WikiTruth a Hoax, Banned and Deleted from Wikipedia!

WikiTruth.info is a site that was started by 12 Wikipedia Administrators that "left" Wikipedia after years of contribution due unbearable "bureaucratic warfare" and especially after seeing an increase in active censorship taking place at Wikipedia.org at an alarming rate. WikiTruth.info does not only describe internal workings at Wikipedia from an insider perspective, but also published several of the Articles that were "deleted" at Wikipedia on their Website. Reported by The Guardian on 4/13/2006.

The Story was "dugg" to the homepage of digg.com on 4/16/2006. The resulting crash of the Wikitruth.info Website was caused by the sudden traffic onslaught and not as bad tounges speculated by some angry "Jimbo Wales" loyal Wikipedians that disapprove the content of the Wikitruth site.

It also started some controversy at SlashDot on 4/16/2006 with over 500 comments by Slashdot's Readers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales claimed less than 2 weeks ago about the protest site: "It's a hoax," Wales said of Wikitruth. "There's no evidence at all that there are any Wikipedia administrators associated with it." Reported 4/17/2006 by TechWeb.com

In the same Article did he state: "It's almost certainly people who have been banned by Wikipedia," Wales said.

The news were picked up by Newspapers and Magazines around the world. The renowned german magazin ""Der Spiegel" reported about Wikitruth and Jim Wales statement on 4/18/2006. See the Post in the middle of the Page with the Headline: "Jimmy Wales: WikiTruth nur ein Hoax"

Now it seems are not just "people" getting banned from Wikipedia, but even links to WikiTruth.info from within Wikipedia itself. Not just Articles, but Article Talk Pages, User Pages and User Talk Pages as well.
I was updating my "Wiki Links" Section last week, which included a link to WikiTruth.info and was surprised to get the following Message.



Okay, Wikipedia blocks users that spam or just perform repeated acts of vandalism usually after 3 clear warnings. In cases of severe forms of SPAM (see WP:SPAM), like Spam-Bots hitting the Wikipedia Site or websites links being added to one or more articles by different users over a period of time, links that violate the External Links Guidelines another solution is available. You just need to get a sysop on the meta-wiki to add a site-wide text filter for the url and add the url to the Wikipedia site-wide spam blacklist.

Well, I did go check and Voila, there it is:

wikitruth\.info #per recommendation of B. Patrick, the Foundation's attorney.

Here again as Screenshot:



Added to the black list on 4/26/2006. Here is a screenshot of the black list page history.
(which is also Interesting reading material all by itself)



Parallel to the Articles and all that was the fight going on within Wikipedia about the fate of the Wikipedia.Info Article. The Wikitruth Article was permanently deleted (after over a day of back and forth).



On 4/16/2006 already and the Editor who created it banned. Since this was not agreed upon by several editors (see delete/undelete log), a vote was started to decide if the Article should be kept or not. Vote! Articles for deletion: Wikitruth. The Vote ended on 4/20/2006 with the "offical" result: no consensus.

No Counts? That's unusual, why was that "forgotten"?
Well, I started counting myself (feel free to do the same).

Votes to keep the Article or to merge the content of the Article to the Article "criticism of Wikipedia" and redirect to it.
61 Keep or Keep/Merge
9 Strong Keep where 2 where a bit unusual (Adamantine Keep and *Strong Keep)
7 Weak Keep
31 Merge, Redirect

Votes to delete the Article or Most of it before redirecting to "criticism of Wikipedia"
25 Delete or Redirect
2 Strong Delete
3 just Redirect (no content merged) or at least partial merge and then redirect.

I don't know where "Mailer Diablo" learned his Algebra.
I look at the Votes and it looks pretty "consensus" to me.
A presidential election has never been as "consensus" as this.

Did I miss maybe something? I am not a Wikipedia Veteran, but maybe some votes count only half or a quarter and others double and triple. Well, my count is based on the assumption that every Editor or Admin has ONE Vote and each vote is counted as ONE. Please let me know if I am wrong with that.

