Wonderful wikis

Today I bit the bullet and leaped into the next era of ICT (information communications technology) and taught a dozen Kindergarten students (and myself, slightly one step ahead) how to design a wiki.

Now, I've dabbled in adding and editing an existing wiki (eg. Wikipedia, Memory Alpha, Memory Beta, etc), but this time I had to work out how to design one, and how to help the students to build up a narrative (in fable form, complete with a motto) - and post it to the wiki.

Within a few moments of launch, our fledgling wiki web pages were being looked at by two different Internet surfers in California, USA. Amazing! Young students are simply not scared to (literally) push that newest button in modern technology.

The cosmic consciousness

There's a theory, isn't there, that writers and other creative people can tap into a kind of cosmic consciousness? And this is why two authors can seem to come up with an almost-identical set of thought processes at the exact same time. While some cynics may even try to label it plagiarism, I reckon it's amazing how often it is very definitely something more inexplicable than mere coincidence.

Last night, Jörg, a semi-regular Internet contact, was researching the Efrosian race, from Star Trek, and discovered that, only minutes before, I had added a comment to an old discussion page on Memory Alpha's Wiki on... Efrosians! We were both trying to ascertain details of a certain cut scene from "ST IV: The Voyage Home", for which a publicity still exists - of a short-haired Efrosian wearing a UFP (United Federation of Planets) badge. Had he ever been officially confirmed as playing a particular role? My theory was that he was intended to be an usher in the UFP Council scenes; the end credits mention "ushers", but the extras(?) playing them had no lines to spout in the final film, and didn't even seem to be visible in the onscreen footage. This comment of mine led my friend back to my blog entry about Efrosians. He'd been researching some embroidered patches bought at one of the big recent ST costume and props auctions from the 40th anniversary celebrations of TOS.

It was almost midnight here for me (and probably midday for him), but we shot an email back and forth - and suddenly he had new freeze frame shots from the various ST movies in my email tray. And lo, he found onscreen evidence of a male usher(!) in the matching uniform, but not the mysterious Efrosian. Technology is making us move so fast. I wasn't mentally prepared for obscure trivia after midnight, but it was fascinating (to us) anyway.

Above: Cut scene of Efrosian usher (left); closeup on cloth badge (dignitaries wore blue-enamelled metal versions that hung under the "UFP" badge); human usher stands near UFP President and Klingon Ambassador (right).

UPDATE: And years later, we found this: