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A Strawberry iMac, APPLE COMPUTER INC., 2000. Jimmy Waless personal iMac used in the creation of Wikipedia.

In 2000, entrepreneur and bond trader Jimmy Wales founded Nupedia, an online encyclopedia for peer-reviewed articles written by experts. A year later, amid a slow trickle of sanctioned articles, he launched a supplementary open-source internet encyclopedia that used collaborative wiki software, and Wikipedia was born. In its two decades of existence, Wikipedia has attained an astonishing depth and breadth: the English Wikipedia alone one of over 300 Wikipedia language editions boasts over 6.4 million articles with more than 250 million page views a day.

This month, the genesis of our online collective memory was commemorated with a sale at Christies, in collaboration with Wales. Hosted where else? online, The Birth of Wikipedia sale took place from December 3 to 15 and offered up two lots: a 2000 strawberry iMac that Wales used to develop Wikipedia, and an NFT of the first Wikipedia edit, which was made by Wales on January 15, 2001, the day that the platform launched. The bidding on both items opened at a low $100. Wales iMac ultimately realized $187,500, while the NFT skyrocketed to $750,000.

Wales used the roseate personal computer for research and development in Wikipedias early days. As the Rubenesque desktop neared obsolescence, the device was relegated to the room of his young daughter, who used it to play video games, a statement from Christies said. An auction house representative told Hyperallergic that the computer is still functional, but it is quite an old computer, and you can expect it to behave like so. It comes with the original box.

In the NFT on offer, the first edit to Wikipedia in which Wales typed, Hello, World!, a classic programming reference is embedded in a recreation of the sites original homepage from 2001. Structurally echoing a Wikipedia page, an interactive feature allows the buyer to grant anyone editing access to the NFT. A timer function resets the page to its original form after set intervals.

Its been over twenty years since I first typed in the words Hello, World! to launch Wikipedia and even today, Im still amazed at the size and breadth of what it has become, said Wales in a statement.

Wales, who found himself disappointed with Facebook and Twitter, launched the alternative nontoxic social network WT.Social in October 2019; a portion of the proceeds from the auction will go toward the advertisement-free platform, which runs on donations. Some of the funds will also be directed toward charities working in the free culture world, a statement from Christies said.

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month, including Robert Gober, Shannon Ebner, Sherrill Roland, Sun Woods, and more.

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very Los Angeles art events this month.

Jonny Negron captures the disappointment and delights of Dionysian narcissism.

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Wikipedia Auctions Off Some Of its History - Hyperallergic

In recent years, we've seen no shortage of terrifying wildlife on a golf course. Gators. Snakes. Bobcats. Bears. More gators. More snakes. You get the point, it's a dangerous world out there, even when you're just trying to get in 18 holes. What we didn't expect, however, is that a crab might be scarier than all these other animals.

That's right, a crab. Although, as you can imagine, the crab we're about to show you isn't exactly any crab. It's a robber or coconut crab, and according to Wikipedia, it's "the the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world, with a weight of up to 4.1 kg."

"Robber" is a fitting term because it wound up snapping one golfer's driver in the following, horrifying clip that was captured by a group of guys playing on Christmas Island, which according to Wikipedia is "an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean." (By the way, we're glad Wikipedia is still around in 2022. Happy New Year, Wikipedia.)

OK, here's the clip of this giant thing wreaking havoc on someone's golf bag that was shared by 9News Australia:

CRIKEY! Those claws. Those teeth. Tough break to lose a driver, but that's certainly better than losing an appendage. That crab is not messing around. Wow.

Anyway, to to our fellow golfers, stay safe out there this year. And watch out for crabs.

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This giant club-snapping crab might be the scariest form of wildlife ever seen on a golf course - GolfDigest.com

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Minister of Women, Family and Community Development Datuk Seri Rina Mohd Harun has come under fire for what some see as her lackluster performance thus far, specially during the recent floods.

As a result, netizens have gone one step further to show their displeasure online, changing her Wikipedia page to contain insults.

Her name on Wikipedia was changed continuously over the past few days, ranging from explicit slurs to references to her love for water jets.

This refers to when she came under fire for using a water jet to wash an already clean corridor at a flood relief center while surrounded by photographers.

Netizens criticised the act as she was not actually providing real aid to flood victims, and instead merely posed for photographs.

However, when Rina Haruns name on Wikipedia was changed to include insults, many more netizens came forward to call out such behaviour as cyberbullying.

Despite the peoples anger towards her performance as a minister, Malaysians are also putting their foot down on blatant cyberbullying of a public figure.

This is not our style. We are better than this. We are way above this [behaviour], writes one netizen.

As of the time of writing, Rina Haruns Wikipedia page has reverted to normal.

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Anne is an advocate of sustainable living and the circular economy, and has managed to mum-nag the team into using reusable containers to tapau food. She is also a proud parent of 4 cats and 1 rabbit.

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Rina Harun Bullied Online: Offensive Edits Made To The Womens Ministers Wikipedia Page - The Rakyat Post

SIR: Now, as my 91st Christmas approaches, I am very grateful that I have never become involved in the online social world of such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Linked-in et al. As a result, if trolled, I am blissfully unaware of the fact and all the better for it.

