This is so terrible it's not even funny

Some things are bad, some are just terrible. This belongs to the latter.

And the dad dropped £100k on this crap?

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En un cerrar de ojos

En esos momentos, nuestro héroe observaba a aquella mística fémina que se apoderaba de sus pensamientos. A pesar de la hora que marcaban los relojes, la sutil influencia del sereno neutralizaba el calor que solía hacer acto de presencia en esas noches de verano. Por ende, era una noche ideal para que la pareja enfrentara una solitaria batalla contra las fuerzas del desenfreno y la pasión; una batalla sin testigo alguno, excepto la siempre-vigilante luna que se encontraba reposando en la cúspide del cénit.

A pesar de encontrarse en la situación que tanto anhelaba, él se encontraba agitado, bajo el asecho de las más primitivas fuerzas de la naturaleza. ¿Acaso era posible que esa mujer, que su sueño oculto y prohibido, se encontrara a insignificantes pulgadas de su cuerpo? Sin embargo, sus dudas no concordaban con las señales que su cerebro procesaba: El olfato le decía que aquel exquisito aroma de fresas se encontraba muy cerca—aquel aroma que le había atraído a la bella doncella en primer lugar. El tacto podía sentir una textura lisa, pero suave, como aquellas manos que una vez había alcanzado acariciar a base de subrepción, casualidad y circunstancia. Sin embargo, el más deleitante de los estímulos que percibía era la vista: Ver a la causa de sus bajos instintos entre sus brazos y observándole con delirio carnal en la mirada.

La tenue brisa balanceaba el cabello ocre de la joven mujer, escondiendo su rostro en sombras tanto inocentes como románticas, invitando al enamorado a acercarse más y más. El cálido brillo de una lámpara de sodio iluminaba su piel de marfil hasta que adquirió un color de durazno—y para nuestro aspirante a amante, su piel se veía tan deliciosa y apetecible como si fuera hecha de la mismísima fruta. Sus ojos negros, oscuros cómo las noches de invierno, tenían un brillo que él siempre había rogado ver, una reflexión vidriosa que surgía del mutuo amor del cual siempre había soñado. Atrapado por esos ojos, él se veía incapaz de evitar el inevitable acercamiento entre sus labios—aunque no es como si él deseara evitar algo que había deseado por lo que parecía una eternidad.

Poco a poco, la marcha del deseo los fue conectando más y más—lentamente, sí, pero también definitivamente. Él sentía como el olor de esa bendita mujer se intensificaba como los milímetros que los separaban cedían su existencia al llamar de la noche. Sus manos comenzaban a emigrar debajo de la sinuosa cintura, con rumbo a regiones más redondas y acolchonadas debajo de las caderas. Este alarmante recorrido recibió respuesta, ya que ella gradualmente empujó las cumbres de sus pequeños, pero firmes senos hasta que quedaron plasmadas contra su musculatura.

Ya poseídos por los trucos de Eros, la joven se encontraba frente a frente con su admirador secreto. Dentro de él, la tensión existente suplicaba que la corta distancia entre su boca y los rubíes de escarlata que ella tenía por labios dejara de existir. Él estaba a punto de estallar en éxtasis—tanto tiempo deseándola, los años deseándola a escondidas, las frecuentes desilusiones que tuvo que enfrentar otra y otra vez, en fin—en fin, la interminable espera se encontraba a meras fracciones de segundo de terminar. El podía sentir el respirar de ella en sus propios labios, y estaba listo para besarle como si fuera la única oportunidad que tendría en la vida, entregándole cuerpo y alma...

En ese entonces, una súbita y desagradable voz destruyó sus anhelos:

—"Van a ser $4.32 en la segunda ventana..."

El joven soñador entonces regresó a la realidad: se había quedado esperando tanto tiempo esperando que le atendieran en el drive-thru que perdió toda noción de espacio y tiempo. Aquel abrazo nunca existió, el olor que percibía venía de la malteada que había ordenado, y sus manos estaban a punto de destruir a un pobre durazno que andaba rodando en el asiento del pasajero. La espera tendría que continuar... pero el sueño, el deseo, no terminaría ahí...

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Time: "Wikipedia a Victim of Own Success?"

As the link in the header indicates, TIME Magazine has published an article that postulates hypotheses about Wikipedia's growth trends. It's an interesting read, check it out.

