10 years of Wikipedia: have your say…

I love video. And I love infographics. And I love Wikipedia. Enter, Jimmy Wales’s video to celebrate 10 years of a magnificent open-source Encyclopaedia – The State of Wikipedia.

“The State of Wikipedia not only explores the rich history and inner-workings of the web-based encyclopedia, but it’s also a celebration of its 10th anniversary. With more than 17 million articles in over 270 languages, Wikipedia has undoubtedly become one of the most visited and relied upon sites on the web today. More than a million people have contributed to make the site what it is today.”

There has always been much discussion about whether Wikipedia serves us with accurate information, but I would challenge sceptics to take the leap and edit a page, or ever create one of a topic. The moderators and community of editors are passionate about accuracy and importance of an article and do not sit by letting anything pass through. The reason for this is that the involvement people have holds intrinsic motivation to them to make Wikipedia a useful source, and when something has this intrinsic value for someone, then motivation need not been in the form of monetary payment. This builds a healthy moderation strategy and sorts the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

The idea of Wikipedia is very important to the internet, and certainly ticks the boxes that Tim Berners-Lee envisaged when creating the internet. A source that is open to all, allow us to share information around the world freely and easily. Of course, making money on the internet has taken a lot of the time but with foundations like Wikipedia we can all certainly see it’s massive benefit to our own growth and education.

I could wax lyrical about Wikipedia all day long, but in the interest of avoiding boredom to set in for you all, I’d love to hear comments on how Wikipedia has changed your information gathering over the past decade.

Over to the floor…

85% of the UK is now online…

Okay, so I realise that my thoughts have been changing a little since leaving a rather well-respected furniture company and heading over to another well-respected furniture company but with a very different business model, but I have always been very keen on people experiencing design through the web and the industry that I inhabit has not yet caught on to the power of the world wide web for this.

Mashable (I am a broken record for how much I love Mashable) posted an article on Social Media in UK, which apart from being very nicely presented, poses an interesting set of numbers which should show that design should really catch up and get online…

“The social media and networking phenomenon is growing extremely fast in the UK. Eighty-five percent of the population is online; they spend more than six hours on social media sites every month, nearly 60% of them read blogs and 64% have their own profile on a social network.

The numbers come from Simply Zesty, an Ireland-based online PR and social media firm that has put together a nifty video with many interesting social media-related figures.

The facts and numbers in the video are based on UK’s online population, but many of them ring true for most parts of the online world. Check it out below.”

13 internet slangs with alternate meanings

This article was original posted at Mashable:

We’ve all grown accustomed to the online jargon, shorthands and acronyms that have developed over decades of Internet use. Silly as they might be, most of us are guilty of truncating, abbreviating or misspelling words to save a few seconds here and there.

The jury is still out on whether the seconds have added up to much or not, but linguists have had a field day studying online lingual behaviors and their effects on offline writing and speech.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to look at how pre-Internet () acronyms and abbreviations like “LOL” have taken on new meanings (“laughing out loud”) with the introduction of widely popular Internet idioms.

Below, you’ll find a list of 13 Internet acronyms and slang terms with unexpected alternative meanings, ranging from downright unpredictable to hilariously ironic. Add your favorites in the comments below.

1. LOL

Before netizens had us “laughing out loud,” there were little old ladies participating in less bone-tickling happenings. LOL in the medical world identifies a patient as a Little Old Lady. Sometimes, in lieu of actual medical terminology, physicians use shorthands like LOLFDGB (Little Old Lady, Fall Down, Go Boom) and LOLINAD (Little Old Lady In No Apparent Distress) on patient records to describe the health statuses of hospitalized elderly females.

A study published by Peter E. Dans, MD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHMS) in 2002, looked at the use of and perceived usefulness of pejorative medical terms among JHMS graduating seniors. While the use of such terms are well documented, only 2 to 13 percent of surveyed medical classes considered usage of terms like LOLINAD and LOLFDGB to be helpful, whereas 30 to 50 percent of classes considered it harmful. Interestingly enough, such terms were used frequently for self-destructive or abusive patients.

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