What is Macworld without rampant speculation? This year, though, someone is going the extra mile and is using Wikipedia to spread what looks to be a fake outline for the Stevenote tomorrow. Many blogs and media are biting (see here and here), including people who should know better (Steve Rubel). At first glance, the notes seem plausible. Nothing too earth-shattering: a thin new MacBook, a 16GB… → Read More
Many of us have waited a year as the Jimmy Wales hype machine promised a human powered search engine that could take on Google. Tonight that search engine launched at alpha.search.wikia.com, and it may be one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing. First of all, it’s barely a search engine at all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and… → Read More
Well, the waiting appears to be over, and the promised 2007 launch date was technically achieved. Wikipedia/Wikia Founder Jimmy Wales has publicly announced the private beta for Wikia Search – right now. And the public launch is set for January 7. In a note to the Wikia Search email list a few minutes ago, he wrote: From: jwales@xxxxx.com Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites… → Read More
We’ve waited more than a year for Wikia to launch their human powered search engine. The project was first announced in December last year by Wikipedia/Wikia founder Jimmy Wales. The promise was to return better results than Google and other search engines, using humans to make quality decisions: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but… → Read More
Details recently emerged that Wikimedia interim COO Carolyn Doran was a felon responsible for a 2004 hit-and-run and multiple DUIs across various states. She also had prior thievery charges, was responsible for writing bad checks, credit card fraud and once shot a boyfriend in the chest. Oh and her late husband drowned on their honeymoon. Sounds like something from a movie. At any rate, all of… → Read More
There was controversy when I endorsed the movie “Once” last week, primarily because some folks (where “some folks” is defined as one of my friends) argued that movie reviews have no place on a tech site. Well, hater(s), this is my column and I’ll endorse whatever the heck I want. Today, though, I’m bringing it back to tech. Wikipedia, you just got endorsed. → Read More
News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put up by Google’s Udi Manber announcing the project. Our initial story on Knol is here. From a product perspective, Knol is… → Read More
There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism. Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that… → Read More
There are a few wars waging on the virtual battlefield of the Internet between all types of services, like that between search engines, or between social networks. Wikipedia has won the battle of open information management, and General Jimmy Wales is ready for his next engagement, which is apparently a dual-front fight against both Google and Facebook. In a meeting of South African eggheads… → Read More
It was eleven months ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first mentioned his vision for a people-powered search engine that would eventually launch under his for profit startup, Wikia. Not much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search… → Read More
Wikipedia is used by millions worldwide each day, draws in billions of page views each month, and often takes the top slot on Google searches. But the truly amazing fact is that it’s stayed ad-free. This is because the mega encyclopedia and its sister sites run on borrowed time, borrowed servers, and — most importantly — public donations. That’s why Wikpedia’s parent… → Read More
We posted yesterday on the move by the Wikimedia Foundation to relocate from Florida to San Francisco, but aside from the obvious conclusions that the move would allow Wikimedia to tap into the superior developer community out West, there may be another reason as well: a mid life slow down. It’s tempting to call it a mid-life crisis, but it’s far too bland for that label. Robert Rohde… → Read More
Can a user-defined dictionary be done better than Wikipedia’s Wiktionary? Babylon, a maker of popular for-pay translation/dictionary desktop software, certainly thinks so, and they are launching Lingoz to prove it. Lingoz is a collaborative, online dictionary where users are encouraged to participate by contributing terms and definitions, as well as by voting, commenting and aggregating… → Read More
Wikipedia had its 2 millionth English language article written on September 10th, the company says. The two millionth article was on El Horminguero, a Spanish language television show. Wikipedia user Zzxc wrote the article. Wikipedia, founded in January 2001, is six years old. → Read More
Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about… → Read More
The Australian Prime Minister’s Office have been caught editing Wikipedia, the latest in a growing line of Wikiscanner entrapments. Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain… → Read More
Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a… → Read More
We’re filing this one under insane, creepy, interesting, telling, and WTF. You’ve possibly heard of the WWE murder/suicide of the week, featuring popular WWE superstar Chris Benoit and his family. Yah, it’s not gadgety, but it’s about Wikiepedia, and if you like, then you’ll love! → Read More
Remember on Monday when Steve Jobs, Lord of all our Earthly realm, proclaimed Safari as the best browser ever and that Apple wanted to steal market share from Internet Explorer? The COO of Mozilla noticed that too and didn’t like it one bit. So he’s called Apple out. → Read More
Something Awful has a flat out hilarious (if somewhat long in the introduction) article on the nerd bias of wikipedia. The point isn’t to say that one article or another on Wikipedia has factual inaccuracies, but rather to show how much more attention certain topics get than others. They suggest opening up two somewhat related articles, where one appeals to the nerds and the other does not… → Read More
We got a tip today on a new search engine called Wikiwix. The site is new to me and there is very little information about it on the web (one post from about three hours ago is here). It is linked from the main Wikipedia search page, although I’m not sure when it was added. Like Wikiseek, a search engine unaffiliated wtih Wikipedia, Wikiwix searches only Wikipedia. The “contact… → Read More
The video for the “Mr. Ten Questions” Australian press prank on Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales that we wrote about a couple of days ago is now online and embedded above. See our original post for a transcript of the questions and additional background. → Read More
update: The video of this is now available. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke at a education.au conference in Sydney, Australia last week. After his talk he took questions. As reported by the Brisbane Times, Andrew Hansen raised his hand as a member of the press and was selected to ask a question. What Wales didn’t know is that Hansen is part of the cast of a wildly popular public… → Read More
There was a lot of controversy recently when Wikipedia announced that all outbound links from the online encyclopedia would include the nofollow tag. The nofollow tag on a link is said to prevent link spamming since some search engines (Google among them) do not count links containing the tag towards any weighing of the destination page. What this means is that a link from Wikipedia will no longer… → Read More
WikiSeek should not be confused with Wikia’s upcoming search engine (although I did). Both, however, are developing community-edited search engines, and both have received assistance from Wikipedia (Wikia, though, is co-founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales). And while Wikia pushed some more vaporware news last week about their own upcoming community edited search engine, WikiSeek quietly… → Read More
Waxxi, an interactive podcast where people can call in and join the discussion, has just announced that they’ll be talking with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on April 5. If you want to be a part of it, register now. Only the first hundred or so people can participate. → Read More
In my post yesterday discussing an attempt by a Microsoft employee to pay a blogger to make changes to certain Wikipedia entries that Microsoft considered unfair, we noted that a Microsoft spokesperson made a number of factual statements. Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. → Read More
There’s been a discussion over the last few days over a Microsoft employee offering to pay an Australian blogger named Rick Jelliffe to edit certain Wikipedia pages relating to Open Office standards, including this page. Jelliffe writes about the offer here. Doug Mahugh at Microsoft freely admitted to doing this in a comment to a Slashdot article on the matter. According to another source, a… → Read More
Palo Alto based startup SearchMe has kept a low profile since being founded in March 2005. The company, which has 17 employees and raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital over two rounds, will launch a number of what founder Randy Adams calls “long tail search engines” in the near future. The first product they are launching is WikiSeek, which went live about an hour ago and will be… → Read More
Qatar, home to nearly a million people, has been blocked from editing any entry on Wikipedia “due to a large volume of spam and vandalism.” Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit… → Read More
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