This website receives an average of 800 to 1,000 article reads a day.  On days when I have a particularly interesting story, such as the Stefan de Rothschild Huffington Post hoax, it jumps to near 10,000 hits; whereas during periods of inactivity and neglect, it plummets to around 250.

Where does the traffic come from?  The answer is: not Wikipedia.

From the lead photo on Madonna’s article to that on the Dead Sea, my photography illustrates over 4,000 subjects on the English Wikipedia alone (far higher if you count all global Wikimedia projects).  On each of those photos are links back to this website.

And while Wikipedia is one of the 10 most-visited websites in the world, the reality is that it provides very little traffic to here.

I’ve run this blog since 2008 and I’ve long known that Wikipedia’s ability to drive traffic is relatively limited, at least when it comes to the author links on imagery.  In fact, the Google Analytics for my website tell me that Wikipedia is responsible for only 7% of all my traffic, despite having some very high profile photographs on the site.

As an illustration, yesterday, February 14, my photograph of Salman Rushdie was featured on the main page of the English Wikipedia for their “On this day…” factoid box:

1989 – A fatwa was issued for the execution of Salman Rushdie (pictured) for authoring The Satanic Verses, a novel Islamic fundamentalists considered blasphemous.

Wikipedia’s home page is one of the most viewed Internet pages in the history of the Internet; yesterday it received 4.4M hits.  Placement on this page immediately brings a wealth of visitors to the subject articles presented. Whereas Salman Rushdie’s Wikipedia biography typically receives 2.5K hits on an average day, Rushdie’s biography yesterday skyrocketed six times that number to 16.3K hits.

What about my portrait of Rushdie that also made its way on to this highly visible piece of web property? The photo on the article is hit–as in a person clicks on the image itself to make it larger–an average of 25 times a day on English Wikipedia. On February 14, the cropped version on Wikipedia’s home page caused that number to jump to 7,000.

How many of those 7,000 hits then went to explore the author of the photograph’s website?  Two (2).

The lesson is that if, like me, you are an artist who cares more about having his work seen, there are few better public places than Wikipedia as long as you are willing to be loose with the copyright.  But if you are reading Chris Silver Smith’s blog post about the “powerful” effect of traffic to your website via Wikipedia photography, I can attest that I have seen very little of such an effect.

In contrast, Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic writing two short blog posts–Stefan de Rothschild and Susan Sarandon doesn’t know what Wikipedia is–brought tens of thousands of hits.  Sullivan drives more traffic than Wikipedia.

I took this early in my photography, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, two months before I bought my Olympus.  It’s the stage that is shared by both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.  I had a cheap Panasonic, but a guy who I had fallen in love with once offered to show me around because he had access to what was then the New York State Theater.  I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, so I used what I had, but it still came out decent enough.  I believe this is my one and only panoramic shot.

Man, I had to go to the ballet a lot when we dated, because he had been a ballet dancer and I thought I should give it a try but after two I was burned out.  Nobody can tell me I don’t have a right not to like Balanchine, as it was his anniversary season so every show was Balanchine.  I’m sure he’s great, but I learned ballet is not my thing.  Particularly as I associated it with this guy.

Two years before on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was one of the most miserable moments of my life, and he had a good bit to do with it; that and MacroCat prematurely dying on that day as law school exams loomed.

I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year after he left to work in Europe, and in that time I had finally forgiven him for the lies and betrayals, forgiven him enough that I pined for that in-love feeling I had felt.  We tried to make a go of it again for about a month, but whatever we had was lost.  Worse, discovering new indiscretions and trying to remember what I had even seen in him cheapened what had been a proud bittersweet memory.

The photo I took that day of a ballerina working with her coach in the empty theater is used on 143 pages on 31 Wikimedia projects around the world.

A guy that the Huffington Post claims is part of the famed Rothschild family is actually an impostor.

Apparently, all it takes to blog there is to claim a pedigree and build a bunch of fake websites with Moonfruit: check out HuffPo’s “Stefan de Rothschild“.

All of the websites used to bolster his credibility were created by the same guy, and all are hosted by the do-it-yourself Moonfruit:

rothschildarts.org=146.101.249.107
rothschild-estates.com=146.101.249.107
rothschildglobalfoundation.org=146.101.249.107
www.moonfruit.com=146.101.249.107

None of those organizations actually exist (try Googling them with quotes).

