Wikipedia

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Wikipedia Weighs Big Questions
Wikipedia Weighs Big Questions
Mar 11, 2008 11:10 AM CDT

Wikipedia Weighs Big Questions

Site struggles with funding, charges of impropriety

(Newser) - Forget dot-com excesses: A piece of printer paper taped to the door and cut-price desks and chairs from eBay and Craigslist are all that distinguish the new San Francisco office of the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia. "We are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be," its executive...

Wiki's Wales Accused of Inappropriate Spending

Claims he abused his foundation's trust

(Newser) - Jimmy Wales has been hit with allegations that he abused his position as founder of Wikipedia, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. A former Wikipedia employee, Danny Wool, has claimed on his blog that Wales used his Wikimedia Foundation credit card for personal expenses. Meanwhile, a former girlfriend released chat transcripts...

Species Site Overwhelmed by Traffic on Opening Day

Encyclopedia of Life will eventually describe all 1.8M species on Earth

(Newser) - A much-anticipated web encyclopedia of all Earth’s life forms crashed hours after its launch yesterday, inundated by traffic. The Encyclopedia of Life had 11.5 million hits in its first 5½ hours—including 2 hours down—leading the site’s founders to ask their opposites at Wikipedia for bandwidth...

Wiki Survey Aims to Find Out Who Posts — and Why

Site will try to ID its anonymous authors

(Newser) - Wikipedia wants to know more about its anonymous authors and has launched a worldwide survey to find out who they are, how much they post, and what type of people go from casual browsers to active contributors. In a first for the site, the survey will attempt to unearth authors'...

Wikipedia Founder to Debut Search Engine

'Wikia Search' will allow users to tweak results

(Newser) - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will open his new project, Wikia Search, next week. Unlike top search giants such as Google and Yahoo, Wikia Search will use open algorithms instead of proprietary search methods. The new engine will also allow users to contribute to—and ideally improve the accuracy of—search...

Felon Became Top Exec for Wikipedia
Felon Became Top Exec for Wikipedia
Dec 15, 2007 6:27 AM CST

Felon Became Top Exec for Wikipedia

Woman with long criminal record was COO for 6+ months

(Newser) -  Wikipedia had a convicted felon in one of its highest executive positions for over six months this year, The Register reports. Carolyn Bothwell Doran was on probation for a DUI that caused a death when she became the charitable foundation's chief operating officer in January, says the UK-based web...

Google Takes On Wikipedia
Google Takes On Wikipedia
Dec 14, 2007 4:40 PM CST

Google Takes On Wikipedia

Online encyclopedia is in beta testing

(Newser) - The company is developing a collaborative online encyclopedia, called the "knol project," that will allow contributors to earn money by including Google ads on their pages. Google won't edit content, but will give high search ranking to entries it considers high quality, reports CNET. Users will also be...

Schools Ban Wikipedia
Schools Ban Wikipedia
Nov 27, 2007 5:38 PM CST

Schools Ban Wikipedia

District officials not bullish on popular online encyclopedia

(Newser) - Wikipedia's so quick and easy—too easy, ruled a New Jersey school district, the latest of many to ban use of the popular online encyclopedia by its students and block it on school computers, fearing potentially erroneous information from the communally edited site will pollute minds and papers. “Kids...

Wiki Founder May Take on Facebook
Wiki Founder May Take on Facebook
Nov 17, 2007 9:13 AM CST

Wiki Founder May Take on Facebook

Jimmy Wales' new project combines networking, search

(Newser) - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is apparently going after Facebook and Google in the social-networking arena, Wired reports. Wales showed slides of his upcoming project during a speech in South Africa, and a tech blogger on hand described it as a "search/social networking hybrid" that incorporates elements of both internet...

Wikipedia Insiders Launch Competitors

Wired profiles former employees out to offer 'more accurate' articles

(Newser) - Danny Wool is following on the heels of Larry Sanger, says a Wired profile of Wiki's next-of-kin, becoming a former Wikipedian who's gone out on his own to offer "more accurate" content. While Wool’s Veropedia refurbishes Wikipedia articles, Sanger’s Citizendium quickly jettisoned that approach, declaring them unsalvageable....

