Wikipedia Editors Uncover Extortion Scam And Extensive Cybercrime Syndicate Wikipedia, the world’s online trove of collective knowledge, is in the midst of a international extortion scandal, where editors secretly charged businesses and artists a fee to create and “protect” articles. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that sponsors but does not operate Wikipedia, announced Monday that at least 381 accounts have been suspended for “black hat” editing, in which editors charge and accept money for “to promote external interests.” The scam affects English Wikipedia, which boasts 4.9 million articles, has over 26 million users, and 1,343 administrators, according site statistics.
Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is published by the Union of International Associations (UIA) under the direction of Anthony Judge. It is available as a three-volume book,[1] as a CD-ROM,[2] and online.[3][4] Databases, entries, and interlinks[edit] The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is made up from data gathered from many sources. Those data are grouped into various databases which constitute the backbone of the Encyclopedia. The databases are searchable; query results may be seen as lists or as various visualizations.
Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat Alexander Christie-Miller You could say they sent the first tweets. An ancient whistling language that sounds a little like birdsong has been found to use both sides of the brain – challenging the idea that the left side is all important for communicating.
List of wikis This page contains a list of notable websites that use a wiki model. These websites will sometimes use different software in order to provide the best content management system for their users' needs, but they all share the same basic editing and viewing website model. §Table[edit] The Geography of Profanity - Pacific Standard “Asshole is a wonderful word,” said Mike Pesca in his podcast, the Gist. His former colleagues at NPR had wanted to call someone an asshole, and even though it was for a podcast, not broadcast, and even though the person in question was a certified asshole, the NPR censor said no. Pesca disagreed. Pesca is from Long Island and, except for his college years in Atlanta, he has spent most of his time in the Northeast.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Speaker: Linguistic Isolation in the Modern World Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura. A language becomes extinct when its last speaker dies, but some argue that language death really occurs when the second last speaker dies, because for the lone remaining speaker, there is no one left to talk to. The curious story of Ayapaneco, an endangered language from the state of Tabasco in Mexico, sparked worldwide interest when it was reported that the last two speakers of the language were not speaking to each other. What a thought! It is the expressive richness of language, the use of our own native tongues, that allows us to explore, fluidly and fluently, what it means to be human, to strengthen social bonds within our communities, to understand and be understood.
The secret history of “Y’all”: The murky origins of a legendary Southern slang word As I jumped across the pond for a few weeks, back in my grad school days, I wanted to at least try to assimilate. Step one was toning down my Americanisms and in particular my Southern accent. I had phased out “ain’t” while teased during my college years in the North, and I could easily swap out my “ATM” for “cash point” and “to go” for “take away.” But one thing couldn’t be distilled out of my vocabulary: “y’all.” So ingrained was the word in my lexicon that I didn’t even notice when I said it.
Why Study History? (1998) By Peter N. Stearns People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? What are Historical Sources? — Faculty of History A source is anything that has been left behind by the past. It might be a document, but it might alternatively be a building or a picture or a piece of ephemera – a train ticket perhaps or a plastic cup. They are called 'sources' because they provide us with information which can add to the sum of our knowledge of the past.
A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping - The Toast Our resident linguist’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. Let’s talk about shipping. No, not the transportation of goods over the water, but that feeling when you want a couple fictional characters to smush their faces against each other and never let go. The word ship itself has an interesting enough grammar, not to mention its variants like OTP and broT3, but my favourite topic in the linguistics of shipping is one that has an actual academic paper written about it: The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology/Orthography Interface is a paper about ship names. You know, like Johnlock and Brittana and Dramione.* It was published in the Journal of Onomastics by Cara DiGirolamo, a linguist and also a friend.
The geography of academic knowledge Our team recently had the opportunity of working with some submission data from SAGE journals. Amongst other things, the data tell us where authors of articles come from, and primary discipline of the journal they are submitting to. We therefore decided to map out the geography of submissions for journals in five categories: Communication (n = 22), Clinical Medicine and Critical Care (51), Cultural Studies (7), Engineering and Computing (34), and Management and Organization Studies (28). A few broad patterns are apparent here. 15 Massive Online Databases You Should Know About Advertisement Think of your favorite open databases. I’m sure Wikipedia and IMDb instantly spring to mind, but you might not be in the need of all that knowledge ever, or a comprehensive database of all things entertainment. Sometimes you need a bit of VLDB (Very Large Data Base) flavor. Something to spice up your data analysis. Something to put the “big” in your big data.
Language Log An important rallying cry and usage distinction made by allies of undocumented workers in the current cultural battle over immigration in the United States is Elie Wiesel's assertion above: "No human being is illegal." In the quote, Wiesel gives examples of the kinds of adjectives that he feels can denote properties of people (fat, skinny, beautiful, right, and wrong). On the other hand, calling a person 'illegal', he says, is a contradiction in terms.