Who is the guy who created them?  He used to go by Stefan Roberts, who has a website at stefanroberts.com.  If you look at the photo and layout, it’s the same as stefanderothschild.com

The Huffington Post was contacted by members of the Wikipedia Review, who caught on when Wikipedia was continually deleting the fake biographies of both Stefan Roberts and Stefan de Rothschild, and also Stefan’s fake father “Andrew de Rothschild” (here’s that discussion – worth a read).  However, HuffPo still has him up.

So much for the future of journalism – HuffPo is helping this scam artist, who appears to be soliciting donations through them:

Here is their (still live as of publication) biography of “Baron Stefan de Rothschild”:

Pretty comical; even by his own admission Stefan was born in 1992, which makes the claim he is a “leading voice” about anything pretty ridiculous.  Anyone who has only read a magazine article about the Rothschilds knows 1) they wouldn’t put a teenager in charge of so many businesses; and 2) they are far more private than this kid, who practically begs people to e-mail him.  Here’s the other HuffPo profile of Stefan Roberts, who has written a non-existent book:

I can’t wait to read his book on how to be liberal on some issues, and conservative on others.  Even though that describes the majority of voters, we’d all like to learn how to do it properly.

Pretty much everything about this guy is fake – but hey, now you have Huffington Post helping it (even Wikipedia didn’t fall for this).

Check out Stefan Roberts fake biography when he wanted to be known as His Excellency Lord Stefan Roberts of Jersey.

If you go to StefandeRothschild.com, you come across this opening shot:

Now here’s Stefan Roberts, same outfit, just slightly different pose:

It’s my understanding that the Rothschilds (the real ones) have been alerted.

So to those victims in Haiti that “Rothschild Estates” claims it is giving $2.5M and that the Washington Post reported about?  Don’t expect to see it.  Here’s Stefan lecturing Huffington Post readers from his column “Since When Was There a Minimum Donation Amount?” (with 130 comments):

The Huffington Post’s coverage of the corporate world’s reaction to the terrible earthquake in Haiti last week has prompted a ludicrous and frankly reprehensible reaction from HuffPost readers – many of whom seem to think that businesses should have some kind of minimum donation amount.

I am on the board of a company which donated $2.5 million to the relief effort, and I am very pleased that we have made such a commitment. We donate over $50 million to charitable causes around the world every year. But these are planned and executed after months of extensive research and assessment to ensure that the money will get into the right hands.

Arianna is not going to like this one bit (now will somebody please tell her).

Update 2/1-A:  The editors of Wikipedia contacted the Rothschild Foundation, which responded:

The Rothschild Foundation replied “Thanks for your message – it has been passed it [sic] on to the relevant authorities.” It will be interesting now to see if Stefan’s fake sites suddenly disappear. JohnCD (talk) 10:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

But he’s still up at Huffington Post!

Update 2/1-B:  Baron de Scamchild is being revealed, and everyone wonders how HuffPo *still* has his blogs up:

• Felix Salmon @Reuters
• Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish
• Gawker/Valleywag: How a Layabout Used the Huffington Post to Become a Rothschild

Update 2/1-C:  Around 5:30 pm EST Huffington Post *finally* removes the “Stefan de Rothschild” and Stefan Roberts blogs; it only took all the blogging above to get them to do it.  Let’s face it: their brand is hurt.  Here’s the message on the now deleted blogs:

Editor’s Note: On February 1st, it came to our attention that this blogger had misrepresented himself and was blogging under a false identity, part of an elaborate online hoax. As a result, his work will no longer be published on HuffPost, and his previous pieces have been removed.

Update 2/1-D: Stefan took down his fake websites sometime around 7:30 p.m EST, but since he has been doing this since 2005 and his StefanRoberts.com website is still up, I imagine this ethically-challenged young man will scam again.  Seek help, Stefan.  Maybe it runs in the family: apparently dad Andrew Roberts  (“Andrew de Rotshchild”) had a fake investment group called Roberts Investments Group (see that whole mess here).

My Creative Commons photography for Wikimedia is one of the most personally rewarding things that I have done in my life, and I knew that it would be a continuous gift when I gave it all away.  Here’s one example.

Time Out New York was my main magazine–almost my bible–to learn about free events going on in NYC with notable people where I could go photograph them. One of Time Out’s graphic artists, Rob Kelly, turned one of these photos into art for the magazine for an interview with Mariah Carey.

I chanced upon the photograph because I have a subscription to TONY, and what a thrill it was to recognize an excellent derivative of my own work in a magazine that was indispensable to the project that created that very image.

