I like this framing:
If you’ve ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you’re doing Digital Litter Picking. You’re cleaning up after others. And I think that’s a marvellous way to spend a little time.
So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
The dominant narrative for the growth of the World Wide Web, the graphical, user-friendly version of the internet created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is that its success has been propelled by Silicon Valley venture capitalism at its most rapacious. The idea that currently prevails is that the internet is best built by venture-backed startups competing to offer services globally through category monopolies: Amazon for shopping, Google for search, Facebook for social media. These companies have generated enormous profits for their creators and early investors, but their “surveillance capitalism” business model has brought unanticipated harms.
It doesn’t have to be this way, says Ethan Zuckerman:
A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. We’ve seen a wave of innovation around tools that entertain us and capture our attention for resale to advertisers, but much less innovation around tools that educate us and challenge us to broaden our sphere of exposure, or that amplify marginalized voices. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.
You are on a website. There are exits to the north, south, east and west.
>...
Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.
So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.
As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!
This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.
I think this might be the first large-scale practical demonstration of the InterPlanetary File System: routing around the damage of Turkey’s censorship of Wikipedia.
Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.
The street finds its own uses for colonial internet practices:
Because the data is completely free, Angolans are hiding large files in Wikipedia articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia site (Angola is a former Portuguese colony)—sometimes concealing movies in JPEG or PDF files. They’re then using a Facebook group to direct people to those files, creating a robust, completely free file sharing network.
A nice navigable timeline of historical events from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia edits converted into Eno-esque sound.
I sense the hand of Tom Morris in this. Wikipedia has created a “nearby” page for browsers with geolocation, much like the Wikinear mashup that Simon created with Fire Eagle five years ago.
Sure, this is a bleedin’ one-to-one copy of feckin’ Wikipedia. Give it an aul’ spin.
Documentation of an ongoing project to create a mobile-first responsive MediaWiki theme.
One of the fun fringe events at Build in Belfast was The Standardistas’ Open Book Exam:
Unlike the typical quiz, the Open Book Exam demands the use of iPhones, iPads, Androids—even Zunes—to avail of the internet’s wealth of knowledge, required to answer many of the formidable questions.
Team Clearleft came joint third. Initially it was joint fourth but an obstreperous Andy Budd challenged the scoring.
Now one of the principles of this unusual pub quiz was that cheating was encouraged. Hence the encouragement to use internet-enabled devices to get to Google and Wikipedia as quickly as the network would allow. In that spirit, Andy suggested a strategy of “running interference.”
So while others on the team were taking information from the web, I created a Wikipedia account to add misinformation to the web.
Again, let me stress, this was entirely Andy’s idea.
The town of Clover, South Carolina ceased being twinned Larne and became twinned with Belfast instead.
The world’s largest roller coaster become 465 feet tall instead of its previous 456 feet (requiring a corresponding change to a list page).
But the moment I changed the entry for Keyboard Cat to alter its real name from “Fatso” to “Freddy” …BAM! Instant revert.
You can mess with geography. You can mess with measurements. But you do. Not. Mess. With. Keyboard Cat.
For some good clean Wikipedia fun, you can always try wiki racing:
To Wikirace, first select a page off the top of your head. Using “Random page” works well, as well as the featured article of the day. This will be your beginning page. Next choose a destination page. Generally, this destination page is something very unrelated to the beginning page. For example, going from apple to orange would not be challenging, as you would simply start at the apple page, click a wikilink to fruit and then proceed to orange. A race from Jesus Christ to Subway (restaurant) would be more of a challenge, however. For a true test of skill, attempt Roman Colosseum to Orthographic projection.
Then there’s the simple pleasure of getting to Philosophy:
Some Wikipedia readers have observed that clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article.
Seriously. Try it.
Read it and weep. Here are the articles on Wikipedia that reference URLs that are getting axed as part of the BBC’s upcoming cull.
What a wonderful idea for a blog: “Collecting Wikipedia’s finest [citation needed] prose.”
Brilliant; just brilliant. Connor O’Brien remains skeptical about the abstract permanence of “the cloud.” The observations are sharp and the tone is spot-on.
If your only photo album is Facebook, ask yourself: since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?