Wikipedia

I can hardly type this for laughing. I've mentioned Wikipedia previously here, where I take a small amount of innocent pleasure in hunting down and fixing errors. Much like I do on BookCrossing, really, where I enjoy tracking down mangled BCIDs or helping people with their HTML. It fair makes my day when I get a good feedback result or a book gets journalled that would otherwise have turned up lost or I can help somebody who's forgotten their password. I know I've done something positive.

Not so on Wikipedia! I discovered it about six months ago and thought to myself "What a fascinating concept!" But I wondered about the accuracy of an encyclopaedia edited by users. And the potential for bias. As it happens, I know a fair bit about Australian politics, so I went hunting for articles about Australian politics and found errors and bias aplenty. It's not blatant, but if you look at the details rather than the bold statements, you find a lot to work on. For instance, one of the enduring myths about a previous Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is that he brought the troops home from Vietnam. People will put money on it. And sure enough, I looked up his article and there it was.

WRONG! Whitlam didn't bring any troops back. All of our combat units had been brought home months before Whitlam got into power. You ask one of these people to name the units Whitlam pulled out and they sort of trail off into nothingness. So I fixed that. Just a simple matter of hitting the "edit" button and removing the error. mmmm. That was nice! I've made the cyberworld a better place.

Oddly enough, there's a few people on Wikipedia who don't like being corrected. They take it personal. It's a bit like road rage. Logic and reason go out the window.

What's making me laugh is the hypocrisy of these folk. Wikipedia is building up a bureaucracy with all sorts of rules and procedures to deal with conflict. I don't think it works very well and the stress and workload on the people doing the arbitration must be horrendous, but in what passes for a Wikipedia Supreme Court, I find that I'm under attack. People are saying all sorts of nasty things about me, really sinking the boot into me. Their complaint? That I'm attacking them! I'm not sure that they can see the lack of moral depth to their position. Another person, a young lady who may or may not have dyslexia, thinks that when I cast an eye over her edits and correct her spelling, I'm stalking and harrassing her. She just quoted an extract from this very LiveJournal blog as evidence against me. Huh? Who's doing the stalking?

And on and on. The loudest howls are from someone who, in the Australian vernacular, has tickets on himself. He thinks he's an expert on the Australian constitution, but confuses constitutional practice (what the politicians do) with constitutional law (what judges do). I really liked it when he claimed that two ex-Governors-General made a comment on a certain matter, because I knew that both of them had died years before. Perhaps they were speaking in a grave voice. Like the people who claim that Whitlam brought the troops home, this guy fades away when asked to back up his weird claims.

So I went looking at his contributions to the Wikipedia project and friends, I hit the jackpot! Here was someone who imagined that there was a "President of the United Kingdom". Here was someone who said "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day before the inauguration of their precedessor."

I thought that was kind of cute, a term of office that expired seven years before it commenced, so I changed that "predecessor" to "successor" and it made more sense. This guy then changed it back again!

But he realised he'd made a mistake, so he changed his wording to "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day after the inauguration of their precedessor". That's still a term of minus seven years, Mister Expert.

So I fixed it again. And AGAIN he changed it back!

Finally, after I'd corrected him for the third time, the penny must have dropped. But do you think he thanked me for my time and trouble? Hell no. His aim in life is to get me booted off Wikipedia so I don't embarrass him any further.

Yeah, like that would work. Wikipedia allows anonymous efforts, so all I would have to do would be to hop on my bike, trundle down Constitution Avenue to Civic where there are any number of hotspots, and enjoy a cup of coffee while I fixed up his latest idiocies. A different IP address every day. What could he do? Complain that some bastard was making him look like an idiot?

In other news, it's cold and cloudy and we're hoping for more rain.

Faithful hound

Our little black dog, a breed best described as a Skittish Terrier, has spent the past two days camped in front of the dishwasher. She can smell mouse, you see, and she's a ratter of amazing ferocity. Once a mouse or rat gets out in the open, it's history. So she's been waiting patiently for the mouse she can smell, and possibly hear, under the dishwasher to squeeze itself through a tiny little crack and leap into her mouth.

"Not going to happen, doglet!" I tell her, but she doesn't listen.

Claude the cat brings them in from outside, where they breed in the honeysucle and live off the compost pile and whatever birdseed gets spilt on the ground. (quite a lot if a cockatoo decides to ravish my bird feeder). Claude is quite healed up now and has quit limping even for effect. But he still delights in catching mice and the occasional small rat. He brings them in through the cat flap, drops them on the kitchen floor and plays chase with them.

And every now and then one gets away from him, dives under the fridge or through the gap beside the oven and is safe. The cupboards have little cut outs for pipes and cables, and there's enough room for a mouse to squeeze through, once they get into the cupboards.

So the dog has been waiting patiently for a mouse to squeeze through that impossibly narrow crack beside the dishwasher. Futile.

This afternoon I put a bowl in and as I pulled down the door, a gap opened up beneath, a mouse sprang out and almost leapt into the Jaws of Death. So it all paid off for the dog!

And now she's camped in front of the dishwasher again. Maybe there's another one, maybe she can still smell the old one, maybe she's just hoping....