sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with & + wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers
Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma (see also the Music Industry).
You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.
And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.” Basically, you sign up, tell them about your site URL and a description, and they review it and decide if you’ll get in. I wonder if Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users are eligible? They all certainly “publish with some regularity on the Internet.”
Once you’re in, you get to link to the full version of articles - people clicking the link can read that article but they can’t go and read other parts of the Britannica site. Participants can also embed widgets like the following:
Half Pregnant
Britannica is doing a lot of things right - a relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors manages 4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field. But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.
Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.
As an outsider, Britannica’s future is clear. Eventually, and if they don’t go out of business first, they’ll be forced to make all their content freely available on the Internet, and will probably create a wiki-like format that allows user editing. Their differentiating factor from Wikipedia will be that they have experts guiding articles, so they’ll have a claim to be more authoritative. This is, by the way, the business model of Citizendium, created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006.
The sooner they do that the more likely they’ll be around for the long term. Perhaps they can even continue to sell those 32 volume sets to a few libraries. But it’s hard to give up that online subscription revenue. When this fails, they’ll try something else.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Web2.0
wikipedia
Company
Profiles
Product
Citizendium
&
The Truth According to Wikipedia
Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered the documentary above, The Truth About Wikipedia. It has now been posted to YouTube and is worth watching when you have a spare 45 minutes. The film pits Andrew Keen, the disapproving author of The Culture of the Amateur, and Bob McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, against Wikipedia co-founders Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales, and Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly, among others. The film is masterfully made and shows many points of view, but it ends up being more than anything else a vehicle for Keen to put forth his diatribes against Wikipedia. You definitely get the sense that he wins the argument in the movie. And, in fact, when I asked van Veelen afterwards on stage who he personally agreed with the most (I was the conference MC), he admitted it was Keen. This siding with the enemy, as it were, actually makes the documentary more thought-provoking. People in the audience were seething, and one man came prepared with a speech denouncing the filmmaker.
In the film, Keen actually argues that we need gatekeepers for the truth, and those gatekeepers should be experts. Of course, he misses the point that the relatively small handful of people who do most of the writing and editing on Wikipedia may very well be experts in their topic areas, or become experts by writing and researching Wikipedia articles. That is not to say that controversies do not arise all the time about factual inaccuracies, edit wars, and companies trying to conduct PR campaigns by changing their Wikipedia entries. But the film also misses the point that Wikipedia is very much a market of ideas. Like any market, information at any given point in time can be wrong, but in the end it turns out to be right more often than not. Whether you agree with Keen or with the Wikipedians depends on your definition of truth. Keen is an absolutist. There is Truth, and everything else is fiction. Experts are the guardians of that truth. But the truth is that Truth itself is always evolving, even the experts’ notion of it.
(via The Next Web).
And for those of you with even more time on your hands, here is van Veelen’s 50-minute documentary from last year on Google:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Gmail April Fools Not Very Funny. On the Upside, They Started A Wikipedia War
Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny.
Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:
How do I use it?
Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.
Funny? You decide. The team did better last year in my opinion.
But the joke has started a minor Wikipedia war, which makes it more interesting. In describing the technology Google says “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox)” and links to the Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia. Someone changed the words “time travel” to “gmail” in a revision, along with the comment “Gmail starts a wiki-war by linking directly to this article on April 1st…”
The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s revision history page (or feel free to participate with your own flourishes).
I wonder who’ll get tired first.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
10 Millionth Article Written on Wikipedia
The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia - a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here).
Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million English articles in September 2007). After English, the next most popular languages are German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
See here for an article count by language.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Web2.0
wikipedia
Company
Profiles
Product
&
wikimedia-foundation
$3 Million Donation For The Sum Of All Human Knowledge
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, announced a $3 million donation from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today. The donation will be paid ratably over three years.
Last year the foundation had total income of $2.7 million and expenses of about $2.1 million (see financials here). This year revenue should be significantly higher. In addition to this donation, Wikipedia has engaged in significant fundraising efforts over the last year. The foundation has 15 employees and hopes to grow to 25 by 2010.
The foundation has also been under close scrutiny lately around potential conflicts with large donors. at some point, it seems, they should seriously consider proposals to become financially independent via advertising on the site. Even very minor advertising would provide a huge windfall. Nearly a quarter of a billion people visit Wikipedia every month (fifth largest on the Internet), generating nearly 4 billion page views (Comscore worldwide, February 2008).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Web2.0
wikipedia
Company
Profiles
Product
&
wikimedia-foundation
Wikimedia’s 2007 Financials Posted
Wikimedia Foundation posted their audited 2007 financial statements (I’ve embedded the document below) last week. Their fiscal year actually ends June 30, so these are already almost eight months old, but they reveal some interesting information about the entity that controls Wikipedia nonetheless.
