Given the recent debate over the accuracy and merit of the Wikipedia project, I found this Penny Arcade piece to be rather funny and fitting:
For every John Doe, Adam Curry and Skeletor there are hundreds of people who are contributing accurate and (relatively) unbiased information to the project. It is only through collaboration and peer editing that the most accurate information will persist. Although Wikipedia may be more susceptible to the rantings of a lunatic, thanks to collective intelligence and peer review these postings can be corrected and filtered out. This is something that can’t be said for the so-called experts over at Encyclopedia Britannica (who could also be considered ranting lunatics depending on your point of view). As far as I?��Ǩ�Ѣm concerned, Skeletor could be a Wikipedia contributor just as easily as he could be on the Encyclopedia Britannica payroll. I prefer the collective intelligence over the opinions of paid experts, and it turns out that according to a recent study by Nature both are equally reliable sources of information.
Thanks to Andrew for bringing this humorous and illuminating Penny Arcade strip to my attention.
Earlier this summer I was playing around with Tiddlywiki and after a few hours of experimentation I came up with Wiktionary, a wiki of web technology terms which I just posted to the MEdTech Labs site.
Although I was impressed with the original and lightweight version of TiddlyWiki, I choose to implement Wiktionary using MyWiki, a server-side offshot of TiddlyWiki. Wiktionary stores the definitions as pieces of mircocontent (or tiddlers) just like TiddlyWiki does but writes the data to a file on the server as opposed to a local HTML file. This allows for the wiki to persist over time and supports multiple contributions, all accomplished without the overhead of a database or a single page refresh.
Wiktionary and MyWiki are just two of many adaptations of the ever versatile TiddlyWiki. For more information on adaptations to TiddlyWiki, check out TiddlyWiki Mania.
Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for several months now as a way to catalogue all of my bookmarks. So far so good, although I find myself yearning for some additional features, such as ratings, notes, and the ability to export the bookmarks. Then along came de.lirio.us, an open-source knockoff of del.icio.us that would allow me to make my own social bookmarking application with the features I wanted. Despite my best efforts I’ve found it nearly impossible to get the required Perl modules up and running, mostly due to my innate aversion to Perl and a set of very ambiguous installation instructions.
So, I’m very happy to report that today I found a much more elegant and sophisticated solution done in PHP/mySQL called Scuttle. Not only did it take less that 10 minutes to install (which is nothing compared to the hours spent trying to understand the cryptic Rubric installation instructions), it’s also has a much nicer GUI than the del.icio.us-style interface of de.lirio.us, and it’s got a handy import feature so that all my del.irio.us bookmarks were in the system in no time. Scuttle can be downloaded from Sourceforge here.
My Scuttle bookmarks can be found here, and previews of my own implementation of Scuttle will be coming soon.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.