Hey, something I initiated made it to the news!
I had never before nominated a Wikipedia article for deletion, since I'd never come across one that was so transparently non-noteworthy. But when I came across this kid's article, I could see that its topic was completely undeserving of an article, so I nominated it for deletion, my first ever. It was deleted in short order, and now it's made the Australian news.
The discussion page on which we discussed the deletion and voted on it is here.
And as a person who lives in Australia I just want to say Luigi, thank you. This tool is a complete waste of space. You'll be pleased to know he's now been arrested for producing child pornography and public nuisance which means he cannot profit from his antics.
When I first read that article I wondered if it was you as I know your handle is Nightscream.
By the way, the deletion debate is blocked.
LOL. Um, you're welcome, I think.
As for the block, you can access the deletion discussion page by clicking on that page's History at the top, and clicking on an earlier version of it. The latest one that shows the actual discussion before it was archived is the 06:42, 16 January 2008 version by user Chuq.
Rodney, since you live in Australia, I'm curious as to how the law would permit a 16 year old to be arrested for child pornography. In America, he'd be considered a minor and would probably receive some sort of rehabilitation, not criminal charges. Are 16 year olds considered adults in Australia?
The "Child pornography" in this case was footage of his naked 16-year old mates he filmed on his mobile., including a game of naked twister apparently.
In Australia, it doesn't matter who does it, it's illegal. No, 16 year olds are still considered minors except in certain instances where is considerable- of which paedophilia is. I daresay that charge will be dropped and the one of public nuisance will stick.
I read a few articles about him, and all I have to say is, why not marry Brittney Spears right now? Maybe together their combined destructive effects will cause a nuclear explosion.
Sorry, getting off topic here. Say, Luigi, how's administratorship treating you?
Not bad, thanks for asking. Most of my activities are the same as before. The only new one is that when I spot some vandalism and revert, if I see that the vandal has been given repeated warnings on his Talk Page, I'll block him.
I'm also participating at the Meetups for New York-area Wikipedians in New York City. The first one I went to was a picnic in Central Park last summer. We then had one in the Brooklyn Library November 3 (shortly before I became an admin), and our last one was Jan. 13th. 
He's a tool (the 16 yo- not Luigi). he did an interview on one of our current affairs shows (it's on youtube- look under Corey Delaney and A Current Affair) and at the end the host asked him what his advice was to other young kids thinking of throwing a party like he did. His response? "Get me to do it".
I reckon the Police charged him so he could no longer profit off his 15 minutes of fame and also so he would be cornered and have to face his parents.
Finally saw the kid. He was on VH1's Best Week Ever.
They now have a new Padlock image, which I wish they'd had before Luigi's NC entry was removed. The padlock temporarily keeps people from editing entries till I guess the Wiki head honchos or whomever decide otherwise. No sooner has Steve Irwin died that an entry about him has been padlocked.
Various levels of page protection have been around since Wikipedia started, Mark. It's for times when there's a hot dispute about the content of an article to give everyone a chance to calm down. It's not to keep an article from being deleted.
First of all, Mark, Nitcentral and Phil Farrand at Wikipedia article is under Nitcentralia. I had wanted to bring this suggestion up to Morgan before, but why not change the title to just Wikipedia, and transfer these posts there? And if there's an Internet-related section of the Sink (Media?), perhaps it would be best moved there too, since it would not necessarily be restricted to Nitcentral.
However, Page Protection has been around since long before I wrote the Nitcentral article. How would this have helped? Did anyone deface the article during the Discussion over its deletion?
Check it out. Some people on the right apparently felt that Wikipedia, with it's (admittedly not always upheld) standards of sourced articles, facts and legit science has a liberal bias. So they created Conservapedia, a place for people of a certain ideological bent to look up things without coming across any inconvenient truths. Really good stuff here. It treats Young Earth Creationism as a legitimate scientific theory that's simply being held down by a liberal conspiracy. Here's what I found most interesting, check out the usage statistics for it.
Most viewed pages
1. Homosexuality [2,198,703]
2. Main Page [2,077,202]
3. Teen Homosexuality [301,594]
4. Homosexuality and Anal Cancer [296,378]
5. Homosexual Agenda [277,447]
6. Arguments Against Homosexuality [253,441]
7. Wikipedia [250,973]
8. Examples of Bias in Wikipedia [247,731]
9. Theory of Evolution [229,779]
10. Adolf Hitler [229,613]
HALF of the top 10 pages are about homosexuality. Me thinks some of those good Christian people doth protest just a little bit too much. BTW a few months ago when someone first showed me that page it was even funnier as 9 of the top 10 were about homosexuality, including something called "homosexual bowel disease."
