Wikipedia to Add Review Layer to Articles About People
The New York Times reports that the online user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia is going to start reviewing changes that can be made to articles about living people. An editorial review layer will be added to articles so that a more experienced editor reviews article changes before they are live on the website.
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.The article says the new editing procedures are already in place on the German version of Wikipedia. The Times says 60 million people now use Wikipedia each month. The Times notes that editing changes mean some Wikipedia editors will have more clout than others. The big concern is that new editorial review layer could delay important changes to the people articles.
The new feature, called "flagged revisions," will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved - or in Wikispeak, flagged - it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia's leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Posted on August 24, 2009
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Wikipedia Founder to Launch Search Engine Called Wikiasari
The Times Online reports that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales plans to launch a search engine called Wikiasari.The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for "rummaging search."Wikiasari may have a difficult time catching the major search engines. Human power might produce better results in some areas but even the human powered web directory at dmoz.org is not as popular as it once was. A visit to Wikiasari.com takes you this Wikia page that says "Amazon has nothing to do with this project." The page also recommends the Exalead search engine.
Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.
Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.
However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support to the venture in the future.
Posted on December 23, 2006
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Surfers Love Research Resources
A recent Nielsen//NetRatings report found that use of online education and reference sites is booming -- a 22% spike this year. The report mentioned the following websites:WWW Virtual Library, RefDesk.com and the Librarians' Internet Index are also great research-related sites. More research links can be found here. Also, library websites tend to be excellent starting points for online research.
Posted on November 7, 2005
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Placeopedia Matches Wikipedia Articles With Places
Placeopedia is a service that connects Wikipedia articles with places by pinpointing their locations on a Google Maps overlay. Surfers can search for a specific location or press the random button to be taken to a random place. There is also an option to add a new location to Placeopedia. (Via B2Day)Posted on October 9, 2005
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Web Surfers Are Building the New Web
BusinessWeek has an interesting article that says the new web is being built by you -- the web surfer. The article talks about websites that are powered by users like MySpace.com, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Meetup and Wikipedia.And this time, it's Your Web. No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives. With its longtime tagline, "The network is the computer," Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) made the case that computing transcended hardware. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz thinks another crucial shift is under way: "The network is now your computer."The article also says that the web will continue to develop more services like the ones mentioned above and new programming tools will make the web even more user-friendly and customizable.
At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software. By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They're producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.
"The Web isn't so much a place anymore," explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, "They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs."
Posted on September 19, 2005
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