I’ve learned something this US election cycle.

Instead of paying phony lip service to the NRA and right-wing gun lobby like Hillary “Annie Oakley” Clinton, every American politician should have a picture on file, waiting in the wings, like this:

Of course, with several captions ready to go:

• “The wife and I have a different idea when it comes to ’shooting the breeze.’”
• “Yes honey, next time you can use the M4 Carbine and I’ll settle for the nancy H&K MP5 9mm peashooter.”
• “See? Not all journalists are left wing crunchy granola bleeding heart liberals. We shoot to kill.”
• “Live fire exercises with 5.56mm rounds? No big deal. I’ve been through Wikipedia edit wars with more casualties.”

PS: Barack, mocking Hillary Clinton probably wasn’t a very smart move for you.

So there is an AP story making the rounds about a furniture manufacturer that erroneously translated “dark brown” in Chinese into “nigger brown” in English, and that it showed up on the label of a sofa delivered to a family in Toronto, Canada. Obviously, it was a shock to the black family who thought it was to be a joyous occasion.

So yes, this is the darker side (no pun intended!) of globalization and of things lost in translation. During the reporting of this, I was called for comment, but could not provide much insight other than, “That’s not good.”

But it seems the new couch owner is going a bit far:

Moore is consulting with a lawyer and wants compensation. Last week, she filed a report with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Commission spokeswoman Afroze Edwards said the case is in the initial stages and could take six months to two years to resolve.

Moore, 30, has three young children, and said the issue has taken a toll on her family.

“Something more has to be done. We don’t just need a personal apology, but someone needs to own up to where these labels were made, and someone needs to apologize to all people of color,” Moore said. “I had friends over from St. Lucia yesterday and they wouldn’t sit on the couch.”

This is a bit much, but all normal in North America where lawsuits speak louder than anything else. Welcome to a globalized world with American-style litigation!

All indications are it was an innocent, though boneheaded, translation error. For folks living in China is a daily occurrence/chuckle/guffaw. Read the recent WSJ story on it from February 5, 2007 for more juicy tidbits.

This label error is not hate speech or an intent to malign. I hope the label is fixed, there are sincere apologies, and the case gets thrown out quickly.

UPDATE: I should point to the Wikipedia article on the word [[nigger]] for those not familiar with the impact of the word.

Legal movie DVD’s are pretty scarce in China. Piraters sell discs here for a flat rate per piece of media. Yes, that means Ishtar sells for the same price as the latest quality Casino Royale dub. Typically this is around 10 RMB per disc. That’s about US $1.30.

Westerners also get a nice chuckle from the mangled “blurbs” on the back of the DVD cover, where it’s either a terrible English description, or something erroneously cut-and-pasted from a completely different film.

So imagine my surprise when browsing in a store I picked up the box DVD set of Family Guy, Season 4. In front of me was a surprisingly well crafted blurb. Not only was it perfect English, there was something familiar about it.

The back cover read:

Obviously there were some odd things:

1. It had “See X below” which meant it was obviously copy/pasted from something larger
2. It was much better than your average blurb
3. It was remarkably informative and balanced

It reminded me of something I might read in Wikipedia.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I bought the seven disc set for a whopping 70 RMB (just under US $10) even though I’m not terribly fond of the show.

While the [[Family Guy]] article now reads quite different, thanks to the complete edit history of the article being available, we find the December 1, 2006 version reads:

Family Guy is an American animated comedy created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. The show was cancelled once in 2000 and again in 2002, but strong DVD sales and reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim led FOX to resume production of the show in 2005 (see “Return to television” below). To date it is one of only a handful of shows in television history to be cancelled and later revived by the power of their fan bases, and one of the few shows to be brought back to air by the same network that cancelled it. (See also Cagney and Lacey and Doctor Who). The title character is Peter Griffin, an inept blue collar head of a lower-middle class family frequently beset by the consequences of his foolish antics. Family Guy’s brand of humor is notable for the usually brief, frequently nonsensical cutaways (usually featuring oddball pop culture references) and flashbacks to various points in history, geography, and reality involving the characters and their outlandish actions (see “Structure and comedic approach” below).

So there you are.

Wikipedia: bringing information to pirated DVDs near you.