Generally Wikimedia publishes these five months or so after the end of the year; this year they took eight months. Total donations and other income increased from $1.5 million in 2006 to $2.7 million (the period covered is prior to their recent fundraising effort). Donations of Google stock actually made up a material portion of contributions - 681 shares were donated in fiscal 2007 (worth about $315,000 based on the current stock price).
Travel expenses jumped significantly from $140k to $264k. Given that this period included time when Jimmy Wales was pitching Wikia Search around the world, some conspiracy theorists are speculating that travel expenses related to the for-profit Wikia (which Wales founded) were being reimbursed by Wikimedia Foundation. Wales, however, told me via email that the foundation does not reimburse him for any travel expenses at all, even for pure Wikipedia events, in order to remove any doubt about mixing funds between the entities. “I fund all that myself, out of my own pocket personally,” he said.
The financial statements also note, though, that Wikia and Wikipedia do share some infrastructure costs, assets, employees and expenses:
The Organization shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007 is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The Organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006 valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007.
Through June 30, 2007, two members of the Organization’s board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc.
Financial statements for 2006 are here.
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc 2007 Financial Statement
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Kaltura Partners to Add Crowdsourced Video to Wikipedia
Crowdsourcing video startup Kaltura is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to put its video-mashup technology on Wikipedia. The program, which is starting in beta today, will allow people to create collaborative videos on Wikipedia and other wikis. Kaltura’s video-editing technology allows multiple people to collaborate in creating a video.
The addition will eventually make it easier for Wikipedia contributors to add video clips, images, diagrams, animations, and PowerPoint presentations to Wikipedia pages. (They could use some livening up, don’t you think?).
As part of this beta, Kaltura is open-sourcing its video/rich media remixing technology. And it will be available to any wiki that runs on MediaWiki software. As part of the program, users will also gain access to a library of videos and other rich media under the Creative Commons license. Kaltura is based in New York City and launched at TechCrunch 40.
cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1200666617"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1200666617","kaltura");
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Fake Apple Keynote “Leaked” on Wikipedia
What is Macworld without rampant speculation? This year, though, someone is going the extra mile and is using Wikipedia to spread what looks to be a fake outline for the Stevenote tomorrow. Many blogs and media are biting (see here and here), including people who should know better (Steve Rubel).
At first glance, the notes seem plausible. Nothing too earth-shattering: a thin new MacBook, a 16GB iPhone, YouTube downloads on iTunes, and a preview of the iPhone software development kit. But it has a few fatal flaws: No mention of iTunes movie rentals, Microsoft Office 2008, more DRM-free music partners, or the much hoped-for Beatles iPod. (At least one of these highly-anticipated announcements has to be true). Not to mention that the self-correcting mechanisms of Wikipedia are already at work debunking the premise behind the notes. “This is TOTAL BULL,” reads one comment.
Still, it is a well put-together piece of speculation and plays on people’s trust of Wikipedia to spread rumor. My favorite part is the purported SDK news. According to these “notes” Steve Jobs will be spending a lot of time on it. The details: iPhone apps will be sold for $6.99 and widgets for $2.99, with 70 percent of revenues going to the developer (or they can be free). Apple will only accept source code, not executables, to protect the device. And example iPhone apps that Jobs is supposed to demo include an RSS feed reader (that would be nice), a Last.fm music app, and Twitter for the iPhone (this part may be true). Here is the relevant excerpt:
iPhone/iPod Touch SDK
- Apps and Widgets
- Using Cocoa with Objective-C
- Developers submit programs as source code, not executable
- Specify iPhone or both iPhone/Touch (certain features iPhone only)
- Set your own price: Apps $0-$6.99, Widgets $0-$2.99
- Users buy/download in iTunes Wi-Fi Store / iTunes Store (Mac/PC)
- Automatic updating wirelessly or docked- Demonstration of exporting from XCode 3 to iTunes Store
- Submits source code to Apple for validation (make sure that people aren’t abusing the system, prevent malware and viruses)
- If using microphone or GSM, iPhone only; otherwise, available for both iPhone and iPod Touch
- Apps can be free or up to $6.99; Widgets free or up to $2.99
- Developers recieve 70% of revenue for their products
- Licensed under Apple Mobile Software License
- Can download wirelessly from iTunes Wi-Fi Store or docked to computer from iTunes Store
- Demonstration of wirelessly downloading (and running) the app submitted earlier
- Apps and widgets can be rearranged on front screen; front screen scrolls to show all apps/widgets
- Resubmit updated versions of apps; when added to store, iPhone/Touch will ask you to update it next time you use it (or next time you dock the iPhone/Touch)
- Developers can get their hands on a beta version of the SDK tomorrow on ADC and start developing; final version due early February
