Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Wiki Trouble | Apr 26, 2006 11:51

My column in the next issue of The Listener looks at the troubles rising at Wikipedia: internal fighting, edit wars, entries that degrade over time. Brilliant idea, shame about the humans. It turns out that the Helen Clark entry is fairly troubled.

The article has suffered various idiotic acts of vandalism and appears to have become a vehicle for some people to work out their boundless frustrations about Clark. Even the present entry qualifies the apparently clear-cut fact of Clark's considerable lead in current preferred Prime Minister polling with pointless, redundant verbiage like: "Incumbent Prime Ministers are usually most popular in these polls but Clark's current lead is relatively substantial." (Well, duh. Do readers really need the "relatively substantial" judgment when the figures - Clark 57%, Brash 22% - are in the previous sentence? Previous iterations were sillier.)

This isn't particularly new. In February, editors were removing badly-written POV waffle like this:

… although there is much debate about whether this was through Clark's policies or as a product of the extensive economic and social reforms in New Zealand throughout the 1990s. The theory that she inherited a revitalised and strong economy has gained much momentum due to the fact that long term indicators are starting to show that Clark's policies are pushing the NZ economy into recession.

Again, these figures are under dispute, and many claim that this was only achieved by moving many unemployed onto other welfare benefits, such as Sickness Benefits.

As people have noted on the Talk Page, "This is supposed to be an encyclopedia article, not a list of reasons to dislike Helen Clark, or a source for anti-Labour propaganda," … "the controversies section is totally out of control" … "sounds like it comes straight from an ACT party blog."

Now you've got Si Humphreys' AL making lengthy and conspiratorial litigation on the Doone business (all the lying media's fault, as usual) and complaining that the entry is "low on facts and high on blandness." A good deal of history has been written and rewritten about Mr Doone (the New Zealand Herald's editorial didn't need the PCA report to declare in January 2000 that "A demoralised and embarrassed police force needed a new face at the top … Prudence should have dictated that when his partner's car was stopped, Mr Doone insisted that she be breath-tested … Mr Doone's departure, welcome even if belated, will allow the police to put a series of debilitating episodes behind them.") and to some people in the blogosphere he seems to have become an odd kind of hero, but I doubt whether Wikipedia is right place to pursue such an argument.

The "controversies" should be in there, and - as most of those involved seem to agree - the "Achievements" section needs someone to come in and beef it up and try and impart some balance and usefulness to the article (to make it, say, as straighforward as the Brash entry - well, actually, it doesn't really need to be quite as cuddly as that one). My fear is that that will simply escalate the edit war. The entry has already been put forward for a POV check on the basis that it is not conforming to Wikipedia's " "absolute and non-negotiable" Neutral Point of View standard.

Clark, of course, is not the only national leader to have this sort of trouble - the George W Bush entry has been locked off after spending about 80% of its time vandalised, and some clown keeps trying to add the bogus claim that David Lange was a vegan to his page. But if people want Wikipedia to live up to its vision, they need to realise that it's not the place to work out personal agendas.

I do expect that saying this will bring down on me usual scorn and abuse, but what's going on there isn't very encouraging. I'd be interested to receive comment on this, particularly from active Wikipedians.

PS: Okay, who's editing the Roger Kerr entry? Spot the difference. Someone at the same IP address has also been busily at work on edits to entries concerning the BRT and Deborah Coddington. I'm agnostic as to whether the Kerr-Coddington affair should really be in an encyclopedia, but it's interesting to watch. (Hat tip: Danyl.)

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Well Geeky | Apr 24, 2006 11:43

It looks like Telecom has finally improved the contention rate at the troubled Mt Eden exchange - and apparently there's more bandwidth to come. My man Zach Bagnall is reporting a clear, if marginal, improvement.

He says: "At peak, it looks like 300-500kbit instead of the 200-400 that was the norm previously. Still a long way off the 2000kbit we're obstensibly paying for, but it's something."

Small mercies. Time also to pick up an issue I raised earlier this month: how come getting a DSL connection on via your third-party ISP takes two weeks - when the same task takes two days if your ISP is Xtra? I mentioned my friend's issues, and a number of readers got in touch to report very similar experiences.

Jonathan had this to say:

Trying to transfer our design business DSL connection (from a 3rd party ISP) to a new physical location is a nightmare. You have to have a physical phone line connected and running at the new location 3-10 business days before you move to allow your ISP enough time to sort things out with Telecom. Telecom's nearest appointment to install that new line was a couple of weeks away (or 2 business days before we opened shiny new doors).

Of course Telecom can install the line AND JetStream and have that all live the next day.

So from not being quite as organised weeks out, as I should have, we're forced to go with Telecom to have a chance of being live on time - which was also the best solution helpful guy at at the ISP could suggest also.

