Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Welcome to Opononi

As Signposts is the name of this blogosphere, I decided to mooch about in search of some.

When Clinton and Gore steered the good ship US of A in the 1990s, these road signs pointing to two towns in South Otago and Southland caught the attention of a local photographer. Clinton was presented with a framed photo in 1995, which he hung outside his office pointing out the directions to his and the vice president’s offices. Sadly there is no Obama in the vicinity of Clinton.

This Eketāhuna sign in Melbourne reflects the perception of that town as a nowheresville that somehow represents the archetypal New Zealand small town. One wonders whether this reputation would have formed if it had held its original Danish name Mellemskov: ‘between woods’. The name Eketāhuna brings to mind the mythical Waikikamookau, which you won’t find on a New Zealand map, but rather in Brighton, UK.

The longest placename is a bit of stretch to read. I’m more into warnings such those telling you to watch for lahar, tsunami, wasps next 5 km!, trespassers will be eaten or that you have now entered Ararua time, where the people set their clocks by cows and don’t you forget it.

Oh and don’t shoot the gay dolphin.

Test your general knowledge (or your workmates’) against the Te Ara Summer Quiz.

If you’re still suffering from backtoworkitis, we’d understand if you resorted to clicking ‘Find the answer in Te Ara’, which will take you to a helpful entry.

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

The Treaty of Waitangi

Waitangi Day, on the 6th of February, is more than just a welcome public holiday at the beginning of the year – it’s when we commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document, in 1840.

Over the years it’s sometimes been a controversial reason for a public holiday, with protests against treaty breaches and debates about the differences between the Māori and English versions of the treaty.

It seems to me that New Zealanders are finding more and different ways to spend Waitangi Day. Among the many events listed on NZLive.com are:

• a festival at the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi
• One Love reggae/dub concert in Wellington – also a celebration of Bob Marley’s birthday on 6 February
• Porirua Festival of the Elements
• Raukawa Wild Food and Music Festival: Last Summer Fling in Tokoroa
• and, my personal fav for being the oddest Waitangi day event, the Whitestone Cheese Rolling competition in Southland.

There’s an excellent showcase of resources (including images and text from Te Ara) related to the history of the treaty on the Matapihi website.

Beaming into Warkworth

I have just returned from Kiwi Foo Camp at Warkworth. Organised by Nat Torkington and Russell Brown, the idea is to invite about 150 people interested in new technology along for the weekend. They put together a programme on arrival, and then let the ideas fly.

I didn’t go to the first camp last year – to my regret, since I heard that Te Ara came in for fierce criticism. Apparently social networking was the coolest fashion in town; we were the symbol of authoritarian Web 1.0. Forewarned, I decided to go and defend us. I was not made more comfortable on arrival, late on Friday. The common room was filled with young men (not a woman in sight) wearing glasses and all tapping intently on their laptops as an alternative to conversation.

As it happened, I didn’t need to put up any armour. The geeks themselves turned out to be real smart, sassy talkers, and in the sessions themselves they were refreshingly polite, fair to others and open to ideas.

As for content, the camp I went to was no longer interested in the cooperative, interactive Web 2.0 world as a good in itself. The question now was how to make money out of it.

Or that was my conclusion from the sessions I attended.

The first was on how to use the media. It began with the premise that 30 seconds of advertising on television is worth $10,000. So 30 seconds of news exposure has the same value. It’s worth learning the tricks.

Session 2 was on the ‘creative federation’, subtitled ‘turning ideas into IP via 2.0′. The concept was to provide an easy-to-use tool so that people with ideas could protect their intellectual property and turn them into small business. At the same time I missed a session on how to get revenue from advertising on the web locally. You get the drift.

The last session, and the highpoint of the day for me, was one by Sunday Star Times resident economist Rod Oram on whether the economy of NZ was rising, falling or completely stuffed. Cleverly, he turned the question back on the audience. What came through was salvation via IT-based small business, which might quickly become big business. Sam Morgan was the oft-quoted hero. Even more remarkably, Wellington was the cool place, a Silicon Valley of the south.

I was not convinced about the economic prescription – but at least, it seemed, I came from the right place.

A peripatus plagiarising

When I was fifteen I plagiarised an obscure Nadine Gordimer short story for English. It was about a woman taking a shortcut and getting mugged. Luckily, my English teacher didn’t read South African authors. I got a high mark.

It is my only case of almost-pure plagiarism, yet it has shades of grey – I added bits, cut most of it. If I stole anything, it was the idea (OK, and some really nice sentences).

Playing around with a bit of text taught me a lot. Before cyberspace, plagiarism was educational – you had to type (or in my case handwrite) word-for-word. This is an effective learning technique known as rote learning. But you don’t take in much when you’re just selecting a block of text and pressing Ctrl X, Ctrl V.

Turnitin would have busted me. Many universities now require students to submit essays through this program. It runs an algorithm that compares the essay with hundreds of thousands of articles in a database and gives the text an originality score. Cut-and-pasted passages stand out like a dog’s family jewels.

Plagiarism can be hard to define. I’ve thought about it quite a bit while working on the encyclopedia. For example, if I’m captioning an image of a peripatus, I get a book from the library and look at captions of similar images and skim the text. I crib words from one book, some more from another. I dump it into the mix, edit it, cutting out all redundancy (isn’t that right, eds?) A word for this process – as long as you cite the source and don’t copy word-for-word – is research. But Te Ara doesn’t have footnotes for captions, as this would have created too much work and cluttered our web pages.

So am I a plagiarist? It would seem not – luckily our editors (liposuctionists) remove redundancy, lack of clarity and repetition. After they have J. Edgar Hoovered out the fat, our captions are different beasts.

Perhaps I shouldn’t worry. As Mark Twain wrote in a letter to Helen Keller after she was accused of plagiarism: ‘As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!’