Archive for Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s “Colbert Alert” missed this one
Posted by: | CommentsHeh. I didn’t get to Wikipedia fast enough to catch the part where Conan was jealous of Stephen, but the part about Conan assaulting a sea turtle with a canoe paddle was still there. I guess that “Colbert Alert” is going to have to apply no matter when or where Stephen appears on television …
(For those of you who are confused right now, we’ll post the Conan video as soon as possible. The big dance number at the end? Brilliant!)
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Wikidrama redux? South Africa tries to control its elephant population
Posted by: | CommentsWay back in 2006, Stephen Colbert started a feud with a little website known as Wikipedia and dared us, the fledgling Colbert Nation, to reverse the course of extinction of the African elephant by editing the relevant Wikipedia pages. Colbert University has the history, and you can watch the Wørd segment that started wikiality fever here:
Watch Stephen’s continued reporting on actual elephant populations (and vasectomies) here:
Now, a year and a half later, South Africa has announced that it will lift the ban on killing elephants because the population has nearly tripled in size since the ban went into effect.
South Africa to sanction killing of elephants
PRETORIA, South Africa (AP)South Africa announced Monday that it was reversing a 1995 ban on killing elephants to help control their booming population, drawing instant outrage from animal-rights activists.
Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk did not say how many elephants could be killed, saying only that some animal-rights groups’ estimates of 2,000 to 10,000 were “hugely inflated.”
“Culling will only be allowed as a last option and under very strict conditions,” van Schalkwyk told reporters. “Our simple reality is that elephant population density has risen so much in some southern African countries that there is concern about impacts on the landscape, the viability of other species and the livelihoods and safety of people living within elephant ranges.”
The Johannesburg-based group Animal Rights Africa threatened to call for international tourist boycotts and protests and to take legal action.
South Africa’s elephant population has ballooned to more than 20,000 from 8,000 in 1995, when international pressure led to a ban on killing them.
This is a controversial and emotional issue. The South African national park service says that if elephants had not been killed between 1967 and 1994, their population would be about 80,000 strong right now. But culling elephants from their tribes will be difficult due to their social nature and strong family groups, and animal rights activists are understandably outraged.
So as not to start a heated animal rights discussion, let’s leave it at this: Stephen was talking about tripling the elephant population in 2006. Today, South Africa has more elephants than it can handle. Just how great is the power of wikiality?
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Stephen Colbert and the Zeitgeist – Verfremdungseffekt Edition
Posted by: | CommentsThe Colbert Report will always be linked with Viacom, YouTube, and Wikipedia in the Nation’s collective consciousness due to boardroom business, legal actions, and copyright controversies crashing through the 4th wall at some point. A few articles over the last week address news in these areas that may effect how we view TCR in the future. So here’s our special techno-zeitgiest for September 1, 2007.
Comedy Central just might be ready to enter the digital age
In their new contract with ‘South Park’ creators, CC helps establish a hub to distribute ‘South Park’ content on-line – I’m assuming this is not MotherLoad!
- ‘South Park’ Creators Win Ad Sharing in Deal – New York Times:
Now, however, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker and their bosses at Comedy Central, a unit of Viacom’s MTV Networks, are attempting to leapfrog to the vanguard of Hollywood’s transition into Web. In a joint venture that involves millions in up-front cash and a 50-50 split of ad revenues, the network and the two creative partners have agreed to create a hub to spread “South Park”-related material across the Net, mobile platforms, and video games.
…
All told, people involved in the deal confirm that it is worth some $75 million to Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone over the next four years. But what is likely to draw the most attention in Hollywood is not the richness of the pact, but the network’s willingness to share its advertising revenue.
- South Park and Comedy Central To Split – IanSchafer.com:
Epidodes of South Park are amongst the most pirated, illegally downloaded content on the web, and this will be a way that fans of the series can finally get their fix, and bloggers everywhere can back up their report on the previous night’s episode with a legal clip of the series.
