In the world of online mapping, it feels like things aren’t quite going in Google’s direction these days: Apple switched away from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap when it launched iPhoto for iOS. Foursquare, too, announced a similar switch just a few weeks ago and today, Wikipedia switched to OpenStreetMap in the latest versions of its iOS and Android apps.

As our own Josh Constine wrote last month, Google’s plan to charge high-volume users for access to its Maps APIs could backfire and this most recent defection is yet another clear signal that we will probably see quite a few more of these moves in the near future.

While OpenStreetMap’s data wasn’t quite ready for prime time not too long ago, the service has greatly improved the quality of its maps recently. The service also now has the backing of a number of large companies interested in the online mapping space, including Apple and Microsoft.

Wikipedia would probably qualify for a non-profit grant from Google and be able to use the service for free (or for a relatively small fee). For Wikipedia, however, this switch is actually more about using an “open and free source of Map Data” than about money. Wikipedia’s Yuvi Panda also argues that not using Google’s proprietary APIs in the code “helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.”

For the time being, the Wikipedia apps are using MapQuest’s tile servers to render the OpenStreetMap data, but Wikipedia’s parent organization Wikimedia plans to switch to its own tile servers soon.

What Else Is New?

Besides this switch to OpenStreetMap, the new versions of the Wikipedia apps also introduce a number of new features for both platforms. iOS users, for example, can now get search suggestions, save pages to Read It Later and perform full-text searches (these features were already available in the Android app). Android users only get a smaller update this time, which includes quick search bar integration and an improved tablet interface.

You may not be familiar with Wikia, but the collaborative media company has been quietly growing into a giant, recently passing IGN, for example, as the largest network of gaming sites on the planet. Led by both its gaming and entertainment verticals, Wikia’s content-driven social network is home to one of the largest and most active communities on the Web. For those unfamiliar, building on the popularity of its non-profit predecessor (Wikipedia), the site allows anyone (even you) to create new communities around any subject they’re passionate about — or participate in one of its 200,000 existing communities — for free.

Wikia now boasts 20 million pages of user generated content, all of which are viewed by 50 million-plus global visitors each month. So, really, if you’ve come across any wiki outside the confines of Wikipedia — be it an article, a video, a review, or a demo — it’s likely that sucker was created by a Wikia user. The open, collaborative nature of Wikia’s content production, minus the hierarchy of a traditional media platform, has proven surprisingly successful in and of itself. Thanks to a simple ad-supported rev model, Wikia CEO Craig Palmer says that the company has managed to remain “profitable for years.”

However, as publishing models change, Wikia is looking to more strategically marry the world of professional content creation with the open, free-for-all of UGC, without fundamentally changing or restricting the formula that got it here. As its communities have been largely disaggregated and separate from one another, Wikia is today officially unveiling its biggest redesign in years, which aims to collect its communities under one, sleek-looking roof while improving both engagement and discovery for a more mainstream audience (i.e. new users).

To do so, the company has launched new category “hub pages” that will curate the site’s content into entertainment, gaming, and lifestyle verticals, which makes it significantly easier for users to interact with pages according to preference and to discover new, previously obscured Wikia content. It’s also a move aimed at more effectively piquing the interest of advertisers, which will be able to expand their footprint beyond individual articles to category verticals and the front page — both of which, as the site’s new entry points, will likely be seeing increased, and more targeted traffic. After all, Wikia is a for-profit enterprise, and advertisers keep the wheels spinning.

All in all, the site’s new look is far more professional in the way it’s visually representing its UGC, giving its portals an editorial, magazine-like interface — a change that may seem drastic to core users, but will be far more familiar in terms of navigation and browsing for first-timers.

The content Wikia will be surfacing on its front page and in each hub will continue to be fueled by the community, through promoted submissions and by way of popularity as measured by the amount of traffic. On top of that, probably the coolest feature of the redesign would be its new remix function, which allows users to shuffle top content with the click of a button, introducing new wikis to browse, etc. (not unlike Wikipedia’s “random page” option).

The new home and hub pages now display current wiki stats, not only making it easier to find out how many people are visiting per month, or the number of edits made on a given day, but to discover trending content, including top picks, popular videos, etc.

Without a doubt, Wikia’s new design has created a much softer landing for new visitors, and it will be up to the hardcore users to determine whether or not their voices still jibe under the new paradigm. The Wikia CEO tells us that he thinks that the site’s new verticals and filtering, in fact, offer a more effective way to make individual voices heard. And that’s really what has made Wikia great, as diving into the depths of communities and individual pages makes one feel as if they’re visiting a meeting of fellow gamers in their basement.

Palmer believes that Wikia’s current trajectory places it in a comparable position to early YouTube. That is to say, the site has a presence, but it really hasn’t established itself as a brand, nor has it created that bullhorn mechanism on behalf of its community. Wikia is sitting on this pandemonium of unique voices, and the CEO thinks it has become imperative to showcase and share the work of those active, and loyal community members. In the long run, Wikia is looking to find ways to bring these users increased exposure, and a more meaningful voice.

In the same way bloggers and YouTube’s videographers have turned passions into careers, Palmer said that the company is set on finding the most effective way to do that for its users. If that means taking a cue from YouTube and creating channels, or offering some sort of hybrid profile, Wikia will likely consider it. But, in the meantime, an aggregated, hub-centered redesign is a good start.

Certainly, the other side of creating a more refined editorial ecosystem is intended to strengthen the site’s appeal to brands and advertisers. With its redesign in place, Wikia will look to expand these relationships, bringing in pre-release content from movie or game studios, for example, to build early, organic excitement for a new title, or increase its reach post-release.

In sum, it provides a telling snapshot of Wikia’s evolution, and it will be interesting to see how the company walks the line between niche and mainstream, and professional content and good, old-fashioned UGC.

For more, check out the new Wikia at home here.

Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia’s data before – for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won’t just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone.

The project’s goal in developing a semantic, machine-readable database doesn’t just help push the web forward, it also helps Wikipedia itself. The data will bring all the localized versions of Wikipedia on par with each other in terms of the basic facts they house. Today, the English, German, French and Dutch versions offer the most coverage, with other languages falling much further behind.

Wikidata will also enable users to ask different types of questions, like which of the world’s ten largest cities have a female mayor?, for example. Queries like this are today answered by user-created Wikipedia Lists – that is, manually created structured answers. Wikidata, on the hand, will be able to create these lists automatically.

The initial effort to create Wikidata is being led by the German chapter of Wikimedia, Wikimedia Deutschland, whose CEO Pavel Richter calls the project “ground-breaking,” and describes it as “the largest technical project ever undertaken by one of the 40 international Wikimedia chapters.” Much of the early experimentation which resulted in the Wikidata concept was done in Germany, which is why it’s serving as the base of operations for the new undertaking.

The German Chapter will perform the initial development involved in the creation of Wikidata, but will later hand over the operation and maintenance to the Wikimedia Foundation when complete. The estimation is that hand-off will occur a year from now, in March 2013.

The overall project will have three phases, the first of which involves creating one Wikidata page for each Wikipedia entry across Wikipedia’s over 280 supported languages. This will provide the online encyclopedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles, no matter which language they’re in. For example, the date of someone’s birth would be recorded and maintained in one place: Wikidata. Phase one will also involve centralizing the links between the different language versions of Wikipedia. This part of the work will be finished by August 2012.

In phase two, editors will be able to add and use data in Wikidata, and this will be available by December 2012. Finally, phase three will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata, which can then populate the pages of Wikipedia.

In terms of how Wikidata will impact Wikipedia’s user interface, the plan is for the data to live in the “info boxes” that run down the right-hand side of a Wikipedia page. (For example: those on the right side of NYC’s page). The data will be inputted at data.wikipedia.org, which will then drive the info boxes wherever they appear, across languages, and in other pages that use the same info boxes. However, because the project is just now going into development, some of these details may change.

Below, an early concept for Wikidata:

All the data contained in Wikidata will be published under a free Creative Commons license, which opens it up for use by any number of external applications, including e-government, the sciences and more.

Dr. Denny Vrandečić, who joined Wikimedia from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is leading a team of eight developers to build Wikidata, and is joined by Dr. Markus Krötzsch of the University of Oxford. Krötzsch and Vrandečić, notably, were both co-founders of the Semantic MediaWiki project, which pursued similar goals to that of Wikidata over the past few years.

The initial development of Wikidata is being funded through a donation of 1.3 million Euros, granted in half by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an organization established by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2010. The goal of the Institute is to support long-range research activities that have the potential to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence, which includes web semantics.

“Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world,” says Dr. Mark Greaves, VP of the Allen Institute.

Another quarter of the funding comes from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through its Science program, and another quarter comes from Google. According to Google’s Director of Open Source, Chris DiBona, Google hopes that Wikidata will make large amounts of structured data available to “all.” (All, meaning, course, to Google itself, too.)

This ties back to all those vague reports of “major changes” coming to Google’s search engine in the coming months, seemingly published far ahead of any actual news (like this), possibly in a bit of a PR push to take the focus off the growing criticism surrounding Google+…or possibly to simply tease the news by educating the public about what the “semantic web” is.

Google, which stated it would be increasing its efforts at providing direct answers to common queries – like those with a specific, factual piece of data – could obviously build greatly on top of something like Wikidata. As it moves further into semantic search, it could provide details about the people, places and things its users search for. It would actually know what things are, whether birth dates, locations, distances, sizes, temperatures, etc., and also how they’re connected to other points of data. Google previously said it expects semantic search changes to impact 10% to 20% of queries. (Google declined to provide any on the record comment regarding its future plans in this area).

Ironically, the results of Wikidata’s efforts may then actually mean fewer Google referrals to Wikipedia pages. Short answers could be provided by Google itself, positioned at the top of the search results. The need to click through to read full Wikipedia articles (or any articles, for that matter) would be reduced, leading Google users to spend more time on Google.

Part of the long-running (and far from over) SOPA/PIPA battle was the drawing of lines in the sand by Internet companies. While most recognized the danger of that irresponsible and short-sighted bill and took action against it, some companies supported it strongly and even testified to that effect in Congress.

GoDaddy was one of those companies, and while it later tried to undo the damage its position had done (the new CEO seems a little more in touch), the Internet isn’t so good at forgetting or forgiving. Among the many, many sites that pledged to leave GoDaddy’s DNS service was Wikipedia, and after three months of work, they’ve finally done so.

Their new DNS provider will be MarkMonitor, with whom they were working already for other reasons. MarkMonitor specializes in brand protection and prevention of fraud and piracy; their services include monitoring of peer-to-peer networks and redirection of users away from potentially fraudulent sites. It’s likely that the Wikimedia foundation was using the company’s services to monitor and prevent fake Wikipedia sites, illegal uses of Wikimedia assets or tools, and so on. They also do DNS for “well over half the Fortune 100.”

So, not perhaps the sunshine-and-flowers solution people might have wanted for Wikipedia as an antidote to GoDaddy, but it mustn’t be forgotten that the Wikimedia Foundation runs one of the most popular and widely-accessed sites on the Internet, and therefore necessarily one of the most vulnerable. Heavy-duty partners are necessary to deliver and maintain the integrity of their content.

Wikipedia’s migration, and that of hundreds of other sites, should act as a warning to Internet companies that fail to heed the opinions of their customers. Cyber-activism may not do much to depose African warlords, but it can certainly have a real effect on virtual tyrants.

As you can tell from the homepage, it’s a sad, trying day for the internet. Many of our favorite sites like Reddit and Wikipedia have gone dark, leaving only an argument against SOPA on their homepages in lieu of cat gifs and knowledge. All in all, it will shape up to be an incredibly boring day in the name of justice. Because to be honest, SOPA is unconstitutional in the way it’ll be enforced, and means rarely if ever justify the ends.

I drone on because I’m about to hook you up with access to Wikipedia, and I want to make sure you still understand what it will mean to our internet if SOPA passes. However, I’m sure plenty of you have papers due tomorrow or simply want to learn more about SOPA, which you should, and so we wanted to give you a circumvention for the Wiki blackout.

It’s actually quite simple, according to CK Sample II:

Just tap the escape button as soon as you begin to load a link to Wikipedia. I find that if you hold the button down, the page stops loading. If you press it too late, you’ll be redirected. It’s an acquired skill but should only take a few tries tops. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong.

If you can’t seem to get the jist of it, you can always check out Wikipedia on your phone. We’re seeing reports here and there that the mobile version of the site does not redirect, and my iPhone 4S confirms.

Again, we here at TechCrunch oppose SOPA and are proud of the sites willing to take a hit in order to show the world what a life without Reddit or Wikipedia is like. I think we can all agree that it sucks.

Wow, and it’s only 9am.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales wanted to send a “big message” to the U.S. government regarding the two heinous internet censorship bills currently being considered, and after a brief period of debate the world’s encyclopedia will soon do just that.

The Wikipedia founder announced on Twitter today that starting at midnight on Wednesday, January 18, the English language version of the world’s encyclopedia will go dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA and PIPA. With their commitment confirmed, Wikipedia will be joining a slew of websites and companies that will suspend their operations for one day in an effort raise awareness around the two bills.

