Part-Time Pundit

Press Release: John Bambenek Declares Intention to Run for Champaign Unit 4 School Board

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 5, 2007

Contact: John Bambenek
217-493-0760 / jcb.unit4@gmail.com
http://www.parttimepundit.com

Champaign, IL - - On January 5th, 2007, Champaign resident John Bambenek declared his intention to run for the Champaign Community Unit School District #4 school board. The election is being held on April 17th to fill the four seats and one special election that is currently up for election. He is running for one of the four open seats for a full four year term.

Mr. Bambenek currently works as a research programmer for the University of Illinois at the Coordinated Science Lab. His duties include system and network administration as well as a small amount of information security research. He recently gave a presentation in Washington DC on information security and identity theft.

Before joining the University, he worked for Ernst & Young and Capgemini Ernst & Young as a project manager and senior consultant. He worked with many of the top Fortune 500 companies. He is also a freelance columnist and blogger writing on political and cultural issues.

In explaining why he is running for the school board, Bambenek said, “Unit 4 has been a frequent target of my criticism both in my columns and on my blog. I could either continue to complain or roll up my sleeves and try to fix it. I choose the later.” Mr. Bambenek is currently scheduling meetings with various community groups and individuals to gather input on the school system. He hopes to restore trust in the school system that was lost in recent years due to actions surrounding the consent decree and other problems.

Mr. Bambenek currently serves as the executive director of the Tumaini Foundation, a Champaign-based not-for-profit. The Tumaini Foundation is a charity that supports rural Tanzania schools by sending them much needed school supplies, medical supplies and computers.

For more information please contact John Bambenek at 217-493-0760 or via email at jcb.unit4@gmail.com.

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January 5th, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Elections, Politics, Unit 4 Race | no comments

The Great Wikipedia Joke

MercatorNet has posted my recent article on wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia’s own estimates there are over 765,000 stubs. This estimate could off by about 20 per cent because Wikipedia rounded up in its counts and articles might be listed as a stub in multiple categories. This leaves about 600,000 stubs. That means over two in five articles in Wikipedia are stubs. That does not include articles that are stubs that have not been tagged by someone. This is in line with other estimates.

Wikipedia also has a policy forbidding the use of original research in Wikipedia. If it hasn’t been published somewhere else, it cannot be used. However, over 180,000 articles are tagged by Wikipedia as not having necessary sources. That is, over 12 per cent of the articles in Wikipedia contain assertions which have not been documented.

Lastly, there are pages that exist solely as “disambiguation” pages. These are pages listing the many alternatives for a certain word. For instance, if you search Wikipedia for “George Bush”, you get a page that lists the alternatives of what you might mean. There are about 73,000 disambiguation pages. There are also about 32,000 articles that are nothing but lists of other articles.

Adding the numbers above shows that 58 per cent of articles on Wikipedia have no intellectual merit whatsoever.

Read more at Mercator.

January 5th, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Technology / Internet | one comment