For the most part, the technically-inclined world is against SOPA and it seems that only big businesses like Viacom and Universal Music Group are for it. There is one strange exception though: GoDaddy. After customers started asking about the company’s position, GoDaddy came out with this statement, one of the few arguments for SOPA. Needless to say, this has a lot of people upset, the kind of people who have a number of domains, the kind of people who are now calling for a boycott.

If you go to Wikipedia in the next couple of days and don’t see anything, there probably isn’t anything wrong with your Internet connection. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blanking out all Wikipedia pages in protest of SOPA, a bill that countless Internet-based content providers and freedom of information advocates are particularly wary of. Wales pitched the idea to the Wikipedia community and feels that a blackout could send an extremely powerful message to law-makers.

After years out of print the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has roared back to life with a new website. The venerable publication is a massive directory of games, books, and other media that fall under the rather large banner of Science Fiction. Perhaps more importantly, the SFE also has a fairly extensive catalog of fan-zines and chronicles other delightful bits of SF culture that might otherwise have slipped away.

Getting the work back in the public eye has been something of an uphill struggle. Originally published in 1979, it was updated once in 1993, and again with a CD-ROM version in 1995. Despite winning Hugo awards for it’s ’79 and ’93 printings, work on the book went quiet for over a decade. In 2005 it was announced that the third edition or the encyclopedia would be revived as an online affair, but is only just now coming to these great wide Internets. 

It appears that the Kindle Touch 3G, despite having 3G right in its name, will only be able to surf the web with Wi-Fi. The 3G capacity can be used to sync books and browse Wikipedia, but anything aside from those two activities will require a Wi-Fi signal. The weirdest part of that limitation, however, is that a previous Kindle model, the Kindle Keyboard 3G had, and appears to retain that very feature.

The limitation came to light after a clarification was posted on the Amazon forums. While the Kindle Touch 3G’s website touts “free 3G wireless” which is technically true, it doesn’t say anything about the restriction. The post on the forums, however, makes it perfectly clear: The 3G is expressly for syncing books and looking at Wikipedia. The “experimental” web browsing present on the Kindle Keyboard is going to stay were it is.

It has come to my attention that Wikipedia has a page that is a list of common misconceptions. This, my friends, is a treasure trove. At the moment, the page lists what must be a couple hundred common misconceptions, links to other lists of more specific misconceptions and has 340 annotations. Of course, a lot of the listed facts are the sort of thing you’ve been yelling from atop your soapbox for years. Some of the other ones, however, are truly mind-blowing.

Now, this is Wikipedia, so anyone can go in there and change anything and a list of common misconceptions seems like a pretty great place to troll. That being said, every item on the list cites at least one source, often 3 or 4, which I assume means that the statement is accurate. I don’t look at the sources or anything, I just assume blue, superscript numbers are markers of truth. Somebody add that to the list of misconceptions.

Check after the jump for a list of 10 of the best ones.

In an effort to retain new editors, Wikipedia is planning to launch a new system through which newbie editors can be praised for their work. The initiative is called Wikilove, will be rolling out as an experiment on the English version of the site on June 29. While most of us take Wikipedia for granted, we don’t always see the sometimes excruciating battle of wills that goes into most articles. For new editors, it can prove so daunting that they chose to leave the community.

Wikilove aims to make new editors feel valued and welcomed in the tight-knit and occasionally cut-throat world of Wikipedia. In their semi-annual review, Wikimedia discovered that the life of a new editor is primarily dominated by learning, criticism, and warnings. From the Wikipedia blog:

The drive for quality and reliability has led to the development of sophisticated automation mechanisms that aid in socializing new users to Wikipedia’s norms, policies and conventions. The act of expressing appreciation for other users, by contrast, is a largely manual effort.

With Wikilove, editors can send trophies like “barnstars” and notes of appreciation to other editors. Whether or not the system will be used, or sufficient to smooth over hurt feelings because of a brutal re-edit is yet to be seen.

(I Programmer via Slashdot)

Wikipedia syndrome, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “the act of going to a site with the intention of looking up one piece of information, and instead finding yourself on one or more articles that have nothing to do with what you had originally come for. Stems from Wikipedia linking to articles within articles.” (If that’s bad, I don’t even want to know the symptoms of TVTropes syndrome.)

Restlessly fluttering between pages may be an inevitable consequence of wiki power-using, but there’s a neat Google Chrome plug-in that alleviates it somewhat. Rather than having to click through every link in a Wikipedia article, WikiPreview lets users evaluate the clickability of a given link by pulling up a preview of the next page.

The plug-in is handy, but it isn’t perfect: For one thing, it shows information for parent articles rather than subsections, even if the link goes to a subsection; for another, it sometimes has issues displaying link previews from further down the page. Chrome users can install WikiPreview here; true obsessives may want to try Wikipedia’s navigation popup tool, which does require users to create a Wikipedia account before setup.

(WikiPreview via Lifehacker)

The webcomic XKCD dropped another Internet truism when it proclaimed in the alt-text of its latest comic:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

Someone took it as a challenge, and put together a “useful” little tool that will show you, with links, exactly how many clicks it takes to get from the subject of your choice to the Wikipedia article on philosophy. It certainly is eye-opening, and is certain to keep folks entertained for quite some time.

The real question is if anyone has yet proved XKCD wrong. 20 steps was my longest chain, who can beat it?

Update: Geekosystem reader Andrew has found one that breaks the chain: “numerary” first links to “supernumerary,” which first links to “numerary” … and so on. What other combo breakers exist?

(XKCD Wikipedia Steps to Philosophy)

Wikipedia gets an unfairly bad rap in academia: Sure, its content shouldn’t be accepted as gospel, but it’s about as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, and it represents an amazing concentration of knowledge in one place, including links and footnotes to primary sources, generally compiled by fairly knowledgeable people. Which is why it’s encouraging to hear that when an English professor at Auburn University named Michel Aaij let his colleagues know about his extensive contributions to Wikipedia, he wasn’t weeabooed out of the room: In fact, they appreciated his work, and he says it helped him get tenure, for which he was unanimously approved recently.

Wikimedia Foundation:

“I quickly found raised eyebrows and skepticism,” Michel admits. But he won his colleagues over by showing them the peer-reviewed aspects of Wikipedia, like the Good Article and Featured Article processes. And he contributed to articles particularly useful to Auburn University Montgomery, including the article on the school and a biography of a colleague, who told Michel that was really cool.

“I’ve written articles in many areas, and in many cases I could show my colleagues what I had done in their field,” Michel says. “I’d like to think that by now most of them have a favorable opinion of Wikipedia. Let’s face it: Guillaume de Dole, now a Good Article, there’s no database entry or encyclopedic article anywhere that compares to the Wikipedia article on that poem (and I realize that that says as much about Wikipedia as about the anywhere else).”

(via Techdirt)

The many, many, many spellings of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi are regular grist for late-night comedians — ABC has counted at least 112 — thanks to the lack of standardization in Arabic translation. This handy chart from Wikipedia uses a bracket notation to break down every possibility.

However, not all are possible, as some alternatives are most probably combined with others, or even impossible with others (for example, simplification of geminated [m:] usually implies simplification of [a:]).

(I Love Charts via Atlantic Tumblr)