In this week’s NZ Listener Russell Brown’s column “Wide Area News” is mostly dedicated to the ongoing tensions, or should that be conflict, between established providers of information (i.e. encyclopaedia publishers) and projects like Wikipedia. Some interesting points about Wikipedia and its like being open to the placement of “viral marketing.”

See: NZ Listener – Wide Area News – 10 Sept. 2005 (You’ll have to scroll down past the David Kirk bit and it flows over onto the next page).

Here are some relevant links. The first two were cited in the paper edition of the article but ironically left out of the online version. I’ve added the latter two because, while mentioned in the article, they weren’t linked to at all in any version.

• TCS: Tech Central Station – The Faith-Based Encyclopedia : Robert McHenry’s (ex-editor in chief – Britannica) critique of Wikipedia.
• Free Software Magazine – The FUD-based Encyclopedia : Aaron Krowne’s reply to Robert McHenry.
• Wikipedia:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia:Errors in Wikipedia that have been corrected in the Encyclopædia Britannica

Update – some more links that go with the above ones.

• On Getting It – A follow-up response by McHenry to his own article above.
• McHenry responds to Aaron Krowne.

Also check out these posts by Tim (especially the comments sections). See “Wikipedia vs Britannica” and “What matters about an encyclopedia?“

A few books on the go this week.

Firstly, I picked up Richard Bauckham’s Bible and Mission : Christian Witness in a Postmodern World the other day in a sale pile for $5. A collection of four reworked essays delivered to various audiences in Britain and Ethiopia, including material relating to the place of globalisation and fundamentalism in the world.
    

Secondly, “Understanding Artificial Intelligence” which is a collection of essays put out by Scientific American. A fairly easy read with some of the familiar names (e.g. Minsky, Brooks, Moravec etc.) popping up. (I think there’s an eBook version out too, though my trusty paperback works better on the train.)

And finally, Guy Gavriel Kay’s “The Lions of Al-Rassan“. An alternative history, or at least a novel set in a world not to dissimilar to our own, based around the tensions in a land like Moorish Spain.

Over at Political Compass there’s a graphical representation of the NZ political scene.

Hat tip to Subversnz

We had our pre-election sermon this morning, with a list of things to consider when voting – from issues of “system morality” (from comments on Stu’s blog) through to others of “personal morality”. I tend to be a multi-issue voter so it was good to see more than one issue up for all to see (and to see the justice, mercy and creation care points on the list).

Anyway here’s a list of web links I’ve been collecting with respect to the election here in NZ. Some are more helpful or provocative that others.

• http://www.nzvotes.org.nz – The Maxim Institute sponsored election site – has brief party comparisons. Variety of opinion pieces too – including Sam Chapman’s piece on the Politics of Race Relations in NZ.
• http://www.policy.net.nz – Another site comparing party policies to more depth than the above site.
• www.election.org.nz – Official election site – all you need to know about MMP.
• http://www.parliament.govt.nz/ – New Zealand Parliament site. All you need to know how NZ parliament works.
• The Churches’ Agency on Social Issues election page – A Christian agency (Methodist, Presbyterian, Churches of Christ, and Quakers) dealing with social, economic, ecological and political matters in Aotearoa New Zealand. They’ve published a document “Before You Vote” (PDF) that looks at social and environmental issues to consider.
• Vision Net NZ – Election. Vision Net’s PPT about how the party vote works. Personally, I think Slide 3 “What does the Lord require…?” doesn’t really capture the Micah 6:8 text the title was lifted from, but it does have helpful information on how the party vote works.
• Variety of Reality articles
  • “Neither to the Left nor to the Right”
  • “Is the Left Right and the Right Wrong?”
  • “The Left is not Right”
• Every Child Counts election material.
• PointSeven – A Make Poverty History campaign.
• New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services (NZCCSS) election material.

I’ll post others as I come across them and if I have time.

Picked up a bug last week that left me feeling really tired (lots of coughing at night instead of sleeping) and I’ve got a reasonable lot on this week. Firstly, I’m off the the Stardome tomorrow for the day as a parent helper for a school trip. I’ve been looking forward to it, but hope I don’t drop off while tilted backwards in the dark of the planetarium. Then Tuesday is the dentist (again) – but that looks less likely now. A sermon to prepare for next Sunday for the congregation out in the country at Riverhead – probably based on psalms of lament (similar maybe to Carl Truman’s “What can Miserable Christians Sing?“). And somewhere along the way trying to polish off a thesis chapter.

Okay, so I’ve installed WordPress 1.5 and it works well. No problems with the install on my web host, it connects to Ecto fine and from the comments in the blogosphere is handles spam well. Plus it has a polling module which I want to add.

But getting it to look like I want could be a problem and looks to be one place that Movable Type 3.2 (but not necessarily 3.1 or 2.6) has over it. A nice simple 3-column layout would be nice, with easy to configure parameters. MT3.2 support for alpha, beta, gamma and delta models is a big plus here. Instead it looks like I’ll have to find someone else’s WordPress theme they’ve made available for download and then hack that to get it how I want. And what’s with all the themes that put the two sidebar-type columns both on the right?

Looks promising – Greasemonkey – a user-centric model for controlling the content you see in your web browser. See Wired 13.09: START : Monkeying With the Web.

Arvind at Movalog notes that the new MT 3.2 styles and layout lend itself to Greasemonkey style hacking.

I’ve been playing around with this over the past few days. Looks like it will be a toss-up between WordPress and the new, improved Movable Type for this blog. Only have one author for this personal blog so licensing isn’t the issue it might be for multi-author type blogs. The style management in MT3.2 looks really good – providing you forget a lot of the 2.6 and 3.1 stuff and start again. Now standardised across Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal.

Movable Type 3.2 (Check out the style library)
WordPress

Had a good weekend when we had two barbecues (one here and one at a friends). On Saturday we hosted the end of season gathering for Mark’s soccer team. 37 people (13 adults + 24 children) came spent the afternoon here – we had sausages on the barbecue plus other good food and drink. Very enjoyable to catch up with everyone and start to think about next season.

On Sunday we headed over to friends at St. John’s for their daughter’s birthday party. Again a nice barbecue and good company. Kim discovered Playstation SingStar which was scary – luckily after my first attempt I was excused from attempting again.

And it was Father’s Day in NZ on Sunday and my family recognised my space opera withdrawal and gave me a couple of Star Trek DVDs to complete my Star Trek movie collection.

It’s Friday, which is normally my evening of space opera – Andromeda followed by Star Trek : Enterprise. But Andromeda finished last week leaving the total amount of space opera across all channels as Doctor Who and Enterprise. TVNZ seems to have dropped the ball on Stargate (Stargate on TVNZ) and I guess in NZ they figure that the science fiction genre has less mileage than yet another reality TV show.

So I’m really looking forward to the arrival of the Firefly movie Serenity in the cinemas relatively soon (10 Nov in NZ – with an advanced screening 19th Sep in Auckland). Here’s a recent Wired article about how fan pressure in response to Firefly’s cancellation helped generate the movie – Wired 13.09: PLAY – Serenity Now! If you’re thinking about going to the film try and get hold of the DVD box set of Firefly and watch the 14 episodes in the order they’re in in the box (TV3 played them all in order too). Firefly had the potential to be really interesting – the right mix of humour and human drama, as well as being a vehicle to explore questions about the world. Dark Horse has produced a comic series that bridges the gap between the TV series and the movie though these might be scare in NZ.