…
Comedy Central’s got some of the most culturally relevant content on television (Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park), and therefore some of the most referenced online. The creation of this hub can be a game-changer for the network, and maybe even big-media in general.
- “South Park” duo draw up lucrative deal – Washington Post:
Lightning may well strike twice at Comedy Central, which already may be negotiating with another Internet darling: “The Daily Show” anchor Jon Stewart, whose current four-year contract expires at the end of 2008. The current deal for “Park” was also scheduled to elapse late next year.
James Dixon, who manages Stewart, applauded the “Park” pact but said his client is not concerned. “We’ll see what happens with his next deal, but ‘Daily’ is a different animal than an animated series,” he said. “A lot more than digital needs to be discussed.”
LiberalViewer uses Viacom fairly
I think most YouTubers know Allen Asch as LiberalViewer and are probably aware that his account was suspended back in The Great YouTube Purge earlier this year. Here’s an interesting article about how it got reinstated and what that means for the rest of us.
- Media Savvy: Parody maker’s copyright fight with media giants takes fair turn – The Sacramento Bee:
But Asch is speaking out to inform other bloggers and purveyors of consumer-generated media that they have just as much right to hold the fair-use banner as journalists in traditional media (newspapers, television, radio) and scholars.
“One of the good things that’s come of this is that Viacom now has made a statement saying it will allow more (fair use) than before,” Asch says. “It’s going to err on the side of tolerance. In fact, I want to make a video about this to let people know they won’t get sued.”
The use of photographs, video clips and music samples on blogs and Web sites has become so popular — and the legal blow- back by copyright owners so prevalent — that several legal organizations have formed to aid people in determining what constitutes fair use of material.
The highest profile is Stanford’s Fair Use Project, which in the past year has won several major legal victories for Internet users, academic researchers and documentary filmmakers against copyright claims.
….
“Viacom has proven to be fairly reasonable,” says Anthony Falzone, director of the Fair Use Project. “So I wouldn’t point to Viacom as the poster child of fair-use abuse — anymore. But there are a lot of other cases out there.”
Related Viacom and YouTube news
Related like a 4th cousin, thrice removed. Viacom still seems to not quite get it and YouTube continues to clean up its act.
- Infringing Viacom claims copyright infringement – BoingBoing.com:
Christopher Knight made three commercials as part of his campaign to run for a seat on the Rockingham County Board of Education. He posted them on YouTube.
Viacom’s VH1 ran one of the commercials on its show Web Junk 2.0, without seeking Knight’s permission. Knight then posted the Web Junk 2.0 segment on YouTube.
Yesterday, YouTube pulled the clip, at the request of Viacom, which said Knight was infringing on its copyright. Link
- Music stars set to reap YouTube windfall – The Guardian:
The agreement between the MCPS-PRS Alliance and YouTube follows a similar deal in the US and though it does not get Google around the thorny issue of copyrighted material appearing on the website, it does mean artists will get paid performance fees when other people upload video clips containing their tracks.
In essence the deal gives online video creators the same freedom to use music that actors and comedians have at events such as the Edinburgh Festival fringe, which operates a PRS waiver. But for online content creators, it is YouTube that picks up the bill for any music they use.
How Comedy Central views Wikipedia as an ally
Notes from a blogger of a roundtable d discussion of how to use Wikipedia for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is important to any website that wants to be found by a public searching for on-line content. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia pops up near the top of any search result on sites such as Google. The snippet below notes some of the ways Comedy Central uses Wikipedia for SEO.
- Wikipedia & SEO – Search Engine Roundtable:
Next up is Don Steele of Comedy Central. He shows a clip of Stephen Colbert editing Wikipedia. “If enough people agree with it, it becomes true.” Comedy Central is a division of Viacom.
Wikipedia is one of the tenets of their online strategy. They’re using social networking, email marketing, search, videos, etc. But their content is viewed as products and they are trying to find people’s content that they can trust and discover.