I have been poking around on the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and found a tiny stub of an article about nitpicking. I've added some stuff to it, but if anyone here wants to help out, just come and jump in!
The link is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking_%28sport%29
You can also post your contributions here if you don't want to add them directly to Wikipedia.
This is too funny. Left-wing pranksters have been infiltrating conservapedia and writing self-parodying pseudo-conservative articles, think Stephen Colbert.
The problem has been that conservapedia's editors have a hard time weeding them out from the actual content. The problem is two fold. First both the spoofs and the real articles have the same standard of proof, none. Second the actual positions that this "encyclopedia" takes are sometimes so ridiculous that the parodies don't seem that far off.
LOL. Where did you hear this? Gotta a link or something? Any idea which articles were hit?
I thought Conservapedia already was a parody. I mean, it HAS to be, right?
Know, it was started by the son of conservative Phyllis Schafly (sp?). You can look it up on...well, Wikipedia!
I checked out the Examples of Bias in Wikipedia article that Brian included in his list above. The reasoning in the examples listed is pretty flimsy and mendacious.
Another good article about how funny Conservapedia is can be found here.
Luigi, here's some stuff about it.
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/03/conservapedia-more-interesting-than-it.html
I found Conservapedia interesting.
I do not consider it to be a parody of Wikipedia but rather a homage or a spin-off to Wiki.
I consider it to be a homage or spin-off to mental illness.
I continue to be puzzled by the purpose of Conservapedia. Does it represent the actual viewpoints of the far right, or is it intended as a caricature? Or is the real thing a caricature?
Are you asking if the far right is a caricature?
Of itself, yes.
No, the people who created Conservapedia are quite serious about the whole thing. They feel that Wikipedia has a liberal bias and they want to correct it with their own "encyclopedia." Of course to quote Stephen Colbert "reality has a very well known liberal bias" and so long as Wikipedia sticks to facts and reputable sources they won't be what those guys want.
Todd, it's just Andrew Schlafly's right-wing Christian viewpoint, basically. It really has nothing to do with being an encyclopedia, since he obviously has no interest in creating one for general knowledge.
One of my old collge profs got a wikipedia article. Cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Drange
Cool. I created the one for my art school caricature teacher, Sam Viviano.
Oh wow, I just scrolled up and realized that this is the second exchange we've had on this board involving the word "caricature".
That was an actual edit made to the "He-Man" article on October 15. Now we all know Skeletor's IP address.
Continued from the RM General Discussion Board:
Mike: Wikipedia is great fun and a great resource. However, the more "academic" you get, the less reliable or informative it becomes. If you want to know stuff about "24" or the Secret Society of Super-Villains, though, it's A1 because people who care about that stuff will be all over it to make sure it is right.
Brian FitzGerald: Wikipedia is also always a work in progress. It's a great jumping off point to find information about stuff but it's hardly a be all & end off of anything. On articles about religious history and politics this can be especially bad because zealots on both sides often rewrite articles to suit their own personal biases. Indeed most articles like that end up needing protected status or semi protected status from vandals.
Luigi Novi: The opposite is true, Mike. The more academic topics tend to be better-sourced. An independent study, in fact, examining 50 science articles from Wikipedia and Brittanica found that Wikipedia had an average of four errors per article, whereas Britannica had three. By contrast, you're more likely to see a lack of citations when you read an article on pop culture.
TomM: Perhaps a better way of saying what Mike meant is that the quality of controversial subjects, especially those where the popular understanding falls short of academic rigor, seem to fare the worst in Wikipedia, as they do in any open forum. That is why one should not take Wikipedia as authoritative in those areas.
Luigi Novi: That's not true either, and doesn't really resemble what Mike said anyway, since heindeed mentioned the more academic subjects, not controversial ones.
Controversial subjects, precisely because they are controversial, tend to attract a lot of editors and administrators, making an eventual consensus more likely. Lack of sourcing is not really an issue, because unsourced material can simply be removed altogether because that violates the Verifiability policy (and in the cases of living people, the Biographies of Living People policy), which makes their controversial nature moot.
Focusing on whether the topic is academic or controversial misses the point regarding whether Wikipedia, or which areas of Wikipedia, should be taken as "authoritative". It's not the area in question. It's whether it satisfies Wikipedia's core policies (Verifiability, Neutrality, etc).
