
The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits - sp332
http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/
======
nl
I find the destruction of written history very disturbing. While the examples
given (Library of Alexandria, Yo La Long Dia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq)
were dreadful, the worst was the destruction of the written Mayan records by
Diego de Landa.

During the mid 1500's, Landa conducted an organized campaign to destroy every
single written text in the Mayan language. He was mostly successful - only 3
complete text survive: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices>

~~~
tomjen3
That does suck - but I still argue that the Mayan where less important for us
than the Greek and Roman writers.

So I would claim that the Library of Alexandria is a greater loss than the
Mayans.

~~~
shadowfox
Since the bulk of Mayan writings were lost, you would never know anyway.

~~~
tomjen3
True, but still - we know that the Romans and Greeks had a great influence on
our culture.

It is very unlikely that the Mayans had, simply because they are so far away,
geographically.

~~~
bingaman
Whose culture? Far away from who?

------
DannoHung
Man, reading this and the linked-to Gibson talk just gave me some sort of
weird sense of like... not-deja vu. Like, remembering something that happened
tomorrow.

------
jlees
I stumbled upon this infographic of Wikipedia edit wars yesterday,
coincidentally also a dConstruct speaker:
[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/wikipedia-
lamest-...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/wikipedia-lamest-edit-
wars/)

~~~
sophacles
Cool infographic. Most of the little boxes seem to describe the conflicts in a
way to make them seem sad and trivial. I'm fine with this, except it made one
little box really stand out as extremely funny:

Hummus: Should hummus be in the "Israeli Cuisine" category, or is it a purely
Arab food the Zionists have illegally occupied?

~~~
frossie
Funniest box in that graphic:

Arachnophobia: Appropriate to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page
about fear of spiders?

~~~
aw3c2
That is not funny, that should be a no-brainer "no" decision. Arachnophobia is
not something to laugh about. You would not put an epilepsy-triggering image
on an encyclopedic website either.

~~~
mikeklaas
Even if the decision should be "no", that doesn't make that comment unfunny.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Yes - an unfunny comment would have been "Arachnophobia: It is inappropriate
to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page about fear of spiders."

The phrasing, minor as the changes are, is what makes it humorous.

------
joe_the_user
Yes,

In any controversial topic or whenever a page doesn't seem to make sense, I go
to the edits.

One cool app would be an editor with the ability to let you select a phrase in
on MediaWiki page and then jump to the first edit in which that phrase
appeared.

------
danw
The audio recording of the talk is certainly worth listening to
<http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/25256>

------
araneae
It's the history of history!

~~~
die_sekte
It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers is recursion.

~~~
fizx
In some sense, it's what makes us unique. Is CS the only discipline that deals
with recursion on a regular basis?

~~~
dhs
There's recursive storytelling and poetry (the kind of stories/poems where, at
the end, you find yourself looking at the beginning again). It's also possible
to describe certain processes which occur as part of some mental disorders as
recursive (e.g. the fear of fear; depression because of depression).

------
chewbranca
Minor annoyance, but in those pictures, book IX as after book XII rather than
before X.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I saw that as a feature, not a bug - a subtle wink to the subjectiveness of
historiography in general, and recongition that even this effort is not
without flaws.

------
antirez
it is interesting how source control systems like Git are making this process
happening for source code: now that everybody getting the project will fetch
the full history it will be very hard to lost the changes that happened in the
full history of a given piece of code.

------
ritonlajoie
Where to buy this book , if that's not a joke ?

~~~
hvs
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books>

~~~
camiller
I don't think book creator grabs history pages.

~~~
hvs
You can add them manually by going to each one and adding it to the book. I'm
not sure if there is a less tedious way of doing it, though.

~~~
ergo98
You can download the entire database, including history.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download>

Or, for a direct link,

[http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100130/enwiki-2010013...](http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100130/enwiki-20100130-pages-
meta-history.xml.7z)

31GB. Decompresses to TBs.

------
nazgulnarsil
history is composed not only of what our best guess is of what happened, but
how that guess came to be and changed over time. my experience of studying
modern history is that the biggest missing piece seems to be knowledge of
where intellectual and political trends originated from and how they
propagated. the information is there, but it is buried among many primary
texts and largely ignored by "story centric" history. I don't blame historians
for doing this, they must make history sexy or risk being considered
irrelevant.

------
surlyadopter
"I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and
how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost
too easily."

Geocities was the first digital Iram of the Pillars.

------
dalore
Reminds me of the heavy metal umlaut video. Props to who ever can find it.

~~~
pohl
<http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html>

------
njharman
The _whole_ truth, is not necessarily the _real_ truth.

~~~
sp332
It's all the truth we've got.

------
metamemetics
The first linked page, <http://2010.dconstruct.org/> is strongly reminiscent
of that other d_____ project...

------
mcyger
Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like
Geocities?

~~~
abrahamsen
Yes. Apart from the editorial aid mentioned by camiller, I use the history tab
to get a quick sense of the trustworthiness of the article as a whole, and of
individual claims.

~~~
watt
There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or
new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics
are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of
interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by
examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body
of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information
waits to be discovered and overlaid.

~~~
corecirculator
Hi,

I am still interested in the link to any tools that overlay wiki history.. can
u point me to any of them? thanks.

