Monday, January 11, 2010

Notable

What makes someone "notable"? As David Segal said, "Wiki-worthiness has quietly become a new digital divide, separating those who think they are notable from those granted the imprimatur of notability by a horde of anonymous geeks." (Ouch, burn.)

I don't claim to be an expert on Wikilaw. I leave it to you to judge our friend Randall Munroe. You and I know him as the author of the webcomic xkcd. You may not know, however, that he is...


The guy gets around.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Vandalism in action

Talk:Centrifugal force (rotating reference frame)

There are two relevant sections in this talk page: one of them is a discussion about the comic's relevance to the article and the other is "stop reverting the removal of the xkcd link."

There are reasonable people on both sides of the relevance argument, of course, but the point of interest to me is the "please stop adding the comic as if we'd reached consensus" discussion. Oh, those wacky xkcd fans!

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Playing catch-up

Hello, internet. I am back from vacation. Let's see what I missed OH MY GOODNESS

681: Gravitational wells
Yes. This deserves to be in the introduction. Absolutely.

682: Erotic asphyxiation
Curse you for making me look up this article, Randall Munroe. Incidentally, including a reference to Wikipedia inside of the actual comic is a guarantee that Wikipedia will be vandalized as a result of the comic.

Oh, and the edit in question is particularly awful.