Shouldn't name the ISP - sales guy might not be popular for suggesting the competition. I feel sorry for them - even though they once disconnected our broadband midweek without warning, just so we'd call and they could ask us to change to a new plan!

Tony Sutorious also wrote:

OK, I've got a good one!

My ADSL is with Orcon, Recently I moved offices (about 200m, same phone exchange). Orcon Provisioning SWEAR that Telecom will not accept bookings for ADSL moves until AFTER the phone move order is COMPLETED ... in other words, your long wait for connection (three weeks or so) starts AFTER you've moved in - no matter how much in advance you let them know.

Unless of course your ISP is ... you guessed it ... Xtra.

These people are outrageous bloody shysters, and will most assuredly be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Ben Lewis Evans had another angle:

The difference in speed of getting a connection through Xtra and another ISP is not all. A friend of mine was trying to get a connection with Orcon for over a month in Hamilton only to be informed that the exchange was full and telecom was not taking any new connections at this time. So he went to Xtra and was connected within days ...

So what the hell, exactly, is going on here? A helpful Telecom staffer with some insight on the provisioning process, was frankly puzzled by these reports. It shouldn't happen, he said. But he made further enquiries and got back to me:

Ah, yeah, I get it now, and you're right, it's the result of Telecom having an unfair competitive advantage, though it's not one that anyone's deliberately planned, just a quirk in the system that they can't be bothered changing.

Short and sweet, only one order that ties up a linecard can be run on a line at any given time. It's not possible to run additional orders until the current order has closed and posted - this is meant to prevent "accidents" like two new connections being run on the same line. Every ISP and wholesale line rental company uses the same system with the same database, but we can see little or no info on each other's customers within that.

The livening of a line might take a few minutes if the line is already intact to a customer's premises, or might take longer if a tech is required to attend the exchange and/or property. Same with ADSL, if the jumpering for the ADSL is present it can be livened remotely, if not it needs a tech to attend the exchange to install.

However, the order to connect a line takes a bit longer than this to fully process, because it needs to go through several different departments to get signed off, and that process can take anything up to a week or two.

When someone has a new connection or a move of address through us, and they want ADSL as well, it's all done on the same order. If they're getting their line through us and their ADSL through someone else, the new connection needs to close and post before the ADSL order can start, meaning you might have to wait a week, then lodge it, and the scheduler might have no slots for techs free for another week. If they do everything through Telecom, they'd get put into the scheduler much sooner, so get an earlier ADSL connection (a few days after the line is livened.)

In theory, I'd guess if a customer got their line rental and ADSL both through another provider, they could get around this because it would all be done on the same order. And if a customer had wholesale line rental but ADSL with Xtra (it happens, believe it or not) they'd have exactly the same problems with the delay.

The funny thing is I don't think that any form of LLU will change this, since the underlying system we all use (ICMS) would stay the same regardless. If anything, it's an argument for bundling all services together when you get your line connected - because the hassles that come from having to deal with different telcos looking after the same line outweigh the benefit of choosing different deals to meet your needs.

Hmmm … doesn't "it has to go through several different departments to get signed off" sound a bit glide time to you? Perhaps a little wholesale-retail separation would improve efficiencies.

With my darling swanning around Europe seeing the Flaming Lips and everything, my routines have changed a little in the past week. I'm doing laundry ("Dad, I've got no clean underpants" "But I washed loads of underpants" "They're not my underpants …") and I have also, to some extent been logging out. Didn't buy a Sunday paper, didn't hardly watch broadcast TV, apart from sport, and instead enjoyed a bunch of TV off my hard drive.

Finally got around to watching the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary Iraq's Missing Billions. I knew most of the information in it in one form or another, but to see it presented like this, with the help of an Iraqi doctor brave enough to stand up and talk about it … I defy anyone to watch it and not feel anger, or at least despair. It is not going too far to say that, through a combination of incompetence, arrogance and simple greed, Iraq was looted; the precious foreign reserves that were supposed to rebuild the country cashed up, shipped to Iraq as ton upon ton of $50 notes, and spent on … well, it's not entirely clear. Unsurprisingly, ultimate blame rests with Rumsfeld, who tore up the State Department's post-conflict plan and put the Pentagon in charge of reconstruction.

There's a torrent here, and streaming, direct download and a torrent for a 28MB RealPlayer version here.

I also watched Pirates of Silicon Valley again. For those, who don't know, it's a made-for-TV movie on the parallel rise of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I'm not sure how it would strike someone new to the topic, but I found it an enjoyable (and apparently largely true-to-life) cultural classic. (Torrents here.)