Compiling Nokia QT on Snow Leopard

Well, I've been trying to install ParaView for a while on Snow Leopard, and I was unable to do so since the installer for the current version of the Qt SDK (4.5.2) is broken. However, not all hope is lost. The installer still contains everything necessary to get Qt up and running. Here's what to do:

First, open the package and mount it by double-clicking it. Cancel the installer that pops out, and go into the Finder, and open the Qt SDK image. You will see a "QtSDK.mpkg" icon, like shown below:

Right-click on it to reveal a context menu, and select "Show Package Contents", which will open a new window with the innards of the installer:

Not very exciting, but it will suffice. Go into Contents/Packages and you will see the motherlode:

Now, each .pkg file contains its own installer, which you can activate by double-clicking on each of the icons. I installed the libraries, debuglibraries and headers packages first, then everything else. Now, if the installation was successful, we should be able to go into /Developer/Applications/Qt and see if the qtdemo program exists. In my installation, it did, and when I executed it, the following screen came up:

Success!

I haven't tried playing around with it very much, but the gradient and vector deformation demos do work. Now I just have to try getting ParaView to work, but that'll be later...

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Removing the spider webs

Well, it's been a while since I actually wrote anything in here. Let's try expanding the scope of the blog from wiki-oriented to essentially just about anything and we'll see where we go from there.

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Open letter to Webcomics community

Here's a copy of a letter I submitted to Howard Tayler's blog about the dispute that has severely strained the relations between the Webcomics and Wikipedia communities. Hopefully he sees the letter and redistributes it to whomever it may be necessary, to solve this situation. Comments are welcome, as usual.

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Hi, folks. I'm just your random Wikipedia admin who is trying to help out in stuff, and I don't know where to post my comment, so I'll just post it here, in the last thread with the "Wikiwatch" tag.

One thing that has been repeated ad nauseam is that mods have a tendency to be delete-happy. Ironically enough, reading some of the threads in several pages, many users who are mentioned are not Wikipedia administrators. While this seems like a petty complaint, I'd rather not get a bad rap I don't deserve... ;) But in all seriousness, if you want to find out who is an admin or not, just plug in their username in Special:Listusers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers).

However, whining about whether someone is an admin or not is not the point of my comment. Watching the Webcomics mess from the perspective of someone who has the delete bit, one thing that I can say is that if there were a way to demonstrably say that a comic is notable, then there would be much less of a mess in this situation. However, as far as I can look, there is no external guidance that allows us to determine why a particular Webcomic is popular or not. So, the only thing we can do is fall into our default guideline, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28web%29. Now, we all agree that the guideline is definitely not ideal, but consider things from our perspective. We have to deal with mountains of crap every day, so how do we discern that which is crap from the non-crap? While we can all agree that a crappy garage band from some random kid somewhere is not notable, what constitutes notability in Webcomics?

In other words, I'd like to ask the Webcomic community for something. If there were a way for you to police your own content, the decision-making of administrators might be much less of a non-issue. However, I'm not asking about doing that in Wikipedia, as doing that would just result in Yet Another Wikipedia Notability System (WP:YAWNS). :P Instead, I consider a much more constructive step for both Wikipedia and Webcomics to be for the comic community to create a site showcasing good webcomics, documenting awards, etc. Not only that would give Wikipedia a litmus test and a secondary source (which is the crux of the whole issue), it would also have its own value within the Webcomics community by creating an information depot of sorts.

I personally believe that is the best way to satisfy everyone's concerns. However, the impetus for such a move has to come from the Webcomics community; it cannot come from Wikipedia. Since I really have no idea how it would be better to distribute that proposal to your community, or even if doing this here would be even seen, I'll leave the details to you, Howard, to figure that out. In either case, I'd really like for all of you to consider this seriously, not only for the benefit to Wikipedia, but more importantly, for the benefit to all of you.

Hopefully the unnecessary dispute between both of our communities can be solved via dialog and innovative solutions. It has dragged on far too long.

Sincerely,

Titoxd
English Wikipedia administrator

On quality, assessments, and worse things

A very, very common discussion nowadays on Wikipedia is the now-famous "Quantity vs. Quality" debate. At the epicenter of these discussions is the concept of quality itself, and how it can be measured, and best recognized.

As it is generally agreed that Wikipedia's quality review system is good, but not featured (heh), there are several discussions regarding the ways the different quality verification systems (in no particular order, they are Good Articles, Peer Review, WikiProject Reviews and Featured Articles) tie together, and how to improve them. Outside my usual spiel (GA and FA are well-established processes, neither one will go away, and PR's reviews are scant to the point they make the page meaningless), I haven't had much input in the page, but I have been silently watching it. That said, it would be a crime against humanity to not reproduce this post by Martin Walker, known outside the WP:1.0 cabal as Walkerma. As it has become his custom, he hits the nail on the head about the current state of affairs in Wikipedia's quality system.

