By JONATHAN DEE
Published: July 1, 2007
When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school. Read more and read it soon
Please note that as of today the Interloans basket (for all returning interloans that have been checked in) has been moved. It is now on the big bench to the left of the ‘c’ location CKI PC, just beside the window. It is clearly labelled.
The reason for the change of location is to improve staff accuracy in placing all CKI’d returning interloans into this basket. Some interloans have mysteriously ended up on the Dewey shelves on Level 4.
UC Climbing Club, located on level 6, James Hight building, are expecting a courier to deliver a banner today. Please direct the courier to level 6. Angelica Merkel is the Climbing Club contact person.
If you need to phone the Loft, please dial ext 4060 which is a generic Loft number and will have a greater chance of being answered than James Oxnam’s old personal number (ext.7935)
Our access to some products on SourceOECD has been lost when our subscription was recently updated. Users will be able to connect to SourceOECD ok but may find resources which they were able to access now have a frowning face rather than a smiley one (true! these are icons to indicate access).
I have followed it up and hopefully full access will be restored asap.