Why do they care about Wikipedia? In the SEO world, it’s huge. They want to channel it and make it better. The content is highly referenced on Wikipedia. If there are links back to Comedy Central, they need to be up-to-date and not 404 pages. They need to focus on a good user experience. Comedy Central needs to use discussion pages to get their company’s word across.
Wikipedia brings a ton of traffic to them.
How did they sell the idea internally? There are 50 million users a month on Wikipedia. For branding, that’s huge to understand the reference of your brand. Getting all this traffic through Wikipedia is free instead of doing it through an SEM agency.
What we don’t do: Google/YouTube vs. Viacom’s lawsuit is known. They won’t edit that out because they are not changing the brand perception. They work with discussion pages and editors and let them know about relevant content to promote it.
Sean Penn was once on the Colbert Report with a guy named Robert Pinski. This was put on Wikipedia. That ended up driving traffic to Comedy Central through Wikipedia. Cool.
Beforehand, Comedy Central was able to edit the pages, but now they can’t due to IP tracking. So they post references in discussion pages. Wikipedia editors are decision makers. They don’t troll for outbound links. They want to encourage conversations within Wikipedia.
Hulu, that YouTube, that you do so well
Considering that the press used to call it “YouTube Killer,” this seems a step up.
- NBC, News Corp. name new video site Hulu – Los Angeles Times:
General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal Inc. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. on Wednesday announced the name of their new Web-based network of films and television shows: Hulu.
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The name was chosen because it is short, easy to spell and rhymes with itself, project chief Jason Kilar said on the Hulu website.
The NBC Universal-News Corp. project, first announced in March, is designed to compete with Web-based video sites such as Google Inc.’s YouTube.
The site will include films and TV shows produced by the NBC and Fox TV networks and the Universal and 20th Century Fox film studios. Revenue will come from advertising and the sale of program downloads.
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“Colbert Alert”
Posted by: | CommentsHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! This is from a New York Times article (TimesSelect subscription required) on Wikipedia:
All the News That’s Fit to Print Out
By JONATHAN DEE
Published: July 1, 2007. . .
Messing with a Wikipedia page requires no hacking skills whatsoever; thus vandalism is pandemic there. Though the admins are loath to give vandals special attention in any form, the fact is that there are some who earn their grudging admiration, if only for their sense of humor. Stephen Colbert, in his fake-newsman persona at least, has been a regular tormentor of the site, urging his viewers to change a given fact en masse; when the words “Colbert Alert” appear on the admins’ chat forum, 20 or more of them will rush to the ramparts of a targeted page.
Stephen has his own *alert* — that’s hilarious!
Shout out to Orion7 on the TWoP boards for the tip.
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Librarians are hiding something
Posted by: | CommentsHee! It didn’t last long, but here’s one person’s Wikipedia handiwork:
Here are more variants on the “Librarian” entry. There were some modifications to “Spanish“, too. Oh, and did you see this entry about alpacas? And this one about oxygen? I suppose this one about Albert Einstein really sums it all up.
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Episode 3072 (05/24/2007)
Posted by: | Comments“I report, I decide. This is The Colbert Report!“
Sea to Shining Me: “Tonight! It’s Memorial Day Weekend; don’t forget to turn your clocks back.”
- Fleet Week: Stephen Colbert’s Fleet Week Clean Time Fun Zone
- Dan Towbin: Flag Flap
- Stephen Colbert’s Survivor Tales: Up in Smoke
Razing Arizona: “Then, I profile Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva in the first of my one-part series, ‘Better Know Raúl Grijalva.’”
- Better Know a District: Raúl Grijalva, Arizona’s 7th, “The Fightin’ Seventh!”
Referential Treatment: “Plus, my guest is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The neutrality of this interview has been disputed.”
