Sometime in the next couple of days, the one-millionth article will be added to the English-language version of Wikipedia. It’s an impressive achievement for a project that’s only five years old , and it’s already clear that Wikipedia has surpassed its main competitors, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta in many important respects. Neither Britannica’s 200-year history and expert staff nor the Microsoft juggernaut have proved a match for Wikipedia’s ten thousand or so regular contributors, and thousands of occasional helpers. While many criticisms of Wikipedia have been made (as with most things, the most comprehensive source for such criticisms is Wikipedia, none has really dented either Wikipedia’s credibility or its growth.

Still, as Bismarck is supposed to have said

If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

The process by which Wikipedia entries are produced is, in many cases, far from edifying: the marvel, as with democracies and markets, is that the outcomes are as good as they are.

I’ve been active on Wikipedia for several months now, and found out some interesting things.
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I’ve been going to post on various things, but others have already done it. First up, here’s Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo making the point that Howard hasn’t, as so many have suggested, succeeded in shifting Australian political attitudes to the right. Gianna has more.

Tim Dunlop covers hearing impairment at the AWB inquiry. It’s good to know the Howard government hires the disabled, and at a million bucks a pop, too.

And, off-topic a little, Tim Lambert shares with me and CT blogger Eszter Hargittai an Erdos number of 3

I’ve been invited to sign up with Newstex Blogs on Demand. It seems like a reasonable way of getting more circulation and there might also be some monetary payoff. The latter might be a negative if I wanted to use CC non-commercial content from others, but so far I haven’t done much of this.

Anyway, I thought I’d ask if anyone else has tried this and if they have any thoughts. Feel free to email me if you don’t want your views published.

Reader and occasional commenter Paul Knapp advises me that he’s set up a site called NewsBump. It’s modelled on US sites such as Digg, where participants nominate stories of possible interest and others can rank them, pushing the interesting ones to the top of the page. The focus is on Oz current affairs. Free registration required for participation. Go and take a look.

I picked up this story, saying that 55 per cent of Americans think the Iraq war was a mistake. Given the frequency with which opponents of the war have been told we are “anti-American”[1], it’s good to know that the majority of Americans are in the same boat, as they have been for some time now.

fn1. For some reason, war supporters seem to have a bit of amnesia about this. So here a couple of links, one from Australia and one from the US. There are plenty more if you look, along with variants like “pro-Saddam”.

Regular commenter here, Mike Pepperday, has started his own blog

Consensus Republic

It is to promote an Australian republic via ‘Sovereign Appointment’, whereby the people take over the sovereign’s duty of appointing the PM’s nominee for GG.

I proposed an Irony ON alternative solution here. Irony OFF

Quite a few people have been having trouble with my RSS feed. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 in the hope that this might improve things, but instead this managed to replace the main feed with the comment feed. Pushing my coding skills to the limit I managed to find and implement the necessary fix which also requires a rebuild of the permalink structure.

I’m hoping that the earlier problems may have been resolved in this process. Advice on this much appreciated.

Economist and regular commenter here, Harry Clarke, has started his own blog. Quite a few meaty posts already, so visit and comment.

Update Adding to the Ozeconoblogosphere is my co-author[1] Joshua Gans. Go and join his captive audience.

fn1. The Oz economics profession is so small and interconnected that “six degrees of separation” is an overstatement. One way of another, nearly everyone is linked pretty closely to everyone else.

Andrew Reynolds suggested I prepare an FAQ for the blog. Easily the most commonly asked question is

Q: Why was my comment moderated/rejected ?

A: Except in rare cases, this reflects the operation of antispam software. My host rejects some posts and comments particularly those including words related to c*sin0s and g@mbling. There’s nothing I can do about this. In addition, some comments are automatically moderated because they contain key words or resemble spam (as far as my software is concerned) in some other respect. I check these and approve the false positives, but you usually have to wait a few hours and sometimes longer.