PUBLIC MARKS with search Wikipedia

The following maps represent the first stage of a project I am embarking on to map out some of the spatial contours of Wikipedia. Data were obtained from the August 2009 Wikipedia geodata dump organised by user Kolossos. The information was then ported over to a GIS. There are almost half a million geotagged Wikipedia articles (i.e. Wikipedia articles about a place or an event that occurred in a distinct place), so the preparation time alone for the files needed to create these maps was almost a week.

These drawings are a methodical interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia (Wikipedia link) by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

The drawings were created as a means of understanding the ideas being presented in the book.

Each drawing is labeled by chapter and paragraph.

Marc sent these diagrams to Brian Massumi, the translator of A Thousand Plateaus into English, who is currently one of the editors of Inflexions, the online journal for research-creation. The first volume of the journal includes some of these diagrams in the Tangents section.

The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.

The Peter Principle is the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence." It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the "salutary science of Hierarchiology", "inadvertently founded" by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity.[1] Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Section 51)

The City of Nanaimo is not alone in recognising this global need. The US Federal Government has recently committed to embrace OpenID to allow simple access to citizen resources (http://openid.net/government/). As of November 2008, there were over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 27,000 sites had integrated the OpenID standard*. (* see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID)

Ptolemy writes that geography is the study of the entire world or large sections or countries of it, while chorography is the study of its smaller parts--provinces, regions, cities, or ports.