After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees
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Wikipediaâs co-founder has called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees.
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In the wacky Wiki world that is the Internet, it's hard to know which information is reliable and which isn't.
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It seems even a crusty old newshound like me can get burned. My item last week about a couple naming their baby âYahooâ turns out to be a hoax cooked up by a (now-unemployed) Romanian tabloid reporter. Reporters making things up just for a laugh? I am shocked, simply shocked.Â
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Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his cloak of 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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Also: Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Jelly spine cure urgently needed by ISP A discredited doctor has forced an ISP to silence a website that aimed to debunk claims made by his "Royal College of Alternative Medicine" (RCAM).â¦
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After an annoyingly long series of beta releases, say hello to MediaWiki 1.3.0! Everyone running the beta releases is _strongly_ recommended to upgrade to the current code. MediaWiki is the collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and other projects. It&apos;s designed to handle a large number of users and pages without imposing too rigid a structure or workflow.   This release includes a security fix: the 1.3.0 beta releases may be vulnerable to a PHP inclusion attack if include files are exposed and you have allow_url_fopen and register_globals on (this is the default configuration in PHP 4.1.x, but register_globals is off by default in 4.2.x and later).  Note that while MediaWiki through 1.1 required register_globals to be on, 1.2 and 1.3 *do not*. If you have register_globals on, you should turn it off unless you are absolutely sure you require it for some other package. See http://php.net/register_globals for general information.   Release notes: http://sf.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=34373&release_id=259965  Download: http://prdownloads.sf.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.0.tar.gz?download  Wiki admin help mailing list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l  Bug report system: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192  Play "stump the developers" live on IRC: #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net
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Also: Ancestry.com puts 90M war records online. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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MONDAY, Feb. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Just 5 percent of Web pages devoted to breast cancer contain inaccurate information. But pages focused on complementary or alternative medicine are 15 times more likely to make misleading claims and contain other false information, a new study says.
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Suspicious (and in at least one case, bizarre) changes to the online encyclopedia are traced to a military computer at the American naval base in Cuba where terrorist suspects are detained.
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U.S. officials gave employers new  tools on Tuesday to try to determine whether a degree comes  from a bogus "diploma mill" or a genuine school of higher  education.
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The BBC's Mike Baker looks at the report that UK degree classifications have outlived their usefulness.
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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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Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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There are no guarantees in business -- especially when it comes to getting to the top of the ladder. Wired's How To Wiki gives you career-advancement suggestions that don't involve subterfuge and blackmail. But we can't cover everything ... without your help, so please give us your suggestions, too. It's a wiki, you know.
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A UC Santa Cruz prof designs a tool to give Wikipedia users a better idea of how trustworthy entries are. The software flags questionable lines by turning the text orange -- the more it's been tinkered with, the deeper the orange. This, on the heels of the Wikipedia tracker that reveals who has edited the entries.
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The folks behind the open-source reference site that's challenging the encyclopedia industry decide to give journalism a go. Through the experimental Wikinews site, anyone can take a stab at being a reporter. By Joanna Glasner.