Ultra vires does not translate as Übermensch. Just saying.

Bootiful.

The answer to some questions about Wikipedia is "it's the community, stupid". Relying on word-of-mouth to bring in new editors is where WP was about 15 years ago. It is actually not so easy to spend money to grow the community as you might think. E.g. the move to devices from PCs is a negative.

Trump’s anti-truth crusade is not just an attack on facts – it’s an unravelling of the Enlightenment | Polly Toynbee The US president, JD Vance and Nigel Farage seem to believe that checking facts is a form of censorship. Nonsense: speech is only free when it is anchored in truth, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee

Trump’s anti-truth crusade is not just an attack on facts – it’s an unravelling of the Enlightenment | Polly Toynbee

"Five years good, two years better"?

On English Wikipedia, the successful drive for more biographies of women does have the limitations of using a metric target. Other desiderata: less presentism, versus coverage of the historical; less emphasis on sport, popular culture and politics; research in depth.

Starmer calls for India to have permanent UN Security Council seat UK prime minister discusses Ukraine and fossil fuels in meeting with Indian counterpart Narendra Modi

Starmer calls for India to have permanent UN Security Council seat on.ft.com/47hO3hW

Good one. "The Boglanders", "Far from the Madden Crowd", and "Iúd the Obscure", maybe.

Dissertation I'd like to see: "Ender's Game to Endgame: Social Media 1985-2025". The Arab Spring use case was always oversold. The capillary effect of networking people undersold. FB=naff was clear from early on.

If Grokipedia recruits Larry Sanger, Wikipedia could be in (gulp) real trouble!

I was at two schools with Jonathan (not that he'd remember). A better advertisement for the education than most.

Stack of What Is Wikisource? pocket-sized zine.

Cover and interior of the Wikisource zine in tiny type with colour images: these cost about $1 each to print.

I’m giving a #LIANZA2025 talk this afternoon about Wikisource, but only get ten minutes, so have been handing out this little zine/evangelical tract.

That would be a tombstone:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombsto...

Far right organisers in this country consistently side with foreign billionaires over our democratic institutions.
They are not patriots.
They are quislings.

What if chatbots as enhanced search engines are a failed freemium offer?

I have to say that I don't rate Barthes. I was very taken, though, with his clock-face mapping of class structure onto attitudes to alterity. As in the "liberal bourgeois" saying "that we leave to the poets".

Conceptually, you can't master the "bell curve" concept without the "area under a curve" concept. If someone tells you that you can do serious statistical reasoning without integral calculus, that is intellectual snake oil. Statistical significance has an underlying calculus stratum.

Cory Doctorow gets it: Wikipedia is about sources, not facts. Subject experts sometimes forget this and write off Wikipedia when they could (and should) be improving it.

The attraction of the new-style Times Literary Supplement is lost on me.

Interesting for the hierarchy of proof methods. Best for the finite group theorist is "minimal counterexample" as a style of induction. So to the case where the maximal subgroups have cyclic quotients of prime order. Then use Chinese remainder theorem. Herstein's way to the whole structure theorem?

A friend is running the length of the Japanese archipelago.

phillrichardson.com#ultramaratho...

Is the peopleless office, successor to the paperless office, really any more plausible?

Good exercise in literally lateral thinking.

Presumably "given name" is smaller than "family name"; but by how much. "Encyclopedia article" would be part of the Wikisource footprint, but how much larger is that?

Breakdown of Wikidata items by "instance of". No surprise in the domination of "scholarly article". The 25% OTHER is a "here be dragons".

Thank goodness for the Internet Archive. I'm so glad it exists—it's such an important tool for truth and for memory, especially at this moment.

(This particular rant brought to you by finding that a report was deleted from the CDC website but is, thankfully, preserved in the Internet Archive.)

WikiCite 2025 starts today. Anyone know where videos are?

Read the fine print. You have to start in the Basque country, and they don't book you a return ticket, because of the assassination.

This is literally the Founders' worst nightmare: standing armies being used to oppress the population by an overweening executive.

What we know is that hard-right politics mostly consists (in varying proportions, case by case) of pretexts, slurs and lying. Any university education worthy of the name should call out such things, and point to antidotes. In particular academics should shun Trumpite fallacies and massive falsehood.