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Deletionpedia: Wikipedia’s Memory Hole

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on September 21, 2008
in Culture
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typing

Back in the days when people were still referring to the Internet as “The Information Superhighway“, a friend of mine liked to make this pronouncement: “The Internet is not an information superhighway. It’s a typing superhighway. Just because someone types something onto a computer doesn’t make it information.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and never has it applied to any website better than it applies to Deletionpedia, a collection of nearly 64,000 articles (so far) that have been deleted from Wikipedia. This is an awesome concept. It’s the world’s second collection of writing that is guaranteed to be useless, the first, of course, being the Toronto Sun. I simply love that a deliberative body has looked over this stuff and decide that it doesn’t meet the high standards of a public encyclopedia that dedicates tens of thousands of words to the television show Lost.

Here is some of the gloriousness that is Deletionpedia:

The complete list of entries for “List of Films with monkeys in them”

  • King Kong- was a gorilla but monkey family
  • Dunsten checks in- Orangatan part of monkey family
  • King Kong vs Godzilla- fictional mechanical gorilla

Some background on the Shady/Aftermath vs. Murder Inc. feud:

In the song, he not only made fun of 50 Cent, Eminem (he called him Feminem), and Dr. Dre (he had called him a bisexual and claimed that Suge Knight knew of Dre bringing transvestites home, and both are false), but he had also dissed his friend Busta Rhymes who signed to Aftermath at that time. The track also insulted Eminem’s daughter, Hailie, by saying that she’ll grow up to be a slut or a drug addict like Eminem’s ex-wife Kimberly Anne Scott and mother Debbie.

And one of the un-told tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, Air Gumbo:

Air Gumbo is an airline based in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. It is a proposed low-cost airline start-up seeking to launch services from New Orleans to cities in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It planned to launch scheduled services in November 2005, but the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina apparently forced the airline to reconsider that plan[1], and as of October 2007, the airline has not started operations.

This thing really is a browser’s paradise, and each article also includes a link back to the original deletion discussion on Wikipedia. This is my favourite new thing on the Internet in weeks.

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It’s Not Easy Being Free

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on September 8, 2008
in Culture and Economics
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For a number of observers, one of the most confounding things about Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment last year was that even after the band allowed fans to download the album from their website, a huge number of people decided to download it via bit torrent instead.

Forbes noted, “But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just as they might with any other pirated album.”

Now comes the news that even though the season premier of Prison Break was available for free on Hulu.com and Fox.com, more than a million people decided to torrent it instead. Cue hysteria. Betty Shiffman over at Wired quotes Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research:

“This is a group of people who define themselves in part by the technology they use and the application of that technology. Chances are that this is only happening in a defined age group. You’d be hard-pressed to find 60 year-old guys passing this stuff off to their buddies.”

This is just plain wrong. Downloading a movie via bit torrent instead of watching it on Hulu has nothing to do with a technology identity or a pirate mindset. First of all, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of those downloads came from outside the US, where content on Hulu and Fox is blocked. If you’re in Canada or overseas and people are talking about the new episode of your favourite show, then of course you’re going to bit torrent it, you’ve given these people no choice. It’s not that they identify as techno-pirates, they identify as fans of the show.

Next, what this whole issue really comes down to is two competing products. One is available in the same place as all the other products someone downloads (a bit torrent search engine) and one you have to go out of your way to get. Given two identical products, people will choose the one that’s more convenient for them. It’s the difference between going to a butcher shop to get your meat or a grocery store. A lot of people don’t mind going out of their way to go to a butcher, and even paying more, but in return they have to get a better product.

It’s not enough to take your product, make it free, and throw it up on the Internet. If you want to complete with piracy, you have to offer a better product than the pirates offer. One way to do this, for example, would be to build a robust community around the website for fans of the show. That way, fans who missed an episode could watch the show at the same place they get their fix of spoilers or speculation and chat with other people who love the show. So far, the networks have done a terrible job of creating online communities, getting their asses handed to them by sites like Television Without Pity.

The Wired article also quotes Eric Garland, the CEO of Big Champagne.

The networks haven’t necessarily improved upon the experience on pirated sites, so users don’t have much incentive to leave those sites.

This is dead on. Media companies have to figure out ways of improving the product they offer on-line. If they do that, people might even be willing to pay for access, the same way people long ago chose to pay for cable instead of relying on over-the-air broadcasting. Give us better choices and a better product and we don’t even mind if the butcher puts his thumb on the scale every now and then.

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The Parking Lot Is Full

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on September 5, 2008
in Culture
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Question All AuthorityI was delighted when this comic came across Reddit yesterday. The original poster had simply stolen the image and removed the name of the comic. Luckily, the all-knowing commenters identified the original source as The Parking Lot is Full, a comic originally published in The Imprint, the student newspaper at the University of Waterloo. Browsing through the comic’s archives, I was reminded of a similar comic we had at UWO during my time there, our beloved Horovitz.

UPDATE: It turns out that the best place to view old Horovitz cartoons is a Facebook Group.

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Gambling Strategy as a Test of Character

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on September 3, 2008
in Culture
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21.jpg

Over at The American Scene, Jim Manzi, himself a former MIT math whiz and card counter, writes about his reaction to the movie 21:

“Surprisingly, one thing that 21 made clear was that card counting isn’t an IQ test, it’s a character test. A good card-counting system, as executed in the field, might give you a 2% – 3% weighted advantage versus the house, so each hand is very close to a 50/50 proposition; consequently, you can run way down and way up several times even within a single day of play. It looks and feels a lot like luck, and a player can get very spooked when he goes down $8,000 out of a $10,000 bankroll. It is amazingly hard not to deviate from the system when you are on either a hot streak or a cold streak.”

He concludes that:

In a bizarre way, you succeed through classical bourgeois virtues: self-discipline, frugality, ego control and steady work.

It hadn’t occurred to me before reading this, but a card-counting system is a commitment device. Only by committing to the system and placing your faith in it, can you achieve the edge over the house that makes all the difference.

Some Links:

In 2002, Wired magazine published an excerpt from the book that 21 was based on, Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, that broke down the team’s card counting system.

Freakonomics guru Steven Levitt has also written about the value of committing yourself to a particular course of action, this time in poker tournaments.

Though I didn’t explore them in the context of gambling, I did write a piece for ROB Magazine recently that explored some examples of commitment devices, and how we are turning to them more and more to outsource our self-control.

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