was that a study published this month in the journal Nature has shown that there isn’t a huge difference in accuracy between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. I still think it’s a good idea that they’re instituting a more formal review process, but it’s important to keep the problems in perspective.
OK. Follow the bouncing ball
on this one – it’s a toughie. This election campaign has been pretty quiet so far, and in English, the only ads I’ve seen have been the amateurish Harper ads. Not much is going on – everyone seems to be saving their ad spend until later on.
In Quebec, however, in French, the Liberals have already started their advertising, and they did so with what I think it the best political ad in the history of Canada. There has been some scandal around this – about which, more later. For now, it’s enough to know that the scandal (not just the ad itself) has been covered in at least one major Montreal daily.
Which leads me to the weirdest part of this little story. I was looking in the English media to see if there had been any mention of this masterful TV ad – and there it was on the CTV site: Liberal ads mock separatists, Bloc priorities. Problem is – the story is completely wrong. The story describes the ad reasonably well, but makes a huge error in suggesting that the ad is mocking Duceppe’s call for a Quebec National hockey team. It has nothing to do with that! Rather, the ad uses the extremely popular theater sports (yes, improv is very popular in Quebec) phenomenon as a metaphor for the election.
The scandal itself is that the group that rented the equipment to the Liberal Party, the Ligue nationale d’improvisation, has objected to the anti-Bloc ads and would like to sue the Liberals. For what it’s not entirely clear – basically, the ads don’t agree with their politics and they think that entitles them to halt the ad.
So, a precis of Canadian politics circa 2005-2006. There’s a silly scandal in Quebec and though it is covered in the English, non-Quebec media, they get the story completely wrong because they haven’t the faintest clue about Quebec and its culture. What more is there to know?
Update: CTV got the story right three days later, but the point remains valid. And it raises another question – why is the CTV site so lame as to not have any kind of date stamps on news stories?
Christmas tree
Originally uploaded by mikel.
This is the first year that we’ve done our own Christmas tree. In the past, we were always travelling to see family over Christmas, but this year we’re staying put, so we got our own tree.
We went out on Sunday to a tree cutting place but we didn’t have the heart to cut a living tree so we ended up buying one pre-cut. Except for the one that our friends cut down, which was lovely, all of the pre-cut trees were nicer anyhow.
So far we’ve been lucky – the dogs have hardly noticed the tree. That might change once we get some gifts spread around the bottom, though.
Long time mikel.org pal
Craig Silverman has posted his year-end wrapup: Crunks ’05 – The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. You can also listen to Craig on The Current today.
Curious:
Does anyone know how/where to download a copy of MetaPhilter? There’s a project I want to do and I am curious to see if it will do the trick or if I should try something else.
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