To illustrate this point, let's look at examples of articles in areas that are Academic, Non-Academic, and Controversial:
ACADEMIC
Abroteia An academic topic, but it's a tiny stub, which means it has only a small amount of text that is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject. It's composed of one small sentence, and that sentence isn't even sourced. Not of any use to anyone who needs info on the topic.
Literature of Angola This seems like a pretty academic topic, but the article is a also stub, and although what little content it has is sourced, it seems to provide poor coverage of the topic. Again, not very useful.
Dorylus This article has some substantial content on its topic, but it's not a very comprehensive article, and there are some passages that unsourced, with a couple of "citation needed" tags placed here and there. So it would provide some useful info to someone who needs it, but they should look elsewhere for a more solid source.
Western Chalukya architecture This is a Featured Article. A Featured Article is one that exemplifies WP's very best work, and is characterized by professional standards of writing and presentation. They are articles that are Peer Reviewed, and judged to be well-written, comprehensive in their treatment of the subject, factually accurate, neutral, consistent with prescribed style guidelines and structure, and supported by properly cited, verifiable sources. Other Featured Articles on academic topics include the ones on To Kill a Mockingbird, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and William Butler Yeats. You can rely on these articles.
NON-ACADEMIC
Chris Batista Chris Batista is a comic book illustrator that I met in art school. It's a stub. Although I can attest to the fact that he went to S.V.A., you need a verifiable source to include such info in an article. Using personal knowledge is called "Original Research", and is prohibited, because it's unverifiable. This isn’t a very reliable article for anything other than which book’s he’s worked on, and even then, it only gives the years on which he worked them, and not the issue numbers, so someone trying to collect his work, would at best have only this as a starting point.
Kieran Culkin This article is still a stub. It has more content than the Batista article, and most of what it has is sourced, but there's no source for the assertion what his most "notable" role is, or for his "recent" stage work. Not a very reliable article.
Jessica Alba I choose this article as an example of a middle ground article because I've been editing it for some time, and since it's on my Watchlist, I'm well acquainted with its content. If you look at it, you'll see that just about every bit of information in it is sourced. It's not a Featured Article, but it's fairly well-written, IMHO, and so if you rely on those sources, you can verify its content.
Superman This is a Featured Article. Other Featured Articles of a non-academic topic include the articles on Batman, The Dark Knight (last year's film), Captain Marvel (DC Comics), J.R.R. Tolkien, Halo Graphic Novel, the Sinestro Corps War, Angelina Jolie, TARDIS, Wonderbra, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Homer Simpson. You can easily rely on these articles.
CONTROVERSIAL
Capitalism II This article, which is on the video game, appears to be an unsourced stub, and its neutrality is currently disputed. I just removed an unsourced passage that seems to have been POV, but I don’t know if that’s the passage with which the editor who added the neutrality tag took issue. Another such article is Caveman (group), which has more material, but isn’t very well-sourced, as there are a number of citation request tags in it, and it too, is being disputed for its neutrality. These are not very good articles to rely on.
The articles on Affirmative action, the Movement to impeach George W. Bush, communism, Scientology and Muhammed Ali are more comprehensively written, but are all currently being disputed. I wouldn’t caution against relying on them, particularly the portions that are well-sourced, but I’d be careful with the portions whose neutrality is being disputed.
The God Who Wasn't There This is a controversial film that promotes the atheistic belief that Jesus Christ was a purely mythical figure, and indeed, editors on its article have disputed its neutrality. Every now and then someone will come along and rewrite or delete something in it. Sometimes I revert it, and sometimes I see that it actually improves its neutrality. I myself rewrote the Overview section due to concerns expressed on the Talk Page that the article seemed to promote the arguments in it, instead of attributing them to the film's director. Most people have probably never heard of this movie, however, which is probably why it isn't that comprehensive, and no one has put a neutrality tag on it. I don't think it's going to generate a full-fledged edit war. You could rely on the article concerning the film’s content, but I wouldn’t recommend it concerning criticism or scholarly views of it.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed This film, which came out last year, caused a firestorm of controversy on Wikipedia, which I was involved in for some time. The banner tag that was once on the article indicating that its neutrality was being disputed is no longer there, and it's entirely sourced. Whereas the article's size caused warnings to appear in the Edit Field when it was first written last year, it's now at a better size, and it seems that the edit warring has died down. Even if you’re a creationist, you can rely on this article regarding the film’s content, and views of it from supporters and critics of it.