Conclusion
Now what does all that mean? It does not look like a "Hoax" to me at all anymore, but serious trouble.
I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but something does not add up here. I guess there will be more to come.
Wikipedia Admins and Staff Members already did some silent moves. What's next?

Update 05/01/2006 1:30 am (PST)
The Ban of Wiktruth.info was just removed per Jimbo's request, only a short time after this article was posted.

See site-wide spam blacklist and History.

Here is the screen shot:



You might also find this special Talk Page rather interesting.
I just got an email that told me about it. Check it out.

The Wikitruth.info Article is also back. Look at the change history of the Article. It looks like a Wikipedianic Battlefield.

End Update 05/01/2006

Google Pages - Fast Lane into Google Search Index?!

The title of this post is not just hype, but a serious question.

Here is what happened.

I wrote and published 5 days ago on 4/24/2006 my article about my experiences and opinions about the current beta of Google's new toy called Google Pages. Link to Full Article: Google Pages Demystified

It is now 4/29/2006, for only 3 hours, because it is right now 3:00 am in the morning here in Fresno/California. I got my usual email from GoogleAlerts.com at around 6:00 pm. GoogleAlerts.com is the commercial version of Google's Free Service with the same name. It has some more features and options that the free version does not have. Anyhow, I use the service to monitor Google Search Results for important things that affect me personally or professionally, such a my Name, Artist Nick Name, Company Name, My Websites etc.

Here is what I looked at and had me read it twice.


The Account is now a bit over a week old and the content (5 Pages) is up for about 5 days now.

The Site is already in Google's index and here it comes: outranking a lot of old sites for the same key-phrase. It ranked #17 and when I checked now in complete disbelieve, was it still #17. The Search Results are for my companies name, VisionOne,Inc. (#24 if you count the indent sub-results). It outranked almost a 100 other websites (our clients for the most part), with an estimated 487,000 Pages indexed by Google.

I am absolutely speechless. This is something for the SEO bloggers to blog about. Too bad that this blog is actually about Text Art and Fun Stuff and not SEO, butI I had to post it somewhere :).

That my Article links to it can't be enough. It was posted on a few good ranking and Google trusted Sites, but that was 2-3 days ago. It was not like a home page feature at CNN or something like that. It was posted to Digg.com late at night 3 days ago and only 5 people dugg it which means that it never saw the light of the day there, not to mention it's homepage.

I sent a link to the article to the Google Pages team as feedback after 2 previous emails with stuff that found its way into the article as well. The pages written are quite personal (some people start eating when they are unhappy about something and I start writing to get my mind busy with something else), hence Pulizer Price worthy content can't be the reason for it either.

The whole thing became an article by accident and had nothing that would "boost" anything it links to. I simply pieced together and partially rewrote the bunch of comments and feedbacks that came together over a span of 2 days while I was playing with Google's new Toy. I decided to make an Article out of it, because I realized, that all this stuff might be of interest for somebody. Anyhow ...

The Point is, that I can not find any plausible reason to explain this. This blog and site is getting slowly Google's attention after constant growth from an one-page Website for some years until last December to about 30-something pages or so during the last 4 months.

I know a thing or two about SEO (without doing it as profession), you can find out more about that on my professional home page, if you like (I have some nice free tools there too ;) ).

Ideas, anybody? I need a little help here.

Digital Art which is not from this World

I am an artist at deviantART myself and was browsing around on dA, checking out Art posted by other artists (one of the normal things to do as a "deviant").

I came across an Artist yesterday that caught my attention more than it normally does.

He goes by the Artist Name Dilekt (Dilekt Artist Homepage at dA).

Below are the pieces that are available as Print. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do.

	Empyrean by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print		Foretold Prophesy by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print
	Glacial Haven by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print		Inner Soul by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print
	The Inevitable by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print		Throne Of God by Dilekt Large View | Buy Print
Full Galery of Dilekt Art @ deviantART.com

I loved his art right away and added 6 of his pieces that are available as print to my wishlist (others can buy me as gift) and 8 others to my favorites (that others can see which Art from from other Artists I like).

