Getting Starting with Wikipedia: Seven Essential Steps

This weekend, something special happened. And I’m not referring to the fact that Steve and I got up before 9AM on a weekend.

A group of women (and a couple men) came together voluntarily on their own time to teach and learn how to edit Wikipedia. For 4 hours, 20 of us sat in the kitchen area of JESS3 headquarters and talked and learned and had a genuinely fun time. As I’ve written previously, it’s critical to have a diverse body of people contributing to Wikipedia since it’s key to making it reliable as a neutral knowledge resource.

If you’re interested in contributing to Wikipedia but aren’t sure where or how to start, here is list of key steps to get you going:

1. Do your homework. If you’ve don’t have any experience with programming or HTML, wiki-markup (the syntax used to create and edit Wikipedia articles) might intimidate you. So might the environment. Don’t let it. Learn the lingo and guidelines for engagement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Getting_started

2. Begin on home turf. Start by creating you own User page and play around with formatting there. Most Wikipedians respect individual User pages and won’t touch them.

3. Be bold. No one owns Wikipedia. Your contributions count just as much as everyone else’s. You can’t break Wikipedia. Nothing is ever lost if you change or remove something.

4. Use logic and tenacity. Sometimes edits you make will get deleted (or reverted). It happens. If you believe in your edits, use logic and tenacity to make them stick.

5. Talk it out. If you encounter a conflict or don’t understand why an edit you made is reverted, leave a message on the person’s Talk page to elaborate. You can see who reverts an edit page by the View History tab.

6. Don’t take it personally. Sometimes edits get reverted. It happens. Sometimes people are in pissy moods and take it out in Wikipedia. It happens. Don’t let this deter you from contributing. Learn and grow from it.

7. Find a buddy. Ask friends if they know how to edit Wikipedia. Or check out your local area for Wikipedia:Meetups and go and make some friends. Most Wikipedians are generous with their time and knowledge and will happily help out a beginner. You can also get “adopted” to be mentored via the Adopt-a-user program.

The full agenda and details of the workshop can be found in Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC_WWW1

Top 50 Los Angeles homegrown bands!

This is awesome! The LA Times magazine released the 50 best Los Angeles bands.

Each with a YouTube video and open voting for the best LA band. I’m viewing it on the iPad app, which is awesome (LA Times Magazine App), but you can also view it at latimesmagazine.com.

The cover everything from the Beach Boys to N.W.A. to The Doors, Van Halen, Chili Peppers, Tool, Rage, Toto, Linkin Park, Oingo Boingo, Weezer, Sublime, and more.

Plus, my new favorite…Los Lobos…what is it about this song that I can’t get enough of?

The glory of M&M’s

*This is a cross post from a new 1X57 project – OmuthituSchool.com*

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Have you ever been away from home so long that you start missing the strangest things?

For me it’s always hometown doughnuts and Mexican food.

For Spence, who has been in Africa for 16 months, it’s M&M’s. Here’s a message I just received from him:

“Alright, goods news off the bat. I received your awesome package today and immediately downed 2 bags of M&M’s (with some sharing involved)…As you can see, my hyperness is still lingering. It’s funny too how much enjoyment I can get from a bag of American M&M’s.”

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It’s always the little things 🙂

 

The glory of M&M's

*This is a cross post from a new 1X57 project – OmuthituSchool.com*

—

Have you ever been away from home so long that you start missing the strangest things?

For me it’s always hometown doughnuts and Mexican food.

For Spence, who has been in Africa for 16 months, it’s M&M’s. Here’s a message I just received from him:

“Alright, goods news off the bat. I received your awesome package today and immediately downed 2 bags of M&M’s (with some sharing involved)…As you can see, my hyperness is still lingering. It’s funny too how much enjoyment I can get from a bag of American M&M’s.”

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It’s always the little things 🙂

 

Funny business, a woman’s career

Funny business, a woman’s career – the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.

Margo Channing

from the movie All About Eve

Funny business, a woman's career

Funny business, a woman’s career – the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.

Margo Channing

from the movie All About Eve

What happened to the iPhone 5?

Between all the hype about iCloud, OSX Lion, and Apple’s WWDC 2011, something went missing. The next version of the iPhone, rumored to be called iPhone 5.

So what happened to the iPhone 5?

I’ve been crawling the internet everyday (see picture at right) for news and everything is mum.

Not my Mom, she is convinced it is coming out in September. I want to believe her but, at this point, there is nothing to back that up.

We might as well add her speculation to the rest, here is what I’ve found so far:

TUAW: “Sources inspecting the…iOS 5 firmware have discovered suggestions of two future iPad 3 models as well as a pair of iPhone 5 models.”

MacStories: “A new report from Digitimes, camera image sensor supplier OmniVision has won “significant orders” for Apple’s next-generation iPhone, set to debut later this year.”