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All too often quality is presented as being a single "dimension" - going from "---- awful" to "perfect". But it's much more complicated than that. I'd like to lay out how I see it - others may see it differently, but I think any delineation should hopefully clarify things a bit. I'm not trying to stimulate a huge discussion (though by all means discuss it if you think it useful!), rather just show the lay of the land beyond the PR and GA/FA aspects discussed above. I just think that before we change the system we need to define the parameters clearly. The parameters mainly fall into two main categories: Content (which requires good knowledge of the topic) and Style (which requires good knowledge of English and WP:MOS). Here are the parameters as I see them:

1. Content coverage: In the early stage of article development, this is what is needed most of all. As the article matures it moves towards "comprehensive coverage" and this aspect becomes much less important. The best people for judging this are subject-experts.
2. Content quality: The issues may be covered, but there are sloppy definitions or actual errors. Again, subject-experts are critical here - preferably experts with good access to reliable sources.
3. Content trustworthiness: The article may be beautifully written and absolutely correct factually - but if there are no clear citations from reliable sources, how can I know that? Many of our early FAs fall into this category. Also see the Quality versions proposal.
4. NPOV: Related to trustworthiness, but you can still write a biased piece that is well cited. Requires a consensus from several subject-experts, IMHO.
5. Article scope: Sometimes a topic is better covered fairly broadly, sometimes it's better to break it up into sub-articles, usually with a top-level article using summary style.
6. Article organisation and flow: The article may be well written and contain all the important content, yet it looks like it was written by a committee (in effect, it was!). It's a side effect of the fact that our articles are written by many people, often in small disjointed pieces. Needs one or two dedicated author(s) - a subject-expert and someone who can write well.
7. Quality of writing: Issues here include poor grammar, spelling, verbosity, poor use of paragraphs, etc. Good copyeditors needed here.
8. Level of writing: A popular or general topic like atom will need to be accessible to a popular, general audience. In a more specialized article like Persistent carbene, it would be ridiculous to explain what an electron is. Ideally needs a subject-expert who can write well.
9. Aesthetics: Sometimes a nice diagram can really help, or a photograph can bring an article to life. Hard to quantify!
10. Compliance with house style: The article may be perfect in every way, but have a Heading Like This instead of One like this, or lack the before units, etc. Requires someone with a good knowledge of WP:MOS.

Article length is often informally used as a parameter, but it's largely based on three of the above: Content coverage, Scope and Quality of writing (specifically the conciseness/verbosity part). This is a tricky issue when assessing an article for quality - we may say, "It's long, so it must be pretty comprehensive" but it may fail to cover major aspects and just be very long-winded. If the scope is very narrow it may be hard to make it long enough to get on the radar screen for GAN/FAC - for example, compare Jarvis Island with United States.

Review types

When assessments are performed, the general reviewer can best judge the Style parameters: Quality of writing, Level of writing, Aesthetics, House style and perhaps Article organisation/flow. Therefore GAN and FAC (with mainly general reviewers) focus on these aspects. This works usually because by the time an article reaches this point it usually has most of the content aspects covered. Meanwhile the WikiProjects help to ensure that the Content parameters are covered: Content Coverage and Quality, Trustworthiness, NPOV and perhaps Article Scope and Organisation. That is why Stub/Start/B/A reviews mainly focus on those aspects, and it explains why an article can be A-Class while failing GA (or vice versa). Content issues are most important in the early stages of an article's development, so it is appropriate that much of the assessment occurs at the Stub/Start/B level. Nevertheless, I think the A-Class review system such as is done at WP:MILHIST is extremely valuable as a form of expert peer review, because it ensures that the content aspects are all well covered before the general reviewers at FAC even see it. This is analagous to peer review for scientific publication, before the house style and grammar issues are cleaned up by the copyeditors working for the publisher.

Soon we will have a third main "category" to worry about - the specific article Version - but let's leave that until WP:FLR becomes a reality (next year?)!

Well, I probably missed a few things, but I think it's important to try and lay these things out. It's especially important to realise that Content issues and Style issues are different "beasts" requiring different types of review. Walkerma 05:57, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

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The only thing I may add is the need for true external verification by vetted experts, done completely outside Wikipedia. I'm talking about Nature-like verification, but on a per-article basis. Unfortunately, that is probably a long way off. That said, getting Wikipedia cited in high-profile subject publications in a few subjects should help. We just need to do that more.

What I'd like is for an outreach campaign, showing professors how much Wikipedia articles are used, and how important it is for the articles to be accurate. With internal style review, WikiProject content verification, and external expert vetting, we'd get the quality trifecta.

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