- Jimmy Wales – Founder, Wikipedia
In closing: Well, folks, that’s it for the Report. See you in a week, Nation, unless you’ve got a million dollars for my speaking fee, in which case, Monday works. Good night!
INTERNET COL-BOMB SITES OF THE DAY:Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Wikipedia – Albert Einstein, Wikipedia – Oxygen, Wikipedia – Librarian
NOTABLE MOMENTS
- Nation, this is it: The last episode of the Report before the summer kickoff, Memorial Day Weekend! It is also one of my favorite “support the troops” times of the year: “Fleet Week” in New York.
- But what sometimes gets forgotten in all the “Fleet Week” fun is that these servicemen are just innocent, small town kids, wandering a big city rife with temptations like liquor, gambling and museums.
- [Marcel Duchamp, "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2"] It’s hard to tell, but that’s a ‘nude’. Area right down here is the naughty part.
- To protect our boys, I have set up the “Stephen Colbert Fleet Week Clean Time Fun Zone”. It is full of wholesome activities for our fighting men.
- Cake walk
- Make-your-own popcorn balls
- Virginity pledge
- “Abstinence Skee Ball”, where all the holes are covered.
- Marine – “You sunk my battleship!”
- Yes, it’s “Stephen Colbert’s Fleet Week Clean Time Fun Zone”. In Midtown Manhattan, right around the corner from Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. But I only mention that for directions. Fight it!
- Dan runs a Mom-and-Pop Hummer dealership in Las Vegas. He wanted to express his patriotism by flying an American flag over the lot. A thirty by sixty foot flag, the size of a regulation volleyball court . . .
- Welcome to 2007, Dan. Democrats control Congress. I’m sure if you were *burning* a gigantic flag, you’d get the Medal of Honor.
- There is nothing more patriotic than using the flag to make money. Think about it: America is a brand, and the flag is our logo. It sells liberty. Specifically, the Jeep Liberty.
- Now, to those who question Mr. Towbin’s patriotism, I say, what is more patriotic than a businessman, at his Las Vegas Hummer dealership, standing before a giant American flag at sunrise? *That* would make a great flag!
- “I’m a big flag! I’m a big, loud flag! Better move around me; better move around . . . Big, big, BIG! BIG FLAG!”
- Oh, the sweet sound of Old Glory.
- Movin’ on. Nation, Memorial Day is a somber remembrance . . . but who doesn’t like a three-day weekend? It’s as American as callin’ in sick and making it a four-day weekend.
- “Stephen Colbert’s Survivor Tales: Up in Smoke”: Veggie Burger [Editor's Note: We called it!]
- *Loosened-tie Stephen in AZ is blowing my mind a little; I’m SO used to seeing him all buttoned up on his show now!*
- The Seventh shares three hundred miles of border with Mexico, making it a popular crossing point for illegal immigrants, and a popular destination for Lou Dobbs, once he gets his Steath Bomber license.
- So dry . . . maybe bottled water isn’t for pussies . . .
- Fun fact: This District is hotter than the Devil’s balls. In fact, the town of Yuma is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘Sunniest on Place Earth’. That’s why, to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, I propose we build a giant magnifying glass at the border.
- Your District includes three hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border . . . When you’re back home in your District, how much of your time do you spend patrolling the border?
- You’re of Mexican descent, correct? . . . As a congressman, do you believe you’re doing a job that Americans don’t want to do?
- Congressman, may I comb your mustache? . . . May I stroke it? . . . How much do you charge for mustache rides?
- My guest tonight is the founder of Wikipedia. According to his Wikipedia page, he can bench press five hundred pounds!
- *Hee! Stephen says Tyra Banks’ having made the TIME 100 two years in a row is bull$#!t!*
- . . . What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. You know? For too long, the elites, who *study* things, got to say what is or isn’t real. But, you know, any – anybody with a computer and, you know, the, the patience to put in a, a password, can get onto Wikipedia and start changing entries. *I* did it, when I asked the Heroes out there to change the entry for ‘Elephant’ last year, to say that the populations of elephants in Africa had tripled . . . you and your folks changed it back. Why’d you do that?
