This is certainly a first:  the Israeli government is holding a worldwide press conference with the public via Twitter in the midst of its war with Hamas.  From Daniel Sieradski at JTA:

In what may be a first for any government the world over, the Consulate General of Israel in New York will be holding a public press conference about the war in Gaza via Twitter. On Tuesday, December 30 during the hours of 1-3 p.m. EST, David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs in New York, will answer questions written in by users of the popular Internet social messaging Web site.To participate, create an account at Twitter.com and compose a message to user israelconsulate, including the keyword #AskIsrael in your tweets. For example: “@israelconsulate How many troops are now on the ground in #Gaza? #AskIsrael.”

When I photographed New York Fashion Week for Wikimedia, there were a few models for whom I had trouble finding their names.

These photos are an illustration of Wikimedia collaboration.  I did not know the names, so I uploaded them to Flickr.  Wikipedia editor  Calliopejen1 over at Flickr found the names, and Commons editor mangostar uploaded and cropped them for use on the Wikipedia articles below their names.  That’s team work!

And the Custo Barcelona designs look fantastic in the photos.

Milagros Schmoll

Milagros Schmoll

Flo Gennaro

Erin Heatherton

Reporter Adam Rose began working on a story about my Wikipedia and Wikinews work earlier this year.  I received word that it is to appear in the January/February issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.  Adam spoke to many people on Wikinews and interviewees such as Gay Talese and Augusten Burroughs.  Even former adversary User:THF.

I have not seen it, and I do not know what the story says, but I am told it will be in both the print and web editions.  Adam was extraordinarily thorough.

I watched an old American Dad Christmas episode with Lisa Kudrow voicing “Michelle” who is the Ghost of Christmas Past.  She takes Stan back to 1970 and Stan doesn’t listen to her and runs off to kill Jane Fonda.  She berates herself for “reaching for the stars” by going for the Christmas Ghost job and that “that’s not stardust on your hands…it’s failure, and it don’t wash off.”  The Kudrow Ghost then laments not sticking with stable Tooth Fairy gigs and not marrying someone named Chad.  (clip below)

The skit begins with a reference that the police were told to stop saying “Christmas Rapist” to refer to an uncaught serial rapist who only comes out that time of year, and instead to call him the “Holiday Rapist”.

I went to the Wikipedia article on the Ghost of Christmas Past to see what it said.  I considered adding this reference to what is a thinly-disguised “Trivia” section, a list of “Appearances in film adaptations” that includes in bullet form:

• In the TV special A Flintstones Christmas Carol, a 1994 animated version, various characters rolled the Ghost.
• In the animated series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Ghost is parodied as the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future, a robot with a penchant of making houses run with elf blood and telling long-winded, incomprehensible stories about the origins of Christmas.
• In the 1988 comedy film Scrooged, the Ghost of Christmas Past is portrayed as a male New York cab driver with a Brooklyn accent.

I decided against adding it.  It’s not that I am against trivia, but I do hesitate to add it wantonly since enough people add it already.  In the end, I was too lazy to find and write a citation for the American Dad add, and I try to never add anything without a reference anymore.

Trivia sections are popularly believed to be disallowed, but that is not true.  Apparently the removal of large swathes of information was cause to add this to the [[WP:TRIVIA]] guideline:

What this guideline is not

There are a number of pervasive misunderstandings about this guideline and the course of action it suggests:

• This guideline does not suggest removing trivia sections, or moving them to the talk page. If information is otherwise suitable, it is better that it be poorly presented than not presented at all.
• This guideline does not suggest always avoiding lists in favor of prose. Some information is better presented in list format.
• This guideline does not suggest the inclusion or exclusion of any information; it only gives style recommendations. Issues of inclusion are addressed by content policies.

Yesterday morning former model and downtown lounge chanteuse Lisa Levy (of Psychotherapy Live! ), Little Man and I were on The People’s Court.  I thought to bring my camera to do photography for Wikipedia, but then decided against it.  I assumed that the use of any recording devices and cameras is verboten.  That doesn’t usually stop me from trying, but I also had Little Man with me and I didn’t want to worry about him, expensive camera equipment and my part on the this reality television show.

The Case – Claire Lieb vs. Waggytail Rescue

Waggytail Rescue is a Chihuahua rescue organization that I fostered and adopted dogs through.  It’s run by one of my best friends, Holly DeRito, who is well known in New York City dog circles for tireless and selfless dedication to saving dogs.  The dogs Waggytail takes in–mostly Chihuahua mixes–are rescued from kill shelters.  There is a flat $250 adoption fee that is a donation.  Waggytail barely makes ends meet. They often cover gargantuan medical bills to get animals to a point where they are healthy and can be adopted.  One 14 pound dog I fostered had been raped anally by a man.  Kill shelters don’t take care of these kinds of medical bills; they just kill the dog.

