The Wikipedia war over Paul Revere

I was thinking that an interface that colored content based on how old it was would be pretty cool. Then I realized that, duh, a SCM style blame function would be cool for wikipedia (which may be available in the diff functionality, I don't remember or use the history diffing ability on wikipedia enough to know off hand). Then I thought, it would be nice to have wikipedia content in SCM anyway, and was thinking of writing something to import it into git.

And it may already exist. A search turned up http://scytale.name/blog/2009/11/announcing-levitation and the code is at https://github.com/scy/levitation

I've seen a lot of proposals for wikipedia to go over to a system that has this sort of thing, I think the primary issue is that it's difficult to come up with a visual indication of this information without significantly detracting from the usability.

See http://www.wikitrust.net/

I just tried it on the Paul Revere page and it said "There is no trust coloring information currently available for the revision you requested. Please try again in about a minute, when the coloring should be complete."

For comparison, I tried it on Halitosis and go this: http://imgur.com/PNBXU

The colored stuff is newer.

It happens all the time, only this time we get to see it unfold in detail, with revision history.

Ghostery. It's like AdBlock, but for all 3rd-party code.

The difference between intent and effect is not always clear.

You're taking the author's words out of context and misrepresenting his opinion. He actually agrees with you. Here's the relevant text:

The really awful thing, though, is that we live in an age where, on every level, it is considered a sin to be wrong. From advertisers to kids on the playground to the world of corporate PR to politicians, the all-too-common wisdom is to defend the indefensible. That's what Palin is doing and that is what her renfields on Wikipedia are doing, and that's sad, because as anyone remotely successful in Silicon Valley can tell you, without owning our mistakes we cannot learn from them and without learning, we cannot win.

Palin's almost-unintelligible statement may allow some flexibility in interpretation, but only under the most generous parsing is she even close to being correct. Here's the quote as it appeared in the first place that google gave me:

>>> "He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms by ringing those bells, and um, making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed," <<<

Her statement tells us almost nothing. She might as well have strung some random words together monty-python style, and we'd have been educated to nearly the same degree. What little is discernible, is simply wrong:

* He didn't ever warn the British that they couldn't disarm us. All accounts of his interrogation have him trying to bluff them away from the town by scaring them with the spectre of a mustered militia.

* He certainly didn't warn the British by "ringing those bells". Perhaps Palin thinks that he continued to ring bells while being interrogated.

* I don't recall any accounts of his ride that have him firing a musket into the air. Correct me if I'm wrong.

So far this is all rather superficial quibbling. But if we're to gloss over the petty revisionism and surmise a greater theme or point, Palin is still wrong. It's pretty clear that Palin wanted to somehow milk the Revere thing for a shoutout to the 2nd amendment. She wants the purpose of Revere's ride to be to tell the Brits that they can't get our guns. Perhaps she wants to believe that Paul Revere set out on his ride intending to be captured.

Personally, I don't pretend to be greatly offended by Palin's grammar and grasp of historical minutiae. What does offend me is the way she and her supporters talk in the aftermath. As though you think that petty, condescending weaselling with semantics can be taken as a serious defense by anybody who isn't already in the choir.

Andrew Malcolm is about as accurate and unbiased here as usual.

There is no possible way -- no, scratch that, no possible honest way -- to interpret what Palin said about Revere as referring to what he did after he was captured by the British. She said he warned the British "by ringing those bells ... as he's riding his horse through town". She talked about his "warning shots and bells". Does Andrew Malcolm seriously want his readers to believe that this is referring to anything Paul Revere did after being captured by the British army?

The reason why Palin was laughed at for her remark about Russia and Alaska wasn't that the remark was false. It was that it was stupidly irrelevant. Palin tried to claim that the physical proximity of Alaska to Russia gave her some kind of special understanding of foreign policy. She was asked how it did that: "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?". Her response was to say that you can see Russia from one place in Alaska.

The point of Tina Fey making fun of Palin in that way was to point out how absurd it is to suggest that being able to see Russia from Alaska is related to competency in foreign politics.

It seems like this has escaped pretty much nobody but Palin supporters.

"This is similar to the Orwellian incident where Palin made a true and factual comment about the fact that you can see Russia from an island in Alaska, Tina Fey made fun of it by changing the words to say that you could see Alaska from her house or office, then people started promoting the Tina Fey comedy routine as if it was reality."

Hm, I really saw that as an analog of Bush's "you forgot Poland" incident--it's not so much that the statement itself is wrong, so much as the fact that it's a hilarious non-sequitur to the question at hand. Being able to see Russia from an island in Alaska does not magically grant the governor of Alaska with foreign policy experience, just as Poland joining the US, UK, and Australia in the initial invasion of Iraq doesn't turn a handful of countries into a strong multilateral force.