Shameless Plug

Hey All Readers!

I just wanted to make a plug for MasonWiki.  I, along with many other hardworking Broadside Onliners, have been working to create a nifty wiki for the school and fill it with as much content as we can stand.  Well, now the wiki is "launching" and our small band needs to expand to pretty much the whole student population.  If we can get enough people to join up with this thing, we'll have a great resource for freshmen, students, parents, and the rest of the interested world.  Plus, we will effectively replace the Mason site and it's crazy web structure.

The wiki format is a cool AJAX format that helps reduce pageloads and increase awesomeness.  Please jump on the wagon with this one!  All you need to do is go to the wiki, look around some of the site (via the column on the right), and then register and make a new page about whatever it is that you think needs to be added.  Also, check out the wiki frequently, as others will be adding newer, cool stuff all the time.

Any questions?...Drop me a line via email or comment.  Also, I'm "loyaleagle" on the MasonWiki.  See you there!

Awesome commentary on the intarweb

While this is pretty true, if this is how your forum is....leave, there are definitely better ones out there.



Found at College Humor.

Reuters seems to have copied Wikipedia

Long has Wikipedia battled people just copying and pasting content from other sources into its pages. Also, may academic groups have tried to stop students from copying from Wikipedia into their assignments. Well now a NEW interaction has occured. I was reading this Reuters (via Daily Telegraph) article about difficulties with Chinese characters in the digital age (pretty funny story actually), when I noted the last two paragraphs of the article.

"The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol used as an abbreviation for "at" in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.

It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name (see below). It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character."

I wanted to learn more, so I dutifully went to Wikipedia to find out what kind of naming the "at" sign DOES have. I didn't expect that I would find the "at" sign article to begin with the exact same text that the other article ended with:

"The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol used as an abbreviation for "at" in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.

It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name (see below). It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character."

What a crazy coincidence. Assuming Reuters is the copier (as it would be a weird place for Wikipedia to get its information from), this is a pretty gross citation error on their part. For clarity, I didn't create either of the indented passages...they are simply being cited for their relevance to this article.

References:
Reuters Article (via Daily Telegraph)
Wikipedia At Sign Article

Wiki Time (now twice as much like Hammertime)!

Just a quick blurb.  First of all I'm now an admin at the wiki that Broadside will be releasing fairly soon.  It's gonna be a cool project to get into on the "ground floor" and I'll post more on it as I go on.

For the most part my life is kind of boring right now so I haven't been posting very much on this blog.  Keep abrest of my tech blog, Mason Tech Beat, as I'm putting more energy into that at the moment (though not too much more).

Enjoy the humidity (if you're in VA)!

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