I was flipping through Wikipedia when I hit the article Writings of D.M. Murdock. It stuck out.  It’s an odd title, and there is no Wikipedia article about D.M. Murdock herself.  Murdock, under her pen name Acharya S, had a biography for years; however, she has been at the heart of a controversy fundamental to Western civilization: was Jesus real?  If any topic can bring detractors, it’s the very suggestion of it.

According to her site, she has a degree in Classics from Franklin and Marshall College and attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Murdock/Acharya has to date written five scholarly books that argue Jesus Christ is a myth, beginning with The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Subsequent books delve further into explaining how the story of Christ was recycled from other mythologies, and they address criticism about her or her research, which she stands by.

From Writings of D.M. Murdock:

Acharya describes the New Testament as a work of mythic fiction within a historical setting. The story of Christ, she maintains, is a retelling of various pagan myths, representing “astrotheology,” or the story of the Sun and also incorporates the science of archaeoastronomy. She asserts the pagans understood the stories to be myths, but Christians obliterated evidence to the contrary by destroying and controlling literature when they attained control of the Roman Empire, which led to widespread illiteracy in the ancient world, ensuring the mythical nature of Christ’s story was hidden.

She argues that the canonical gospels represent a middle to late 2nd-century CE creation utilizing Old Testament “prophetic” scriptures as a blueprint, in combination with a collage of other, older Pagan and Jewish concepts, and that Christianity was thereby fabricated in order to compete with the other popular religions of the time.

Murdock continues to write a column as Freethought Examiner.  Below are five questions for her.

Five Questions: Different people, same questions

Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?

A. Every American should know that they are protected by the greatest Constitution the world has so far created and that their freedoms must not be taken for granted but must be fought for. As American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson was reputed to say, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A. I have a big soft spot for ancient Greece, and I would have loved to have been active in the creation of the classical Greek civilization. It would have been amazing to be in ancient Egypt as well. As concerns modern countries, New Zealand would be lovely, I imagine. Everyone loves New Zealanders. I rather like India as well. There are many fascinating cultures and places on planet Earth.

Q. What is one misconception people have about you?

A. Many people think I am an atheist or anti-religious. I do not label myself either an atheist or a theist, and I have a tremendous appreciation for religion, so long as its meaning and origins are understood. Unfortunately, very few people are truly aware of the roots of religious ideology, so what we see manifested is often the pathology of religion, and that is all I am really criticizing. The rest of my work is designed to show the great beauty of human culture dating back thousands of years.

Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A. The profundity of how my mother’s death affected me was not surprising. The most surprising sense of loss, probably, was over the death of Princess Diana. Although I liked what I knew about her before her death, I was under the false impression that she was somewhat shallow and superficial. It occurred to me after she was killed just how deep and caring a human being she was. Diana was extremely innocent and trusting; yet, she was also incredibly powerful and had been born into a world-changing role. Amazing woman, really. Her death was the end of the glamour age for royalty. I hoped that the massive globally mourning would have pulled people together, but it seems not at all. I hate to think that her life and death were for nothing. Ditto with my mom and every individual who has contributed light and love to planet Earth.

Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A. LOL! Of course, I have had many disappointments in life. It’s an ongoing thing. We try not to be negative, so instead we set high hopes and positive wishes; yet, the reality frequently shortchanges our desired outcome. That’s how life is. Thus, in order to keep that zest for life alive, we must look to smaller pleasures for a sense of excitement and accomplishment, while relishing that occasional grand achievement we may be fortunate to attain.

Every year as winter approaches, I notice a change in my dog Little Man’s personality. At eight pounds, he is a small guy in a big city and he has known nothing else but this city his whole life. That is, except for travels to my sister’s in New Jersey and our month out in Colorado, New York City to him is nature.

Yet every November to December he begins his winter depression.

Little Man is known in some Wikipedia circles. He has accompanied me on the New York City Wikimedia picnics, and he also illustrates a few articles. You can see him playing fetch on the campus of Colorado College on the article about fetching; he is being cradled by Ingrid Newkirk, the President of PETA, on her wiki biography; overlooking the city skyline on the roof of my apartment with fat activist/Big Beautiful Woman Kira Nerusskaya (photo, right, from a Wikinews interview); on a platform waiting for a train on a subway station article; on the Chihuahua page he is illustrating the aggression for which the breed is stereotyped (the story behind the shot is here); and on animal communication he is demonstrating the desire to protect a bone.

He used to illustrate evolution and selective genetics in this photo of him (and his friend Paco) next to a couple of Great Danes; although the image no longer illustrates artificial selection in English, it still does in Portuguese.

