Wikipedia
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Crunch Network
How we built a newspaper in 72 hours
Earlier this year, Impossible Labs was commissioned by Jimmy Wales, to try to come up with a platform that could help combat that problem. In 72 hours. “I could have raised money from Silicon Valley and then engage in a year long massive investment in a priori thinking about a model that might not even be of interest to the public,” explains Wales. Read More
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Wikipedia has been blocked in Turkey
Wikipedia, the online user-generated encyclopedia, has been blocked by the Turkish government. News of the blockage was first reported by the website Turkey Blocks, at around 1AM Eastern this morning. Confirmed: All editions of the #Wikipedia online encyclopedia blocked in #Turkey as of 8:00AM local timehttps://t.co/ybFolRmsOs pic.twitter.com/hI9tn4bHe5 — Turkey Blocks… Read More
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Bots are waging passive-aggressive war on Wikipedia
Bots are a useful tool on Wikipedia: they identify and undo vandalism, add links and perform other tedious tasks set by their human masters. But even these automated helpers come into conflict, reverting and re-reverting each other on the same topic — sometimes for years. Read More
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To the Moon! Lunar XPRIZE team looks to send Wikipedia into space aboard homemade rover
Quick: you can send 20 gigabytes of data to the moon. What’s it going to be? Time’s up! Wikipedia? What a coincidence — that’s what the Part-Time Scientists, a team working on a homegrown lunar rover for Google’s Lunar XPRIZE, decided too! And they’re really planning to bring Wikipedia to the Moon. Read More
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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales blasts “deranged” companies editing their own pages
In a chat with Guy Kawasaki at South by Southwest, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales spoke out about self-interested parties editing their own pages on the Internet’s collaborative encyclopedia. “Companies think it’s a powerful marketing tool but I think they’re deranged and should leave us alone,” said Wales. Yet he believes that the best public relations teams… Read More
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Crowdsourced project aims to add text-to-speech to Wikipedia
An open source project hopes to draw on crowdsourced contributions to make Wikipedia more accessible by adding text to speech synthesis that will enable users of the online encyclopedia to have portions of the text read out to them. Read More
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Wikipedia’s new iOS app focuses on discovery, personalization
Wikipedia today launched an upgraded version of its iOS application aimed at helping users better discover content matching their own interests, including both articles and images. In addition, the app has been optimized for Apple’s newer OS and latest iPhones (6s and 6s Plus) with support for 3D Touch and Spotlight Search integrations. This is the latest in a series of efforts from… Read More
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Crunch Network
App-Improvement AI And The Future Of Web Development
Artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating our lives — just not in the ways we might have expected from reading sci-fi novels or watching robot apocalypse-themed movies. Instead of having live robots walking around, doing our dishes and engaging us in conversation, AI exists primarily in web and mobile apps designed to help us with small intellectual chores, like finding out when the… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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13 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week
This week, rumors swirled about the new Apple TV, Google changed its logo, Chrome killed Flash ads, and BB-8 scared our office dog. These are the stories to catch you up on this week’s tech news. Read More
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Wikipedia Bans Hundreds Of “Black Hat” Paid Editors Who Created Promotional Pages On Its Site
Sometimes Wikipedia’s reliance on volunteers to craft its online content comes back to bite them. Case in point: this morning, the organization announced that editors on the English version of Wikipedia have banned 381 user accounts that were engaging in “undisclosed paid advocacy.” In other words, they were posting promotional articles to the user-editable online… Read More
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Russian Wikipedia Editors Weighing Options After Site Is Blacklisted In Russia
The Russian government has instructed all ISPs in the country to block Russian Wikipedia following their denied request to remove a post about preparing narcotics. Read More
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The Wikimedia Foundation Turns On HTTPS By Default Across All Sites, Including Wikipedia
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and a number of other wiki-based projects, announced this morning that it’s now implementing HTTPS by default across all its sites in order to encrypt its traffic. The decision, it says, will make it harder for governments and other third parties to monitor users’ traffic, and will make it more difficult for Internet Service… Read More
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Wikipedia’s New iOS App Sees An Improved Design, Adds Social Features With Shareable “Fact Cards”
The Wikimedia Foundation has been steadily rolling out updates to the Wikipedia mobile experience in recent months, and today that trend continues as the organization rolls out a brand-new iOS app. This release is focused on improvements to the visual design of Wikipedia’s app, better search, and includes the addition of social features that allow you to share facts and images with… Read More
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Wikipedia Picks Up $140,000 In Bitcoin Donations In One Week
In late July, Wikipedia announced that it would accept donations in bitcoin. In its first week of accepting bitcoin, Wikipedia racked up $140,000 in new funds, according to Coinbase, the service that powers its cryptocurrency influx. CoinDesk, a publication that tracks bitcoin and other alternative, digital currencies heralds the news as suggesting “the staying power of digital… Read More
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Web App WikiWand Raises $600,000 To Give Wikipedia A New Interface
WikiWand has raised $600,000 from angel investor Saar Wilf to give users of Wikipedia an attractive new interface for the popular site. Though Wikipedia is one of the ten most visited sites in the world and an important online repository of information, it still looks much the same as it did when it launched back in 2001. WikiWand wants to fix that with its browser extension. Read More
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Wikimedia Attacks Europe’s Right To Be Forgotten Ruling As Threat To Its Mission
The Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization behind Wikipedia, has strongly condemned the recent right to be forgotten (rtbf) ruling in Europe, warning the requirement to allow private individuals to request the de-indexing of links from search results associated with their name is going to have “critical repercussions” for its online crowdsourced encyclopedia. Read More
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Wikipedia Revamps Its iOS App With Offline Access, Support For Editing While On The Go
Wikipedia has today made a significant update to its iOS application, which most noticeably features a cleaner, “distraction-free” design, as well as the ability to edit Wikipedia articles from your smartphone or tablet device. Under the hood, the app received a number of other improvements as well, including speed increases, offline access, a reading history, and more. Read More
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Wikipedia Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations With Coinbase
Wikipedia, the decentralized community-powered encyclopedia, is now accepting donations in bitcoin, the decentralized community-powered cryptocurrency. The Wikimedia Foundation partnered with Coinbase to process the donations. Also new today, Coinbase will waive processing fees for all registered non-profits. Today’s news shouldn’t come as a surprise. Back in March, Wikipedia… Read More
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