Posts tagged #wikipedia

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December 3, 2021 at 07:45PM

Flying back home yesterday I read this article about Wikipedia in the New York Times: Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page? – NYTimes.com:

The three tenets of Wikipedia articles are “No Original Research,” “Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability” — terms that, in and of themselves, are open to debate. At any rate, Mr. Wales wanted to make real the words of Charles Van Doren, one of the editors of the Encylopedia Brittanica, who wrote in an essay in 1962: “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too. It should stop being safe — in politics, in philosophy, ...

I was talking with Noah Mendelsohn this morning and we got into a discussion about RDF and it’s role in the world. Noah mentioned something called DBPedia which I had not heard of. DBPedia but it turns out to be a platform that grabs and analyzes Wikipedia content and delivers all that it can as an RDF Service. This sounds a lot like Freebase, another service which I am a fan of too, which has it’s own representations and standards, but among many other things, grabs and analyzes Wikipedia content and opt...

I just saw the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car” which makes a pretty compelling case that years ago General Motors had a working and practical electric car which they took off the market under what are portrayed as suspicious circumstances. It’s an interesting movie but part of me, while never underestimating the corruption and incompetence in government and industry, still felt like there must be another side of the story.

Here’s an article in Wikipedia about the film “Who Killed The Electric Car” and evidence in support and opposition to the case made in the movie. While one might quibble similarly with the Wikipedia article, it is replete with references and links to other sites which tell other sides of the story.

Interesting.

People wonder about Wikipdia and what it’s good for. This is an example from a while back, of Wikipedia at it’s best. Lots of details, edited and co-edited by many people giving you a feeling that there’s less bias: Wikipedia on the Virgina Tech Tragedy

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia. Here’s a new neat hack: Wikipedia Vision. This is a live, animated, world map, showing in real time each edit to the Wikipedia, as it happens. Makes the world feel even smaller, doesn’t it? It’s a cool way to learn about topics in Wikipedia that you may not have known about.

Check out Wikipedia Vision

If you keep up, you may have heard abou this. A new search engine coming from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Check out this post from Mashable!for a pretty good update:

“Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is set to launch a search engine early next year in partnership with Amazon – it’s intended to be a rival to Google and Yahoo.

(Read the rest here: Wikiasari: Wikipedia Founder Launching a Google Rival)”

Here’s another pretty good article introducing the idea from TimesOnline.

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia who later quite the project over differences in vision, just announced a direct competitor to the project: Citizendium Via Modern Dragons, via KurzweilAI.net

A really great article in The Atlantic about Wikipedia. Very relevant during this Wikimania weekend.

“Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge. ” (from “The Hive“)

Check it out here!

Technorati Tags: wikimania, wikipedia

The Web-2.0, No-Bull-Shiitake Marketing Test by Seth Godin

A good set of ideas about getting your (my) ideas to spread

(tags: ideas sethgodin marketing soflow)

Pito’s Blog: Atlantic Magazine on Wikipedia

(tags: wikimania wikipedia)

BlogBridge: Wikipedia Topic Guide

If you are going to Wikimania you might be interested in this collection of Wikipedia related blogs and feeds.

(tags: wikipedia wikimania guide)

Wikipedia – How to milk the ole cow

A rare glimplse into the spammers mind: how to milk wikipedia for traffic.

(tags: spam wikipedia interesting-soflow)

Micro Persuasion: Attend a Marketing Conference in Second Life

Looks pretty interesting. What will they think of next???

(tags: soflow interesting secondlife)

Jaron is a brilliant thinker (and an amazing piano player as well) Anything he writes is interesting. In this case he seems to be worrying about how much credence is being given to knowledge in Wikipedia and related types of sites. I don’t know if I agree with him, but it is a great read!

Jaron worries about: “the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective ...

Hacking Computers Over USB

Here’s an amazingly simple way to have someone hack your computer. Wow people sure are creative!

(tags: security interesting hacking)

Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers!

How to tap in the world’s brain to get answers to all the questions you’ve been looking for.

