geekosystem

In what seems like something straight out of an updated version of 1984, the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, or DCRI, a French intelligence agency, apparently recently summoned and subsequently forced a Wikipedia volunteer to delete an article on the online encyclopedia. This came after the agency first attempted to get Wikimedia France to remove what it considered classified information from an article about a French military compound in March. They declined to remove the offending bits, so DCRI took more drastic measures.

Ok, I'm just going to say it -- the physicists at Aalto University may have a bit too much time on their hands, seeing as they've taken Wikipedia watching to a new extreme. Working with researchers from around Europe, they've created the first known mathematical model of editorial conflicts in Wikipedia, which tracks the birth, life and occasionally even the resolution of the Internet grudge matches that determine what is fact on the Internet's number one repository of facts.

Tomorrow the 143,000 ton asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass a mere 17,200 miles from the Earth. What does that mean for you? Nothing. There's no chance of DA14 hitting the Earth. We'll all be fine this time around, but hundreds of smaller objects strike the Earth every year. Our friends at Movoto have a handy calculator to get the odds that one will hit your house. Give it a try, and you'll probably feel a lot better about the whole thing.

Good news, shut-ins! It's now even easier to kind of see the world from your computer. Google Earth has added over 100,000 places in more than 200 countries to their Tour Guide feature. The Google Earth Tour Guide combines animated flybys of places, interesting facts pulled from Wikipedia, and even user-generated Panoramio images to get a better look. Why not kill a little time pretending to explore the globe? You might learn something.

The world of internet piracy and online copyright enforcement is rife with stories of incompetence, especially on the side of major corporations and copyright holders. Many of those problems stem from the fact that the most frequently used weapon of copyright-holders, sending DMCA takedown requests to remove sites illegally sharing copyrighted material from search engines, is automated. The systems in place send an obscene number of notices, including duplicate requests for sites that have already been removed and now, apparently, random requests to remove any site even slightly connected to a company's copyrighted material. For example, a recent rash of DMCA notices from Microsoft asked Google to delist a series of popular, most-likely non-infringing sites, including TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, BBC.com, and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something of a modern day miracle. It's a free, perpetually up-to-date, nigh-all-inclusive, readily accessible encyclopedia that has long proven to be about as accurate as more traditional alternatives. The easy thing to forget, however, is that this is only because an army of Wikipedians is dutifully editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing the site's myriad pages. Unfortunately, there seems to be a downward trend; the number of new Wikipedia Admins has dropped off, and if the pattern continues, the site could face a very serious shortage.

You might not be allowed to use it for school papers, but Wikipedia is effectively the go-to source for information in most of the non-graded sectors of the world. The thing we tend to forget, or at least not think about very often, is that Wikipedia isn't written in stone. In fact, it changes faster than you can imagine.  Wikistats, a new site that tracks the "trending pages" on Wikipedia, can give you good idea of what's changing at any given time, and by how much. The results might not be what you'd think.

If you're young enough that Wikipedia existed while you were in highschool, you've probably played WikiWars in a library computer lab. The game is simple: Two users start on the same page and attempt to be the first to navigate to a second random page using nothing but internal links. It's a blast. This video by thegregorybrothers shows a match in progress and acts not only as an informative tutorial for would-be WikiWarriors, but also an amazing proof of concept for WikiWars as a televised sport with commentary. While it's surprisingly fun to watch, it's obviously better to play. So grab a friend, start at "string beans" and get to "alternating current." Ready? GO!

Wikipedian and compulsive editor Justin Knapp has just accomplished a goal that is surreal in its magnitude. Justin Knapp is the first person to make 1 million edits to everyone's favorite free, editable encyclopedia. Yes anyone can edit it, but no one edits it quite like Justin Knapp. He's been barreling at the record for the a while now, maintaining an average of over 350 amendments per day. In celebration of his achievements, Knapp has been given an impressive array of Wikipedia awards, and has had April 20th named as a holiday in his honor as a thank you from Jimmy Wales himself.

The Wikimedia foundation has announced that the organization completed the transfer of popular online repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia from GoDaddy hosting this past Friday. The move has been a long time coming, with several reasons motivating the change over -- not the least of which was GoDaddy's support of SOPA, which contrasted greatly to Wikipedia's opposition of the proposed Internet regulation.

Wikipedia's innumerable lists is already the stuff of legends. And yet still amidst the back alleys, we hear whispers of lists of lists -- strange, higher planes of existence which float above everything. But it has transpired that there is still another level; a greater plateau of enlightenment. Friends, believe me when I say that Wikipedia has a List of Lists of Lists. And, most beautifully, it not only links to a list of lists, but also to itself. This, dear readers, is the information singularity. Wikipedia has attained nirvana

Wikipedia, now the default seat of all knowledge and wisdom, is like a beautiful gem. Every time you examine it, you discover new facets, and pleasures, that had hitherto gone unseen. Today's find is the list of notable sandwiches, in case you need that. While certainly far from comprehensive, and containing a few references to sandwiches created by obscure chefs within the past few years, it's another sterling example of the many earnest-but-hopeless tasks on Wikipedia.

If you're a person who feels the need to use something right when it turns out you can't, or you're the type of person that must know everything about everything when it comes up in conversation, then the Wikipedia SOPA protest blackout is probably an obnoxious inconvenience, though it is happening in the name of all that is good. Fortunately for Wikipedia enthusiasts who can't live without learning all they can about Bruce Willis and his studio albums, Wikipedia is still accessible during its blackout protest. Head on past the break to find out how.

It should come as no surprise that SOPA has come back off its proverbial "shelf" but feel free to be surprised that it came back so fast. A mere 4 days after announcing he was dropping the DNS blocking provisions of the bill and putting it on the shelf until a "consensus" was reached, Representative Lamar Smith has brought SOPA back out to play, and just in time for the January 18th SOPA blackouts.

The bad news is that while SOPA may be "shelved," PIPA is still on. The good news is that while PIPA may still be on, Jimmy Wales has come out and announced that Wikipedia's anti-SOPA, anti-PIPA blackout is on too. The decision isn't unilateral, but rather by concensus of the Wikipedia community and as such, the English language Wikipedia will be going dark on January 18th from midnight to midnight EST reaching an estimated 25 million users globally. Better listen to what Jimmy says and get your homework done ahead of time.