I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more?
I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal?
First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the site (or maybe my own settings) blocks me from editing, so that’s that.
Secondly, it reinforces this blog post.
This one sentence was presumably written by a New Zealander, and one who knows very little, though they have more editing privileges than me.
Like the 12-year-old ‘Ford CE14 platform’ piece that only got corrected after I posted on Drivetribe, I have to ask: what possesses someone to invent fiction and to be so sure of themselves that they can commit it to an encyclopĂŠdia? (Incidentally, subsequent Wikipedians have reintroduced all the errors back on to the Ford page since editor Nick’s 2017 effort to correct itâyou simply cannot cure Wikipedia of stupid.)
I know we aren’t being set very good examples by American politicians (on both sides) and by British ones these days, but surely individual citizens have some sort of integrity when they go online to tell us how great they are?
For the record, the Familia nameplate was never used here in the last generation for a new carâyou only see it on Japanese imports. Secondly, the three-door BH shape was only ever sold here as a Ford Laser, never a MazdaâFamilia, 323 or otherwise.
“Post-truth” is nothing new: it’s been the way of Wikipedia for well over a decade. It was all foreshadowed online.
It still begs the question why I don’t see such callous edits on the German or Japanese editions of that website.
Itâs Boxing Day here, but Christmas Day in a lot of places. And Autocade is about to hit 18,000,000 page views, in record time (under 7,000 to go at the time of writing, which it will comfortably hit within hours). Not a bad Christmas present in terms of the business.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million, from first week of October to December 26)
Weâre sitting on 3,981 entries. We might crack 4,000 in January, or, if the mood takes us, we could see the milestone before 2019âs out (it wouldnât be unprecedented to have a big updating session in the last week of December).
There was some sort of a surge during December, as detailed in my blog post on Christmas Eve, although generally traffic had been up over the last three months.
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, e.g.:
Anyone alive during this period will be wondering, ‘Where’s Altavista?’ Just on visitor numbers, as opposed to visits per month, they were doing 19 million daily in 1996, 80 million daily in 1997. Goodness knows how many searches we were doing per day. Yet they are nowhere to be seen on this animation till December 1997, with 7 million monthly visits. If you were anything like me, you were using Altavista countless times a dayâeven conservatively, say you went on four times daily, and you were one of the 80 million per day, you would be putting Altavista at 9,600 million visits per month, dwarfing AOL and Yahoo. By 1997â8, we weren’t using directories like Yahoo for search, we were using these newfangled search engines. Google only overtook Altavista in 2001 in searches.
And I am old-fashioned enough to think this channel should be called Data Are Beautiful, not Data Is Beautiful.
I’d love to know the sources: not only could I remember clearly Altavista’s position (and Alexa had them in number one as well), it took me no time at all to confirm my suspicions through a web search.
Above: A re-created Altavista home page from 1999.
Some interesting traffic patterns at Autocade. At the time of writing, two models have been added: the Audi A2 and the Daimler DE36. Theyâve netted 5 and 2 views respectively, which is what youâd expect for new pages.
The last significant updates, when models were added, took place on December 13. The last model added was the Toyota Corona Mark II (X10), which has amassed an incredible 1,409 views. I would expect around 100â200 for a page of its age. Here are the views of the latest 20:
Not that Iâm complaining one little bit, but the figures for the third to ninth entries are anomalous; the subsequent ones are where Iâd expect things to be. The Lancia Lybra link has had some social activity and the Opel Rekord C page is quite well linked on Autocade, so potentially people (or spiders) have hit it, but that doesnât explain the 690 for the Morgan Plus Six. The Toyopet remedied an old 404, but again Iâm surprised at the figure.
To whomever has been visiting this much, I do thank you. We may crack the 18 million mark before 2019 is out, and weâve netted a million page views on Autocade in record time. More on that after we get the next 14,000 page views.
Incidentally, the Po.st sharing gadgets across all our sites are down. Anyone else?
Usually, all our publications use Hartâs Rules. Itâs well understood, enough compositors know it, and itâs a credible enough style guide for us to point at and use as a defence. There are some departures, which so far few have complained to me about.
