“wikipedia”
28 posts under this tag.
I remember being completely, utterly floored when reading in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson about how, at bottom, supply and demand are one and the same.
Those who think that the destruction of war increases total “demand” forget that demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact, to offer in exchange for the things they want. In this sense the farmers’ supply of wheat constitutes their demand for automobiles and other goods. All this is inherent in the modern division of labor and in an exchange economy.
This fundamental fact, it is true, is obscured for most people (including some reputedly brilliant economists) through such complications as wage payments and the indirect form in which virtually all modern exchanges are made through the medium of money. John Stuart Mill and other classical writers, though they sometimes failed to take sufficient account of the complex consequences resulting from the use of money, at least saw through “the monetary veil” to the underlying realities. To that extent they were in advance of many of their present-day critics, who are befuddled by money rather than instructed by it. Mere inflation—that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices—may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
Yes, it was obvious. Ridiculously obvious. But I had never realized it. A whole semester of economics in high school plotting gratuitous graphs and fondling equations for what? They should have put this in big, bold black letters at the very first class and let us go afterwards. My twenty something dollars per hour would have been far better employed.
But yesterday I stumbled on Wikipedia’s trade pedia and realized, mind blown, I had only scratched the surface of it. It only took the first, luminous paragraph. (Its scary how good Wikipedia is becoming.)
Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both. Trade is also called commerce. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. Modern traders instead generally negotiate through a medium of exchange, such as money. As a result, buying can be separated from selling, or earning. The invention of money (and later credit, paper money and non-physical money) greatly simplified and promoted trade. Trade between two traders is called bilateral trade, while trade between more than two traders is called multilateral trade.
Buying and selling are concepts that only acquire meaning when we bring in money. At its essence, trade (barter), is fundamentally reciprocal—providing no ready way to distinguish between its participants.
So simple and yet so deeply buried by mindlessness. Don’t forget it and watch countless everyday fallacies come tumbling down, naked.
(Notice also the definition of market: “a mechanism that allows trade”—a mechanism that allows for voluntary exchange. There’s untold beauty and nobleness in free trade.)
Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.
So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.
Here some usage examples:
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Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.WP
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By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.ELZR
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Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.ELZR
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At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.ELZR
Making posters has been a hobby of mine since I can remember. At high school I tried to start a series of posters on moral values but only finished one on gayness and another on licentiousness. At college, I made one on Esperanto and several for the cinema club I ran with some friends.
This one, my latest, is about the Jicama fruitWP and it plays on a joke by Friends’s Chandler: “Cheese. It’s milk that you chew.” The funny thing is that for Jicamas it’s almost true, from the fruit’s pedia:
Jícama is high in carbohydrates in the form of dietary fiber. It is composed of 86-90% water; it contains only trace amounts of protein and lipids. Its sweet flavor comes from the oligofructose inulin (also called fructo-oligosaccharide), which the human body does not metabolize; this makes the root an ideal sweet snack for diabetics and dieters.
Scott McCloud begins Understanding ComicsAM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.
So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.
A photo heap. Intriguing at first but quickly unmanageable and unwieldy.
Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.
By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).
And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.
Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.
(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)
A scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s NausicaaWP manga. Such is the magic of comics. Such is the magic of blogs.
What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.
Consider a popular pediaELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.
Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)
“Roughly speaking, the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”
X is the new Y.
Original X: “pink”; original Y: “black”; commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt (original 1960s, popularized 1980s)
X. Y X.
Original X: “Bond”; Y: “James”; from the film Dr. No (1962) and all subsequent James Bond movies.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
Original X: “doctor”, original Y: “magician”; from a famous misquotation of a line from Star Trek. (c. 1966)
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
See Eskimo words for snow WP.
, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Strapline from MasterCard advertising campaign (2000)
Glenn Whitman finally dubbed the linguistic artifact a snowcloneWP (at 22:56:57 on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California, btw) and the meme just bit me. It just bit you.
Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.
Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.
Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”
The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief SummaryPDF
I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)
Man’s achievements rest upon the use of [short] symbols.
Alfred Korzybski
 Wikipedia has become such a taken-for-granted, basic building-block (on the web and beyond) that I’ve taken a special hatred for the unwieldy, clumsy “Wikipedia article” epithet and similar unhappy permutations. I need more of the short sweetness English is known for: “email”, “web”, “net”, “blog”, “post”, “podcast”, “inbox”, or “feed”. Language is the ultimate interface (to steal an ALA title) and shortness does make a difference.
English GMail’s Sidebar
Spanish GMail’s Sidebar
I tried “article” and “wiki-article” but both are hopelessly general. Then I thought of being grammatically incorrect and use wikipedia for articles themselves—similar to the way we use email for the email address, the actual message, and the act of sending it: “email me an email at my email”—but it just won’t do. It doesn’t feel right. Wikipedia is so huge that the brutal metonymyWP feels jarring. Port-manteausWP were tried, but neither wikipedicle nor wicle struck any fancy.
The only path that proved fruitful was twisted back-formation. Wikipedia comes, of course, from encyclopedia, which in turn comes from the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, often translated as “general education.” Paideia is a nice, short Greek word that means education and that is itself a derivation of pais, child. It’s perfect (with a slight respelling).
I propose we call a Wikipedia article a pedia. It’s short, has a nice ring to it, has meaning (“a pedia is a document for learning”), is memorable, and has a semantic link with Wikipedia (the uninitiated might think it a contraction and that’d be okay too). With even the pettiest pedia gradually refining into a massive, referenced survey (take the optimistic leap with me for the sake of argument), wouldn’t it be beautiful and inspiring if we could whisperingly call them “documents-for-learning”?
Did you know “thruthiness” has a pedia?
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