Obsidiana Wikipedia Quotes

The proselytisers for man-made global warming have long exercised a tight stranglehold over the contents of Wikipedia. ~ Christopher Booker

Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity's most spectacular open source project. ~ Gretchen McCulloch

Graduation Speech: I'd like to thank the internet, Google, Wikipedia, Microsoft Word, and Copy & Paste. ~ Steve Weinburg

You are looking at the largest portal ever. The internet. You can start on the Wikipedia page for jelly donut, and four link clicks later, end up on the meaning of life. ~ Jake

Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud. ~ Cory Doctorow

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia ~ Leo Tolstoy

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digi ~ Jaron Lanier

The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data ... which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data. ~ Freeman Dyson

Wikipedia is run by hippies of course - the same kind of impractical utopian losers who gave us the first affordable desktop computer and the iPod ~ Andre The BFG

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Times have changed in research and if you are not using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, and the like, you will be left in the dark. ~ Steven Magee

Wikipedia…" Jamison began, his voice dripping with disgust, "is not a resource for researching one's moral quandaries. It is pornography for pseudo-intellectuals." ~Gauze ~ Tiffany Reisz

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry:

Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

Yes, "smallpox was. ~ Steven Pinker

It's really hard for me to memorize the medical jargon if I don't know the meaning of every single word. So I do have to do a little Wikipedia/YouTube research to figure out what I'm talking about. ~ Kelly McCreary

The more successful I got, the more scared I got. My name was all over Google. I had a Wikipedia page I was terrified to look at. And so I just snapped. I thought, 'If I'm going to come out with this, I'm going to do it in a big way. And not just for myself. This can't just be my story.' ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone is contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture. ~ Wael Ghonim

Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is also the founder of economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism. Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of England £20 note. Source: Wikipedia ~ Adam Smith

Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it's a total disaster. ~ Sue Gardner

Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated). ~ Larry Sanger

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly. ~ David Graeber

Many American TV actors employ agents, managers, business managers, publicists and stylists, and are now adding digital media manager to the list. Their job is to reach out to the fans, managing websites, Twitter feeds, Facebook and Wikipedia. ~ Gina Bellman

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views. ~ Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information. ~ Steve Carell

I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong. ~ Larry Sanger

I can't stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages. ~ Robin Sloan

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia ~ Victor Hugo

The definition of marriage cannot be disputed. It's right there in black and white and it's been the same since the start of Wikipedia. ~ Jesse Tyler Ferguson

You know it's Oscar season when you see a slew of new movies based on true stories whose resolutions you can find in three seconds on Wikipedia. ~ Richard Corliss

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love. ~ Clay Shirky

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. ~ Clay Shirky

Wikipedia is a non-profit. It was either the dumbest thing I ever did or the smartest thing I ever did. Communities can build amazing things, but you have to be part of that community and you can't abuse them. You have to be very respectful of what their needs are. ~ Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of people inputting information, and every day millions of people withdrawing that information. It's a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. ~ James G. Stavridis

Our pals over at Wikipedia make hair sounds like the sun of fresh water, saying in their snooty tone that head hair has "gained an important significance in nearly all present societies as well as any given historical period throughout the world". But then again, those lovable eggheads can make anything sound pretty serious. ~ Neil Pasricha

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

If you're reading IMDB, half of it's made up. You can't trust it or Wikipedia, which is just lies, lies! ~ Julianne Moore

Julian: "Wikipedia knows about everything. It might be run by warlocks."
Emma: "You think that's what they do all day in the Spiral Labyrinth? Run Wikipedia?"
Julian: "I admit it seems like a letdown. ~ Cassandra Clare

Don't believe Wikipedia, not everything written there is true. The Soviet Artists Union was not a communist party organization. It was a professional union, which did not protect you from the government if the government decided you were the enemy, but it did give you the possibility to work in your profession and survive. ~ Ilya Kabakov

Wikipedia was a big help for science, especially science communication, and it shows no sign of diminishing in importance. ~ Aubrey De Grey

Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen. He shares his feast day, June 22 on the Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop during the English Reformation to maintain his allegiance to the Pope. More was added to the Anglican Churches' calendar of saints in 1980. Source: Wikipedia ~ Thomas More

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did. ~ James Gleick

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ~ Jaron Lanier

Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia. ~ Larry Sanger

On a scale of 1 to extroverted, I'm a 3.14159. So is pi. I network like "the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter." Thanks, Wikipedia! ~ Jarod Kintz

That's why Linux and Wikipedia and Firefox work. ~ Daniel H. Pink

I wouldn't advise making a four-year commitment to eventually land an $8.00/hour job. Skip college. Read Wikipedia for free instead. ~ Jarod Kintz

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online. ~ Joichi Ito

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad. ~ Gloria Steinem