Head over to the front page of Wikipedia. Reload the page a few times (done by hitting f5 in IE or Firefox). Way to be unbiased, Wikipedia. Now if only the sides of the pictures flipped, too.
The featured article was actually two articles, the articles about Barack Obama and John McCain. Except to appear unbiased, wikipedia set up their front page to randomly order the two articles. Sometimes Obama's article was first, sometimes McCain's article was first.
Because,based on my knowledge of how Wikimedia and wikis in general work, randomly generating which candidate comes first would require semi-obtrusive changes to the wiki. But maybe Wikimedia has some built-in killer feature I didn't know about. I'll look it up later.
5 comments:
ok, so what did it do? I missed it!
The featured article was actually two articles, the articles about Barack Obama and John McCain. Except to appear unbiased, wikipedia set up their front page to randomly order the two articles. Sometimes Obama's article was first, sometimes McCain's article was first.
and why was that interesting?
Because,based on my knowledge of how Wikimedia and wikis in general work, randomly generating which candidate comes first would require semi-obtrusive changes to the wiki. But maybe Wikimedia has some built-in killer feature I didn't know about. I'll look it up later.
And shouldn't you be sleeping?
ok, that makes sense.
and yes, I should've been sleeping! I didn't relize what time it was :-(
but I did sleep!
Post a Comment