If you want one to put on your wall (not computer :)), no Problem. Prints are available and cost only between $2 and $24 dollars (without frame) depending on size and print type (lustre, matte or glossy) plus about $5 for shipping (2nd day air and special packaging). You should get it within 3-4 days, if you order today.

Roy/SAC Blog Redesigned - Tribute to Text Art

Anybody who is an active blogger could recognize the default blogger template layout which I used for my Roy/SAC Blog when I launched it at the beginning of February.

I did some changes to it to have it at least look a bit different, but that was not enough, the basic design of the blogger template was still clearly visible.

I used this weekend to take care of that issue for good and redesigned the Blog. The Blog continues to use black as the general background. The MS DOS background was black and ASCII's look best with white font on dark background which made me pick the template with the black background in the first place.

I did not want to change anything about that concept, because I liked at back then and I still like it today.

In incorporated some "fake" and "real" Block ANSI elements into the design. I will probably continue doing some fine tuning over the next months for those elements, especially the text borders.

Over all does my Blog now look much better and you can tell, that it is primarily about me, Roy/SAC and what I did and do using that nick name, ASCII and ANSI Text Art and some Pixel VGA Art.

Please come and have a look for yourself and tell me what you think about it. If you have any ideas, generic or specific or even criticism, do not hesitate and just add a comment to this post. You can do so anonymously, if you do not want to tell me your name.

Cheers,
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Here is a sample, that you get an idea. Click on the Image to open a full size screen shot.

Playing Around with Google Pages

I got finally an Invitation to create an account at Google's new Service (still in beta) called "Google Pages" or "Google Page Creator".

I tried to create an account there already a while back, but as always, they had not enough server resources available to handle the amount of traffic, because of interest in the new services by a lot of people and disabled the creation of new accounts on the same day they announced it to the public.

My First Pages
My first impression was very positive, but I realized quickly, why the service is still in beta. It has still a lot of minor to severe flaws and some features require a lot more tweaking and improving before they should release the service from beta and make it available to the general public.
You can have a look at my Test Pages here.

No IFrames allowed
I noticed that even if you modify the HTML Code of the pages directly, that certain things are not allowed and "stripped" out of the page when you publish it, such as Amazon Ads which use JavaScript and IFrames . I assume that the IFrames are the problem and removed by Google Pages, because they are a possible security issue, if abused. The blocking of IFrames prevents the possible abuse of the Google Pages service by fraudsters that may try to do things like installing malicious software on the visitors machine. This is one of the notorious misuses of IFrames .

No External JavaScript / No Google AdSense
External JavaScript Code seems to be prohibited in general, because even Google AdSense Code was removed automatically. That is something I do not understand. Okay, if they strip 3rd Party external JavaScript understandable. Also I they want to prevent that a User places AdSense Ads uncontrolled anywhere on the Pages. The ability to place AdSense Ads on those Pages should be of high interest by Google since it allows them to increase their Advertising Revenue. Any build in function to place AdSense Ads somewhere into Google Pages is not in sight anywhere. I assume though that this will be coming. It would simply be stupid of Google, if they would not provide this feature to Google Pages users.

No JavaScript allowed at all
Google Pages does not allow any JavaScript to be added at all. This is a bummer and limits the ability of what you can do with your Pages. I hope Google will eventually allow JavaScript to a certain extend to allow experienced Users to improve their pages. Even blogger allows the inclusion of Javascript. "Internal" and "External".

No Tools
There does not exist the ability to create any Forms or in general ANY interactive content which severely limits the use of Google Pages. This is also something the Google Pages team should work on. Basic stuff like a contact form that integrates with Google GMail, the publishing of Feeds from Google Reader or the Integration of Google Maps and Google News. Google Analytics can't be added to the Pages as well.

