College: Wikipedia not source for papers
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Middlebury College history students are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia in preparing class papers.
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Online freedom of speech tested Drugs giant Eli Lilly has failed in its bid to restrict a wiki from linking to documents that could be damaging to its business. The ruling of a New York court said the court could not rule against the internet "in its various manifestations".â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Wikimedia Foundation popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia cracked the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S. for the first time in January, according to comScore Networks. Wikipedia sites ranked ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, ahead of the sites from The New York Times (No.10), AppleÂ (No.11) and Viacom International (No.12), comScore reported Thursday. Wikipedia, which already ranked in the top 10 list of most popular Web sites globally, has been quickly gaining popularity in the U.S., where its parent company, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, is based. In January of last year, Wikipedia sites ranked in the 33rd spot with 18.3 million unique visitors. By July, it had climbed to the 18th spot on the list with 28.1 million unique visitors, and in November it ranked 12th with 39.1 million unique visitors, according to comScore. In doing its tally for Wikipedia, comScore also counts visits to other Wikimedia sites, such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks and Wikinews, but most of the traffic comes from the Wikipedia encyclopedias, a comScore spokesman said. Wikipedia started in January 2001 with its English-language site, which currently has more than 1.6 million articles. The Wikipedia project has since grown significantly and has more than 5 million articles in more than 200 languages, according to WikiMedia. Access to Wikipedia is free. Volunteers contribute the encyclopedia's content, which can be edited by anyone accessing the sites. Globally, Wikipedia sites ranked sixth in December with almost 165 million unique visitors, according to comScore.
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They say if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. But these days, it seems you haven't really made it unless you have that most prized of status symbols -- your very own page on Wikipedia.
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Blog: RoboCup's use of Wikipedia for results leave some wondering who the winners are
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Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly. Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
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The Encyclopedia Britannica has opened a blog which may be a sign that Britannica is looking at user generated blog discussion content as a possible way to battle the popularity of Wikipedia as a trusted reference source. The discussions on the Britannica Blog are led by experts in their fields and guess what?&#8230;. Like most blogs you [...]
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Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut on Monday, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market.However, people who give the search engine a test drive on Monday shouldn&#39;t expect a Google killer, because they will be looking at a project that is at a very early stage and will need participation from volunteers to grow and be refined, Wales said.In that sense,&#160;Search Wikia&#160;is expected to develop in a similar fashion to&#160;Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators who have expanded it and improved it organically over the years.&quot;Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It&#39;s a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it&#39;s in its very early days,&quot; Wales said.Still, Wales fully expects Search Wikia to eventually be a better alternative to commercial search engines from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com.&quot;I don&#39;t know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I&#39;d say at least two years,&quot; he said.People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results.Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends&#39; actions.Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a &quot;mini article&quot; at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.Below the &quot;mini article&quot; will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time.Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. &quot;That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results,&quot; he said.Those who try to abuse the system for, say, search engine spamming purposes, are bound to be quickly noticed by administrators and other community members, and they will swiftly be blocked and banned, Wales said.Initially, people will only be able to do general Web searches, but the plan is to add tabs for image and news searches later. Likewise, Search Wikia&#39;s index will only contain links to English-language Web sites at first, but more languages will be supported progressively. &quot;The goal is to be in as many languages as possible as fast as possible,&quot; Wales said.Improvements to Search Wikia will be added on a rolling basis. &quot;It&#39;s release early, release often. We want to be constantly updating the software every day,&quot; he said. Search Wikia will be supported by advertising revenue, but it hasn&#39;t yet been determined how.Search Wikia&#39;s software and data, including its Web crawl index, will be freely available to anyone wishing to use them to create their own engine or search application, Wales said.