(tags: research interesting socialnetwork soflow)

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia, and of course traditionally (like anyone) have been an admirer of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Recently the highly respected magazine Nature published an article describing a study in which they compared the two and found only slightly fewer inaccuracies in Wikipedia than in Britannica.

“The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (from “...

Wikipedia appears to have banned all contributions and edits coming from the US Congress!

“I am opening this RFC in order to centralise discussion concerning actions to be taken against US Congressional staffers who repeatedly revert wars, blank content, engage in libelous behaviour, violate WP:NPOV, WP:CIV. The editors from this IP are rude and abrasive, immature, and show no understanding of Wikipedia policy. The editors also frequently try to whitewash the actions of frequent politicians.

They treat Wikipedia articles about politicians as though they own it, replacing articles with their sanctioned biographies and engaging in revert wars when other users dispute this sudden change. They...

I assume you know about Wikis and the Wikipedia. If not, click on the links to the left and you’ll both find out and experience it, in one fell swoop.

On BlogBridge we use a Wiki as a very lightweight project collaboration tool. Minimalist eRoom if you like. That’s the kind that most often occurs to me.

But if you think about Wikipedia articles work, they are actually meant to properly describe or define something that exists and has a name. In other words, they specifically are meant to be ...

We all love Wikipedia – I know I do. I’ve sung it’s praises to lots of people and have personally often looked stuff up in it and been satisfied. Still I can’t help but be impressed with an article I came across written by Robert McHenry former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

He’s sick and tired of it and not going to take it any more:

“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What h...

Just a final follow up on this interesting story (actually more of an event than a story because it was over so quickly:)

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has an interesting view on why the Wikitorial experiment (seems to have) failed, and how to do it differently:

“The LA Times didn’t understand what it was doing and made three criticial mistakes. […] 1. Collaboration vs. argument […], 2. Care and feeding […], 3. Newspaper ego […]” (from Buzzmachine)

Technorati Tags: wiki, wikipedia

I wrote a few days ago about the coming LA Times initiative to create something they are calling “Wikitorials.” Well they’ve done it, and the results are quite interesting:

Someone going by the name Hank Ramey (a real name?) does a complete ‘rewrite’ of the LA Times Editorial. A really provocative idea. However it’s not at all clear what was rewritten though, so the effort is kind of loss.

For the more sophisticated Wiki user, a little digging reveals highly sophisticated edit trai...

A couple of interesting related articles on facts and non-facts:

“Wikipedia is one of the Web’s most popular sites. I asked a teenager if he understood that it carries a disclaimer; Wikipedia “can’t guarantee the validity of the information found here.” “That’s just so that no one will sue them,” he shrugged. As to the content: “It’s all true, mostly.” (from: New York Times)

And in a related story, the LA Times is turning their editorial page into a wiki. As Jon Stewart would say: “Huuh?”:

“• Watch next week for the introduction of “wikitorials” — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editor...

If you are interested and fascinated with the Wikipedia, how it came to be, why it is the way it is, there’s an absolutely gripping account of the history and origins on Slashdot:

“An impassioned debate has been raging, particularly since about the summer of 2004, about the merits of Wikipedia and the future of free online encyclopedias. This discussion has not benefitted by much detailed, accurate consideration of the origins of Wikipedia and of its parent project, Nupedia.

But it seems to me that those origins are very important — crucial, even — to forming a proper judgment of the current state and best future direction o...

I got many comments from people about my postingsrecently about Lotus Improv. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a pretty accurate description of Improv and its history in the WikiPedia. By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with writing it. Actually I am quite curious who did write it, because he or she was pretty well informed so I suspect it’s someone who was on the team from the early days, or knew someone who was. (Of course there are a few inaccuracies, but what the heck!) Cool

If you haven’t heard about Wikipedia, you should check it out. It’s a grass roots encyclopedia. It has a huge number of articles, contributed in general by anyone who feels like writing an article, presumably because they know something about it. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia. It’s quite an amazing thing, amazing because of how it has grown, how it was built, who built it and what it was built on.

One often mentioned question is how accurate is Wikipedia anyway?. It’s an important question in that Wikipedia is developing quite a reputation, not only among Technorati, but also among civ...