Month: February 2007

A busy last couple of weeks.

• Work is as busy as ever, more interesting than usual though
• I was down in Wellington today talking DNS with a few people, all very
  interesting and fun.
• I’m a bit behind with a bunch of other projects but one thing I’ve done
  in the last couple of weeks was create a Linux.conf.au: First timers Guide , bit of fun and people seem to like it.
• On the weekend various people and myself went to the
  
  Auckland International Cultural Festival , pretty good although a bit hot.
  I think some of the stall holders could have also got more sales but having
  smaller portions off food at lower prices. If you want to try out lots of
  different foods then paying $10 for a lot of food is not an attractive option.

On Sunday night I went along to the Karajoz Great Blend
at the Auckland Museum. Not too bad.

• Morgan and Robyn have a few details, read them first.
• The “Back of the Y” guys and the dancers were good.
• No Soy Milk for the Sponsor’s coffee bad
• No Soft drinks bad
• I agree with the comments by Morgan about the panel, it’s didn’t really gel. Rob McKinnon of theyworkforyou.co.nz was okay, although he sounded a little over-rehearsed. He was good to talk to afterwards.
• Rick Ellis wasn’t to bad, he seemed a little over confident though. I am interested that TVNZ is planning to use Akamai for content delivery. AFAIK they are fairly expensive for the sort of bulk stuff TVNZ will be doing to just a few ISPs. I
  also wonder how what ISPs will do when their Akamai clusters start trying to stream to a few hundred/thousand of their users. Putting them on the far side of their traffic shapers might be the first step.
• I also found the music a little loud, I guess I’m getting old but I have trouble hearing conversation over the background noise. A more concentrated and quieter discussion area might have been a good idea.
• The venue was very nice however.

A little disclaimer first. My total edits in this area are here , I
have no access to deleted articles or other stuff the general public can’t see.

Over the weekend there was a local version of Foo Camp called
Baa Camp (There seems to be
confusion as to the exact name) held north of Auckland. Various
journalists, technical types and even a couple of government ministers
attended. From
href=”http://www.technorati.com/search/kiwifoo”>all accounts much fun
was had by all and interesting stuff took place.

The problem began however when local bloggers/journalists
href=”http://www.publicaddress.net/default,hardnews.sm”>Russell
Brown and Juha
Saarinen decided to create a Wikipedia article about it.

The problem is that there are hundreds of conferences around the world
every day ( like this
) and the majority of these do not justify a Wikipedia entry. So the
Wikipedia editors are used to removing details about conferences that are
non-notable.

One of the big things in Wikipedia is ( from Wikipedia:Notability ) :

A topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject itself and each other.

This bit is usually the minimum threshold that all articles must meet. So while
the average Homeless guy is unknown this guy has
a documentary and many articles about him.

So the Baa Camp people created an article which was quickly removed as spam ( sorry
I don’t have a copy) probably because it lacked links, external references and
contained phrases like “The meeting marks a historical turning point for a country that is still focused on primary industries” ( see
this old version ) .

Juha and Russell reacted with a little bit of shock that their article had been
removed ( See blog posts here ,
and talk page here) and recreated the article a few times until it got a slower and more
formal Articles for deletion nomination.

Things seem to have calmed down a little but it is interesting to watch Russell, Juha
and friends run around of the Blogs and Wikipedia acting offended that they
are being painted as spammers and subject to “needlessly hostile editing”.

What they need to understand is that Wikipedia is there to create an Encyclopedia
and articles that fall outside that criteria are not wanted. They created an
article that looked a lot like spam, was for a not “obviously important” event,
didn’t contain external references (blogs don’t count) and is in an area that commonly gets other
non-notable articles.

It is very obvious from their posts that they have never edited Wikipedia before
and have thus taken some of the processes as personal attacks against them. This
is not the case. They just needed to take a little while (which they appear to have now) to calm down and work with everybody.

On a related note, if you live in or near Auckland there is a Meetup for
Wikipedians taking place on Saturday the 10th in Mt Eden. See Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland 2 for details.

END