&quot;With an open-source search engine, lots of people will download and use our software to compete with the major players. We think we have a chance of actually restructuring the industry to be much more competitive,&quot; Wales said.In the past, Wales has said that search isn&#39;t a &quot;defensible business&quot; because it&#39;s easy for users to switch among providers, so democratizing search is a good thing for all companies in this market. What is a defensible business is the ad brokerage that rides on top of the search engine activity, and that&#39;s where a company such as Google should focus, according to Wales.Search Wikia and Wikipedia operate under two organizations that were both founded by Wales: Wikia Inc. is a commercial, for-profit company with about 40 full-time employees. Wales is its board chairman. The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, is a nonprofit entity, and Wales is its chairman emeritus.Wikia Inc. and Wikimedia operate independently. Search Wikia is one of several projects and services at Wikia Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected as pope last year, some Internet users who logged onto Wikipedia to see what he looked like found a rather different image: that of the evil emperor from "Star Wars." The prank lasted only a minute or so before someone fixed it, but it highlighted one of the chief problems faced by the online encyclopedia: How to remain open enough that anyone can contribute entries and edit them while alsoÂ keeping pranksters at bay. In the coming days Wikipedia will begin using a new system at the German version of its Web site that it hopes will fix that problem. If successful, the system is likely to be introduced at Wikipedia sites in other languages. At the German site, users who have been registered for four days or more will be able to flag a recent entry as being correct and unvandalized, effectively locking it for a period of time. People will be able to update the entry with new material, but it won't be visible as part of the main entry until another trusted contributor has flagged the updates as being correct. Four days may not seem a long time to become "trusted," but it should be enough to deter troublemakers who come up with an idea to deface the site on a whim, said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, at the IDC European IT Forum in Paris on Tuesday. The idea isn't to flag all of the half million or so entries on the German site, just the contentious or topical ones likely to attract attention-seekers, he said. People who visit the entry will be able to see that it's flagged as vandal-free, and have the option to click through and see the recent additions that have not yet been vetted. HeÂ unveiled the German planÂ in August at the Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it's likely to go live any day now. "I'm just off to look at the software to see if it's ready," Wales said Tuesday. The exact details are still being worked out and the flagging system may be updated even after it goes live, depending on what works best, he added. It's one of several measures that Wikipedia has taken to improve the quality of its content, some of which have drawn criticism for making the encyclopedia less open. At Wikimania, Wales also talked about creating "stable" or "static" pages for entries that are considered complete, to help people who want to cite them in published works. The plan being tested in Germany appears designed to root out mischief, as opposed to inaccuracies that may be harder to detect. The question of accuracy spurred Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to unveil plans last week for a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia called Citizendium (a compendium created by citizens), which will enlist so-called experts to resolve disputes and verify that entries are correct. The experts will have to publish their credentials online to verify they are who they claim to be. Citizendium will begin life as a mirror of Wikipedia, the contents of which can be used by anyone under its GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). But articles that have been updated at Citizendium will remain that way in the future, according to a descriptionÂ available here. Wales noted that the content of Citizendium will also be available under the GFDL, so if the new site is successful, Wikipedia will be able to incorporate the changes back into its own site. Asked about Citizendium in Paris, Wales said that he and Sanger had a "difference of vision," but he said the two men are "still friends." Some animosity seems to exist, however. One of the entries flagged as "disputed" at Wikipedia is Sanger's biography. Sanger calls himself a co-founder of Wikipedia, a claim that Wales disputes. "He used to work for me," Wales said in Paris. "I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title."
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Whats wrong with this picture?  All these URLs return HTTP 200 0K.  The only problem is that none of them actually exist and they're just HTML error pages.  Now whats wrong with this page?  This page has an RSS chicklet.  The problem is that it doesn't LINK to an RSS page.  It links to an HTML page which then *describes* the link to the RSS feed.  People click on the RSS link and subscribe to this and not the real RSS feed.  To add insult to industry *none* of these HTML pages have RSS autodiscovery.  This isn't funny.
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'An unequalled miasma of debauchery and ignorance' We're delighted to report that Conservapedia - the "conservative encyclopedia you can trust" - is maintaining its hard line on liberal bias.â¦
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This is really strange.  Today I wanted to download a Tomcat source tarball and it pointed me to this mirror:  mirrors.*playboy.com*/apache...  The full link to the Tomcat tarball is here :  Whats up with that?    More evidence that Tomcat  is just cat on the prowl for a kitten in need:  caption: Can you pass the Tomcat Rorschach  test?
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Drops the C word Is Wikipedia running a censorship board? John Barberio thinks so. After more than two years as an active contributor to the free online encyclopedia, the 27-year-old Oxfordshire man recently left the project over the behavior of its "OTRS volunteers," unpaid administrators who act on reader complaints about the site's content.â¦
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Also: Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Following disclosures that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves.
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&#160;China watchers, get your scorecards out: Google&#39;s YouTube is blocked,&#160;Wikipedia is still blocked, but, for the moment, Google blog site Blogspot.com is available and some pictures from Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photos can once again be viewed.
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Wikia Inc, the commercial arm of the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, announced yesterday the opening of a new free service for hosting any community-sponsored content, such as blogs, social networking or other Web 2.0-like content that promotes interaction.