Blog/A Bit of History

Flipping the Bird

There's a couple of Crimson Rosellas outside my window. It's around noon here in Canberra and I've enticed them down with some sunflower seeds. I also get Eastern Rosellas, Cockatoos and Galahs, among others.

A galah showed up on Wikimania about an hour ago, replacing various pages with an offensive image and text. Anyone who's been around WP for a while will recognise the trademarks of the GNAA vandal.

I reverted as fast as I could, but he was gettinga way from me. Fewer keystrokes required to paste in his text, you see, and he didn't have to go through that validation routine if there were hyperlinks in the page text, as there usually was. Luckily there were a few folk lounging around on the IRC channel, and after a bit we managed to trim him back. He gave up, maybe he'll return in the dead of night, but it's daylight for a long while yet here. Anyway, check the history of some of the pages for an idea of what was going on.

Gotta wonder about some people...

Anyway, almost as soon as I posted my last entry, noting that archives and transcripts weren't appearing, they started to do so in greater numbers. Obviously Wikimania was coming alive and attendees flipping open their laptops with their morning coffee.

I tuned in on a live feed, enjoying a couple of presentations. The session I was particularly interested in (at least of those I could access via the video stream, anyway) turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. The presenter was talking about on-line communities and I wanted to hear what she had to say about WP, which I regard as well worth a study. As the psychiatrist said about Basil Fawlty, "There’s enough material here for an entire conference!".

Unfortunately, she'd only spent enough time on the site to be able to spot a few of the "touchy-feely" areas, such as the Village Pump. An indepth analysis of the peculiar behaviour to be found on WP awaits a later event.

In the meantime, there's another episode of the galah to be dealt with. ***SIGH*** --Skyring