The brilliance of Wikipedia is that anyone, at any time, can contribute to the project, and in doing so, the collective knowledge of the world’s largest encyclopedia keeps improving and expanding. In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins brought up an interesting point about Wikipedia worth sharing; one that anyone interested in dealing with virtual communities should absorb.
To put it simply: in the burgeoning world of virtual communities, there is still a good reason to bring people together in real life. In the course of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon in June, with a group of its curators and 20+ Wikipedia volunteer contributors, the British Library was able to update over 30 of the online encyclopedia’s topics tied to collections housed within its walls. Something tells me this would have been difficult to do with a scattered online group.
I think this example also shows how an organization can harness and direct crowdsourced work in a way that’s a win for both sides. Here, the British Library staff was able to get the content that mattered to the organization updated in Wikipedia for free. And the volunteers? Rather than feeling like they were being exploited, they were empowered by their own sense of accomplishment, and powerfully rewarded by the recognition they received from the library curators and their peers. (And I guess getting mentioned in The New Yorker doesn’t hurt either.)
*Side note: This wasn’t a central theme of the story, but Collins also points out a site called Wikipedia Vision, where visitors get a real-time snapshot of what’s being edited at Wikipedia, and by whom. Text bubbles briefly superimpose on the site’s world map, showing the location of the editor, and what they’re working on. Even people who monitor traffic on websites with analytics tools like ChartBeat, like I do at PLoS Blogs, will appreciate Wikipedia Vision’s slick interface and open nature.
Photo via Flickr / nojhan
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Sign in nowThis brands me as a colossal dork, but those Apple patents are for the design of the Apple ///, not the Mac. The Apple /// (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III) was a very advanced 8-bit machine, sucessor to the Apple II, and Apple’s first big failure. It was also totally unrelated to the Mac, and didn’t even support a mouse. So there.
“a device similar to today’s track ball, which was inserted alongside radar screens and was used for retrieval of aircraft data. From 1966 to the American company Orbit produced such “Ball Tracker, ” (google translate of the Heise article)
The track ball goes back *much* further than this. It was invented in 1952 by a Canadian company as part of the user interface for a radar / packet data system. The English Wikipedia entry is an accurate summary of this, although the German language one doesn’t mention it at all.
[...] Importance: Fact-checking medical claims – via Decision Tree- In 2007/08, the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler revealed that human behaviors, and even states of mind, tracked through social networks much like infectious disease. But according to a new research study, incorrect medical facts may be no different, galloping from person to person, even within the confines of the revered peer-reviewed scientific literature. And by looking at how studies cite facts about the incubation periods of certain viruses, a new study in PLoS ONE has found that quite often, data assumed to be medical fact isn’t based on evidence at all. [...]
[...] may be ignored since they haven’t had enough time to generate a significant h-index score. But as I’ve discussed before, there is a clear trend of people working to bring public health data to light faster than before. [...]
To paraphrase the Blues Brothers, “If raw milk cheese kills me, I don’t mind dyin’…”
Haggie: Ha – maybe you have a point! I hope you’ll tune it to find out what I uncover.
[...] Read post 1 here: So long, raw milk cheese [...]
Perhaps they should irradiate the cheese or use another sterilization method that does not change the taste. Irradiation is so underused!
In my book, people should be free to buy whatever they want so long as their is a disclaimer and it is well above the market price.
Irradiation isn’t the answer. Raw dairy products is more complex issue than taste. For some people it is taste, for others it’s about health. When you irradiate something it doesn’t differentiate between harmful and helpful bacteria. It might sound gross in this day in age of over-sanitizing everything we can, but there are healthy helpful bacteria that are useful to our bodies and if we irradiate our food we’re altering it nutritionally. Same goes for pasteurization. Some people argue that cooking does too (though I think there are things that are meant to be cooked … though not overcooked or burnt.)
Basically I want to be able to continue to choose to eat what I want how I want it. I would NOT buy raw milk from a farmer I didn’t trust. Raw milk cheese on the other hand is a little less likely to be a problem than plain raw milk. No chemical additives, no flash heat treatments, no irradiation, no genetically altered seeds.
I want to retain that choice of what food I put in my body without having to buy a farm out in Timbuktu to grow it all myself. Where does it end?
And the reason I’m a raw milk advocate is that it has helped me with my allergies when traditional drugs and shots did nothing. I’m not saying it was a cure all, just saying it’s one of several things I started doing and when I remove it my allergies do start coming back.
I was excited to see the Wired piece too, although I was would have liked some mention of feedback as part of larger more complete social systems. It seemed to focus on how on individual can minimize risk; i.e. negative feedback. What about positive feed back (hypcercycles or catalytic cycles)? Scientists have talked about feedback loops’ role in evolution, and I think that feedback loops are incredibly important for major social change. I wrote a blog on it:
http://thefeedbackloop.org/2011/06/22/feedback-loops-stir-shit-up/
Lovely reflection on climate and infectious disease. I will share this with the JIDC FB users.
I find this to be a fascinating relationship.
As I was doing some research a couple of weeks ago I became aware of this paper
published in the JIDC. Not trying to plug the journal, but I highly recommend this article reviewing Cholera in the marine environment. Entitled: Influence of environmental factors
on the presence of Vibrio cholerae in the marine environment: a climate link
http://www.jidc.org/index.php/journal/article/view/19734600/207
Before reading this paper I had not thought about this environmental relationship deeply. Of course Cholera would be connected to the marine environment (mainly I had thought of sewage), but I had not thought about the connection with weather patterns.
Thanks,
Alyson
Thanks, Alyson. I thought people might like this PNAS study. For all the talk on climate change, I’m surprised that there isn’t more effort directed to understanding how this could impact public health and infectious disease. Thanks for sharing the links.
Does not storms play an important role in the dissemination of Infectious diseases agents from one continent to other or to the neighboring countries?
Hi there. Thanks again. Everyone really liked your write-up. It was shared many times by JIDC members.
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
Well that’s an interesting story. I can only imagine the possibilities of these “miracle berries” and what kinds of recipes would be created.