Wikimedia Scholarship 2009-2010 Posted Sun, 27 Jun 2010

Folks at last year's Wikimania may remember the presentation I gave there. It was essentially a literature review of Wikipedia and Wikimedia scholarship from the previous year. The idea was to give a bird's-eye-view as well a series of highlights -- all aimed at Wikimedians.

Apparently somebody found it useful because I've been asked to do it again! I'm going to be paired up in a longer session with Felipe Ortega -- whose excellent dissertation I summarized as part of my talk last year -- and Mayo Fuster Morell has also agreed to help out. Felipe is program chair for WikiSym this year and will be focusing on providing folks with a summary of the papers published at that conference. It will be held immediately before Wikimania in Gdansk. For my part, I'm going to be focusing more broadly and talking about papers published, well, anywhere else.

And this is where you come in!

With search engines and all, I've got a pretty good idea of breadth of the work that's out there. I also "just know" stuff from my own areas of interest and study. That said, I don't have as strong of an idea of what's good and what's relevant beyond what I can grok from citation counts. And after one year (or less!), that's clearly not very much information.

As a result, I'm looking for suggestions or recommendations from anybody on interesting, useful, important, or otherwise noteworthy scholarly papers on or about Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects published in the last year. Feel free to leave a comment, email mako@atdot.cc, or edit this page.

"Lance!" Posted Fri, 25 Jun 2010

On probably a dozen occasions, I've had people in cars taunt me by yelling some version of "Lance!", "Hey Lance!" or "Go Lance!" at me while I am riding my bike. It seems to be particularly likely if I'm wearing spandex.

Indeed, the "verb" to Lance has an Urban Dictionary entry and there is a Facebook group for Yelling "Hey Lance!" when you see someone riding their bike.

My friend Seth pointed out -- after we were (collectively?) called "Lance" in California -- that it's pretty strange to insult somebody by comparing them to a man who is nearly guaranteed to be on any list of greatest living athletes, in any sport.