Change of policy September 15, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation , 1 comment so farThe following was sent to an email list I have been lurking on for many years.
As of now, each individual poster to the mailing list
is limited to three messages per day. If you post more than this then
your posting won’t be sent on, and you will be sent an automatic reply
asking you to try again tomorrow.This is being done to help cut down on the ever-increasing spam problem
and deal with potential mail loops. The restriction may be lifted, or
the maximum message count raised, in the future.
Thankyou Mr Hubble September 14, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music, video , 1 comment so farThankyou Mr Hubble, for your telescope……
Unrecorded song written by Loudon Wainwright III
update:
Linda suggested I post these links - I recorded this song in order to use it in a soundtrack for a short video called “specks of dust” which was in turn part of a triptych “minute by minute“
Dynamic Page List September 12, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , add a commentIn response to my login to edit post, Ted Ernst comments:
Great post! John just installed the Dynamic Page List extension (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList2) so now you can do whatever queries you like at WikiIndex. See http://www.wikiindex.com/DPL_Test_Page for more.
Ooh goody, lots of fun to be had with this, I think. The open source mediawiki developers are certainly delivering some innovative and powerful extensions, and the Wikiindex community is well positioned to make use of them.
Technorati Tags: wiki, mediawiki, opensource, wikiindex
USB turntable September 9, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools , add a commentI have a goal somewhere on 43things to the effect that I would like to get around to converting some of my vinyl record collection to mp3 one day.
Here’s just the thing - a USB record player.
Reviewed at the Register:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/review_ion_usn_turntable/
Login to Edit? September 7, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , 1 comment so farOn the mediawiki support list, an unnamed correspondent asked for a rationale as to why he shouldn’t aquiesce to a request from a coworker to change his wiki from allowing anonymous edits to requiring logins.
He already supplied this one: “the barrier to surf-by-editing is too high with logins required.” but had been told that the use of cookies makes it no trouble, so I added this:
I think that even in a limited internal corporate environment it will
be more fruitful to allow edits from users who are not logged in. That
way people have the option to contribute ideas which are judged on
their own merit rather than according to the idenity of the
contributor. Most people will want to be logged in and have their
words attributed, but the extra contributions from anonymous editors
will add more value which would otherwise be lost.
There then ensued a series of posts advocating LoginToEdit citing risk management, integrity of data, legal liability, due diligence, and litigation from shareholders.
In the public arena there are a lot of enforced logins as well, but this is usually done as a knee jerk reaction to being attacked by wiki spam. It’s a tightrope that takes some careful balancing to walk optimally, and I have ended up requiring login to create new pages but not to edit existing pages for this reason.
Wikiindex is a commendable project which aims to catalogue all the wikis out there in the wild, and one of the categories used in the database is called Wiki Edit Mode. From this we can glean some quantitative data on the number of wikis which have made it into the catalogue compared by type:
category “OpenEdit” There are 2,012 wikis in this category.
category “LoginToEdit” There are 1,041 wikis in this category.
category “ByInvitation” There are 77 wikis in this category.
category “ReadOnly” There are 183 wikis in this category.
( + 3 unknown ) Total = 3 316
Another category used is Status which attempts to summarise how active each wiki is, and it may be useful to be able to cross-reference the status by edit mode. I wonder if the mediawiki engine could do that - if not it should be possible for the domain administrator to write a mySQL query to extract it directly from the database
category “Vibrant” There are 231 wikis in this category.
category “Active” There are 2,778 wikis in this category.
category “NeedsLove” There are 98 wikis in this category.
category “Inactive” There are 434 wikis in this category.
+ about 50 others = 3591
Technorati Tags: wiki, mediawiki, wikiindex
A board of directors for Meatball Wiki? September 6, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , 2commentsMeatball Wiki is a significant node in the network of online communities. Recently, though, it seems to be going through a period of some turmoil. The first thing I noticed was that on the technical side, a protection system has been put in place to detect open proxies, the upshot of which is that for myself and presumably other people, waiting for edits to be saved is extremely slow or not possible.
Next it seems there’s been some kind of server crash which necessitated a call to the community to rebuild lost pages.
And now Sunir Shah, who I think is the original convenor of meatball wiki, has asked for the setting up of a collective board to take over the running of it.
I’m not sure whether this is a viable idea, but it’s leading to some nteresting machinations as the regulars ( out of those who survive Open Proxy ) attempt to tackle the practical issues as well as the more philosphical, such as whether or not ( or when ) VotingIsEvil, for example.
Technorati Tags: wiki, meatball
Birthday Present September 3, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music , 1 comment so farFor my own birthday I decided to buy a new set of guitar strings but somehow I ended up walking out of the shop with another guitar! I couldn’t resist this one. It’s a second hand 12 string acoustic of unknown pedigree. Nicely playable, sounds pretty good, stays in tune to the extent that any 12 string is ever really in tune. Bargain.
This is what it looks like: 
This is what it sounds like when I try and bash out part of an old Roy Harper song : SameOldRock.mp3
Well that’s a bit of a trvesty really, since the original is one of the best songs ever written, but it’s one of my favourites and definitely suits a 12 string. And I don’t currently do Leadbelly impersonations.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