One app on my mobile phone that I do find really useful, translates languages. As a result I can communicate with my Chinese flat tenant and it helps with my Spanish, German and Franglais, when required.

Banking, using a mobile phone, leaves me totally cold. I consider it too dangerous. I have a dedicated bank account with hardly any money in it and use the debit card for all online shopping, only adding funds when needed.

As a very active investor, perhaps the best advance for me, has been online investing. When I first started dealing in shares a transaction involved phoning a stockbroker and paying commission. Now, on my computer, I can look at my portfolio and access information about shares instantly. Dealing takes seconds and sometimes I even buy and sell the same share in a day if there is enough movement in the price.

Apart from some soup making and the occasional cake, I now take responsibility for cooking lunch once a week, to give my wife a rest and find online recipes very helpful.

Looking back I remember opposing credit and debit cards, these days I very rarely write a cheque. We spent a small fortune on postage and probably the best investment I have ever made, some 20 years ago, was buying two or three hundred first class stamps, two days before the price went up. I still have a dozen or so left and the price of postage has probably tripled.

However much thing change, much remains as it always has been. The one thing I have learned, is that change is not always bad and even at my age, I need to try to keep up.

Keith Webb,

Quarry Road,

Winchester

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LETTER: a 90 year old keeping up with progress - Hampshire Chronicle

Christian HumborgContributor

As COVID-19 spread rapidly across the world in 2020, people everywhere were hungry for reliable information. A global network of volunteers rose to the challenge, consolidating information from scientists, journalists and medical professionals, and making it accessible for everyday people.

Two of them live almost 3,200 kilometers away from one another: Dr. Alaa Najjar is a Wikipedia volunteer and medical doctor who spends breaks during his emergency room shift addressing COVID-19 misinformation on the Arabic version of the site. Sweden-based Dr. Netha Hussain, a clinical neuroscientist and doctor, spent her downtime editing COVID-19 articles in English and Malayalam (a language of southwestern India), later focusing her efforts on improving Wikipedia articles about COVID-19 vaccines.

Thanks to Najjar, Hussain and more than 280,000 volunteers, Wikipedia emerged as one of the most trusted sources for up-to-date, comprehensive knowledge about COVID-19, spanning nearly 7,000 articles in 188 languages. Wikipedias reach and ability to support knowledge-sharing on a global scale from informing the public about a major disease to helping students study for tests is only made possible by laws that enable its collaborative, volunteer-led model to thrive.

As the European Parliament considers new regulations aimed at holding Big Tech platforms accountable for illegal content amplified on their websites and apps through packages like the Digital Services Act (DSA), it must protect citizens ability to collaborate in service of the public interest.

Lawmakers are right to try to stem the spread of content that causes physical or psychological harm, including content that is illegal in many jurisdictions. As they consider a range of provisions for the comprehensive DSA, we welcome some of the proposed elements, including requirements for greater transparency about how platforms content moderation works.

But the current draft also includes prescriptive requirements for how terms of service should be enforced. At first glance, these measures may seem necessary to curb the rising power of social media, prevent the spread of illegal content and ensure the safety of online spaces. But what happens to projects like Wikipedia? Some of the proposed requirements could shift power further away from people to platform providers, stifling digital platforms that operate differently from the large commercial platforms.

Big Tech platforms work in fundamentally different ways than nonprofit, collaborative websites like Wikipedia. All of the articles created by Wikipedia volunteers are available for free, without ads and without tracking our readers browsing habits. The commercial platforms incentive structures maximize profits and time on site, using algorithms that leverage detailed user profiles to target people with content that is most likely to influence them. They deploy more algorithms to moderate content automatically, which results in errors of over- and under-enforcement. For example, computer programs often confuse artwork and satire with illegal content, while failing to understand human nuance and context necessary to enforce platforms actual rules.

The Wikimedia Foundation and affiliates based in specific countries, like Wikimedia Deutschland, support Wikipedia volunteers and their autonomy in making decisions about what information should exist on Wikipedia and what shouldnt. The online encyclopedias open editing model is grounded in the belief that people should decide what information stays on Wikipedia, leveraging established volunteer-developed rules for neutrality and reliable sources.

This model ensures that for any given Wikipedia article on any subject, people who know and care about a topic enforce the rules about what content is allowed on its page. Whats more, our content moderation is transparent and accountable: All conversations between editors on the platform are publicly accessible. It is not a perfect system, but it has largely worked to make Wikipedia a global source of neutral and verified information.

Forcing Wikipedia to operate more like a commercial platform with a top-down power structure, lacking accountability to our readers and editors, would arguably subvert the DSAs actual public interest intentions by leaving our communities out of important decisions about content.

The internet is at an inflection point. Democracy and civic space are under attack in Europe and around the world. Now, more than ever, all of us need to think carefully about how new rules will foster, not hinder, an online environment that allows for new forms of culture, science, participation and knowledge.

Lawmakers can engage with public interest communities such as ours to develop standards and principles that are more inclusive, more enforceable and more effective. But they should not impose rules that are aimed solely at the most powerful commercial internet platforms.

We all deserve a better, safer internet. We call on lawmakers to work with collaborators across sectors, including Wikimedia, to design regulations that empower citizens to improve it, together.

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Digital regulation must empower people to make the internet better - TechCrunch