- iTunes 7.6 and iPhone/iPod Touch Software update 1.3 allowing for Apps mid-FebruaryExample apps/widgets
Apps:
- iChat (coming with 1.3 update) (AIM, Jabber/Google Talk)
– Quick demonstration
- RSS Feed Reader (coming with 1.3 update) (read feeds online or off)
- One of our partners made something cool: Last.fm (scrobble tracks played on iPhone/touch wirelessly without syncing w/ computer)
Widgets:
- Dictionary (coming with 1.3 update) (quickly look up words, translate, use wikipedia)
– Quick demonstration
- Yellow/White Book (coming with 1.3 update) (search for contacts, add them to your address book directly from the app, will sync back with address book on your Mac/PC)
- Sports Ticker (coming with 1.3 update) (choose your sports and teams, get updates on their progress)
- Another partner: Twitter (update your Twitter on the fly, see your friends tweets)
- Try these out on the show floor today
Again, I say this is all bunk. But it does reflect in its own way what the Apple faithful want to hear. And hopefully, Jobs will shed some light on Apple’s iPhone SDK plans tomorrow.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Wikia Search Launches Private Beta; Public Launch On January 7
Well, the waiting appears to be over, and the promised 2007 launch date was technically achieved. Wikipedia/Wikia Founder Jimmy Wales has publicly announced the private beta for Wikia Search - right now. And the public launch is set for January 7. In a note to the Wikia Search email list a few minutes ago, he wrote:
From: jwales@xxxxx.com
Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available
Date: December 23, 2007 7:04:01 PM PST
To: search-l@wikia.com
Reply-To: search-l@wikia.comPing me if you want one…. we’re launched.
I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we
are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the
system with help from people to complain about what is broken…Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t
answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here.–Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Search-l mailing list
Search-l@wikia.com
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
Change options or unsubscribe: http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l
I spoke with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina on the the rules around the beta - users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch on January 7. Hopefully people will respect that - there are bound to be some major hiccups and Wikia deserves a chance to iron those out before what is sure to be a ton of attention on the product.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Wikia Will Search. But When?
We’ve waited more than a year for Wikia to launch their human powered search engine. The project was first announced in December last year by Wikipedia/Wikia founder Jimmy Wales. The promise was to return better results than Google and other search engines, using humans to make quality decisions:
“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”
A lot has happened since that announcement. Mahalo, a Sequoia backed startup with their own approach to human powered search results, launched in May and is showing promising early growth. Meanwhile Google, perhaps somewhat annoyed by Wikia Search as well as Wikipedia’s ongoing refusal to add Google ads to their pages, announced Knol earlier this month - clearly a shot across the Wikipedia bow.
Not much on Wikia search, however. They’ve set up a page to discuss the project. In July Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, which had technology to allow distributed web crawling by users. And an early screen shot, showing a Facebook-like profile page, was shown in South Africa in November.
Wikia Search In 2007 Or Not? Jimmy Wales Say Yes.
But the promise has been to launch Wikia Search this year, and time is fast running out. There’s just one week left in 2007.
Today a report was published that Wales, in an IRC chat, promised to make the end-of-year launch date: “ the search engine *will* launch before the end of the year, probably in private beta first, and then open to the public in early january. No specific dates are certain yet. But sooon.”
I asked Wikia CEO Gil Penchina if the quote was accurate and whether to expect a launch in the next few days. His response was “Can’t comment on exact timing.”
It won’t be important a year from now if Wikia Search launches this year or early next year. But it is time for the product to be judged on the merits of the search results created by it, not on a series of press leaks and hazy screen shots. I look forward to the launch, whether it be this year or (hopefully at the latest) next.
cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1198472628"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1198472628","wikia"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_1_1198472628","mahalo");
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Wikipedia Sued For Nazi Sympathies
There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.
Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.
Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”
Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”
Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Get Ready For Wikia Search; First Screen Shots Shown In South Africa
It was eleven months ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first mentioned his vision for a people-powered search engine that would eventually launch under his for profit startup, Wikia.
Not much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search is here.
But the promise has been for Wikia Search to launch this year, and it appears to be on track. Yesterday Matthew Buckland reported that Wales showed “some of the first screen shots” of the new project (the first, as far as I know).
