What’s the landmass of World of Warcraft?

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Cory Doctorow:
Through a very clever improvised measurement technique, Tobold has come up with an estimate for the size of all the land in the virtual world Azeroth, where World of Warcraft is played. He estimated that pre-Burning Crusade expansion, Azeroth clocked in at 200km square.

To measure a square mile, you first need to define what a mile is. As "a mile" doesn't even have the same length on different places on our earth, that isn't trivial. The basic definition of a mile is coming from Roman times, defining a mile a 1000 double steps of a marching legion. The soldiers had to walk through all of Europe anyway, so you just needed to count their steps and had the place all measured up with few extra effort. Clever guys, these Romans. But on Azeroth "steps" aren't that easy to count, and the length of legs between the different races varies widely. But interestingly all races move at the same running speed, so it makes sense to define the mile by the time it takes to run it. On earth, a marathon runner has a running speed of about 12 miles per hour. As everybody on Azeroth is a hero, lets just define the Azerothian running speed as 12 mph as well. This effectively defines an Azerothian mile as "the distance you can run in 5 minutes", without using any speed enhancing items of course.

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(via Waxy)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Wikipedia battle over iPhone trademark

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There's something deeply fascinating about article debates at Wikipedia; reading the intricate threads is like eavesdropping on a librarian's convention where the punch has been spiked with PCP. The tumult du jour is the involved discussion on the appropriate naming and disposition of the iPhone article.

It seems that the rational question of "What do we put at the wikipedia.org/wiki/iPhone page: the Apple product, the Cisco/Linksys product, or a disambiguation of the two products?" has led to fear, thence to anger and naturally to suffering. The commotion and disagreement apparently attracted the attention of some Cisco employees, who attempted to right the perceived injustice and were promptly chastised. The whole affair has resulted in the virtual lockdown of the iPhone page while tempers and keyboards cool off.

If you want a taste of the secret sauce that helps Wikipedia manage as a self-regulating community, check out the conventions on the naming of articles. Highly gripping; couldn't put it down.

Thanks Adam!

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(Via TUAW.)