Meant to curb IP theft and piracy, the (imaginatively named) Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act have raised eyebrows recently due to their decidedly scorched-earth approach to handling suspected offenders. Websites found to offer pirated content, along with the services that they use, could be hidden from US internet users by being delisted on search engines and potentially on DNS servers themselves.

Rather than let users access Wikipedia’s vast stores of English-language information on the 18th, Wales mentioned that the Wikipedia landing page will instead be populated with a letter of protest and a call to action that urges readers to get involved with the issue. It doesn’t appear as though the new landing page has been finalized, but one of the community’s prototypes can be seen above.

The news comes after a lengthy debate as to the particulars of such a grand gesture — whether or not the site should participate at all, which versions of the site would be affected, and how exactly the blackout would go down were all on the table for the community to discuss. Ultimately, the consensus pointed to a full blackout as a the proper way to make their collective displeasure known. There’s no official word on how other parts of the site will handle the event, although Wales has mentioned that the German language version of the site will be displaying a banner in support.

Meanwhile, some of SOPA’s supporters are already reacting to the very public backlash against the bill. Ars Technica reports that Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) would be pulling his DNS-blocking provisions from the bill after having consulted with “industry groups across the country.” What’s more, the White House has responded to two petitions about SOPA and PIPA on the official White House blog stating that they will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Wales notes on Twitter that while SOPA has been “crippled,” buts its counterpart in the Senate is still very much alive and very dangerous. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently popped up on Meet The Press claiming his continued support for PIPA even though it “could create some problems.”

Though the event is meant to raise public awareness over two critical pieces of legislation, Wales still took a moment to offer a bit of sage advice for students heading back to school:

Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other sites, this morning announced that they’ve raised $20 million from more than a million donors, shattering a record once again. The organization says donations have risen every year since its global fundraising campaigns began in 2003.

Wikimedia Foundation claims its sites now serve more than 470 million people every month. Wikipedia, which will celebrate its 11th anniversary in about two weeks, now boasts over 20 million articles in 282 languages.

The organization says more than 100,000 volunteers work on Wikipedia and sister projects.

The foundation employs approximately 80 people full-time.

From the press release:

The annual fundraiser is how the Wikimedia Foundation pays its bills. Funds raised in this campaign will be used to buy and install servers and other hardware, to develop new site functionality, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects, and support the large global community of Wikimedia volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is 28.3 million USD. The bulk of that is raised during the annual campaign, and the remainder comes throughout the year in the form of grants from institutions such as the Sloan Foundation, and many other small donations year round.

If you’d like to learn more about the organization’s annual plan for 2011-2012, start here.

Also read:

A Personal Appeal TO Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Programmer: We Do The Funny Portrait Placement Thing Because It Works

You know, I’m becoming something of a fan of Brandon Harris (the latest face of Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts, which you should absolutely donate to.)

First, he’s a programmer on Wikipedia, which is pretty much the most world-bettering programming gig you could ever have. Second, he stopped in for hugs even as we were sort of poking fun at him. Third, he’s taken the time to answer the question we’ve been asking for over a week now: what’s up with the crazy confusing/hilarious donation plea portrait placement?*

The answer: They do it intentionally. Because it works.

Harris answers the question (and a ton of others) in a rather wonderful reddit AMA (Ask-Me-Anything):

Were your and Jimmy’s portraits placed like that (directly above the article subject) intentionally?

It’s intentional, but I don’t believe it was actually designed that way from the start. There have been many experiments over time as to the optimal position of the photos, and it just so happens that the left side is where it’s got to be.

The folks at Wikipedia are kings of A/B testing, and it turns out that this positioning just works best. While it may cause an eye twitch for the UX designers of the world — and everyone who likes to pretend that they’re UX designers (i.e. the entire Internet) — it means more cash for Wikipedia in the end.

Plus: intentionally or not, it’s had an awesomely viral effect for the whole campaign (hence this post.) Now go donate.

* And finally, just look at that hair.

The good news is that Wikipedia has finally switched up that image of Jimmy Wales begging for money on its homepage. The bad news is that they’ve replaced it with another unfortunately left-aligned image of some random guy (Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris to be precise) who, according to my email inbox, looks like everything from Jesus, to Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger to a member of the Hell’s Angels.

And because Harris’ image is left aligned, the weird article title/image juxtaposition thing still stands; The last straw was when I was Wikipedia-ing actress Diane Keaton last night and up he came, inadvertently wearing the same outfit and in the same pose as the Annie Hall star.

Here is a particularly hilarious conversation I had about it with somebody on IM.

Person: damn some idiot biker is screaming at me to give me money today http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakra
Person: refresh the page
Person: he should ride in on a harley
Person: and then jack me with a switchblade
Me: Snort
Person: cut my face if i don’t drop some funds on wikipedia
Me: Should I do another post?
Person: I’ve heard Jesus
Me: seems necessary
Person: Is wikipedia run by a biker gang?
Person: Will they slit your tires if you don’t donate?
Person: i like how he has two different pics
Person: there’s the soft outside guy silently judging you and the intimidating dude who will jack your ass

“I donated to get Brandon Harris’ picture off the top. I didn’t mind Jimmy Wales’ piercing gaze but Brandon was just disturbing,” notes interaction designer Xianhang Zhang on Quora. Until Wikipedia finally figures it out, Jimmy Wales himself offers an alternative to donating (and complaining) for those of you still creeped out,”You can also just click the little ‘x’.”

To donate money to Wikipedia, WHICH YOU TOTALLY SHOULD IN CASE IT’S NOT CLEAR, follow this link.

Dearest Jimmy Wales,

So we meet again Wales … Yes I know, another holiday season, another reason to poke fun at your silly, scopophobia-inducing banner ads belying the very noble cause of raising $29.5 million for an unlimited supply of constantly updated knowledge — FOR WHICH WE ARE ALL VERY THANKFUL JIMMY, I PROMISE.

But, for whatever reason Jimmy, this year you’ve chosen to left align your traditional banner ad portrait asking for Wikimedia Foundation donations, which means that your mug ends up being the accompanying image for whatever I end up looking up on Wikipedia.

And thus hilarity ensues (See above, and below and below and below and well you get the picture).

My — granted unsolicited — advice is that next year you take some of the donation money, especially the 20 bucks I’m about to throw at you out of guilt for writing this post, and hire a professional graphic designer so you’re not creeping people out or (worse) making them laugh unintentionally.

Best (and Happy Holidays!),

Alexia Tsotsis

Suggestion for @jimmy_wales: consider right-aligning your headshot in the "personal appeal" banner: http://t.co/49e2vaL8—
Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) November 12, 2011

I find it very unsettling to see that photo of Jimmy Wales at the top of Wikipedia. I keep thinking I'm in the wrong entry.—
Gretchen Rubin (@gretchenrubin) November 18, 2011

Why does every single person you look up on Wikipedia resemble Jimmy Wales?—
  (@geneweingarten) November 20, 2011

Each time I go to Wikipedia, I see a photo of Jimmy Wales. It's as if he's watching over all of us en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Be… it's the wikiopticon—
Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) November 21, 2011

Sometimes, when I go to Wikipedia, I think I've actually accidentally stumbled onto Jimmy Wales's Facebook page.—
Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) November 17, 2011

In the true spirit of online activism, the entire Italian Wikipedia website has voluntarily taken itself down in order to protest a bill being proposed to Parliament. The law (“DDL intercettazioni,” roughly translated as Wiretapping Act) would require every website to publish within 48 hours a correction or comment relating to any content an applicant has deemed “detrimental to their image,” as they put it. If that sounds vague, broad, and onerous, that’s because it is.

If this law were passed, Wikipedia and other websites would have to post unedited and unsolicited “corrections” to any content deemed objectionable by any person. This content would have to be displayed without any review of the offending content or the “correction.” It doesn’t take an expert to see that this law is contrary to the principles of truth and openness.

In case it isn’t clear, let me just sketch out an example. Say a government official was facing charges of soliciting a prostitute. If this were to be reported on a news website, or written into his page on Wikipedia, he or someone representing him would be able to submit a “correction” that would be required by law to be displayed alongside that information within 48 hours, regardless of what it says or the truthfulness of the allegations.

There are already slander and defamation protection laws on the books, and this part of the law (which seems to have very little to do with wiretapping) seems to simply be a present to the highly visible and frequently-criticized class of people comprising politicians, celebrities, and so on.

To be specific (without getting too deep into it; I am not versed in the subtleties of Italian politics), the law is seen as a tool for people like Italy’s infamously newsworthy Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The many salacious charges against him would be required by law to be paired with any official commentary from the PM, his office, or his lawyers. If the

Wikipedia is careful to point out that the whole point of their service is to provide a free, comprehensive, and neutral encyclopedia that is open to input from all parties. This law would eliminate the neutrality of the resource they have worked to create, and so the users of Wikipedia.it have opted to remove it entirely:

Dear reader,

at this time, the Italian language Wikipedia may be no longer able to continue providing the service that over the years was useful to you, and that you expected to have right now. As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced to actually delete it.

Wikipedia is, of course, actually based here in the US and foreign versions and communities are managed locally to some extent. The takedown of the Italian Wikipedia was not suggested or carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation, but they have written a short blog post in support of the effort:

The Wikimedia Foundation stands with our volunteers in Italy who are challenging the recently drafted “DDL intercettazioni” (or Wiretapping Bill) bill in Italy. This bill would hinder the work of projects like Wikipedia: open, volunteer-driven, and collaborative spaces dedicated to sharing high-quality knowledge, not to mention the ability for all users of the internet to engage in democratic, free speech opportunities.

I hope that the Wikipedians, as they are apparently called, here in the US would be able to take the same step, though I also hope it will never prove necessary. Personally I support this peaceful yet forceful demonstration of internet activism, and I’m sure many of our readers do as well.

Update: It seems the law has been amended to apply only to “official” press outlets. A dubious distinction. Also, the fine would reportedly be an outrageous 12,000 euros.

Personal search engine Greplin is announcing the launch of its Wikipedia Search Design Contest today, with the ultimate objective of conceptualizing a better way to search Wikipedia.

Greplin founder Daniel Gross tells me that Wikipedia search is “broken” in the sense that most people use Google to search Wikipedia, typing in something like “Beatles White Album Wiki” to get to this page of results. He re-imagines a world were people could use Wikipedia search for that functionality and in addition get beautifully visualized layout of links and images, essentially a more visually appealing way to learn from searches.

He says,

“I don’t think there is something specific about Wikipedia search that is specifically bad, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be infinitely better. If a good designer sunk deep thought into a search interface specifically for Wikipedia they would be able to build something that would make people shocked.”

Entrants can send in static comps as .jpeg .png or .pdf files or actually build out a product, by the deadline of August 18th. While the winning entry won’t necessarily be built out by Wikipedia (which isn’t affiliated with the contest), the winner will receive some pretty amazing prizes including the placement of their Twitter handle — in Helvetica Neue Bold of course – on a billboard in SOMA and a trip along with the runner-up to see a talk by data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte. Winners will own their own work and can give Wikipedia the option to use it under the Creative Commons licence.

What’s most impressive is the coterie of judges Greplin has brought on to moderate the entries, design luminaries like Google lead search designer Jon Wiley, Milk design lead Daniel Burka, Dribbble founder Dan Cederholm, Milk founder Kevin Rose, former Twitter product manager Kevin Cheng, Sidebar director of user experience Dan Rubin and Khan Academy design lead Jason Rosoff.

“I’m excited to see the myriad of approaches that people might take,” judge Daniel Burka said regarding what exactly he was looking for. “I think a few of the big opportunities in the search might be around more visual browsing of search results, incremental searching, and improved display of related content after a direct search (e.g. I search for Titanic and go to the Titanic page with the ability to navigate sideways through related results).”

On a base level, if you’re interested in getting Burka or any of the people above to see your work you should enter this (I would if I were a designer), but the grander idea is that why shouldn’t designers contribute to the design of Wikipedia the way laymen contribute to its over 3.5 million articles? “There’s a ton of unrealized potential,” Gross says.

The systems are over three years old, but have at least 3GB of RAM, 2.5GHz dual core CPUs, and at least an 80GB hard drive. The official posting notes that some servers have up to 32GB of RAM and 320GB hard drives. Wikipedia just wants the servers to find a cozy home at a deserving non-profit. Unfortunately due to shipping costs, taxes and exportation regulations, Wikipedia is limiting the giveaway to USA-based organizations.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Hunter Walk who spends way too much time researching 1980s hair metal bands on Wikipedia. His obsession with Wikipedia is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube.

Wikipedia is the world’s 5th largest website, runs no ads and, depressingly, seems to be perpetually on the fringe of solvency. Google for “Jimmy Wales personal appeal” (Wales is Wikipedia’s founder) and you’ll see that there are 32,000+ results, which gives you a sense of the fundraising requirements for this user-generated encyclopedia. The question of whether they’ll ever run ads in order to break this cycle is an ongoing debate. In fact there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to this topic with discussion about ads, opt-in ads, search ads, etc.