He appeared on the People’s Court in defense of a dog rescue.  Two elderly neighbors have keys to my apartment so that they can take him for company when I’m at work during the day.  He is not yippy, but a brawny little bruiser with swagger and lots of heart.  He is much loved in my neck of the woods.  I last blogged about him when he was in a rivalry with my sister’s dog Riley in Colorado.

At eight pounds, he loves heat almost to an extreme.  No matter how piping hot the fresh-from-the-dryer laundry is, he burrows into it like a mole.  If the radiator is wheezing, he sits on the shelf over it.  Summer makes him happy, but fall makes him…confused.

He sits inside the apartment at the window, and the sun through the pane makes him think it is so warm outside, just like in July.  So he begs and begs and begs.  He becomes restless if I don’t take him out.  I relent, knowing the moment he steps outside the brisk front door of the building, his ears will go down and he’ll immediately sit to show he won’t move until we turn around.

We go through a month of this before it sinks in: no more sunshine and squirrels to chase through the leafy grass.  It’s winter, and it’s cold.

In December, Little Man falls into discontent.  He no longer yearns to go outside, but he stirs.  He doesn’t know what he wants but he knows he is bored in the apartment.  Playing with me only takes an hour.  He wants to see what is happening on the block!  He wants to patrol.  Yet, not in this weather.

So as the snow falls, so does Little Man, staring from his shelf at the window that sits atop the steam radiator warming his stomach through the wood.  Wondering, when will it be comfortable to search for the squirrels through the leaves?

Until that time arrives again–if it arrives again, he frets–he cloisters in caves of blankets.

Andrew Dalby, historian, librarian and the author of The World and Wikipedia (read review here) takes time out of his day to answer five questions…

(post continues below)

Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?

A. Who am I, a mere Englishman, to prescribe what every American should know? Never mind. This will work for Britons as well as Americans. “1. Keep your head down and push.” But push gently. “2. Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too fucking much.” (John Wayne’s advice to Michael Caine.) Britons and Americans may possibly make a contribution to keeping humanity alive, but we’ll need to keep our heads down, push gently, and not say too much.

Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A. I’ve never thought about that one. I don’t feel that nationality matters much to me. Greek, perhaps. I like the way Greeks talk — endlessly, seriously, fiercely. I like the way they eat and entertain.

Q. What is one misconception people have about you?

A. When I was employed (I worked as a librarian) my employers used to believe they knew what I thought. One or two of them used to tell me what I thought. They never got it right; they never even got near.

Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A. My father. It’s an obvious thing to say. But before I left home to go to university I seemed to spend all my time arguing with him. After that, I don’t believe we quarrelled even once; but after that, as it happened, I never lived at home for very long. It was obvious that the arguing had been a waste of our time, but there were never enough opportunities to share life and talk sensibly.

Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A. That’s a difficult one. Plenty of unachieved goals, naturally. And goals not yet achieved — e.g. books still waiting to be written. But you’re asking about goals that, once achieved, didn’t seem so good …

Ah, well, there was that episode two years ago when we decided to make wine. We put a lot of time and effort into it. We did make wine, within the dictionary meaning of the word: it started out as grape juice, it fermented, the sugar turned to alcohol, it was just about possible to drink it. “Is that all there is?” is exactly what we said to ourselves.

FIVE QUESTIONS – A SERIES

• Jeff Kreisler – award-winning comedian, author and sardonic scourge of Wall Street…I have five questions for you.
• Gerald Posner – Bane of Kennedy conspiracy theorists, white shoe lawyer, Chief Investigative Reporter for The Daily Beast…I have five questions for you.
• Bebe Buell – Artist, musician, scenester and lover; mother of Liv Tyler; embodiment of a rock era…I have five questions for you.
• Evan Wolfson – founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
• Jimmy Wales – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• Billy Name – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

Andrew Dalby’s The World and Wikipedia stands as one of the best chronicles to come from an active member of the site’s editing community because it is not a how-to manual, but an historical and philosophical overview.   His authority in writing such a book does not derive solely from his extensive involvement with the Internet; but also as a classic historian and librarian of the highest caliber.  From Wikipedia:

Dalby studied Latin, French and Greek at the Bristol Grammar School and University of Cambridge. Here he also studied Romance languages and linguistics, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1970.

Dalby worked for fifteen years at Cambridge University Library, eventually specializing in Southern Asia.