Indexing of Google Pages by Google Search
What I haven't found out yet, is if Google automatically adds Google Pages to the content to be crawled by it's Web Crawler and adds it automatically to its Search Index. A Search in the Google Index reveals that over 46,000 Google pages were already indexed and added to Google's Search Index as of today. This tends me to believe that the pages are automatically crawled by Google.

Conclusion
Google Pages is surely for a good reason still in Beta Status and will probably remain in that Status for a while longer. The existing features have still a lot of flaws and a lot of very important features are missing all together. Google Pages does also not interface with any other existing Google Service although Google Pages is a perfect candidate to exploit and showcase a wide variety of existing Google Services (live and beta ones). Google has still a long way to go with this service to provide a useful tool for the general public. I see it's use today as a place where you can create some static pages with content to link to from you blog at Blogger or other Blogging Services. It is certainly not enough for most folks to create their complete Homepage/Presence on the Internet.

A Great Time at the new Wynn Resort in Las Vegas

A week ago was my birthday and I got spoiled with a free trip to Las Vegas. I was staying for free at the all new and luxurious Wynn Resort and Casino.

I blogged about the reasons for the free stay at the Wynn Resort and Casino at my personal Blog already two weeks before I actually got there.

It was actually a coincidence and had nothing to do with my birthday. It was great timing nevertheless. I had a great time at the Wynn. It was really luxurious. The Service was great and we had a lot of Fun. I was bringing a friend of mine along since the invitation included everything for free for TWO PEOPLE and I am a single and pretty busy at the moment to find time for a girlfriend.

Fancy Dinner at Daniel Boulud French Brasserie
We started with a great dinner a the Daniel Boulud French Brasserie were we got to meet our host and also other the other people that were invited as well. I completely forgot all the entree's because of the main entrée. It was angus beef filet and ribs. I would have never imagined that I would eat a great angus beef filet AFTER the "other" stuff on the plate, but man, the ribs were not from this world. They were cooked and the meat was so tender and juice that a knife was not needed at all, the meat was falling apart, all by itself.

A Fantastic Show: LE RÊVE
After the dinner did we have plenty of time to socialize before we hopped over to the LE RÊVE Theatre which was specially built for their main Show with the name... right ... LE RÊVE (which means "A Dream" in French). LE RÊVE is a Cirque du Soleil like show which should not surprise anybody, because it was created by Franco Dragone the creator and director of shows like Cirque du Soleil's "O", Mystère and Celine Dion A New Day and other Cirque du Soleil productions. He did his own "thing" with LE RÊVE, that's the reason why it is not officially titled "Cirque du Soleil's LE RÊVE".

The Show was fantastic and more than I expected (and I expected a lot considering the creator's reputation).

The Music was fantastic (I bought the CD :) ) and the acrobatics' breath taking.

I could not get the thought out of my head "no disability insurance is going to cover those guys and girls".

I have a picture from before the show actually started. It's showing the inside of the theatre (no pictures allowed during the show). There is a short Video Clip (with music) available here. Go check it out (you must scroll down a bit to see it).

A Massage at midnight? Golf in the City?
After a good night sleep did we meet with our Host again and they showed us the property. Everything is very nice. The Suites have a bathroom that is bigger than my living room and every single one of them has a separate room, just for massages (with massage service available 24/7). We also got a glimpse at the Golf Course, the only one right at the Las Vegas Strip, which is in the middle of the city. I guess that's were the saying "Only in Vegas" derived from hehe.

Avenue Q
We watched the other Show that night which was actually a musician with the Name Avenue Q. It was not bad, but I am personally not such a big fan of Musicals anyway.

Ferrari ... yeah baby
We also seized the opportunity to check out the only Ferrari/Maserati Dealership in Nevada which is located in the Hotel also. They had one of the few "Enzo" Ferrari's there (estimated value 2.5 Million!!! dollar) which I was not able to photograph. I was able to "steal" a picture of a nice but used Lamborghini with my camera phone. "No Pictures" did I hear a voice from behind me. Well better one picture than none.