The dogs are traumatized if not by abuse, then certainly by the experience at the shelter, which reeks of death and sounds of anguish to a dog. When a person adopts a dog, it is not a commercial transaction.  Most people get this.

Claire Lieb adopted Waggytail dog Chiquita, and signed an adoption agreement with short, easy to understand representations.  One stipulated she was making a donation, not buying a dog.  A dog rescue is a place people go to find a pet that somebody else hurt, didn’t love or irretrievably lost.  Ms. Lieb and Chiquita didn’t work out, so two weeks later Ms. Lieb returned the dog.  Waggytail offered to help find a new dog, but Ms. Lieb apparently discovered a “free” dog through a friend and so she wanted her donation back.  Waggytail refused; Ms. Lieb sued.

The People’s Court scene

Ms. Lieb was a sight to behold.  I would not have been surprised if she didn’t make it through the night.  Her ill-fitting wig was gray and bulbous, like a hair hat.  The crackling sparkle of the polyester was jarringly juxtaposed atop a face so chaotically caked with make-up that it didn’t look as if Ms. Lieb applied it, but instead fell face-first into it.  The woman she was accompanied with, though, wore none and had the figure of a hockey player.

The most fascinating part of this Anthropology project was her eye-make up.  Large swathes both under and over each eye, as if she had taken 1960′s robin’s egg blue eye shadow on the her index finger and thumb and then rubbed at her eyes to smash the make-up into her face.  At one point when she looked up quickly, angered, she resembled a celestial baglady raccoon.

Ms. Lieb was also not the only Lady of the People’s Court with an ill-fitting wig. It was a great discovery:  People still wear wigs!   It was awesome!

Lisa Levy, who is heavily involved in Waggytail, had Holly’s Power of Attorney and represented our side.  Little Man was there as a Waggytail dog on behalf of Chiquita (the dog Claire Lieb did not want).  I was a witness, but there was no need to call me to testify about the adoption process.  It was an open-and-shut case:  you can’t expect to receive a charitable donation back.  A dog rescue is not a commercial enterprise.

The one dramatic episode in our case was that we didn’t have the signed adoption agreement that she signed – it was at Holly’s mother’s house in Pennsylvania where she stored Waggytail records last month, not thinking she would need any of them urgently.  So Judge Marilyn Milian was angry about that.  She even called a recess!

When we went back, I told Lisa we have to give them some more theater.  “Give them some crazy” and “think Ricki Lake” and “nobody’s watching daytime TV”.  It’s supposed to be entertainment as well as arbitration.  So Lisa went back and started bang-bang-banging her hand on the podium when she spoke with an emotionally shaky voice!  It was excellent.  Judge Marilyn told her to “take it down a notch.”  It was great.

People in the audience were asking whether Little Man is available for adoption.  And the bailiff, Douglas Macintosh was really hot.

Here’s reader mail -

Dear Mr. Shankbone,
I saw a photo that you posted on Wikipedia of a man in an A shirt (tank top):
Man in A Shirt at Brooklyn Book Festival
I wanted to respond that he might be the most attractive man i have ever seen; perhaps he and i should marry (in a state or country where that’s legal).
I don’t know if you have his contact information or if he’s even interested in men (or more specifically me), but if you could possibly forward him my contact information, i’d be most appreciative. If we do get married, I will be sure to invite you.
Thank you so much for your time. keep up the good work.

Response:  Unfortunately, I don’t know who that person is and whether he’d marry another man, but I understand how you feel.

It might seem stranger than a FedEx from the grave, but it is just as true.  In a move likely to add to the horror film genre that has given us Body Parts, Frankenstein and The Eye, the Cleveland Clinic announced today that it had replaced the face of one woman with the face of another woman who had died three weeks ago.  Would you consider donating your face for someone else to use?  Here is the history of the face transplant from The New York Times:

In November 2005, a team in Amiens, France, performed the first partial face transplant. The recipient, Isabelle Dinoire, then 38, was seriously disfigured when her Labrador retriever mauled her. The surgeons grafted a nose, lips and chin from a donor who had been declared brain dead.

In a published report in December 2007, Ms. Dinoire’s doctors said she was satisfied with the aesthetic result. She has spoken in a news conference.

In 2006, Chinese doctors did a partial face transplant on a farmer who lost much of the right side of his face in a bear attack.

In 2007, a French team performed the third partial facial transplant, on a 29-year-old man. His face had been disfigured by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that causes tumors to grow in tissues around nerves.

The revision history of the “Face transplant” Wikipedia article has only recently started to heat up.

Wikipedia, what most people know as Wikipedia, in reality is a universe of websites that span the globe in almost every language. It includes a university, a news service, dictionary, creative commons media repository, et al.

