My Wikipedia Prank

My Wikipedia spam lasted 20 days.

My strategy: I posted on the List of Awareness Ribbons page on Wikipedia on the 18 September 2007. I suggested that wearing the green and blue ribbon was a symbol of support to people with ‘centophobic tendencies’. I referenced this fact with a link to http://www.centophobia.com/fromprank/.

This sneaky addition was removed on the morning of 8 October; 20 days later. My prank was quite clearly spam and yet it still remained for 20 days. While the List of Awareness Ribbons page isn’t necessarily a hugely popular page, you would wonder how long it would take for less obvious changes to be corrected. I just hope no school children (or from my experience, university students) were reading this article during this time period.

Why did I do it? Because I wanted to know how efficient Wikipedia is. Tell me about your experience with Wikipedia. Do you love it?

Last.fm, 30boxes, Jaiku etc.

So I have been joining a heap of social networking sites lately (I don’t know why I bother, no one ever visits me).  One of these sites was Last.fm. It has probably been around for ages but I just discovered it. It listens (scrobbles) the music you play on your computer and then matches you with other people who have the same musical tastes. Great idea, because unlike other web-radio-station-things, it doesn’t mean you have to be streaming songs off the internet for it to recognize them. The interesting thing is that on many social networking sites you gain ‘credibility’ or coolness or whatever on how many friends you have or how many posts or comments you make.

However Last.fm is different. You get ‘credibility’ by listening to more music. Which is super great!

I’m weird!

I also joined twitter and 30boxes a while ago but the 30boxes sites has been down because of traffic and the Twitter IM thing is never online to IM so that is helpful. Anyway I discovered Jaiku > Basically the same as Twitter except different.

This is a really crap post but I have to keep my public entertained! I only have three assignments to go before the end of semester, so hang in there! Please forgive me.

Four Corners: You only live twice

I have heard about this ground breaking internet community and have studied virtual communities at university, however the story on Four Corners last night did reveal issues that I had never thought about, including:

• How would a virtual Stock Exchange work within Second Life? However later I also thought that the real world stock exchange is pretty much virtual anyway - people buy and sell shares of a company, which give them no say about how the company is run and they don’t see any profit from the company (unless dividends are paid).
• I had also never thought about the law and order problems - Do laws exist in the virtual world? Are real world laws applied to the virtual world or are laws only defined by the EULA? Should real world police enforce laws within Second Life or should the game developers cover the cost?

In the next few months and years more people will be entering virtual worlds and you would think that crime would follow. Do you agree with this - would people in a virtual world commit crimes? Why?