We also gambled a bit and flew the next day back to Fresno after a good lunch at the Paris Hotel and Casino (I was showing my friend a bit (else) of Vegas since I have been there already a couple times.

Okay, here are the pictures.

Wynn Hotel



Le Reve Theatre right before Show Start



My future car :)

Wikipedia back up - recovery from power outage

Wikipedia is now up again after several hours down time. I found the Wikipedia/Wikitech Server Admin Log which provides some insights about what happened.

It seems that they had a major power failure. Even though they seemed to have gotten power back fairly quickly, did it take a lot more time to get all the servers up and running properly again.


See here the excerpt from from Server Admin Log. Please note that the Date and Times are GMT Time.

April 10
04:26 jeluf: ixia, thistle, lomaria, db1 have broken replication settings, webster has database page corruption. Taking db2 out of rotation to create copies from it.
04:20 jeluf: mounted /home on all DB servers
04:03 brion: ran mass-correction of bad-timestamped entries on enwiki (1529 revision records)
03:05 brion: srv71-srv79 had wrong clock, apparently set to local time instead of UTC.
01:45 brion: irc feeds online. had to rescue udprec from kate's old home dir
01:38 brion: taking thistle and db1 out of rotation; broken replication.
01:32 brion: turning read_only off on adler. seems to be set to go on always on boot.
01:28 brion: things look mostly good; tried to take site read/write but someone has put adler into read-only? examining
01:23 brion: got fs-squids on the right ip. seems to work now.
01:20 brion: had to start lighty on amane
01:18 brion: trying to get fileserver squids+lvs up. (avicenna as lvs master)
01:10 brion: run-icpagent.sh didn't take previously; seems to have helped now
01:04 brion: trying to add 10.0.5.5 on dalembert also. no idea if this is correct. 10.0.5.3 works internally, but squids still don't show anything. there's no explanation for this that is obvious to me.
00:55 brion: added the lvs master ip on dalembert; http'ing to it internally seems to work, but still nothing from outside
00:49 brion: trying starting LVS monitor thingy on dalembert. no clue if it's working
00:45 brion: turning on apaches

April 9
23:45 brion: srv33, srv36 should now replicate properly.
External storage borkgage, 2006-04-09
23:20 brion: looking at srv33, srv36 external storage; jens reports replication seems borked
22:00 brion: added izwinger ip to suda; it wasn't automatic.
21:52 brion: finally got into srv1 and albert. maybe working
21:49 brion: ldap depends on dns; dns is still broken. we can't reach srv1 or albert.
21:32 brion: still trying to get some core machines online (suda booting; albert ?? srv1 ??). kyle should be available in 30 minutes
20:55 brion: bw is onsite and available to poke at machines. there was a power problem; some machines seem to still eb booting
20:42 brion: phoned kyle (message)
20:38 brion: network mostly back up, still trying to get in
19:20 brion: PowerMedium offline?

Btw. None of my changes got lost and I was able to finish my changes to the ASCII art Article. Check it out.

I also created a new ASCII and ANSI. Yes, a new one. I created it for deviantART. Enjoy.


       Ciao Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC



...cu at dA

Wikipedia down?!

I was in the middle of updating the article about ASCII Art at Wikipedia.org when the site suddenly hung when I attempted a preview of my changes.

When nothing happened after over a minute did I quickly copied my changes to a local file as backup and check further. Yes, Wikipeda is down.

It's now over 1 hour and no sign of of Wikipedia coming up again in sight. It can't be routine maintenance or reboot of servers that's causing this. It must be something more serious.

I checked my network, just to make sure that it is not just me who has the problem. Network is fine. I also connected remotely to a completely different network and tried to access Wikipedia.org from there... nothing.

I did some other changes before today, which I did not backup locally. I hope that this "crash" of the Site does not result into any data loss and that they are up again soon, that I can complete my modifications.

I am an active user at wikipedia and updated or extended already multiple articles at the popular and free online encyclopedia. It's the first time that I see the Site being down for such a long time which worries me a bit.