At 400+ million users worldwide, any of these options could certainly raise considerable funds used to support the technical and philosophical mission of this non-profit. But to date, Wales has been reluctant to introduce any advertising. So where do we end up? After hitting its 10 year anniversary this January, the question is: can Wikipedia sustain itself for another 10 years without a significant change to its business model?

In my mind there’s a simple solution previously unexplored which would cover their fundraising goals of $16 million annually without any visible change to the site or behavior of its authors and users: simply insert affiliate codes into relevant links on Wikipedia. When I’m reading about the film Twilight, give me a link to buy the video at Amazon and Wikipedia will collect up to 8.5% of any transactions as an Amazon Associate. Or from the Hawaii page, a simple Orbitz affiliate link will produce $3 for each plane ticket sold, 3-5% for a hotel reservation, and so on.

How much money could Wikipedia make from this small change? How about $16,422,000 annually from just their US traffic, roughly 2.7 billion monthly pageviews (25 percent of Wikipedia’s total pageviews). Multiplying those pageviews by a .50 revenue per 1,000 page views yields a total which amazingly just exceeds the $16 million target. [note: the .50 eCPM is an estimate gathered from web experts in affiliate monetization. Oliver Roup, CEO of Viglink, a technology which helps web publishers monetize their site in the manner I suggest for Wikipedia, told me they see some eCPMs up to $5 within their network but suggests a more conservative estimate like mine  for Wikipedia.]

Three simple steps can make this happen and preserve Wikipedia as a vibrant, free service:

1) Jimmy Wales needs to say “yes!”

Although I’ve heard Jimmy talk about his views on advertising, I haven’t located any comments regarding affiliate programs. Unlike ads, affiliate links require no change to the site or conflict of interest. However today Wikipedia maintains strict policies on outbound links which forbid affiliate programs. Accordingly, Wikipedia would need to relax their policies on outside linking.

2) An Affiliate Marketing Partner needs to be selected

Viglink and Skimlinks are two of the leaders in the affiliate monetization space. Although specifics would need to be worked out, Roup offered Viglink’s support: “We’ve helped thousands of publishers monetize their content, including a few of comparable scale and we’re proud of the meaningful role VigLink revenue now plays for them. We’d be honored to similarly assist Wikipedia in continued pursuit of their mission.” That sounds like a deal waiting to happen!

3) Participating Merchants need to honor Wikipedia affiliate clicks

Affiliate programs exist to generate incremental sales and merchants reserve the right to limit payment to partners based on a variety of conditions. This is why you don’t see Twitter just append their own affiliate code to all Amazon links shared via their site — Amazon would likely say “bug off.” However, in this case, given Wikipedia’s non-profit status and the massive amount of traffic this would help unlock for participating merchants, merchants would likely welcome the affiliation. And those who don’t? Well, there’s always another merchant who will or how about a people-powered boycott by the Wikipedia community?

By embracing a smart affiliate program technology, Wikipedia could readily remove the questions around their solvency and redirect all that fundraising energy to activities more directly productive to the wikipedia corpus. So c’mon Jimmy, what do you think?

Disclaimer: I work for YouTube, which is owned by Google, which has a group called Google Ventures which made an investment in Viglink, however I’ve got no agenda here other than Wikipedia’s future.

Wikipedia just celebrated its tenth birthday. As a self-proclaimed fan of the site, I wanted to share with you this video, made for the occasion as Wikipedia enters its second decade.

The ‘State Of Wikipedia’ video is part of the ‘State Of’ series made by interactive agency from JESS3, and is narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Today, the English Wikipedia now stands at 3.5+ million articles (up from roughly 500,000 in March 2005), and more than 17 million across all languages.

No matter what you think about Wales, the foundation or the site, that’s an impressive feat.

(Source: press release)

Click the image below for a larger infographic:

It’s the last day of the year, according to the Gregorian calendar at least, which prompted me to do some research on how well Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts for 2010 were going. As you may have heard, the Wikimedia Foundation is trying to scrape together $16 million from user and supporter donations to fund its strategic plans for 2011 (PDF).

The contribution campaign, starring Wikipedia founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales in a prominent role, was kicked off around November 13, 2010, and has so far brought in $15 million according to the banner that appears on top of Wikipedia articles these days.

Or has it?

Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia (and other free knowledge projects), is keeping a nice public Fundraiser Statistics page, which shows the cumulative total raised to date is actually just north of $13 million. We’re not sure where the discrepancy lies, but according to the Wikipedia Twitter account there was $2 million left to raise on December 29, so we suspect the stats tool provides an inaccurate estimate.

(click image for larger version)

Either way, Wikimedia’s fundraising goal hasn’t been reached yet, although we should note that this is by far the most money the organization has ever raised from contributors – they netted just over $6 million in 2009 (according to Wikipedia, ha).

We should also note that the goal wasn’t necessarily to bring in $16 million by the end of the year, but to raise that amount in two months, which means there’s still two weeks left.

So why did I donate?

Quite simply because I love Wikipedia, and frequent the site regularly, both on my desktop computer and from my mobile phone. I realize that I’m hardly the only one visiting Wikipedia and appreciating it for being both exhaustive and free, but what prompted me to donate to keep it gratis is also because I actually enjoy Wikipedia. It’s not only a source of knowledge for me, but also a form of entertainment of some sorts.

I’ve spent countless hours on the site this year clicking from one article to the next, and I genuinely love getting lost in there.

My latest revelation: actor Josh James Brolin (No Country For Old Men, American Gangster, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) was actually the guy who played the older brother character in the 80′s-classic flick The Goonies (whoa – I had no idea).

Is Wikipedia perfect? By all means, no, but that’s not the point. I couldn’t imagine a world without it, and having an answer to the majority of my questions a mere click away.

All that – and, I confess, Wales’ begging eyes – is what made me donate to Wikimedia, and why you should at the very least consider doing it too.

Behold, the Nativity of Jesus 2.0, featuring Internet sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay and yes, iPhone text messages.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go #worshipthebaby.

Thanks to @Orli for the tip – video made by Excentric.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yes, Christmas has come early again this season with the launch of Jimmy Wales’ annual appeal for Wikimedia Foundation donations. Wales’ ubiquitous banner ad is now in its seventh year and the company is shooting for $16 million dollars to keep their impressive collaborative encyclopedia afloat ad free.

And while Wikipedia tested out different banners for the 2010 launch, none came close to the effectiveness (a 3% click through rate!) of the unintentionally hilarious image of Wikipedia founder Wales gazing at you intently. The image is so beloved that someone actually created a Google Chrome extension that allows you to take the Wales banner with you wherever you go online. And so we did.

You can download the extension here.

Thanks: Zorgloob

There is definitely some bad blood between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikileaks, the controversial organization which posted thousands of pages of classified Iraqi War documents. On the Charlie Rose last night, towards the end of his interview, Wales says, “If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wiikileaks.”

He prefaced that remark by noting that he has “mixed feelings about Wikileaks.” People with information about wrongdoing in open societies should have the opportunity to make that information public. His concern is the way that Wikileaks chose to do that without regard for the safety of people “who are not the wrongdoers.” ” I think they should be slower in releasing things,” he says.

So what would Wales do with that information? He would send it to the New York Times or some “responsible” journalistic enterprise. The relevant segment is in the video above, or you can watch the entire interview here.

Wales has criticized Wikileaks before. Some of this bad blood stems from the fear that some people might associate Wikileaks with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia foundation. Wales gets into that as well with Rose, noting that he has traded emails with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange “about the domain name.” He describes a dispute there, with the Wikimedia Foundation registering defensive domains and then transferring them, which seems to be in the process of being resolved.

More Wiki- news for your afternoon. It seems the FBI now has a problem with Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, specifically the site’s “unauthorised reproduction of the FBI Seal [that is] prohibited by US law.” That is, the FBI does not like the fact that its logo is available on Wikipedia. The world has run out of things to complain about, I’m thinking.

The FBI says that the presence of its seal on the site is “particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of restrictions by Wikipedia users.”

Restrictions? Wikipedia’s counsel recognizes that there are restrictions in place regarding the display of the seal, but that “the enactment of [these laws] was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognisable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.”

And if you think Wikipedia is trying to deceive to deceive the public with the presence of a seal in an encyclopedic article, I don’t know what to tell you.

The one thing that I may see some wiggle room: the high resolution of the seal. You can get the seal in sizes of up to 2000px, so maybe Wikipedia can tell the Feds, “Look, we’re keep the seal, but we’ll kick the resolution down to, say, 500px. Deal?”

Hopefully cooler heads prevail here.