Boy Scouts of America membership controversies This is obviously a controversial topic, but the article on it has achieved Featured status. Other Featured Articles on controversial subjects include the ones on the 1996 United States campaign finance controversy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Pope Pius XII, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, John McCain, Xenu, Religious debates over the Harry Potter series, and Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. These are obviously reliable.
So as you can see, it has nothing to do with whether the topic is academic, pop cultural, or controversial. It’s how well the article meets Wikipedia’s core policies, and in general, standards of journalism and scholarship. In that regard, you can find articles in each of those three types of areas, from worst to best.
Currently, I'm reading Mixed Blessings by William and Barbara Christopher. In the book, the Christophers make reference to thinking about adopting another child. The way it was stated, made me think that one of the two children in the book was adopted. So I googled Christopher's name. I read the Wiki entry, which didn't help me. But I did find an error in it.
According to Wikipedia, the Christophers started writing Mixed Blessings in 1985. Please note that the copyright to the book is 1989. In the Introduction to the book, William Christopher speaks of attending a ceremony in which he was given a statue for his contribution to the image of religious figures in television. In his acceptance speech, Christopher spoke of his family life and mentioned being the father of an autistic child. This prompted one of the people in the audience to suggest that Bill Christopher write a book about the family's experience with Ned, the autistic child. This happened in 1987. Which means Wiki got that one wrong.*
*To be fair, it appears that some idiot on Wiki copied the William Christopher entry from the M*A*S*H fan site, bestcareanywhere.net Here's the bestcareanywhere Christopher article. The Wiki article is here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Christopher
Thanks, I paraphrased it.
I've recently started posting at the BB for snopes.com, generally considered the best reference page on the internet for urban legends and saw a neat thread about wikipedia. The article itself was about how the fringes of wikipeida have the hardest time staying bias free as people with an agenda can change something back and fourth for a time before protection is activated.
Wikipedia even keeps a page dedicated to the lamest edit wars
Snopes has actually had a problem with a wikipedia editor. The guy e-mailed them after they told a reporter for factcheck.org that much of the information on their own wikipedia page is wrong. According to Snopes:
His attitude is that the information in the Wikipedia article was taken from actual secondary sources (i.e., newspaper articles written by reporters who were sloppy with details), and who are we to say it's wrong?
We're merely primary sources, after all, and Wikipedia doesn't do those.
I understand that wikipedia can't do primary sources because any schmuck in his Mom's basement could claim to hold a PHD in a discipline but they will cite a snopes article on a variety of subjects but snopes is less credible than some fluff journalist who misquoted them.
Untrustworthy text to be color-coded.
Color-coding sounds like a good idea, but I don't know if using how long a given piece of text has persisted in an article to be a good criterion, since how long it's been left untouched really has nothing to do with how well it's sourced or neutral. The hoaxed text in the John Siegelthaler incident, for example, went undetected for four months. (See Wikipedia biography controversy.) How long does text have to be up before it gets the "trustworthy" color?
I would imagine that text that is cited and verifiable will become 'trustworthy' by default, and any edits made without citing source would be labeled as 'un.' That's just a guess from my $#^$&*# &*(#$^&*#$^&*$#&*-in' irritating experiences trying to edit Wikipedia, of course. :-)
See, that's what I would've suggested, and what I thought would be the criteria. But the story does not indicate that. It indicates that the criterion will be how long the text has persisted.
The way I read the article, it looks like a given contributor's reputation will be determined by how long, on average, his words go unchallenged, based on his entire output. And the color-coding will reflect the author's reputation, not necessarily that of the specific passage.
If they did that in red, and a similar scale of the author's use of citations in green, the resulting shade of orange would be a more reliable indicator of the author's trustworthiness.
Usually if I misread an article, a second, slower re-read clears up the issue. In this case, the second read only confirms confusion. The article does say that the concept was based on the author's reputation, but it also seems to assume that the program is based strictly on the passage's surviving page edits.
I'm so confused!
but it also seems to assume that the program is based strictly on the passage's surviving page edits.
That seems problematic to me. Mostly because controversial but factually supported things like evolution, JFK's assassination or 9/11 would suddenly turn into "undetermined" things where facts, science, biology and physics suddenly become debatable simply because enough nuts believe the BS and keep making edits.
For the most part, fringe material tends to be weeded out of articles on controversial topics. Granted, every now and then someone vandalizes or introduces such material into articles; I wonder how that would affect the text's standing in the eyes of that program?