After his time at Cambridge, Dalby worked in London helping to start the library at Regent’s College and on renovating another library at London House (Goodenough College). He also served as Honorary Librarian of the Institute of Linguists, for whose journal The Linguist he writes a regular column. He later did a part-time Ph.D. in ancient history (in 1987-93), which improved his Latin and Greek. His Dictionary of Languages was published in 1998. Language In Danger, on the extinction of languages and the threatened monolingual future, followed in 2002.

With that pedigree and active involvement in Wikipedia projects in several languages, Dalby’s voice is an authoritatively neutral view on the birth, life, inner politics and future of the site.

A comprehensive resource

When you open a non-fiction book on a topic that you know a good deal about, it is interesting to immediately flip to the index.  There you can look for names and issues that show how well the author understood the subject.

Dalby uses two indexes: one that documents real life issues and people; and a second index of editor names.   The editor index is important as those are the people writing the site and making the arguments.  Hundreds of editors are documented for their effect on the site.  Antandrus, ChildofMidnight, Diderot, J.delanoy, Sceptre, Raul654, Steven Walling, SlimVirgin….Dalby’s index is practically a social register.

Particularly interesting are his insights into the conflicts on the non-English projects (especially the French).  The stories show English readers and writers of Wikipedia that they are not alone in trying to figure out how to handle “The Truth”.

Humanity’s flawed attempts to understand reality are illuminated often in the book, including a well-known example written by Bill Gates about Microsoft’s effort to produce Encarta:

The Bill Gates article had begun with a simple question.  ‘Did Thomas Edison invent the incandescent light bulb, or was it Sir Joseph Swam?’  This was followed by the admission that while the US version of Encarta credited Edison alone and did not even mention Swan, the British version had an additional entry on Swan and gave him equal credit.

[....]

The Microsoft editorial teams had developed their subjective approach to reality while localizing Encarta for various national markets around the world.  The Gates article then explored a second example of the same subjectivity:  did the Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone, or was it the Italian-American Antonio Meucci?  To McHenry’s horror, the article announced that while Bell was given the credit in other versions of Encarta, the Italian version, then in preparation, would emphasise Meucci’s work, adding only that, ‘in 1876 another inventor, A.G. Bell, patented a similar device.’

[....]

To give credit where it’s due, the Gates piece already foresaw that problems would arise when the different national versions of Encarta were all available online and people noticed that they were being fed different versions of reality.  No solution was proposed.

Robert McHenry, the aforementioned editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica at the time, criticized this openly:

How do the Encarta editors propose to deal with real conflicts? I have to wonder. How will they deal with the status and borders of Jammu and Kashmir? Will they prepare different versions for Greece and Turkey, treating Cyprus differently? For Greece and Macedonia, the former version making no reference to the latter state? For Britain and Argentina (remember the Falklands/Malvinas War)? For Israel and Syria? For Spanish-speaking and Basque-speaking Spain? For New York and New Jersey?

The same problems that confront editors of Wikipedia.

For the first time ever, humans from all walks of life are engaged not just in information consumption, but information analysis and composition.  Critics of Wikipedia often decry how it attempts to deal with problems like the Encarta example that have always existed.  There is no “The Truth”; there is no “reality” – there are only conceptions about it.

It’s fundamentally frustrating for people who were raised to trust whatever they found in their paper textbooks, paper encyclopedias and paper newspapers to now learn that what they learned were “best guesses” and often tainted by concerns other than the truth (sorry, Andrew Keen).

Much of the criticism of Wikipedia and its consensus decision-making and its perceived inaccuracy arises from an idealized time that never existed.  “Experts” disagree, or have agendas.  In this regard, the historian Dalby points out that Wikipedia has been a vast improvement on information gathering and analysis:

On Wikipedia not only do the proponents of different ‘realities’ argue them out publicly; in addition, Wikipedia has set its face firmly against national editions; and in addition to that, every reader can immediately compare what the different language versions have to say on any issues and what the different talk pages have had to say about it.

The challenges in writing about Wikipedia

The primary problem with Dalby’s book is not the writing nor the knowledge, but its presentation in the Siduri Books first edition.

The reader is faced with pages and pages of monotonous blocks of text roughly equal in length. Instead of structuring paragraphs so that they visually jump and come alive on the page, the aesthetic impact instead made my eyes sleepy.  When I first opened it, I found it difficult to enjoy until I hit Chapter 3 (“Why they hate it“).

Dalby handles another problem better than most:  Wikipedia’s labyrinthine rules and complex standards are a gauntlet to articulate.  They can easily distract any writer who does not want to examine processes, but focus on the meat of the issues.

