind Print Wikipedia, there’s the desire to collect all of Wikipedia (at least its English form) into a shape like those reference tomes of yesteryear. The New […]
...morePrinting Out All Humanity’s Knowledge
Wikipedia hopes to one day contain all of mankind’s (literally, mankind’s) knowledge in a singular repository. Artist Michael Mandiberg decided to create a hard copy and start printing out the online encyclopedia—all 7,600 volumes of it. The New York Times spoke to Mandiberg about the project “From Aaaaa! To ZZZap!” on the eve of the […]
...moreWikipedia’s Sausage Party
Wikipedia has a gender problem. The site has an overwhelmingly male authorship, meaning that the contents of the encyclopedia meant to document all of human knowledge is skewed toward men. The New Statesman takes a look at what this means: The gender disparity has skewed the encyclopaedia’s content – not only which pages are created but also […]
...moreFor the Love of Good Grammar
Bryan Henderson has made more than 47,000 edits to Wikipedia. This prolific career is not the product of Henderson’s great breath of knowledge, but rather because he has an obsession with fixing a specific grammatical mistake. The mistake he corrects over and over again is composed of two words: “comprised of.” His efforts to remove […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Victorians: The original futurists. Can Sony stop the leaks? Can social media stop vitriol and still maintain freedom of speech? Should you go to jail for your Facebook profile? What a podcast teaches us about memory. Wikipedia is becoming as cumbersome as, well, real encyclopedias. Owen Thomas and a career editing for the web.
...moreWeekly Geekery
As if you needed another reason to hate the Internet. Here you go, Luddite. Can a monkey own a picture? Wikipedia thinks so. Need to measure your soul? There is an app for that. Life at the edge of connectivity. A network of networks.
...moreWeekly Geekery
You may never need to text words again. Except the word taco. Still no taco emoji. Wikipedia tries to better itself. Still not allowed as a source in college papers. The theory of disruption has been hugely important to technology and innovations and may just be a bunch of bunk. Kisses can change technology too. You […]
...moreBook of Wikipedia
Some Wikipedia fans in Germany are aiming to change the way the online, editable encyclopedia is read. The group known as PediaPress is trying to raise $50,000 to turn the website into a 1,000 volume set of books, each containing around 1,200 pages. Their goal is to exhibit the printed encyclopedia at a Wikimania conference […]
...moreLiterary Feuds in the Digital Age Get Ugly
While we were all shaking our heads about sexist changes to the “American Novelists” page, Wikipedia editor “Qworty” was taking action—by making a series of “revenge edits” to Amanda Filipacchi’s page. But, sadly and strangely, that was only the tip of the iceberg. It turns out Qworty is a novelist himself, and he’s conducted an elaborate […]
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FUNNY WOMEN #100: Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel
A lot of women people (as opposed to men people, or just “people”) are upset that Wikipedia editors have created a subcategory for “American Women Novelists.” But I’m not.
...moreDear Wikipedia Editors,
Not all of you, just the ones who decided that it was a good idea to start removing women from the category “American Novelists” and putting them into a new category: “American Women Novelists.” You guys. What the hell, man? What’s wrong with you? It would have been bad enough had you decided to replace […]
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Forgotten Country, by Catherine Chung
In Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country, Janie, the eldest daughter of a Korean immigrant family and a graduate student in mathematics, has always carried the responsibility of appeasing and protecting her little sister Hannah, and has always felt she had to be “the one who had to fill the missing pieces.” On the very day of […]
...moreRevolutionary Wikipedia
All of us Wikipedia users are constantly reaping the benefits of massive information-based collaboration. This essay, published in the Awl, considers why this resource is so essential in our digital age. Anybody who has ever accidently cited Wikipedia on a college paper as a freshman can now liberate themselves from the shame–Wikipedia is deconstructing the […]
...moreToo Many Inkblots?
In the last few months, Wikipedia has been in debate with psychologists who are upset that Rorschach inkblot plates can be easily found online. Because the Rorschach tests are displayed with common responses to the open-ended questions doctors pose while using the plates, several psychologists have voiced concerns that the materials are being undermined.
...moreThe Past and Possible Future of Wikipedia
The London Review of Books recently published one of the best single articles I’ve ever read about the history and possible future of Wikipedia, in a review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution. The LRB article, by David Runciman, starts off by comparing Wikipedia to the one-volume encyclopedias of a former time; pre-eminently, the Columbia […]
...moreThe Story of Encarta
From a New York Times article, published two months ago, about the end of the line for Encarta: “It’s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind. But Encarta arguably would have failed even without that competition. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that […]
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