From Wiki's own page on the program:
WikiTrust analyzes edits in real-time, as they are entered by users, and it computes author reputation, text trust, and text origin:
* Text author: WikiTrust computes the author of every word of text, using an algorithm that is robust to cut-and-pase, delete-and-reinsert, and most type of attacks (we claim, all attacks -- try your hand at it and let us know!). If you click on the check text tab, when the mouse pointer hovers over a word, the author of the word is displayed in a small pop-up next to the word.
* Text origin: WikiTrust keeps track of the revision in which every word was inserted. In the check text tab, clicking on a word redirects to the diff showing the the edit where the word was introduced. You can examine the edit, as well as access information on the author of the edit. As for author tracking, WikiTrust uses algorithms that are robust to attacks.
* Text trust: The trust of a portion of text is computed according to the reputation of its author, as well as the reputation of all users who have subsequently revised the text and the article where the text appears. Text trust is displayed via text background colors in the check text tab: the background is white for high-trust text, and shades of orange that are the stronger, the lower the text trust.
* Author reputation is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior.
From a talk given at WikiSim 2008, while the program was being developed:
Text Trust: Details
Trust depends on:
• Authorship: Author lends 50% of their reputation to
the text they create.
– Thus, even text from high-rep authors is only
medium-rep when added: high trust is achieved only
via multiple reviews, never via a single author.
• Revision: When an author of reputation r preserves a
word of trust t < r, the word increases in trust to
t + 0.3(r – t)
• The algorithms still need fine-tuning.
"* Author reputation is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior"
WHAT?!? So if a pig-head like 'the Real FennShysa' keeps reverting my edits to the 'Star Wars Fan Edits' page (where the Star Wars Revisited edit being sold as an official bootleg in India has caused a major legal crackdown on the entire industry of fan-editing as recounted in numerous edits) because he can't find the information covered in a major periodical... I would lose reputation points because he keeps removing my text after I( update it with new citations that he doesn't approve of? That seems a very unjust system... text 'bullies' could ruin the reputation of anyone or gain it at others expense by reverting their legitimate edits and then adding the same info slightly rephrased- then they gain reputation and the poor reverted-text poster loses it!
Or, on The Man With The Golden Gun page, when an oft-poster states in ignorance that the Spiral Ramp Jump in the film was an early use of CGI, it will be considered reliable, yet when I correct the fact to reflect that it was in fact planned by computer (physics computations on the weight, balance, etc.) and performed in a specially constructed car, that information, far more accurate than the fallacious CGI claim, will be considered far less reliable because it was my first wikipedia post?
This sounds like a system BEGGING for abuse! :-(
Apparently there is a way for the program to detect an edit war. Participants lose reputation much more quickly the more they participate. So if three or four authors with stable posts elsewhere are on one side and one fanatic is on the other side, his reputation will be shot so fast that his effect on the others' reputation becomes negligible.
On the other hand, if he gets friends to join on his side of the edit war....
I really think that reputation should be two dimensional, not one, noting objectivity (based on third-party citations) as well as consensus.
What the heck is an "official bootleg"?
Andrew, Wikipedia:Verifiability is a fundamental core policy, and the burden is on you to provide a reliable, verifiable source for the info you add. You're not supposed to add material without it. If he provides a valid rationale why the sources you cite are not reliable, then he's doing the right thing. If you feel his rationale is not in keeping with policy, then you should challenge it on the basis of that policy. It is not supposed to be about what one editor "approves of".
And where is this Star Wars Fan Edits article? I couldn't find an article with that name.
I also couldn't find where in the Man with the Golden Gun film article was this matter with the CGI. Where is it?
Luigi- good point. I should say, it's being bootlegged and sold as an 'official' Lucasfilm release. :-)
The Man with the Golden Gun is already corrected on the main film page. The Star Wars Fan Edits was a subheading under 'Alternate versions and edits for Star Wars,' or something to that effect.
And yes, I am aware of the verifiability issue- I wasn't at first, but did my best to proof my sources. The difficulty was that even after a full set of citations backing up everything stated in the article, none of the sources I provided- whether it was a fan edit site or an independent blog news site, weren't considered 'objective' enough. It isn't as if the comings and goings of the fan edit industry are covered in Time or Newsweek. Nonetheless, the events I was reporting happened and were documented, having major effect on the genre. But since none of the sources provided were acceptable (it is apparently only considered acceptable if it meets the same level of objective third-party coverage that the famous 'Phantom Edit' did) it didn't happen.