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That’s pretty much it, my mom’s speculation, TUAW’s, and MacStories. I’m not all that convinced…

Let’s switch into likely outcomes…September, December, next year. Here is BeatWeek’s break down:

  • August – iOS 5 needs beta testing and developer lead time…sounds reasonable.
  • September – the above scenario, except Apple uses its early September iPress Conference to launch the iPhone 5…most likely.
  • Just before the holidays – Something about the iPhone 5 and/or iOS 5 is running late, and we mean late…you’re getting colder
  • Doomsday 2012 – Apple decides to leave the iPhone 4 as the current model for more than a year and a half, unleashing the iPhone 5 in February of 2012 or so….evokes the phrase “epic fail.”

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Ok, so we are back to September as the best option. Although, it feels like wishful thinking to me..what do you think?

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Oh, and PS, does the following mean the iPhone 4S is dead?

BeatWeek:

“Here’s what really happened behind the iPhone 4S saga, as best we can piece together:

The iPhone 5 will be the next iPhone and it’ll have the same A5 processor as the iPad 2…

Some developers complained that they wouldn’t be able to properly test the limits of their upcoming iPhone apps if they were limited to doing their testing on an A4 instead of an A5. So Apple sent out some jury-rigged iPhone 4 units with A5 processors wedged into them for testing purposes. Word leaked out about it, and some folks misinterpreted this ..being the next commercial iPhone release. And because the last time Apple released an iPhone model twice in a row with a different processor inside they called the second one iPhone 3GS, these folks decided that this “new” iPhone 4 must therefore be called the iPhone 4S..”

Web vs Internet: The Future of Going Online

Here is an interesting debate between Josh Topolsky and MG Siegler talking about Apple’s new iCloud strategy.

Josh is making the case that Apple is completely ditching the Internet, and MG is countering that Josh is missing the App revolution.

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Josh: “When it comes to Apple, it feels to me like the company views the web as a technology which undermines rather than enriches its products. It wants you to talk to the cloud, but only through its portals and its gateways, in closed loops and private networks…(the iCloud comes) to fruition in terms of syncing, activation, and even file storage and management… but the company seems to have forgotten the one big piece…the web front-end for these services. Instead of pulling up the stakes here, Apple should be doubling down. The internet is not just going to go away.”

— iCloud and Apple’s Truth

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MG: “His entire argument is based on what I believe to be a fallacy: that Apple is going to completely turn their back on Web support for iCloud…Topolsky seems to do what many of us now do: interchange the meaning of the words “Web” and “Internet”…the Web (that is, the World Wide Web — HTML documents linked together).”

MG: “I woud argue that Apple is attempting to redefine at least a part of what the Internet is with iCloud…Further, I applaud Apple for not taking an approach to the Internet that is more or less creating another Google Docs clone. Or Flickr killer. Gmail replacement. Facebook eater. Etc…Apple is doing what they do best: re-imagining the way things are done.”

— Thinking outside the browser box

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After reading this all I can think of is my Bank of America app and all of its bill paying friends (Etrade, ATT, Fidelity, American Express). Would I rather sit in front of a desk with a computer to check balances and pay bills? Or, would I rather sit at a neighborhood cafe or be johnny-on-the-spot checking a balance right before I buy something?

The facts are obvious on this one. Apple is on to something with over 500,000 apps in its store and over 10 billion downloads, not to forget billions in revenue.

This means that Apple is at it once again “re-imagining the way things are done” as MG Siegler says. Imagine where this App fiasco will take us…causing a drastic reduction in web browsing, with the new norm being 75% of internet data use via apps and only 25% via browsers?

It appears to be heading that way since every major player has an App or an App Store. Heck, Apple is even switching over their operating system to Apps (see OSX Lion). We might even be witnessing the birth of the new operating system, the ultra-powerful but super-simple App OS.

Are we saying bye-bye to folders and windows and hello to bright shiny picture buttons?

Apple's new Launchpad (turning laptops into mobile App devices)

 

 

My Favorite Sun Hat (roll it up and go!)

Innovation in a hat

I don’t usually endorse products (least of which retail/clothing) here, but considering how much I get complimented on this sun hat every time I wear it and how important it is to protect our skin from the damages and dangers of the sun (multiple members of my family have had malignant melanoma on their face), I highly recommend San Diego Hat Company’s UPF 50+ Roll UP Wide Brim Sun Visor Hat.

You can roll it up (to the size of the head of a champagne flute which fits easily even in a small purse) and it’s adjustable (which is really important because I have A LOT of hair and most hats don’t fit my head!)

It’s innovation in a hat…and looks good:)

Our consumer-driven growth model is broken: Now what?

Last week at dinner, our friend (@doyendon) challenged 1X57 to find, or at least contemplate, a solution to consumer-based economies, aka contemporary capitalism, which is causing a global crisis of unconscionable proportions – with food and energy prices soaring, world populations surging, and weather-related disasters like tornadoes, tsunamis, droughts, fires and floods increasing in frequency and scale.

In a new book by Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur Paul Gilding called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World” – the solution offered is “moving to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.”

We’ll be exploring this solution and others, and welcome any suggestions that will help lead us to a global remedy.