The main screen shot is a profile page for a user (see above) that looks surprisingly like a Facebook profile. It was taken by Nic Haralambous.
The Man v. Machine debate as it applies to search is about to begin. By this time next year we should have lots of data on the performance of Wikia Search, as well as the new startup Mahalo which is also in this space. Until then, we can spend our time speculating and, I guess, continuing to live with Google for our search needs.
cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1195226966"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1195226966","wikia"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_1_1195226966","mahalo");
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Are You One Of Over 10,000 Donors to Wikimedia?
Wikipedia is used by millions worldwide each day, draws in billions of page views each month, and often takes the top slot on Google searches. But the truly amazing fact is that it’s stayed ad-free. This is because the mega encyclopedia and its sister sites run on borrowed time, borrowed servers, and — most importantly — public donations.
That’s why Wikpedia’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has been running their annual fundraiser to support their effort to spread free knowledge. Most of their revenue comes from private individuals, with donations averaging around $25. Founder Jimmy Wales makes a personal request for donations and outlines future plans in a video below. Over the past nine days they’ve attracted over 10,000 donations (they’re also donating a lot of fan photos as well). The 10,000th one came from a contributor in Finland, who donated 10 Euros at 8:58 UTC (4.58 ET). And there’s still time for plenty more. The drive runs all the way through December 22.
You can donate money here. You can get a banner to help promote donations here.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down
We posted yesterday on the move by the Wikimedia Foundation to relocate from Florida to San Francisco, but aside from the obvious conclusions that the move would allow Wikimedia to tap into the superior developer community out West, there may be another reason as well: a mid life slow down.
It’s tempting to call it a mid-life crisis, but it’s far too bland for that label. Robert Rohde has put together a statistical analysis on Wikipedia activity and has discovered that things are rapidly slowing down on Wikipedia after years of astronomical growth.
According to Rohde, since the beginning of the year the rate of editing articles has declined 17%, new account registrations are down 25%, user blocks are down 30%, article protection is down 30%, uploads are down 10% and article deletions are down 25%.
Rohde also has also put together some graphs here that show that an increasing number of edits are reverts (now at 20%) as opposed to the addition of new material, which he aptly calls “Unproductive Article Edits.”
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Wikipedia: 2 Million Article Milestone
Wikipedia had its 2 millionth English language article written on September 10th, the company says.
The two millionth article was on El Horminguero, a Spanish language television show. Wikipedia user Zzxc wrote the article.
Wikipedia, founded in January 2001, is six years old.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
1.9 Billion Words; Scribd Users Have A Lot To Say
Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about 2,500 volumes (~15GB).
Today Scribd has released some numbers talking about just how big they’ve gotten as well. Since launching 6 months ago, the site has collected over 178,798 documents. That may not seem like much compared to Wikipedia’s over 5.3 million articles (source) across all languages (as of last September), but Scribd users seem more verbose. Scribd users have uploaded over 1.9 billion words, which would take up over 2,287 of Smolenski’s volumes (13.4 GB). No word on how many of those words are copyrighted.
However, Wikipedia is still obviously the pageview king, drawing over 7 billion pageviews (June) and 42.9 million (Feb) visitors per month, to Scribd’s 3.8 million uniques. Google was responsible for 24% of the traffic, and I imagine the same is true for Scribd. Wikipedia also features highly targeted and edited content to Scribd’s library of reports and rants. Although, unlike Wikipedia, Scribd is helping a lot of people catch up on Harry Potter.
Scribd has had quite a ride since launching over 6 months ago. They sustained a considerable amount of traffic after launch, and eventually went on to raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Apparently, easily publishing documents online was not a solved problem.
Here’s a chart of the word growth of both Wikipedia and Scribd:
Note: According to statistics listed on Wikipedia, the site (all languages) has grown from 49,000 words in January 2001 to 1.7 billion words last September (the last reported point). Since the data only goes to September 2006, I extrapolated the growth (yellow) assuming the previous year’s monthly growth rate of 7.7%.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Wikipedia Edits Cause Australian Political Scandal
The Australian Prime Minister’s Office have been caught editing Wikipedia, the latest in a growing line of Wikiscanner entrapments.
Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain Smirk” from the Wikipedia biography of Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, and a range of bizarre edits, including the addition of the line “Poo bum dicky wee wee” to a Wikipedia article on Bubishi, a book related to Martial Arts.
Australia faces a Federal Election by November this year, and the edits have become major news locally. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd accused the Prime Minister of directing public servants to change history to suit the Government and that the behavior was “odd.” Notably though, Rudd admitted that his own staff might have edited Wikipedia “for factual changes.” The truth I guess is in the eyes of the beholder.
