Tim Bray and Wikipedia
by Stuart Robertson on May 30th, 2006 | designmeme
I thought it an interesting coincidence that yesterday, Bob Rae mentioned Wikipedia during his keynote speech. Earlier that morning I had mentioned Wikipedia and politicians during my own presentation, so I decided to ask Bob about updating his own entry.
In an even more interesting coincidence, today’s keynote covered virtually the same topics I had been talking about yesterday – although admittedly with a bit more detail and eloquence.
Despite not actually being an official OUCC conference attendee, I still went to today’s keynote speech by Tim Bray, the Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems.
Tim’s speech started with a discussion of Wikipedia, and he later encouraged Academics to be more involved in ensuring the entries are accurate and sufficiently detailed. He went on to discuss blogs, and the democratization of information through Google’s PageRank algorithm.
One of the points he made that I didn’t cover was the importance of human readable URLs. He gave the example of the Government of Ontario’s website, which has an abysmally structured http://www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_24P/_s.7_0_A/7_0_24P/_l/en?docid=EC002001 on it’s english index page. Tim didn’t have very good things to say about the way their content management system works, and I tend to agree with him.
An additional topic Tim covered, and I was very pleased to hear him do so, was PHP and Ruby on Rails. He was encouraging the audience to consider PHP development, and mentioned that much of Yahoo infrastructure is PHP based. He was especially enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails, and strongly encouraged Universities to consider it as a development platform. This is particularly noteworthy as Tim Bray works for Sun, the maker’s of the Java programming language. Hopefully with that type of endorsement, more Java Programmers will take a closer look at Ruby on Rails.
With so many coincidences between our presentations, and out of a sense of bemusement more than curiosity, I decided to repeat my question from the previous day and ask Tim whether he edits his own Wikipedia entry. It turns out that he only had to correct a few errors, like his birthday, and other people filled in the rest.
And now I have an even more interesting annecdote about Bob Rae, Tim Bray and the Wikipedia connection.
Stuart Robertson
Jesse on May 30, 2006 at 1:51 pm
You are exploiting OUCC for wikipedia credits… tsk.
Stuart Robertson on May 30, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Heh. I don’t think there was anyone updating Tim’s Wikipedia entry from the conference room today—and if there was, I’m sure he would notice right away. He mentioned the RSS feeds for wikipedia changes and how much easier they make it for him to keep track of changes to pages.
Http://Www.Gov.On.Ca/Ont/Portal/!Ut/P/.Cmd/Cs/.Ce/7_0_A/.S/7_0_24P/_s.7_0_A/7_0_24P/_l/En?Docid=EC002001 - Dogpile Web Search on December 13, 2007 at 7:37 pm