The one website that links all of these together is Meta-Wiki. It is where issues common amongst  the projects are discussed, chapters are formed and guidelines are suggested. Not many people go to Meta, at least compared to Wikipedia or Commons, because it is largely organizational and informational.

Perhaps the most interesting guideline on Meta is the “List of articles every Wikipedia should have” – all 253 language editions.

The list covers everything—actors, ancient history, society, law, animals, chemistry, physics, technology, food, math, et al.—that a basic Wikipedia should have. I looked at countries. In December 2005 there was a glaring omission – there was no list for priority country articles.  Understandably, nobody wanted to offend:

Screenshot:  In December 2005, unlike every other topic, the list recommended “all countries”

But on April 13, 2006, editor Silence proposed this change:

One of the most glaring deficiencies for this page is its complete lack of any recommendations on which countries to have articles for. All it has is a lame cop-out, making the unreasonable and completely unhelpful demand that every Wikipedia have an article on every country, with absolutely no differentiation or prioritization between whether we need an article on India or on Swaziland first. This is both absurd and highly impractical. -Silence 07:02, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Silence proposed a working draft list, and the criteria for selection focused on quantitative analysis such as “largest” “greatest” and “highest” population, geography, development index or other measurement.  By December 2006 the editors of Wikipedia had determined that out of 194 countries, there were 39 “more high-priority countries”.    At the end of 2007 the list had increased to 49 countries.  So now, as of December 2008, here are…

Wikipedia’s 48 More High-Priority Countries
(the ones that, at the minimum, every Wikipedia in any language should have articles about)

Sub-Saharan Africa

Democratic Republic of the Congo
Ethiopia
Nigeria
South Africa
Sudan
Tanzania

Asia

Bangladesh
People’s Republic of China
India
Japan
Pakistan
South Korea
Thailand
Vietnam

Europe

Austria
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Poland
Russia
Portugal
Spain
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Vatican City

North Africa/Middle East

Afghanistan
Algeria
Egypt
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates

North America

Canada
Mexico
United States

South America/
Central America/Carribean

Argentina
Brazil
Venezuela
Cuba

Oceania

Australia
Indonesia
New Zealand

Al-Baghdadia TV is an independent Iraqi-owned^[1] Arabic-language satellite channel based in Cairo, Egypt. It is considered a moderate Sunni channel.^[2] During the Iraqi insurgency several prominent journalists with the station were murdered.^[3] Recently, the station became known as the employer of Muntadhar al Zaidi, who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a press conference in December 2008.^[4]

That is the lede of the article about the Arabic satellite channel Al Baghdadia TV that I spent the last day researching.  I was fruitless in my search for some basic information when I went to write its Wikipedia article.  Such as: who owns it?  When was it founded?  How is it financed?  Basic information is very difficult to come by on the Iraqi and Arab media.

In trying to research an article like this, it becomes jarringly apparent how little the British, American and Australian media have covered Iraqi institutions, particularly its informational institutions.  It’s ridiculous.  We’ve been fighting two wars in this region since 2002, and I can’t even find out who owns and finances a television station that sends a reporter to be in a stone’s throw of the U.S. President.  We’ve done such a poor job in learning anything about these people, this society and this region.  Here are a few statements from June 2008 on a blog called Talisman Gate that I can’t use on Wikipedia, but  that are interesting as conjecture:

.…Al-Baghdadia (isn’t this Saleh al-Mutlaq‘s outfit?). While ‘Baghdad’ is the IIP’s, right?

[....]

There hasn’t been a serious study on how these two dozen Iraqi satellite stations and the hundreds of newspapers in Baghdad are getting their funding. I think we’ll find money trails going all over the world when such a study emerges.” -Nibras Kazimi

Nibras was just a commenter on the Talisman Gate blog, so I don’t know how knowledgeable he is.

In what will surely be the definitional final moment of the George W. Bush administration, an Iraqi journalist threw both his shoes–one right after the other–at Bush during his indoor press conference in Baghdad.  Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki made a halfhearted attempt to block the second shoe, or he was stretching.  Is there a more contemptuous symbol than that?   For a journalist to do that is the symbolic equivalent of giving the President a kick in the ass as he is being thrown out of the club.  The visit was a complete surprise, and the reporters likely did not know whom they were to cover.  So this was not plotted; it was a random act of contempt.

According to The Times:

Two of the worst insults in Islam feature dogs and shoes. After Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, onlookers beat the statue’s face with their soles.

The Iraqi journalist who took aim at Mr Bush yesterday while calling him a dog combined both at one stroke. Muntazer al-Zaidi, who works for the Cairo-based al-Baghdadia channel, sat patiently in the third row of seats in the Prime Minister’s Office, waiting for his moment.

That guy had good aim, and Bush has good reflexes.  Here’s the video:

Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>