The Australian press also discovered that staff from the Australian Department of Defence were the most active Wikipeda editors among Australian Government Departments, having made over 5000 Wikipedia edits. DOD edits included changes to pages ranging from the 9/11 Truth Movement, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers. A Defence spokesman said that the Department would move to ban access to Wikipeda for all staff.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Wiki Jacking
Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever.
(via Graywolf)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Wikipedia’s Nerd Bias
Something Awful has a flat out hilarious (if somewhat long in the introduction) article on the nerd bias of wikipedia. The point isn’t to say that one article or another on Wikipedia has factual inaccuracies, but rather to show how much more attention certain topics get than others. They suggest opening up two somewhat related articles, where one appeals to the nerds and the other does not, and see how much longer and more complete the nerd-related entries are. Some of my favorites are below. If you want the quick results, just click on Lightsaber Combat and you’ll get the point (”The master practitioners of Form IV make extensive use of acrobatic maneuvers often thought physically impossible without the aid of the Force.”). People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.
- Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
- Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
- Girlfriend v. Video Games
- Half Life v. Half Life 2
- Love v. Masturbation
- Bathing v. Acne
Update: check out wikigroaning, which shows the difference by numbers. No idea how they are trying to measure it, but its very funny.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The Mysterious Wikiwix: Affiliated With Wikipedia?
We got a tip today on a new search engine called Wikiwix. The site is new to me and there is very little information about it on the web (one post from about three hours ago is here). It is linked from the main Wikipedia search page, although I’m not sure when it was added.
Like Wikiseek, a search engine unaffiliated wtih Wikipedia, Wikiwix searches only Wikipedia. The “contact us” link points to this page on Wikipedia, which is in French. A translated version of that page is here.
The domain name is owned by Martin Pascal, a resident of France. The contact link above has information added as early as March 20, 2007. One of the questions on that page is “Who is behind Wikiwix, with which technology, which is the content of the bond with Wikipédia?”, which adds further confusion. Also, the fact that Wikiwix has been added to Wikipedia Search, something not offered to Wikiseek, suggests some sort of connection between the entities.
I’ll update this post with more information as it comes it. I’ve emailed Jimmy Wales and await his response.
Update: good additional information in the comments. Sounds like this is not affiliated with Wikipedia.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Update: Video From Jimmy Wales Press Prank
The video for the “Mr. Ten Questions” Australian press prank on Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales that we wrote about a couple of days ago is now online and embedded above. See our original post for a transcript of the questions and additional background.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
From Freebase to DBpedia with love…
A nice post on the Dbpedia-discussion mailinglist showing the collaboration spirit in the semantic web: A category browser for Wikipedia:
Hi, DBpedians. While we’ve been working on Freebase (www.freebase.com)
we’ve built some tools to help sift through Wikipedia categories looking
for ones that label articles as of a given type.
[…]
We’re making our category browser tool available so that other groups
can easily search and navigate through Wikipedia categories. The browser
lives here:
Australian Press Prank On Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke at a education.au conference in Sydney, Australia last week. After his talk he took questions.
As reported by the Brisbane Times, Andrew Hansen raised his hand as a member of the press and was selected to ask a question. What Wales didn’t know is that Hansen is part of the cast of a wildly popular public television show in Australia called The Chaser’s War on Everything, a weekly half hour satire/prank show.
Hansen said “Ah, Jimmy, um, look I just have 10 questions,” and then fired off ten questions in a row, not waiting for answers (It’s normal at events like this for reporters to ask a follow up question at the same time as the initial question to save time). This is a regular prank by the cast of the show, called “Mr. Ten Questions.”
His questions:
- First, how are you enjoying Australia?
-
Second, how do our computers compare to the ones in America?
- Third, why does everyone in IT look so nerdy, yet you look like a daytime soap star?
-
Fourth, Mac or PC - do you really give a shit?
- Fifth, there are 1.7 million articles on Wikipedia; how long did it take you to write them all?
- Sixth, Craig Reucassel’s a bit unhappy with the photo on his page. Could you upload a better one maybe for him?
- Seventh, my dog is getting some scabs under his chin. I don’t know if you can bring him in the number of a local vet?
-
Eighth, Jessica Rowe and Peter Overton - will it last?
- Ninth, cracked pepper?
- Tenth, how do you feel about the fact that when I looked you up on Wikipedia this morning I changed your page to say that you were a teenage drug lord from Malaysia?
To his credit Wales attempted to respond to four of the questions.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0