My thoughts on the Wikimedia projects

The way they put it: "The goals of the foundation are to maintain and develop free-content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."

I see Wikimedia as an effort to break away from the commercialisation. The short hand: if we don't to end up like Jennifer Government, we'll have to realise sooner or later that information is not one of those material things we can own and sell. If a person wants to know something, I believe he/she has the fundamental right to be able to find out. In that point, the advent of internet has done much, but not enough. What Wikimedia does, is nothing short of the encyclopedia galactica from Asimov's Foundation series. I am proud to be a contributor (although I'm showing signs of addiction). Also, I'm glad to be a contributor to Wikinews. The fun thing about new wiki's is that you're not one annonimous user amongst many. That's why I lost interest in Memory Alpha: it was getting to big. In Wikinews, an article you create is prominently featured on the Main page. Which means it gets a lot of attention, which means your work gets checked by a lot of people, also a good factor. Anyhow: I recommend Wikimedia to the world and see it as the intellectual's obligation to be a member on at least one of these wiki's and contribute all the knowledge he/she posseses!

Wikinews

Well, I've found a new project to keep myself busy. Wikinews, a sisterproject of Wikipedia, is a Public Domain news source, and in the wiki philosophy, open for editing and adding for everyone. Now I just need to find some news to report...

Contact Disrupted

The other day I was walking down the street, when I saw a car parked halfway across the pavement. An elderly couple was approaching from the other side, so i stopped and let them pass first. Then the man says: "Bedankt, gij zijt een heer.", which is slightly old-fashioned Dutch for "Thank you, you're a gentleman." I went back to school smiling the whole way. So I wandered: how come nobody really pays compliments anymore. I so very seldomly hear someone compliment someone else, escpecially strangers. Here's my theory why this is: paying someone a compliment because of something he does either puts you in a possition where you owe him something (when he or she lets you pass first, for instance), or it makes him or her temporarely superior to yourself, as you haven't done anything worthy of praise. But most of all, you don't have reason to expect the other to respond in kind. And after all, in this individualistic, post-modern age we all function on the do-ut-des principle. The only sollution I can think of, is a rather silly one, but it may just be silly enough to work: when someone pays a compliment to someone else, this is an action worthy of praise. in other words: when someone compliments you, you compliment him or her for complimenting you. (This goes up once, or we'd be stuck in a visicious circle.) How's that?