I hope that everything will be alright again later today.

Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

My personal Virtual Trade Show Experience

This post is a bit business related. It has to with my Internet Marketing activities. Anyhow, the reason is a different one.

I like to describe my experiences and the look and feel with my first Virtual Trade Show / Expo I ever attended. It's the eComXpo The Virtual Tradeshow for eCommerce Marketers happening completely virtual in cyberspace since April 4th until today April 6th.

If you get a chance, check it out yourself. Admission is free for visitors.

What amazed me what the general presentation when you are in the Virtual Exhibit Halls which give you the actual feeling of a busy and crowded Exhibit Hall in the real world, such as Affiliate Summit. The Noise, the look. You have virtual Booth's of Exhibitors you can visit. Chat with people at the booth or other attendees that are "walking around" on the Exhibit Floor. You can collect Documents and add them to your virtual Briefcase, exchange Virtual Business Cards, the whole deal you would get from a real world expo, but without the need to travel, booking flights and hotel rooms and the other costly expenses you get automatically when it is a show at a physical location which requires to attend physically.

In this case can you enter the Expo without wearing a uncomfortable suit. A pajama will do just fine. you also don't have to walk and spent the time to find the booths of presenters or people you know who are just a visitor as you are. It's tough to find them at a real world Expo. Here you simply Browse or search the list of attendees and exhibitors and voila. You can even add them to your "buddy" list and see if they are currently online or not and "where" they are at the moment.

There are different "Halls" for the different Industries and Shows within the Show plus an Educational Center with real-time presentations, streamed conveniently to your home with Q and A afterwards, giving you the ability to ask the Speaker questions. If you pay for the access to the "eComXpo University" you can access all past presentations (which are recorded) whenever you saw them already or the ones you missed, even presentations from the previous years. I paid the less than $50 dollars for that feature which is really a bargain.


The Technology used for the Virtual Expo is a mix of DHTML, Flash and Web 2.0 Technology. Really awesome. I hope that this kind of technology will be used for a lot more Expos in the Future and not just Internet Marketing.

Btw. If you have a Website or Blog, private, club or business, you should check it out. You are missing out on important stuff, if you don't. You can monetize even your personal sites. That will probably not male you rich, but pays maybe the cost of the site. You should not do intrusive advertising and plaster your site with banners etc.Never forget why you created your site in the first place. Certainly not to be a virtual bilboard. Have a look at my blog here for example. It has various Ad's using Google Adsense, Chitika and Amazon.com. I used the same for my Roy/SAC Text Artist Homepage.

Cheers,
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

The Fool on April Fools day

Lolly, an Admin at deviantART.com seized the opportunity on April Fools day to fool a lot of Deviant's with his article about the new Web 2.0 powered mock-up of deviantART.com.

This Article caused comments from thousands and thousands of mostly shocked Deviant's worldwide. C'mon, this joke was so obvious, that even a blind man could have seen it.

A close look at the mock-up itself and you can tell right away, that this is a joke, not to mention that the mock-up looks ugly and not dA worthy nor make the shown features any sense for a site like deviantART.

The thing with the creative commons license "NC-1701-D" was actually funny (Trekkies know) and the "powered by AJAX V1.5" should trigger a laugh or at least a smile from any Web Developer.

I could not resist and jump on to this bandwagon and counter proposed an alternative mock-up for a new version of deviantART.com. The people that were not fooled had a good laugh. I am always amazed how easy people can be fooled.

The Mock ups

Lolly's version of deviantART with Web 2.0 Technology, including Tag Cloud.



My Alternative Mock up of deviantART.com



And while I had so much fun, did I create a fun Version of "my" Windows Desktop, which can be seen here.



I also did something more serious and finished my entry for the "Art of Threes Resolution" contents which is titled "The Three Styles of ..." and about the Three Styles of the PC Underground (Text) Art Scene during the time of when BBS's ruled the earth and the Internet was still in its infancies.



Enjoy
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC