wikipedia

From the roof of the Windsor Palace Hotel, overlooking the bay of Alexandria, Andrew Lih, Liam Wyatt, James Forrester and Austin Hair sum up the final day of Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Weekly.   Focus:  world knowledge, world languages.

Reblogged from Smart Mobs, "Wikipedia Reputation System": UCSC Wiki Lab has come up with a brilliant response to Wikipedia's need for some kind of reputational, refereeing system.

Here's a very interesting reblog from Nat Torkington, "Thinking in Wikis" from O'Reilly Radar

There's an excellent Nicholson Baker piece on "The Charms of Wikipedia" in the NYRB: I'm definitely charmed!

From AJR, February/March 2008 issue Wikipedia in the Newsroom

February/March » While the line “according to Wikipedia” pops up occasionally in news stories, it’s relatively rare to see the user-created online encyclopedia cited as a source. But some journalists find it very valuable as a road map to troves of valuable information.

This is a reblog from Chris Kelty's posting on Savage Minds on Wikipedia's recent announcement of its own version of Wikipedia.

knolcats: i’m in ur pedia, innovatin ur ass

Do you trust the information you read on Wikipedia? If anyone can edit content, how do you know who to trust? Would educators accept Wikipedia as a source for research projects if the entry had a high level of trust?

UCSC Associate professor of Comupter Engineering, Luca de Alfaro, developed a "truthiness" rating system that color codes text of Wikipedia articles according to a computed value of trust. The Wiki Lab demo contains a few hundred pages; click here to check it out.

Sure there are problems with Wikipedia but where else do you find out that some of the most important principles of calculus were around in 1800 bc in ancient Egypt (and required for the building of the pyramids) and other ideas about spherical volumes and infinitesimals were being debated by mathematicians in 5th century AD China and India?

In an earlier posting, "Wikipedia R Us," I wrote about the power of all of us to contribute to Wikipedia. WikiSkanner has revealed that "all of us" includes the CIA, FBI, Disney, Fox News, and other corporate and political interests who are using this tool for propaganda and, in some cases, defamation of character. Jimmy Wales should be giving Virgil Griffith a prize for exposing this----and I'd love it if Virgil could next turn his attention to mainstream news sources!

A very thoughtful and fascinating article on Wikipedia by novelist Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2007.