Welcome, Wikinauts!

OK, I'm not saying that Plashing Vole is the second-most popular and trusted site on the entire internet, but I think it's significant that when Wikipedia went dark yesterday in protest against SOPA, my visitors more than doubled. So actually, I am saying that in the absence of Wikipedia, I am the go-to guy for facts.

I suppose I should give you the answer to yesterday's true-or-false facts. Amazingly, nobody identified 'Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are serious Presidential candidates' as true - either you're not reading the newspapers or you haven't really the depths to which American political discourse has sunk. The other true fact was that Boris Johnson was indeed born in New York and is eligible to run for the Presidency - he was in fact an American citizen until recent years, which makes me wonder whether he used it for tax avoidance. Let's start campaigning for him - then we can have him deported.

You may have come to Vole for the facts, but stick around: I've got politics, music, books and general nonsense. Think of me as a thicker, more sarcastic Radio 4 (that's NPR for you Shermans).

Anyway, back to the marking… I wonder how my students fared without Wikipedia?

Welcome, Wikipedians

Feeling lost? Homework impossible without Wikipedia?

Fear not, brave webnauts! Plashing Vole, as a service to readers, has harvested the key facts from Wikipedia which you might need to get you through the day.

•  Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations while on holiday in Arizona, in the settlement later known Area 51.
•  In Series 3, episode 2 of Doctor Who, a prototype mobile telephone can clearly be glimpsed in the Tardis.
• The eye-in-a-pyramid on the dollar bill was designed by the Earl of Oxford on behalf of the Illuminati.
• There are no Palestinians. Anyone who says otherwise is antisemitic.
• David Miliband is the leader of the Labour Party.
• WMD were found in Iraq.
• The first UK Number 1 hit single was Noel Coward, with 'Half-Caste Woman' (1958).
• Steve Jobs' 'death' was in fact part of the iSingularity - on general release Fall 2012.
• Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were serious presidential candidates in 2012.
• Charles Darwin converted to creationism in 1858, but his diaries were suppressed by the Royal Society. 
• Jon Stewart's PhD thesis was on North-Western Saskatchewan Women's Writing, 1930-1936). He was required to rewrite the final three chapters on the grounds of 'sketchiness'. 
• The 'Occupy' movement takes its inspiration from the Sudetenland, 1938.
• On several South Pacific Islands, effigies of Montgomery Scott are worshipped as gods. 'Beam Me Up' is believed to relate to the Ascension. 
• The 'Hollywood' sign originally advertised Christmas trees. 
• Steve Martin's novels topped the Finnish sales charts in 1983, 1987, 1993, 1994 and 2003. Only William Shatner's Tek Wars series is more popular across Scandinavia.
• Katie Price holds A-levels in Critical Thinking, Textiles and German. She chose 'Jordan' as a stage name after living in Petra as an ascetic for several months in 1998. The claim that she chose the name after her favourite pair of basketball shoes was an internet meme with no foundation. 
• Richard Madeley is a member of the Privy Council. 
• Boris Johnson was born in New York, and is therefore eligible to run for US President. 
• 9/11 was executed by a rogue NSA/CIA unit. All Jews were evacuated from the buildings in advance. Film analysis places Oliver North and Gore Vidal in the cockpit of the first plane but their DNA was never recovered from the scene.

PS: a couple of these are true. Which ones?

The 100 Second History of the World

This is a fascinating piece of grassroots history: the video animates a timeline of all Wikipedia's historical events which are given a geotag. As time advances, recorded history spreads across the globe - or some of it.


A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.


Apart from being beautiful, does it mean anything? Well, sort of. It's not about history. It's about Wikipedia and access to information. To be recorded in this video, an event has to be deemed worthy of inclusion. Who are the gatekeepers? Most of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are decent liberal people with a curious and informed attitude, but I'm willing to bet that they're an elite of European or European-ancestry white people from capitalist Western countries. Note that Africa remains largely dark on the map despite being the place from which we all emerged. Has nothing happened there? Of course it has: but African history is largely understood the history of what white people did there: I know very little about the continent between the formation of the Rift Valley and the foundation of the Royal African Company (with an uptick around Rome v. Carthage and Egypt). Other events are lost, unrecorded, absent from European-language accounts or seen as less important than other categories of activity.

This isn't to say that this video isn't fascinating and a useful piece of historiography: it dramatises cultural relativism in a way a lecture couldn't.

The Wikipedia it's OK to like

The Republic of Cuba has launched it's own online editable encyclopaedia, called Ecured. It's small enough at the start, but will no doubt expand. What will be interesting is the degree of freedom allowed to its editors when dealing with sensitive topics such as Cuba itself. After all, Wikipedia has restricted edits on matters such as Palestine and Israel. Plus, no doubt, anti-Cuban and anti-Communist trolls will be all over it.

The signs look promising: the entry on Wikileaks has a section on Cuba's appearance - though whether this is full or partial is unclear, as is how long it will last. There's even a section on the Cuban Missile Crisis, though my Spanish isn't up to assessing its quality.

Hasta la victoria siempre, comrades.


MEanwhile, have a look at Lori Nix's tiny models of post-apocalyptic urban scenes. After the Singularity, my house will look like this (sorry, can't copy the images).

Academic top tips for students

Students: when copying and pasting from Wikipedia and other webpages, take the time to change the font to the same one you're using in the rest of the essay. Removing the hyperlinks is also a good idea when trying to make me think that you wrote the paragraphs in question. Otherwise there's no challenge or fun playing these games of mental chess…

Emma from Limerick suggests that instead of handing plagiarised essays in, you could send me the URL of whatever site you plan to plunder. Then I could mark you on your choice of source and no paper is wasted, thus saving the environment.