In the Online Journalism Review, Ray Grieselhuber proposes six ways to improve Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is a good idea. There is a need for a freely available, reliable encyclopedia on the Internet. Commercial alternatives like Britannica clearly have their place. But, if only because users expect information on the Internet to be free, we should be [...]
B4, a Wikipedian who’s working on a graphic for Wikimania, is looking for a decent, public domain or loosely licensed image of the spines of generic old books for the graphic. If you have one you would like to share, drop him a note on his talk page. And, no, he’s not B-4 from Star [...]
A coworker pointed me to the Village Voice’s examination of Wikipedia. It includes a nice history of the project, too. Wikipedia’s general counsel, Brad Patrick, will visit Berkman on Tuesday (1/31) for their luncheon series. To attend, please RSVP to rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu no later than noon on Friday (1/27). It’ll be Webcast http://harmony.law.harvard.edu/luncheon….), too, [...]
For a long time, I felt like not joining Wikipedia was the right thing to do because it meant I could possibly remain more objective in my reporting of Wikimedia Foundation activities and appear more objective. However, now, I’m beginning to feel conflicted. In my attempts to continue to learn about the Wikimedia Foundation projects, [...]
Two professors and a technologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which is a business school, analyze Wikipedia’s quality and some of the challenges for the encyclopedia. They suggest a rating system might be a way to let people know about the quality of articles. "Indeed, the key may be putting Wikipedia into a [...]
InfoWorld’s Jon Udell summarizes the current state of Wikipedia and wonders what the competition will be like between it and Digital Universe.
The article Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors provides an interesting look at Wikipedia because of how it maps the work. The first ten pages also offer a great introduction to the encyclopedia and provide lots of great statistics that were current as of October 2005.
"I think an enormous number of problems in the world are just caused by a lack of information, a lack of understanding, a lack of reflection," explains Jimmy Wales about the importance of access to free, neutral information, especially in certain regions of the world in this Christian Science Monitor article. As well as summarizing [...]
George Johnson expounds on the differences between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia the recent Nature study highlights. After explaining the complex differences in the number of siblings Dmitri Mendeleyev had, he observes that the number typically isn’t an important detail. For many people, though, one error–no matter how minor–jeopardizes the reliability of the entire source. One [...]
Jeffrey Harrow of The Future Brief examines encyclopedias and the Internet, of course including Wikipedia. Some quotes: "… [T]he Web provides an incredible, vast information resource on virtually every subject imaginable (and on many subjects beyond many of our imaginations) literally at our fingertips. That’s the upside. But that’s also the downside, since it’s often [...]