Wikimedia Begins '07 Fundraiser
Wikimedia Begins '07 Fundraiser
Oct 22, 2007 4:49 PM CDT

Wikimedia Begins '07 Fundraiser

(Newser) - The Wikimedia foundation, non-profit operator of Wikipedia and related sites, announced the start of its annual fundraiser today, News.com reports. The pledge drive, which will run through December 22, will finance general improvements to the online encyclopedia as well as a planned expansion of the site into geographic areas...

Has Wiki Replaced the College Library?

Not quite: Undergrads still turn to more traditional sources

(Newser) - Contrary to expectations, college students are not rushing online for answers to research assignments. A new survey shows only 3% of undergraduates with research tasks went to Wikipedia first and only 13% tried search engines. The largest number, 40%,  turned to course materials first and 23% sought out the...

CIA, Wal-Mart, Fox News Purge Wiki Entries

Hacker reveals vanity changes to online encyclopedia articles

(Newser) - A new data-mining tool has tracked the identities of the anonymous users who make edits to Wikipedia entries—and revealed that Wal-Mart, voting-machine magnate Diebold, and even Fox News have tried to bowdlerize or spin their appearances in the online encyclopedia. And they're not the only ones, Wired reports.

Online Maps Give Personal View of World

User-generated custom atlases are becoming guides to everything

(Newser) - Taking a page from Wikipedia, Internet users are harnessing the collective knowledge of millions and applying it to maps. On the rapidly growing "GeoWeb," surfers create custom atlases using mapping technology by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. The user-generated maps can highlight anything from stores to previously unavailable...

Wikipedia: Encyclopedia, Newspaper, or Cult?

All of the above, and an astonishing success

(Newser) - Novelist Jonathan Dee plumbs the phenomenon that is Wikipedia: First it was a populist encyclopedia, increasingly it's populist journalism, and all along it's been a religious cult, populated by cybermonks working in isolation, often putting in long hours in their bedrooms on school nights. The amazing twist, he notes, is...

Wiki Twist in Benoit Horror
Wiki Twist in Benoit Horror
Jun 29, 2007 5:07 AM CDT

Wiki Twist in Benoit Horror

Wrestler's Wikipedia page was altered hours before police found family's bodies

(Newser) - In a disturbing twist, police report that Wikipedia contributors in the U.S. and Australia made note of the death of wrestler Chris Benoit's wife 14 hours before her body, Benoit's, and their son's had been discovered. The first edit stated Benoit missed an event "due to personal issues,...

Internet Users Slam Chinese Censorship

As top sites are banned, web surfers rail against 'Great Firewall'

(Newser) - Frustration with government curbs on the Internet is growing among China's 140M web users. Wikipedia has been banned, and the censors recently shuttered photo-sharing web site Flickr, after a user uploaded a picture of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tens of thousands of human monitors and an elaborate filter system...

Conservative Takes on Wikipedia
Conservative Takes on Wikipedia
Jun 19, 2007 7:30 AM CDT

Conservative Takes on Wikipedia

'Conservapedia' plays David to allegedly liberal Goliath

(Newser) - Unhappy with what he perceives as Wikipedia's liberal bias, a conservative lawyer has launched Conservapedia.com, a religious-right-friendly answer to the online encyclopedia. Conservapedia has some 12,000 entries (to Wikipedia's 1.8 million in English) and several thousand readers and volunteer writers. It includes multiple Bible verses, psychoanalyzes Hillary...

Bloggers Urge More Civility
Bloggers Urge More Civility
Apr 9, 2007 7:53 AM CDT

Bloggers Urge More Civility

Epidemic of nastiness has techies mulling a Web 2.0 code of conduct

(Newser) - Prominent techies are calling for a code of conduct for the Web 2.0 blogosphere.  The group, which includes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, urges that bloggers  purge their sites of anonymous comments and delete libelous or menacing ones. “If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it...

Google's Worst Nightmare
Google's Worst Nightmare
Mar 18, 2007 8:41 PM CDT

Google's Worst Nightmare

Can Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales take on Google in search and win?

(Newser) - Fast Company’s Alan Deutschman profiles Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ effort to take on Google in search. With 1000 initial volunteers, $4 million, and a commitment to mass collaboration Wales’ new for profit company, Wikia, mostly has idealism on its side as it takes on Google.

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