I was at Macworld Expo in New York in 1999, when Noah Wyle, who plays Jobs in the movie, came on pretending to be Steve. I think anyone more that 20 rows back was fooled. That was the year Steve unveiled the iBook and ("one more thing") AirPort WiFi. The story, of course, has moved on a little since then, with the most recent twist being Apple's Boot Camp software that allows Windows XP to run on new Intel-based Macs. Retailers have started selling Macs with XP pre-installed. Now someone's worked out a way of getting Linux on there too.

The problem for Mac users, of course, is that they're suddenly, if itinerantly, in the Windows world; where their systems have to be armed to fend off every damned thing and may still behave in the most capricious of ways. Our kids' computer is an Acer Pentium 4 with a gig of memory and (since I shelled out for comprehensive service and an upgrade) a fresh installation of XP SP2 on a 160GB hard drive. So the kids decide they want to repurpose their monthly online gaming budget in favour of The Matrix Online. We pay $US20 for a Direct2Drive download of the game client installer - and the damn thing bluescreens four times in the course of a 2GB download. Then we got random shutdowns in the middle of gameplay. It seems to have stabilised now, but the whole thing is a complete mystery to me.

I'll tell you one thing Apple has got right in OS X - installations. Downloads almost all come as .dmg disk images that the system mounts automatically (why does Windows handle disk images so badly?) and they either require a simple drag-and-drop to the Applications folder, or use the excellent and stable installer built into MacOS X. I actually can't remember the last time an installation failed. And, of course, they don't patch the goddamn system.

Rant over. For now.

Intriguing week on the Public Address Virtual Super 14 leader board - and a very low-scoring one. My 18 points was better than some of the high-fliers managed. That, of course, is because the Hurricanes stumbled against an under-strength Brumbies, and the Crusaders were very lucky indeed to escape with a draw against the Western Force, who had what looked like a good try ruled out in the dying seconds.

What I found almost as astonishing as the result was John Mitchell's half-time interview; because (a) he actually made himself available, and (b) he doesn't appear to be a space alien any more. He was straightforward and intelligible and he used words like "bloody" and "mate". None of the psychobabble that he used to spout as All Black coach.

Can we take it from that that he's dispensed with his "life coach"?

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I'll be having a quiet one | Apr 20, 2006 10:42

How odd. The one weekend where I simply cannot head out of an evening and come home tired but trollied is the one on which I would cheerfully do so multiple times. That's the weekend where, on Friday night, the Skatalites (the freakin' Skatalites!) play The Studio, and the really rather fun looking new cult film night, Mondo Weirdo, debuts at The Academy with a screening of Gimme Shelter.

On the same evening, Brit brokenbeat (no, I don't know what it is either, but it's probably a gas) exponents Bugs in the Attic play Galatos, and Tourist headline the new PowerTool-sponsored Indie Club, way upstairs at the St James. And it's Ant Timpson's 40th birthday party.

And - holy shit - Wing is playing Real Groovy at 6.30! Now that's the beginning of a special evening right there.

The next night, there's HDU at Studio, as advertised on this site (those free tickets were snapped up smartly). Pluto, the D4 and Motorcade play the Powerstation (yes, the Powerstation - the bFM ad is really funny). The Checks play the Masonic in what must be one of their last shows before heading for their big year in Europe. Shaft, Voom and The Nudie Suits play the King's Arms. Tim Guy, Steve Abel and Dunc Tha Funk are up at the Leigh Sawmill, there's an Interdigitate event at Galatos.

Not quite in my line (although I'm keen to hear from any motherfucker who goes to both): DJ Zinc at Fu; and Buddy Guy and Robert Cray at the St James.

And on Monday night, Ian Pooley plays a late one at 4:20. The kids will doubtless proceed from there to pay their respects to the fallen at the dawn ceremony at the Domain …

But I'll be having a quiet one. My honey, on the other hand, might be going to the Flaming Lips at the Royal Albert Hall. Wow.

Erratum: Until it was corrected, yesterday's post named Ticketek as the ticketing agent for the Rolling Stones show. It was, in fact, the competing company Ticketmaster.

Filthy liberal traitor alert: Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has written Senate hearings on Bush, now for the Vanity Fair website. And the new Rolling Stone cover story, by leading American historian Sean Wilentz, is The Worst President in History? They're both quite persuasive.

And in a similar vein, there's now a video to go with Waxaudio's popular mash-up of Bush enunciating the words of John Lennon's 'Imagine' …

PS: Seeing as you all love freebies so much, I have obtained two double passes to the Mondo Weirdo premiere tomorrow, which (like all Mondo Weirdo screenings) features a special themed cocktail. But just to make it interesting, I'll oblige you to tell me the full names of the three directors of Gimme Shelter.

PPS: You may have heard about the van fire from which Ryan McPhun and the Ruby Suns escaped with their lives but not much else, leaving them seriously stuck on their US tour. If you can't make the benefit gig at the Schooner tavern in Auckland tonight, you may feel moved to make a donation.

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