And perhaps I'm just being a sore-head about it... but I've seen far more ludicrous, unverified, or just plain WRONG things posted on Wikipedia with no edit wars to remove THEM... :-) Ah, Wikipedia... I love it and I hate it. :-)
I still think this 'reliability' system sounds rife for abuse... unless they are going to require each reader to say, check off an article for authenticity before posting one of their own edits, or somesuch, why should 'how long the text has been up unchanged' be a valid measurement? What if it's simply an obscure, seldom-visited page? I dunno... I think the idea is good, but the execution, as outlined, seems potentially very flawed.
Luigi - "List of changes in Star Wars re-releases", near the page bottom.
Fan sites indeed are not reliable, nor are blogs, because they do not have journalistic standing, the content is user-generated, and there are no editorial controls. It really has nothing to do with objectivity.
The Star Wars Fan Edits was a subheading under 'Alternate versions and edits for Star Wars,' or something to that effect.
Luigi Novi: On what article?
As for the sub-standard stuff you've spotted, that could be because no one found it. Again, the hoaxed material in the John Siegelthaler incident went undetected for over four months.
The section in that Star Wars article titled "Bootleg versions, fan edits, etc." is completely unreferenced. Overall, the article itself isn't very well-sourced.
I have to agree with the "benign" explanation taken from your link:
There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia's slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else — well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial" — making sure that articles are well formatted and readable.
There's still stuff to add, but not nearly as much.
If that's the case, then I don't see why it has to be seen as a "decline". Is Encyclopedia Britannica in "decline" because it has achieved a comfortable range of articles, and doesn't add that many more within a given time frame? Why is the rate at which new articles are added the one criterion? Me, I see this as a good thing: Now that the rate is slowing down, users can concentrate more on improving existing ones.
This evening I finished uploading over 100 pics of the people I photographed at the Big Apple Convention over the weekend. I snapped pics of over 90 actors from Star Wars and Star Trek, Playboy models, reality TV personalities, pro wrestlers, comic book writers and illustrators, etc. I photographed the bulk of them, about 70, on Saturday, and about 20 on Sunday.
Some of the highlights:
On the Star Trek front, I met Brent Spiner, Kate Mulgrew, John Billingsley, Erick Avari (who guested in TNG, DS9 and ENT) and Saul Rubinek (Fajo from The Most Toys(TNG)). Spiner was right there at the first table in front of the entrance when you walk in on Saturday. I took a medium-shot of him, but he then asked me to take a close-up, which he preferred. I agreed that that one looked better. Avari was friendly, and Billingsley and Rubinek were also cordial, but Kate Mulgrew, who on Sunday was sitting at the table that Spiner had been at on Saturday, seemed distant. She was sitting there talking with her sister, so I waited patiently, standing right there in front of her, thinking she would eventually look up and give me an opportunity to greet her and ask for a pic. A woman behind the table approached me, so I assumed this was Mulgrew’s rep, but when I asked if I could take a photo of her (as I almost always do), she said I had to ask Mulgrew. I didn’t want to interrupt her conversation, so the woman asked her for me, and when Mulgrew stood still for the camera, she didn’t smile or anything. I was too intimidated to ask her to smile for another, as I got the sense that she was irritated by doing this, so I just left it at that. There’s a couple of nice pics of her smiling already in her Wikipedia article, so I didn’t replace it with the one I took.
It was cool to meet comic book illustrators Adam and Joe Kubert, and photograph them at the Kubert School table in one shot right after arrived at the con, but Andy Kubert was not there. Still, getting a luminary like Joe Kubert, whose article didn’t have a photo, was cool.
I really liked that martial arts film The Last Dragon when I was a kid, so it was cool to be able to get a pic of Taimak.
There were a number of glamour models, and Playboy/Penthouse models there, but my favorite was Sandra Taylor. She’s just beautiful, period. When I asked for a pic, she took the pins out of her hair, and let it down, just like women do in the movies. I photographed her because the photo in her article at the time I checked it out was this horribly pixilated one, but when I got home Saturday night, I saw that someone had put a much better one in there, one that I think is better than the one I took, so I didn’t replace it.
On the reality TV front, I met Rupert Boneham, the loveable fan favorite from Survivor: Pearl Islands, Jenna Morasca, the winner of Survivor:Amazon, and Johnny Fairplay, who became infamous as a villain on Survivor: Pearl Islands for fraudulently leading the others to believe that his grandmother had died. The latter two were fun to be around, and Jenna let me photograph her a second time Sunday because my Saturday pic was a bit blurry. But Rupert was the nicest. He really is as friendly as he comes across in the media. Other reality stars I photographed were husband and wife Adrianne Curry from America’s Next Top Model, and Christopher Knight from The Brady Bunch. The two first met on The Surreal Life, and went on to star on a spinoff, My Fair Brady, which documented their relationship and marriage.
