We can observe some 170 billion galaxies in the known universe, and I’m thoroughly convinced that this planet, in this solar system, in this galaxy, is the dumbest one of them all. Quite an accomplishment! Wikipedia has come under fire, from complete dunderheads, for hosting “pornographic” content. What type of pornographic content? You know, things like the photo of a NAKED MAN AND WOMAN in the… → Read More
The Wikipedia site doesn’t often go down, but yesterday it did. It’s also unusual for YouTube to suffer downtime, but since approximately 7:05 AM Eastern time visitors to the homepage have been greeted with an error message that simply reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” or a 500 Internal Server Error message.
Seriously, what is the world coming to?
Fortunately, videos still play on sites where… → Read More
Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past 24 hours.
Some of the most popular… → Read More
Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.
Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:
I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the… → Read More
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark will join the advisory board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer… → Read More
Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole… → Read More
The new WikiReader is a $99 portable device from the Openmoko group that stuffs every Wikipedia article into a pocket-friendly traveling companion. While those of us entrenched in technology day in and day out may scoff at the idea of having Wikipedia at the ready (we all have smartphones, remember?), this is something that might be able to make some waves with baby boomers and/or the technically… → Read More
The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially… → Read More
Just got this email. It’s a bit presumptuous considering the common expectation is that you don’t author your own Wikipedia entry.
Basically Jimmy is asking me to become a fan of his Facebook page but does Jimmy really need fans? And does he have to launch such a personal appeal? He’s a heck of a guy, I’m sure, but what’s in it for me? → Read More
Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.
In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir… → Read More
It’s ‘official’; big shot CEOs are social media slackers. The hot news comes straight from ÜBERCEO, who says it conducted research on the topic for the past few weeks and has found that there’s little chance you’ll ever get to exchange pokes and tweets with Fortune 100 CEOs for the time being. Here’s the ‘miserable level of engagement’ ÜBERCEO has uncovered:
(after the jump) → Read More
Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need… → Read More
France Telecom’s Orange, one of the biggest mobile phone operators in Europe, has partnered with Wikimedia to provide Wikipedia content through co-branded channels on Orange’s mobile phones and web sites. Through a revenue-sharing arrangement, the non-profit Wikimedia foundation will get a cut of some of the advertising dollars (or Euros) generated by its content.
Orange will create specific… → Read More
Would you pay $10 for an entire offline copy of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia of information that you can get on the Web for free? WikiPock, a Paris-based startup, has compressed the entire English language version of Wikipedia to under 4 gigabytes (not including images), and is selling it for mobile phones. The other language versions are smaller (it also comes in German, French… → Read More
Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now, thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress. Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English… → Read More
Medpedia Project, an initiative we wrote about during its private beta launch, has unveiled a public version of its trustworthy, fully transparent technology platform for the worldwide health community. Combining social networking with Web 2.0 health information, Medpedia’s website offers consumers a Wikipedia for health information, a LinkedIn network for health professionals, and a Facebook-like… → Read More
This is only one data point. But at least the Wikipedia entry on TechCrunch doesn’t state that we sell corn and oat cereal, and it wasn’t written by someone whose bio simply reads “Troll“. Other than that, it’s pretty accurate..
So much for units of knowledge.
Update: Googler Matt Cutts weighs in on the discussion of Knol’s quality, saying that the service is doing fine and that it’s still… → Read More
Wikipedia, one of the greatest collaborative volunteer collective knowledge projects of all time and one of the most visited sites on the web, has finally released a mobile-formatted site – mobile.wikipedia.org. Although it may have already existed in some unofficial capacity, the mobile site is now officially available. The official mobile Wikipedia offers text-only results in fourteen… → Read More
This is the image that comes up when people try to access Wikipedia.de, which used to be forwarded to Wikipedia.org. It reads:
The county court of Luebeck (North Germany) has issued an order in the name of Lutz Heilmann, Member of Parliament (left party/post-communist) that the German Wikipedia (Wikimedia e.V.) must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the Web site wikipedia.org, as long… → Read More
A bit more Wikipedia news simply because it’s interesting, sad, and startling. When Tim Russert collapsed last week and was eventually pronounced dead – an absolute tragedy – NBC news held on reporting the news until Russerts family could be notified. It was a noble act, all said. However, a “junior-level” employee – read someone who knows how to use the… → Read More
Dumb kids in Scotland are failing tests not because they’re dumb, or because they haven’t properly prepared, but because Wikipedia is evil and mean and “littered with inaccuracies.” Shucks, and I thought Wikipedia was to be trusted 100 percent of the time. Right, so the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, which just sounds like a fun group, hated on Wikipedia the other day… → Read More
Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million… → Read More
Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered the documentary above, The Truth About Wikipedia. It has now been posted to YouTube and is worth watching when you have a spare 45 minutes. The film pits Andrew Keen, the disapproving author of The Culture of the Amateur, and Bob McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the… → Read More
Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny. Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the… → Read More
The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia – a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here). Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million English articles in September 2007). After… → Read More
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, announced a $3 million donation from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today. The donation will be paid ratably over three years. Last year the foundation had total income of $2.7 million and expenses of about $2.1 million (see financials here). This year revenue should be significantly higher. In addition to this… → Read More
I don’t think it’s actually as salacious as it sounds — it’s not as if he just vandalized her Wikipedia page with “ITZ OVER” or something. It’s more like, in response to some allegations of conflict of interest, he declined to help edit her bio page on the grounds that they “had” a “brief relationship.” His statement is now moved to the… → Read More
Wikimedia Foundation posted their audited 2007 financial statements (I’ve embedded the document below) last week. Their fiscal year actually ends June 30, so these are already almost eight months old, but they reveal some interesting information about the entity that controls Wikipedia nonetheless. Generally Wikimedia publishes these five months or so after the end of the year; this year… → Read More
Crowdsourcing video startup Kaltura is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to put its video-mashup technology on Wikipedia. The program, which is starting in beta today, will allow people to create collaborative videos on Wikipedia and other wikis. Kaltura’s video-editing technology allows multiple people to collaborate in creating a video. The addition will eventually make it easier… → Read More
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