Just as the whoopee cushion is the lowest and most banal form of comedy, so is cat blogging to online citizens media. So going against all my instincts, I reluctantly enter into this objectionable tradition to present a corpulent cat from Shandong with no name. (Many folks here don’t name their pets, instead simply addressing them as “mao mao” or “gou gou”)

People’s Daily gives us the hard hitting news:

A super fat cat weighing 17 kilograms has been raised by Xu Jirong, a citizen of Qingdao, a coastal city in east China’s Shandong Province. This super-fat cat has lived in Xu’s family for 10 years. It has lived for the equivalent of 70 human years. Its “waist” measures around 86.7 centimeters, wider than a girl’s.

That’s over 37 lbs. And at 34 inches, perhaps the waist is wider than a girl from China, but perhaps not Houston, Texas.

The cat likes meat but doesn’t eat fish. It eats one steamed roll and half a bowl of chicken hearts and some pork every day.

It’s sad to say, but this is about the same daily nutrition as a migrant construction worker in Beijing.

How does this cat stack up against cats worldwide?

Xu says that he has no way to make the cat lose weight. He has tried to reduce its food, but this makes the cat bad-tempered. It scratches visitors and relieves itself all over the house in protest. According to the record, the world’s fattest cat is in the USA and weighs 18.55 kilograms. Xu’s cat is a pet cat and it may well be the fattest pet cat in the world.

The US had better look in the rear view mirror. Its sole superpower status is being directly challenged by Super Cat. Did you hear that neoconservatives, Project for New American Century and the Heritage Foundation? The US was previously the undisputed fattest country in the world, but China is catching up. Starting with the cats.

Time magazine made its annual pick of Person of the Year, and it’s “You.” It’s more dramatic if you have the paper edition which has a mirrored panel on the front in a Youtube frame, so you see your reflection. Pundits are already labeling it “cop out” and “lame.” (This is not unprecedented though. Remember Time chose the Personal Computer as their 1982 “Machine of the Year”)

But as someone who has focused on participatory media and a book about Wikipedia, you can imagine I found it a clever choice, even if the associated essays were not so interesting. You’re better off going to Edge or Corante. An excerpt from Time’s writeup graf:

“It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

Myspace wouldn’t be my choice for the list, since Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Xanga and others were around much earlier. I’d much rather see the real meta-filtering of Slashdot, Digg and Dailykos explained, or an examination the phenomenon outside the U.S., like with Korea’s Cyworld online community.

To the critics — sometimes there are indeed weird results with user-generated stuff. When I was doing a search for this article, I did a Google search for:

time you wikipedia

Try the Google search, in that order. Yahoo gives the same result.
And don’t hold it against Wikipedia. For some reason, people are linking to an article about a… cat.

UPDATE: Good post from my former partner in teaching citizen media, Dan Gillmor. “I look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace us when it comes to the journalism. This is coming, and faster than anyone (including me) would have predicted just a year or two ago. It can’t come fast enough, because the time is short to make the transition.”

Anyone who remembers the Encyclopedia Brown series of mystery books will find this take amusing.

Take Wikipedia content. Add a brilliant cartoonist. Shake. You get WikiWorld.

Greg Williams is a veteran illustrator and designer from The Tampa Tribune newspaper in Florida. As a fan of Wikipedia, he started drawing cartoons based on the articles in his spare time for fun.

Now he’s put them four of them up for public consumption on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikipedia sister project for free media content. They’re fabulous.

One of the most interesting sessions of Wikimania 2006 were the Lightning Talks (five minute speedy presentations, somewhere between a brain fart and a quick demo). I moderated two rounds of them, and learned about Webaroo’s offline Wikipedia, Yurik’s Query.php, Yellowikis, Azerbaijani and Serbian Wikipedia writing system issues, among many other things. (I will post my Lightning Talk on “Using Wikipedia Efficiently”, as promised).

But what takes the prize is Domas’s talk about “How to Read Wikipedia.” Only a few dozen people at Wikimania had the pleasure of hearing it. Fortunately, I have a recording of it for posterity.

(3.6 Mbytes in Ogg and MP3 format, 96 kbps. NullC, this Ogg’s for you.)

Fancy this from The Onion:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored

“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone.

“At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”

Make sure you know what The Onion is before reading the full article.

technorati tags:wikipedia, satire, funny, onion

I found myself flinging cows over and over again at Cow Abduction. There’s something zen about it…