Normally I place priority on photographing people whose Wikipedia articles lack a photo, or lack a good one. One exception I made was with John Schneider, since I grew up watching Dukes of Hazzard, and enjoyed the first few seasons of Smallville. At one point, he picked up some of the headshots on his table, and I thought he wanted me to put those pics in his article, I can’t do that, because I can’t use copyright-protected pics (the whole reason I go to these things to take my own), and he became apparently irate, telling me to “Just take the @#$%ing picture”. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, and I saw that he was just holding the headshots next to him, so I took it, and explained that I misunderstood him, telling him self-deprecatingly that I was dense today. He then apologized himself. That was an odd encounter.
Miracle Laurie from Dollhouse was my favorite guest at the con. Must be that radiant, trillion-dollar smile of hers. (Don’t believe me? Check out the pic, or Google her.) She also paid me a nice compliment, after a fan took a guerilla photo of her from some distance away and then ran off after she tried to get his attention and tell him not to do that. The guests try to sell headshots there, and some don’t like it when people take pics for free; Me, I always tell the guests I’m covering the con for Wikipedia, I ask them for permission to take a pic, and comply when they decline. Because of this, she said I was “very professional”. Hers was one of only two pics I put in her article when I got home Saturday night, because I was otherwise exhausted.
Rekha Sharma from Battlestar Galactica. After I took her pic, she asked to see it on my camera, and I let her, as I always do, and she requested that I retake it a few times. Good thing, because the one I ultimately ended up was the best one I took Saturday and one of the best I took at the entire convention. I placed that pic in her article when I got home that night. I thanked her on Sunday for making me retake it. The one I took of Rachelle Leah on Sunday was also one of the best of the convention.
Photographing Thomas Jane proved to be problematic. Since the pic in his article is of him on a convention panel looking sideways, and I favor pics in which the subject is looking at the camera smiling, I put him on my list. But there was a line a mile long for his one-hour signing session on Saturday, which surprised me, because I didn’t realize he was that big a star. (I mean, didn’t The Punisher and The Mist not do that well?) I didn’t want to devote all that time to waiting on a line when I didn’t know if he’d grant me request (even though most do), but I noticed that he and his people didn’t seem to be objecting to people taking photos of him from who weren’t on line, so I made an exception to my usual protocols, and tried to snap some pics. I took a dozen or two before I managed to take one when was posing with a fan, and got him to smile in my direction. But I noticed during this that he looked a bit well, unkempt. He had a white T-shirt that seemed to be sticking to him with sweat, the hair not covered by his hat seemed similarly matted down, and he was unshaven. Looking at the photograph at home, I tried to rationalize adding it to the article, but ultimately came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t. I mean, he looks homeless, for crying out loud.
Edward Furlong, Loretta Switt and a wrestler named Virgil declined to be photographed. I respected their wishes.
Because the con was at Pier 94 this time instead of the Penn Plaza Pavillion, the comic book artists were in a different part of the place then the celebrities, so I didn’t photograph as many artists this time, but of the ones I did, meeting and photographing Adam Hughes, whose one of the best artists in the biz, was cool. I took two pics of him Saturday, and then one of him on Sunday of him holding up the convention sketch he was working on, so now I have a pic of a Hughes convention sketch no one else has. Yay! (Well, okay, the guy he did it for will have it, but still, I’m the one who uploaded it…) I also met James O’Barr (the creator of The Crow) and Tim Bradsheet, who renders some of the finest cover work in the industry.
---I also ran into three different friends I went to art school with, James Rodriguez, Nelson DeCastro, and one I didn’t even know would be there, Gino DeCicco, who I hadn’t seen since we graduated in 1994. I was really stoked to see him after so long. It turns out he worked with Robert Smigel doing those animated shorts on Saturday Night Live until that studio closed.
Trying to get a pic of Billy Dee Williams was irritating. I went to the booth where he was, and I showed the guy in charge of the line my press pass. He asked if I had some ticket or something, and I said I didn’t know I needed one. He told me to stand right by the table as Williams was signing, and I thought this guy would indicate when I got ask Mr. Williams for a pic, but other people went in front of me. The line guy said that I had to say something myself, but when I did, Williams’ rep, who was next to him in the booth, said, “He doesn’t have time for that.” (For what? A single photograph? And after I had been standing there politely waiting while others walked up to the booth past me?) They then got up and walked over to another part of the building for an interview. I chased after them, getting ahead of them and trying to photograph Williams during his walk over there, and then tried to photograph him from some distance away during his interview, but none of the pics ended up being any better than the one already in his article. I deleted most of them, and only uploaded one to the Commons. Elsewhere on the Star Wars front, Daniel Logan and Maria de Aragon were much more cordial, aside from the fact that when I approached de Aragon, before I could say hello, she took out her blaster and shot me first. (Wink, wink.)
