88.Alphabetization and collation

As for Icelandic names, my impresson by taking a look on Iceland, Icelandic name, Icelandic language etc. is that most articles about people with Þ or Ð in their name are titled that way.

 

And the redirect Thortharson is quite pointless: Icelanders aren't usually referred to by their patronymic alone (e.g. Björk, not "Guðmundsdóttir"); so a redirect from Thorbergur might be more useful.

 

 I won't insist on this as I'm not an Icelander, but if you want to do a large-scale renaming of articles with þorns and eðs in their names I suggest you ask the opinion of people at WP:ICELAND first.

 

 (More generally, articles should be at the name the person is most commonly referred to as by in English, even if this leads to inconsistences as Strauss rather than Strauß but Schrödinger rather than Schroedinger; as a rule of thumb, modern names tend to be translitterated less often than old ones.)

 

89. Farmers Manual

 

Farmers Manual is an electronic music and visual art group, founded in Vienna in the beginning of the nineties. The core members of the collective are Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner and Nik Gaffney.

 Part of the very lively viennese electronic music scene of the 90s, Farmers Manual were succefully crossing the boundaries between electronic music, live visuals, experimental graphic and web design.

Their CDs, published through avant-garde labels such as Mego, Tray or OR, often contained multimedia content. Their most significant release might be RLA (which stands for "Recent Live Archive"), a DVD released on Mego in 2003, which contains the bands extensive backcatalogue of live concert recordings from 1995-2003, compressed in mp3 format - totalling 3 days and 20 hours of audio content and released under a Copyleft licence..

As visual artists, Farmers Manual have been included in numerous international festivals, such as FCMM (Montreal, 1999), Avanto (Helsinki, 2001), Art+Communication (Riga, 2006)

90. Culture of Norway

Norwegian culture is closely linked to the country's history and geography. The unique Norwegian farm culture, sustained to this day, has resulted not only from scarce resources and a harsh climate but also from ancient property laws. In the 18th century, it brought about a strong romantic nationalistic movement, which is still visible in the Norwegian language and media.

In the 19th century, Norwegian culture blossomed as efforts continued to achieve an independent identity in the areas of literature, art and music. This continues today in the performing arts and as a result of government support for exhibitions, cultural projects and artwork The greatest sources of influence on Norwegian culture have been the Protestant church and Germany during the Middle Ages, France during the 18th century, Germany again during the 19th century and the English-speaking world after World War II. Norway today enjoys a strongly adapted western culture. Over the past 30 years,

Norway has evolved from an ethnically homogenous society to a culturally diverse nation with large immigrant communities, especially in Oslo where a quarter of the citizens are immigrants. Norwegians have an egalitarian outlook. The concept of Jante Law is in many areas and fields still today strong in Norway. Any form of elitism is likely to meet strong criticism. Norwegians generally express themselves in very modest terms, especially when it comes to compliments and praises - when they say something is “totally okay” that means it is very good indeed.

There is a strong drive for more individualist values. During the 20th century, these have taken over from the more collectivist tradition. Notably there is very strong support for tolerance toward same-sex relationships compared to most European countries, and Norwegians are often thought of (and most Norwegians think of their country) as a country with little xenophobia, which does not necessarily make it true.

 

96. Openness and transparency

As a process, governance may operate in an organization of any size: from a single human being to all of humanity; and it may function for any purpose, good or evil, for profit or not. A reasonable or rational purpose of governance might aim to assure, (sometimes on behalf of others) that an organization produces a worthwhile pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances.

 

Perhaps the moral and natural purpose of governance consists of assuring, on behalf of those governed, a worthy pattern of good while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad. The ideal purpose, obviously, would assure a perfect pattern of good with no bad. A government, comprises a set of inter-related positions that govern and that use or exercise power, particularly coercive power.

 

A good government, following this line of thought, could consist of a set of inter-related positions exercising coercive power that assures, on behalf of those governed, a worthwhile pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances, by making decisions that define expectations, grant power, and verify performance.

 

Politics provides a means by which the governance process operates. For example, people may choose expectations by way of political activity; they may grant power through political action, and they may judge performance through political behavior.

Conceiving of governance in this way, one can apply the concept to states, to corporations, to non-profits, to NGOs, to partnerships and other associations, to project-teams, and to any number of humans engaged in some purposeful activity.

100. Discussion about Business Aspects

Mark Choate:

"Wikipedia is a living example of how network effects can confer sustainable competitive advantage in a market mediated by an open platform even though Wikipedia (on the surface) does not seem to act in accordance with the resource-based view of sustained competitive advantage.

 

The editing process taking place at Wikipedia is transparent. Not only can just about anyone participate, but the history of all the edits and who made them is available. At the same time, Wikipedia makes available all of its content. You can download every article and photograph and import it into your very own Wikipedia clone if you would like to.

 

Given the transparency of the process and the easy transferrability of resources, once might conclude that Wikipedia does not have a sustainable competitive advantage in the online encyclopedia market. One would be wrong, however.

