Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism
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Wikipedia has started to hit the big time.  Accordingly, several critical     articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based     Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very     widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When     Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive".    These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully.  I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia.  (I have since left the project.)    Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue.  These problems     could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem.  If the project's     managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new     management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.
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Only 'folksonomy' inspires more fear and loathing It's official: "folksonomy", "blogosphere", "netiquette" and "blook" are among the net-spawned terms which should be cast down into the eternal fires of hell, AFP reports.â¦
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.
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Drops the C word Updated 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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'You are such an anti-semitic turd' FoTW Regular readers will be aware of the Vulture Central tradition which dicates that you're not a fully-fledged Reg hack until you've been subjected to a vicious outburst of e-anger from some reader with steam coming out of his or her ears.â¦
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Comment is free: George Monbiot:  A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects.
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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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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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If there were such a book, it would say, instead of Don't Panic: No need for anyone to suffer. Twitter is not a mail list or a chat room. No one has an investment in anyone else's manners. If what someone says causes you too much angst, just unfollow. It's a single click.  Got other advice for Twitter newbies? Post a comment.
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English-derived neologism bids for world domination God alone knows what Cervantes would have made of it, but the English term "blogosphere" has slithered onto the growing list of neologisms shoehorned into the noble Castillian language, joining chatear, chip, formatear, Internet and mÃ³dem in a burgeoning list of tech and net-based foreign vocab.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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(InfoWorld) - Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia user-generated and edited encyclopaedia, said he expects contributors to the site who claim certain credentials will soon have to prove they really have them. The new policy, which is currently under discussion by the community of users who regularly write and maintain the site, is being considered after it emerged this month that one of Wikipedia's most respected editors didn't hold the qualifications he claimed. The user, who went under the pseudonym "essjay," described himself in an online profile as a "tenured professor of theology" and said he taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the subject. He also said he held a bachelor of arts in religious studies, a master of arts in religion, doctorate in philosophy in theology and a doctorate in canon law. But it wasn't true. Essjay was actually Ryan Jordan, a 24 year-old from Kentucky, who revealed his true identity when he joined Wikia Inc., the for-profit company run by Wales that seeks to use the community content model to make money. "I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc.," he wrote on Wikipedia when questioned about the different profiles, according to a copy of a now-deleted page kept by Wikipedia Watch. Jordan said he lied about his job and educational background in order to protect his identity, but when he was hired by Wales to work at Wikia came clean on who he really was. However, the controversy didn't stop there. Essjay was interviewed for a story in The New Yorker magazine in 2006 so the revelation of his fake profile prompted an editor's note in a recent edition. That spread the controversy well beyond Wikipedia's message boards. Subsequent investigations into his claims on his Wikia profile indicated that some of those could also be false. "It's a bit of a mess," Wales said in an interview in Tokyo. Wales arrived in Japan at the beginning of the week, and plans to stay there a month. "We're not happy about it," he said. "To discover that someone had been deceiving the community for a long time really was a bit of a blow to our trust. Wikipedia is built on the idea of trusting other people and people being honest and we find that in the most part everyone is, so it was a real disappointment." As a result of the problems contributors are now likely to be asked to back up any specific claims they make regarding qualifications, especially when they are relevant to articles being written, edited or altered, said Wales. If editors are using their real name then this can be quite a simple task but for those editing anonymously it could be trickier, he said. "In that case we'll probably just discourage them from prominently featuring their credentials," said Wales. "You know, it's fine if you want to edit and don't want to go through that process but you shouldn't be writing about your credentials unless you can prove them." The revelations came at a bad time for Wikipedia. In recent months the site has been in and out of the headlines for various issues but its credibility is continually being questioned -- not because it's full of errors but because it doesn't know the identity or motivation of its contributors. Wales initially pledged his support for Jordan, and that set off the site's critics. The Wikipedia founder now admits that was a mistake and says he reacted in the way that he did because he didn't initially fully understand the specifics of the case. "I didn't think it was all that important because I didn't realize he was relying on credentials as a professor," he said. "He treated it really as a bit of a joke and the actual credentials he claimed were a bit ludicrous. After the fact you can look back and say, 'Well that was a bit odd,' but I never really looked into it and that was the big mistake that I made in the whole process." Essjay has now given up his work on Wikipedia. At least that's what he said in a final post, but whether Jordan is still at work on the site is impossible to know simply because contributors are anonymous. He also resigned his position at Wikia. For Wales, "The great irony is that he is a fabulous editor and did really an amazing amount of good work." "He spent most of his time reverting vandalism, mediating disputes and was always a very kind and loving and thoughtful person who, you know, anytime people were having a dispute it was always good to see Essjay show up because he was quite good at getting all parties on the same track." Wales said he thinks what's happened is unfortunate for Jordan. "My view is when he first came on the site he made up this persona not really thinking very much about it and not realizing he was going to become very active and respected in the community and then I think he felt a bit trapped," he said. "I talked to him the other day and of course he's not very happy about all of the press coverage. One doesn't want to become famous for something like this but he feels a bit relieved that it's all over so I'm hoping the world will let him grow up in peace and he'll be successful in life." REFERENCES: Wikipedia breaks into U.S. top 10 sites, Feb. 17, 2007Wikipedia has to do what it has to do . . ., Network World (US), Jan. 27, 2007
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Comment is free: Robert McCrum: The great essayist would be appalled by the writing, but applaud the democracy of the web.
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By Patricia Kitchen, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.  Feb. 18--Just as employers are figuring out the role of blogs, their value and downside, along come wikis.
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A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
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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.
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By Nicholas Craig  Blogs, wikis, podcasts. The internet is spawning a strange new language. More importantly, it is also freeing up old ways of working and learning.