This convention was particularly important for me, because usually, publishers and their editors don’t appear at the Big Apple Con (unlike the New York Comic Con, which does not grant me press passes), so I can’t show them samples of my artwork, but this time, perhaps because the con has gotten bigger and more prestigious after being purchased by Wizard Wrold, three people would be there this time that I could give copies of my artwork to: Joe Quesada, the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics who was a guest speaker in my class when I was in art school, Jim Lee, who heads Wildstorm Comics, an imprint of DC, and Joe Madureira, an artist who I think has is a creative director at a video game company. I was so frustrated that I didn’t get to show my samples to many people at the last con, but this time, I managed to complete a 4-page Hulk sequence on Friday, and on Saturday I gave all three of them a copy of it in addition to photographing them. I also got Esad Ribic to critique my samples, and what he said dovetailed largely with who Nelson DeCastrro said, so I’m going to redo parts of the sequence to incorporate their corrections and suggestions.
You can see all the pics I took at the con, including a bunch I haven’t mentioned here (along with all the pics I’ve taken from previous Big Apple Cons) here.
Victoria Zdrok...whoa!
Oh, and I almost forgot about Linda Hamilton. She was such a sweatheart. Some people on the line for her were saying that she was really touchy-feely, and I saw that she was, hugging and kissing the fans who posed with her with a photograph, etc. She was very nice.
Are people still having fun putting silly things on Conservapedia? I know that was a couple of years ago, but I wonder if I should still try? I've thought of a few things to put on there.
Wow. It's the end of an era.
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, and will only produce the online version and educational materials for schools.
Why does Wikipedia make it so difficult for people to contribute to existing articles, and so difficult to create new articles and entries
Because some people make new articles about silly things that nobody else cares about, often giving them silly titles, etc.
Wikipedia still needs an article/entry for American Supermodel
Elle Johnson , born
October 25,1990
She is basically the blonde hair blue eyed Marilyn Monroe of the
21st Century. Elle Johnson is from
Park City, Utah, but her Twitter now says Las Vegas, Nevada
Elle Johnson & Lindsey Pelas are
Both Incredible. Lindsey Pelas already has a Wikipedia entry, but why does Wikipedia make it so difficult to create new articles and entries ?
Well, Jeff, if you feel so strongly about this, then why don't you create said entry yourself.
Or would that be too much like work?
I see Jeff has been let out from the ward for 24 hours…..
Tell me about it.
We lose good members like JEP, but Jeff Winters, who has contributed absolutely nothing of value, keeps coming back.
There ain't no justice.
Rodney, what ward ?
The one that houses McMurphy and his friends.
Who's McMurphy ?
Why am I not surprised?
Since doing research is, like good grammar, beyond Jeff's abilities:
Randle McMurphy is a character from the movie (and novel), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*.
*I'd have put a link to the Wikipedia page, but said link includes brackets, and this site doesn't like brackets.
In fairness, I'm familiar with 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' (had to read the book in school FORTY years ago and saw the movie), but I couldn't tell you any character's names other than Nurse Ratchett. I know Jack Nicholson is in it, but I don't remember his name.
I didn't get the McMurphy reference either since I've never seen Cuckoo's Nest, although I did wonder if it was a Cuckoo's Nest reference.
I didn't think it was necessary to outline the entire plot or dramatis personae to get the point across.
Steve and KAM got the reference despite having not read the book or seen the film and even if they didn't I'm sure both are than capable of doing their own research.
@Steve, Jack played McMurphy.
I didn't know who McMurphy was either. However, a few clicks of my mouse got me the information I needed.
I guess even a few clicks of a mouse is too much like work for Jeff.
If clicking a mouse is considered work, then somebody owes me ALOT of overtime pay! There's always SOMETHING I want to know or need to know.
As far as this thread is concerned, though, I'd like to say that I really, really like Wikipedia, with all of its information and detail. Doesn't always give me as much information as I'd like sometimes, but at times it can be very thorough, which I appreciate. Kudos to the researchers and contributors.
I've found it handy as well at times.