- So Wikipedia is like a battlefield, of information . . . It is. It’s like a caged match.
- Wales: It’s more of a conversation around the fireside.
- Stephen: Really? Then how come I got blocked from that conversation?
- Wales: Well, now . . .
- Stephen: We don’t want to talk to you any more!
- Wales: Well, you know . . . we, uh — you know, you misbehaved a little bit, Stephen.
- Stephen: Wha — ?! No, there’s no such thing as ‘misbehaving’; I was accused of vandalism, but . . . when, when information is democratized, you know, isn’t – isn’t ‘vandalism’ just ‘free speech’?
- Wales: Well, no no no . . . I don’t think so.
- Can you change things that nobody can change back, since you’re the founder? Are you like a root user that can go on and say ‘Albert Einstein was an alpaca farmer’, and it just, it just stays?
- Wales: I think the community would kill me if I did that.
- Stephen: Oh really? But still, it’d be ballsy.
- Shouldn’t those other language Wikipedias just say, ‘Learn English’? . . . At least the Spanish one.
- What would you do if I tried to, like, some of the things I’ve said tonight about, say, Albert Einstein, or ‘oxygen’ being ‘poison’; what would you do to try to stop me? Because, the Nation – the Nation knows what I want.
- Wales: . . . Well the first thing we try to do if somebody comes on and they’re trying to do something is, we’ll ask them to behave themselves, . . . we’ll —
- Stephen: You’ve asked, go on.
- Wales: We can, we can block, ah, people from editing; we can temporarily protect or lock down pages, things like we have a pretty good —
- Stephen: So you might, tonight, temporarily protect and lock down ‘oxygen’ or ‘Albert Einstein’ . . .
- Wales: Oxygen, Albert Einstein, the *entire* Spanish Wikipedia is gonna have to be closed for a couple of days, I’m afraid.
- Stephen: Sorry about that. But what if I put something up, what if I put something up that I didn’t tell you about? Like, say, I might put something up on the screen right now that you couldn’t see ["Librarians are hiding something."], but the audience could see, and, uh, so you don’t know what it is . . . you can’t protect all the millions pages on Wikipedia, because who knows what I just put up?
- Wales: Who knows, well, I think, you know, the interesting thing about your show?
- Stephen: Yes?
- Wales: . . . is that Wikipedians watch it.
- Stephen: [laughing] Yeah, they sure do.
- Wales: So when this airs, they’ll be scrambling, one thing after another, to lock things down.
- Stephen: Okay. Fantastic. I look forward to it.
- I actually do think that Wikipedia is an amazing thing. It is the, it is the first place I go when I’m looking for knowledge, or when I want to create some.
Fangirl Suit Report: Charcoal grey pinstriped suit, light blue shirt with single barrel cuffs. Red tie with white pattern.
Jimmy Wales: Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, joins the Report.
More Video Highlights, courtesy of Comedy Central’s Motherload
- Sea To Shining Me: It’s Memorial Day weekend. Don’t forget to turn your clocks back.
- Fleet Week: To protect our boys, Stephen has set up the Fleet Week Clean Time Fun Zone.
- Big Loud Flag: Some people have complained about Stephen’s big loud flag.
- Survivor Tales — Up In Smoke: Stephen presents a scary tale from a backyard cookout.
- Know a District – Arizona’s 7th: Stephen asks Representative Raúl Grijalva for a mustache ride.
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Wikipedia goes into lockdown again . . . and this time, Steve Carell is the mastermind
Posted by: | CommentsThe folks over there at Wikipedia are really going to hate The Daily Show’s alums if this keeps up. From the AP, via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
‘Office’ fans flock to edit Wikipedia
By ANICK JESDANUN
AP INTERNET WRITERNEW YORK — In the NBC series “The Office,” the boss Michael Scott turned to Wikipedia for tips on fending off an employee’s request for a pay raise. Viewers quickly flocked to the online encyclopedia and added their take to its entry on negotiations.
