Monday, August 20, 2007

Random Notes ~ Idle Late-Nite Websurfing, Fun Toys














After attending a backyard barbeque in the rain ~ your Demon, unfortunately, seems to be stuck for now in a climate where the long winter drip & drizzle not only seeps right into the spring, but has now overtaken our brief summers, too ~ resulting in a grey weepy mono-climate practically year-round. We cope bravely by barbequeing anyway, despite the moss which by this time is growing on our backs.

Towelling off, Demon determines to cheer herself by eating a bowl of chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream & surfing the web a bit before turning in, thereby coming across this interesting little site.

Some gadget-guru techno geeks came up with a handy little spy-v.-spy tool for determining when edits to a Wikipedia page are made by a commercial or other organizational concern (usually by an organization holding the opposite point of view, natch.)

A list compiled by Wired of the most interesting is featured below. High on the list of items "needing editing," apparently, according to the oppositionists who thought their identities were cloaked when the edits were made were: Darwinists (by creationists), religious figures' bios, Arabs being anti-semitic, Jews being anti-Arab, & of course the garden-variety commercial progaganda wars, whereby one company compares its product to the rival's, or companies editing their own Wikipedia entries to delete references to scandals & product malfunction.

http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame/

With this link you can purportedly conduct such a search yourself, & find out who's making edits to Wikipedia entries.

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

So much for the ultimate experiment in a truly democratic user-edited encyclopedia when Babylon is burning. But props to the people who figured out one way to fight back.

Labels: , , ,

2 Comments:

Blogger sumo said...

I wouldn't feel right doing something like that...besides...I'm not smart enough to figure it out anyway.

2:42 AM  
Blogger Demon Princess said...

Because I know you, Sumo, I have to say that that last bit about "I'm not smart enough" deserves to be challenged.

I can't figure out how to read the results the gadget comes up with, but it's not because I don't think I can if I WANT to. I'm just not that motivated to mess with it.

People make choices about what they CHOOSE to make important enough to fiddle with. And in my estimation, the world is benefitted as a whole by the types of things you choose to focus on.

But then, I'm not a techno-geek either. In the land of the almighty Microsoft. Imagine my intellectual loneliness :)

6:25 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home