 

While I can replicate the content on Wikipedia, I can never replicate the overall value of Wikipedia, for two reasons. The first is that there is a network of users who regularly monitor and update Wikipedia articles and they will continue to do so on Wikipedia's site, and not mine. Of course, I can continue to copy Wikipedia's content and maintain a site very close to the original, but with a slight delay and a modest degradation in quality. Even if I were able to make the transfer all but instantaneous, I still will not have replicated the value of Wikipedia because I also need to consider all the other sites on the Internet that link to Wikipedia as well.

 

It is the degree to which Wikipedia is entrenched in the network itself, the degree to which it is woven into the web that provides its greatest competitive advantage and one that, I suspect at least, will prove to be sustainable because that network is difficult to replicate. Clearly, network effects are still relevant, even with an open platform. The technology is readily replicable and the process by which the content was produce is entirely transparent. As it turns out, it is the weave of the data as woven into the network itself that is nearly impossible to replicate. Much in accordance with the old resource-based view of sustained competitive advantage, Wikipedia has secured it by making the value of its offering very hard to imitate."

 

99.Conflict Arbitration

Wikipedia is not owned by any individual or group. The content of Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Document License (GFDL), the open content counterpart to the GNU General Public License (Stallman, 1991). On a fundamental level, participants edit on equal footing; however administrative roles are granted by peers to participants who exhibit competence, trustworthiness and dedication to the project ( Meta–Wiki, “Power structure?). This system creates a bottom–up hierarchical structure based upon merit.

 

One of the things I did was to try and clear people out who were being disruptive. We actually had to go to arbitration over that article. It is like the supreme court of Wikipedia. There is a panel of 15 arbitrators. They hear the case. There is evidence, arguments and decisions. It is really like a simulated law suit. You get all the experience of a simulated law suit with the real threat that you could be banned. If they don’t like what you are doing they can actually ban you or restrict you from topics.

 

So it is really fascinating how this social space Wikipedia becomes a very real platform though it is in a virtual world for real world disputes. Most disputes are over the definition of things. If you have a you suit most disputes are about how things are defined. And Wikipedia has become the defacto definition of things in the real world. People want to know what are “The Troubles.” If you go to Wikipedia you find out The Troubles are a dispute over Northern Ireland. What the article says has a profound impact on public opinion.

98. Openness and transparency of histories

Openness and transparency are central to the functioning of the Wikipedia project. As a matter of Wikipedia policy, anyone, including an anonymous user, is permitted to directly edit any module on any subject. Wikipedia participants, like free and open source software hackers, are personally motivated to contribute. Participation is voluntary and is the sole condition for membership in the community. Instead of going through a moderation process, contributions become immediately visible on the site, providing immediate satisfaction for participants. Ownership of the work is distributed throughout the community. Contributor names do not appear on entries, although discussion and history layer entries are typically signed with user names.

 

Contributions are recorded in the history section of a module. They are peer-reviewed and either contribute directly to an iteration of an entry, are modified or are deleted. Reviewers debug edits according to consensus recorded on the discussion layer of each module. Because the discussion layers are the only forum for dialog (a benefit of geographically distributed, asynchronous, networked collaboration on a dedicated platform), discussion is open to all participants and decision–making is transparent.

 

Transparency is important to the success of Wikipedia because it allows participants to understand the reasoning behind decisions, contributing to trust in the Wikipedia process. It also allows newbies a means to understand informal community protocol and culture, as well as reduce abusive practice. While formal procedures exist to limit members who violate project mores, these measures are rarely necessary. Peer pressure typically regulates behaviour before administrative actions are needed. Participants self–manage and are usually not subjected to organizational authority.

 

Openness and transparency contribute to the success of the project in additional ways. Schlock and chaos are avoided due to the watchful eyes of the many, exemplifying Linus’ Law, coined and articulated by hacker Eric Raymond as “Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow? (Raymond, 2000). As anyone can edit Wikipedia, vandalism does occur. On the other hand, because anyone can edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia is robust. IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Research Group found that most Wikpedia pages have been vandalized. These researchers also found that most pages were repaired through version rollback using the module histories so quickly that most users would never see the effects (IBM). This phenomenon is called soft security in the free software, open source and wiki communities.

97. Measuring governance

Over the last decade, several efforts have been conducted in the research and international development community in order to assess and measure the quality of governance of countries all around the world.

 

One of these efforts to create an internationally comparable measure of governance is the Worldwide Governance Indicators project, developed by members of the World Bank and the World Bank Institute. The project reports aggregate and individual indicators for more than 200 countries for six dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and lack of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption.

 

To complement the macro-level cross-country Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank Institute developed the World Bank Governance Surveys, which are a country level governance assessment tools that operate at the micro or sub-national level and use information gathered from a country’s own citizens, business people and public sector workers to diagnose governance vulnerabilities and suggest concrete approaches for fighting corruption.