Administrators at Wikipedia had to limit editing of the entry, most recently late Tuesday, placing it in “semi-protection” mode. That meant users couldn’t make changes anonymously or from accounts fewer than four days old – to discourage those drawn to the site specifically because of the broadcast.
The site imposed similar restrictions on the entry twice before, only to see vandalism continue after they were lifted.
. . .
Wikipedia does face vandalism from time to time as a result of high-profile mentions.
Fans of Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” flocked to Wikipedia to alter articles on elephants after he said on the program, “all we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true – for instance, that Africa has more elephants today than it did 10 years ago.”
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In the Fog of Wikiality…
Posted by: | Comments…reality may be a commodity, but a man’s true character will come to the surface.
I first thought to put this in the Zeitgeist but realized I wanted to editorialize a bit… with your kind indulgence, of course.
Wikipedia founder and self-proclaimed “anticredentialist.” Jimmy Wales seems a little touchy about ‘co-founder’ Larry Sanders calling himself a ‘co-founder’. The excerpt below is from an Associated Press article (via Huffington Post) published today. (Emphasis added.)
Sanger Says He Co-Started Wikipedia
The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn’t seem particularly controversial _ Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder.
…
Wales has repeatedly tried to address this – even going so far as editing his own Wikipedia biography to tone down credit for Sanger. Such autobiographical contributions are frowned upon in Wikipedia’s community, and Wales apologized after his changes were noticed and publicized by blogger Rogers Cadenhead in 2005.
In a lengthy instant-message exchange about Citizendium and other topics, Wales raised the subject of Sanger’s role: “When you write this up please do not uncritically repeat Sanger’s absurd claim to be the co-founder of Wikipedia.”
“I know of no one who was there at the company at the beginning who would think it anything other than laughable,” he added.
Yet a few moments later, Wales asserted that he didn’t really care: “I am not bent out of shape about it,” he wrote. “The facts are on my side, which is why I bother so little about it.”
When I read the end of the article – the ‘I don’t really care” attitude , the ‘I don’t bother with that’ description – I was reminded of something I had read before… and I found it here on NFZ, (of course) first published in August of 2006. Here I quote the end of that MTV article (Emphasis added.):
Can Wikipedia Handle Stephen Colbert’s Truthiness?.
…
“It’s fine,” Wales told MTV News. “We have a sense of humor, and if we wanted to, we could figure out if it was really him making the changes. But why bother? We banned the user because of his or her behavior, because they were messing around with some articles and encouraging other people to mess with several articles about elephants.”
Wales wasn’t worried that Colbert’s humorous jabs at Wikipedia — or his coining of the term “Wikiality” — will undermine the site’s goal of one day creating a free, verifiable, worldwide information source. And he said he’d be more than willing to have his administrators unblock the StephenColbert username if the host would just apologize on air.
“We try as hard as we can to make sure every piece of information on the site is backed up by verifiable sources, and if something is under dispute, we remove it until people can provide us with sources,” he said. “Also, I’ve met Stephen, and I know how he is. He likes to have a joke. The one time we met, he told me that we had to fix the article about him on our site, because it said he was married. I said to him, ‘But I thought you were married.’ And he replied, ‘Well, I am, but it disappoints my female fans.’ ”
Well, given Stephen’s uncanny ‘B.S. detector’ and his love of status shift for our, and his, amusement, it now seems apparent to me why he relishes the whole Wikiality campaign. I do not mean to imply that it is meant as a personal attack on Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is ripe for satirical critique on it’s own. But given that Stephen has met Wales and given Wales’ apparently superficial ‘coolness’ it must make Stephen giggle a bit when he thinks of little Jimmy.
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