1. Citation style. The OUP publishes The British Year Book of International Law, which doesnât follow Hartâs on citations; and we follow a version that can be found in older examples of the Year Book (you can tell it has to be an older one, for at some stage it was renamed The British Yearbook of International Law). It also happens to be the style I learned when I was starting out, from a book by Jost Hochuli, and I understand some use it on the Continent. Brexiteers will not approve.
2. Diphthongs. Man, I love diphthongs. How can you not? Typographically, these look great, and their abandonment, I believe, only came when typesetters using computers found it too hard. Todayâs computers make it easy again, so I see no reason to not have them present again. Hartâs is silent on ligatures, so Iâm quite happy to manĆuvre CĂŠsarâs minutiĂŠ.
3. I am not a fan of the American short scale, because at some point, the numbers are going to get ridiculously large and itâs going to be inconvenient to use it. Plus the Chinese language adopts long scales for names of numbers, so the British long scale makes more sense to my native culture. Ten to the power of nine is a thousand million or a milliard, not a billion, which traditionally (I believe till 1974, so within my lifetime) was ten to the power of twelve, or what the Americans call a trillion. So far our publications do not require massive numbers, so we still say three thousand million, but I suspect when we get into bigger figures, we may have to bring back milliard, which is still in the dictionary, albeit as a defunct term. On this, Jacob Rees-Mogg might be quite happy to agree as part of his mission to take the Commons back to the 19th century, before all this metric system nonsense, other than using milliard, which is just too French. Maybe when we get to citing American authorities, we may have to relent, and certainly in the Middle East, American English tends to be more greatly accepted.
4. Other than where requested, I go for the âroad signâ approach to citing place names: Milano over Milan, Lyon over Lyons. On this, Chris Patten and I disagree. When doing transliterations and romanizations, I would actually write Beijing because thatâs what a Beijinger would call their home town.
I probably wonât win the third one, as most of the two thousand million Anglophones disagree with me, and the ratio of one holdout versus a milliard plus arenât great odds.
I often find myself in accord with my friend Victor Billot. His piece on the UK General Election can be found here. And yes, Britain, this is how many of us looking in see itâlike Victor I have dual nationality (indeed, my British passport is my only current one, having been a little busy to get the Kiwi one renewed).
Highlights include (and this is from a man who is no fan of the EU):
When reporters with their TV cameras went out to the streets to ask the people about their concerns, their motives, their aspirations, they recorded a dogs dinner of reverse logic and outright gibberish. BoJo had screaming rows with his girlfriend, made up policy on the go and hid in a commercial fridge. Corbyn however was seen as the weirdo. âI donât like his mannerisms,â stated one Tory convert as the hapless Labour leader made another stump speech about saving the NHS. âBritainâs most dangerous manâ shrieked a tabloid headline.
Corbyn made a honest mistake in thinking that people may have been concerned about waiting lists at hospitals. It turned out that voters are happy about queues as long as they donât have any foreigners in them, or doctors with âforeignâ looks at the end of them.
The Murdoch Press machine: predictably, business as usual.
and:
A curious aspect of the election is how the behaviour of the leaders seems to be measured by a new matrix of values. The more boorish, and arrogant, the better, in a kind of pale reflection of the troglodyte Trump in the midnight dim of his tweet bunker. BoJo, a blustering, buffoonish figure with a colourful personal life and the cocksure confidence of an Old Etonian, can be contrasted to the measured and entirely decent Corbyn with his Tube pass and allotment. Perhaps this is an inevitable side effect of the growing rage and alienation that bubbles under the surface of society, providing the gravitational pull towards the âstrong manâ who will âmake our nation great (again)â in a world of other people who arenât like us.
I shan’t spoil the last paragraph but it all builds up to that nicely.
There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. Itâs a damned shame, because I feel itâs a stab at the heart of what made the internet greatâthe fact that we could be in touch with each other across borders. These two US websites, and there are plenty more, are enacting the âfortress Americaâ policy, and Iâve never believed that isolationism is a good thing.
