Friday reading

Two pieces on semi-colons (I am a frantic over-punctuater, and have begun in some correspondence to use square brackets inside my normal brackets in order to arrange my nested thoughts -- and I am not averse to the dangling hyphen, en- or em-dash either. It is salutary then to be reminded of what these little marks are actually there to do ...)

'Semicolons: A love story', Ben Dolnick, New York Times


'Semicolons; So tricky', Mary Norris, The New Yorker


And in a completely different vein, MIT economist Abhishek Nagaraj has used the digitisation of 70 years' worth of the Baseball Digest to analyse the re-use of this material in articles on baseball players in Wikipedia, finding that "the full benefit of the digitization process accrues only to players who played before 1964, and therefore more likely to feature in an issue of Baseball Digest that is out of copyright. Further copyright seems to impede the process of democratization that digital books engender through which less well-known pages become more popular." 


'MIT Economist: Here's how copyright laws impoverish Wikipedia', Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic


Nagaraj's proposal for Wikimania 2012