On Wikipedia, the two are often inextricably linked, which can be a bore for most readers.

World admirably attempts to craft a narrative that is not weighed down by the site’s rules with the recognition that they can’t be ignored.  However, the sweet spot of writing Wikipedia narrative to make it interesting for non-Wikipedians remains elusive.  It may be an impossible task.

One solution Dalby used to differentiate between the real-life issues of an article subject and the issues pertinent to that subject’s Wikipedia article is to bold the article names.  For instance, Dalby spends a good deal of time on the recent controversies that involved David Boothroyd, the English politician who edited as Sam Blacketer; which are somewhat different issues than those that surrounded the now-deleted article David Boothroyd.

At first a minor bother, I came to forgive the boldface as an efficient method of differentiation.

Default to keep when no consensus to delete

Dalby’s background as an historian and librarian means that there is much attention paid to the philosophy of truth and information gathering.  Wikipedia is not new in its attempt to be an accurate compendium of knowledge; it is only new in how it attempts to do so.  Dalby recognizes this, and finds that at the least it is superior to many methods before it.  Even when an agenda might (temporarily) win on the site, it will eventually have to contend with the presentation of a significant minority’s view alongside it.

He covers antiquated controversies, such as the Essjay and Siegenthaler incidents.  He also explores the pettiness of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger over the co-founder issue.

Most important, he explains why things on Wikipedia are the way they are now.  For instance, he reviews an important-but-old bit of drama between Larry Sanger, who had a far more autocratic view for the site under his own authority; and editor The Cunctator, whose articles Sanger was summarily deleting himself.  In 2001, many feared the result would be to keep out information from the “sum of human knowledge” that not everybody agreed was worthless.  Jimmy Wales waded in to the dispute, the conclusion of which led to Wikipedia’s current “Default to keep when there is no consensus to delete”:

We enjoy finding these old arguments on forgotten talk pages.  Partly because they explain why Wikipedia is the way it is — and that matters to you as well as to us.  Looking back at Jimmy Wales’s intervention between Sanger and The Cunctator and his ruling that page deletions should be explained and the explanation archived, we realise that this is the exact precedent for what is done now:  if a new page is nothing but vandalism, or a mispelling, or totally unsuited to an encyclopedia, it can be deleted on sight by an admin.  But if it’s arguably out of scope or insufficiently ‘notable’, any editor may propose to delete or merge it, and there’ll be a discussion, which someone will, after a few days, conclude, announcing a consensus one way or the other.  If there’s no consensus, the article survives by default.  This practice, for which The Cunctator can claim credit, means that although more unprepossessing pages are deleted, their shadows — the deletion discussions — live on.  [See pages 122-125]

Worth the purchase for any editor wanting to understand the site, or anyone wanting to learn about how and why communal decision-making works on the world’s largest collection of knowledge.

Between Saturday Night Live, Scare Tactics and 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan has become a one man gang of hysterical. Now he’s written a book about his experience, I Am the New Black. Amongst its revelations are how he felt about his former Saturday Night Live cast members:

“I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to ‘SNL,’ those motherf*****s just felt bad for me. None of the cast i came up with saw this future for me. No, sir. All i have to say about that is, where’s Chris Katan now? Where’s Cheri Oteri now? That b***h can’t even get arrested. … It’s all right; I don’t mind. It’s hard to get mainstream America to catch up. Mainstream America has just learned the words to Sugarhill’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’! And we don’t do that s*** no more! Jay-Z and Lil Wayne don’t sound like that! No one sounds like that no more!”

On friends who were only interested in his money:

“I’ve got friends who want money but don’t want to do anything to earn it. They won’t hold down a f*****g McDonald’s job to feed their own kids, but now that I’ve got money they want to come and work for me. I don’t know what the f*** makes them think i want them working for me if they won’t get off their a** to provide for their own family. I’ve lost a lot of friends that way, friends who feel like they deserve a place on my payroll. They don’t get it: I don’t need an entourage. I don’t need motherf*****s to play Xbox with me. I’d rather play Xbox with my kids.”

Below are Creative Commons photographs of Tracy Morgan that I released under the 3.0 attribution license that are now found on Wikipedia and my Flickr Creative Commons stream.

Below are Creative Commons photographs I released under the 3.0 attribution license that I took of Leslie Bibb and Sam Rockwell at the premiere of Moon at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. They are now available on Wikipedia and my Flickr Creative Commons stream.