Letâs start with the Auto Trader one. As someone who found his car on the UK Auto Trader website, it seems daft for the US to limit itself to its own nationâs buyers. What if someone abroad really would like an American classic? Then again, I accept that classic cars are few and far between on that site, and if photos from the US are anything to go by, the siteâs probably full of Hyundai Sonatas and Toyota Camrys anyway.
I went to the CBS website because of a Twitter link containing an interesting headline. Since weâre blocked from seeing that site, then I logically fed the same headline into a search engine and found it in two places. The first was Microsoft News, which I imagine is fine for CBS since they probably still get paid a licence for it. The second, however, was an illegal content mill that had stolen the article.
I opted for the former to (a) do the right thing and (b) avoid the sort of pop-ups and other annoying ads that content mills often host, but what if the Microsoft version was unavailable? These geo-restrictions actually encourage piracy and does the original publisher out of income, and I canât see that as a good thing.
Some blamed the GDPR coming into force in the EU, so it appears CBSâwhich apparently is against Donald Trump talking isolationism yet practises itâdecided to lump ânot Americaâ into one group and include us in it. But so what if GDPR is in force? Itâs asking you to have more reasonable protections for privacyâyou know, the sort of thing your websites probably had 15 years ago by default?
I still donât think itâs that hard to ask users to hop over to Aboutads.info and opt out of ad tracking on each of their browsers. We havenât anything as sophisticated as some websites, which put their controls front and centre, but we at least provide links; and we ourselves donât collect intrusive data. Yes, some ad networks we use do (which you can opt out of), but weâd never ask them for it. The way things are configured, I donât even know your IP address when you feed in a comment.
Ours isnât a perfect solution but at least we donât isolateâwe welcome all walks of life, regardless of where you hail from. Just like the pioneers of the web, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Make the internet great again.
I really had hoped that for the next Bond, we wouldnât see âBrofeldâ.
Iâve never had a problem with M being a woman or Q being a nerd, but ignoring Flemingâs entire background for Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Daniel Craig movies, and supplanting him into the Franz Oberhauser family as a foster brother to Bond, felt a step too farâa step, incidentally, that we have Sam Mendes to credit. We have yet another Bond villain, as penned by screenwriters Purvis and Wade, with Daddy issues, the same plot device used in The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day in the Brosnan era.
Looks like the third Austin Powers movie contributed something back to the cinematic Bond-lore, when we learn Dr Evil was really Dougie Powers. The ret-conning of the first three Craig Bonds in Spectre felt forced. And professional reviewers have said plenty. No Time to Die looks decent enough from the trailer, but once again weâre exploring back stories. While this may be how blockbusters do it in the 2010s and the start of the 2020s, I just really donât care about Brofeld and the silly world we find ourselves in now. The sooner they can get away from this tangent, the better, and as much as I liked Daniel Craig as Bond, Iâm looking forward to the start of the new actorâs tenure some time early next decade. Iâve no idea what the world would expect in cinematic tastes come 2023 or so, but letâs hope all the pieces fall together once more for a satisfying Bond entry, well away from Mendes.
Trivium that no one cares about: No Time to Die is the first James Bond movie to be released in a year ending in 0.
When Twitter is awesome. Thank you, everyone, tÄnÄ rawa atu koutou.
Wellington Twitter. Our friend @jackyan's Dad is extremely unwell in hospital so please can you send him good wishes and strength. Jack, we are all with you through this trying time, but still hoping for a miracle. Arohanui to you and Amanda ❤
Ah Jack, sending aroha to you and your family. Glad it was a peaceful passing. 💞He knew how much you cared, loved and supported him. The end of a rich journey, and now peaceful slumber.
Jack, you will be in my prayers. 🙏❤ It is hard to lose someone, especially at this time of year. Having experienced it personally, I wish for you that the memories of your father will help sustain you through this time. Lots of love!
@jackyan Iâm terribly sorry to hear your dad has left us. I know you cared for him as well as loved him. My sincerest condolences and hugs go out to you.
Usually, all our publications use Hartâs Rules. Itâs well understood, enough compositors know it, and itâs a credible enough style guide for us to point at and use as a defence. There are some departures, which so far few have complained to me about.
