wikipedia

Chewing on TechCrunch party tidbits

I eatd mini cheezburger at the TechCrunch party at August Capital on Friday, as LOLCats would say. There were other morsels there too, some tastier than others.

Remember before the Internet came along, when you could call a 900 telephone number to talk to "Santa Claus?" Dial Directions feels nostalgic like that. Being directionally challenged, I consider it a gift. You literally dial "DIRECTIONS" on your cell phone and get a turn-by-turn text message. The service is available in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles during beta testing. It did a pretty good job … Read more

Crawl the Web with Wales' open-source search tool

Friday morning, at the O'Reilly Open Source conference in Portland, Ore., Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, announced the release of an open-source Web crawling site called Grub.

Grub was acquired from LookSmart under the open-source project Wikia. The platform, now available for downloading and testing, is built on users donating their personal computer power. It's meant to operate through open protocol and community collaborative added functions combined with the wiki.

Last year, Wales claimed that Internet search as we know it is broken. Grub is one of his attempts to gather open-source technologies to organize free … Read more

Wikipedians backlash against Search Engine Land article

Wikipedians don't like editors who are disingenuous. Playing games within Wikipedia in the hopes of not getting caught is just asking for trouble. I was reminded of this fact while reading the Search Engine Land article What To Do When Your Company Wikipedia Page Goes Bad. On the surface, Jessica, SEO at Business.com, offers some no-nonsense advice on removing or minimizing negative material on Wikipedia. But be advised that you are entering into dangerous territory if you employ Jessica's tips. Read the comments and you'll find some very negative reactions from respected Wikipedians JEHochman and Durova … Read more

Does Wikipedia entry offer clue to Benoit family murders?

An anonymous edit to Wikipedia could provide a clue about the deaths of pro wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and 7-year-old son. Or it could simply be random Wikipedia pranksterism by a University of Connecticut undergraduate.

The changes were made to the Wikipedia article on Benoit, an internationally recognized athlete who participated in World Wrestling Entertainment, hours before police discovered the bodies in the family's suburban Atlanta home.

At 12:01 a.m. EDT Monday, the entry was changed to say he missed a championship match because of personal issues "stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.&… Read more

Wikipedia

Category: Reference

Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia. Instead of being authored by a select group of editors, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone anywhere, and at any time. Wikipedia is available in a large number of languages and has entries about nearly everything. It's become so well known, people consider it an adjunct to Google as a place to find out more about almost any subject.

Each Wikipedia entry gets its own article as well as a built-in discussion in which users can talk about things they want to add or request changes from frequent contributors. There's … Read more

CNET to interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Please join CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman as he interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The interview will take place at the CNET Second Life bureau (free Second Life account required) on Thursday, May 10 at 1 p.m. PDT.

The conversation will cover a wide range of topics, including Wales' for-profit venture, Wikia, the future of Wikipedia, competition for Wikipedia and the free encyclopedia's assault on Google. Come take part and ask Jimmy a question.

Wikipedia's Wales gets pranked Down Under

Looks like Wikipedia and its founder, Jimmy Wales, have turned into legitimately global icons--they're getting pranked overseas in addition to domestically. Wales was the keynote speaker at the Australian "Education.au" conference last week, as reported by the Brisbane Times (linked via TechCrunch), and in the question-and-answer session that followed his address, he was subject to the antics of a well-known Aussie prankster.

One of the inquisitive attendees happened to be Andrew Hansen, a cast member from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's sketch comedy show The Chaser's War On Everything, which features a recurring segment called &… Read more

Wetpaint adds private messaging to Wiki service

Wetpaint, the wiki editing and hosting service, added private and group messaging this morning. The new service allows users to communicate one-on-one just like e-mail, and gives wiki administrators a new way to communicate to those moderating and contributing to their pages.

Sending a message in the service is pretty simple. If you're signed in, just click a user's name to pull up a "send message" pop-up. If you want to send out a group message, just start typing in names and the service will pull them up (like Gmail does).

In comparison, wiki juggernaut Wikipedia … Read more

Citizendium: Wikipedia 2.0

Citizendium, the new wiki project from Larry Sanger (one of the co-founders of Wikipedia) launched publicly yesterday. Citizendium is a lot like Wikipedia, but with more emphasis placed on responsibility and the policing of content--two things arguably lacking in Wikipedia. Before you can contribute to Citizendium, users must apply for access, and it's not just a casual name and e-mail address; you actually have to provide your real name and sell yourself to the service's content cops in 100 to 500 words.

The site's content is managed and controlled by community moderators called "constables." After being screened and chosen even more carefully than ordinary contributors, constables are given the power to manage user submissions and general content. Constables aren't paid or given compensation for their services, it's purely a volunteer gig. Likewise, contributors receive nothing besides the prestige of creating and editing content for the service.

There are just more than 1,000 entries on the site. This pales in comparison to Wikipedia's 1,700,000 plus, but Citizendium just launched. Wikipedia's been live since early 2001.

Citizendium is an interesting experiment (a term coined by its founders, not me). It's too early to say whether or not it will become a serious competitor to Wikipedia. To my mind, Citizendium is setting itself up for problems.… Read more

Web update roundup: Box.net, MySpace, PreFound, Netvibes

Box.net gets new design. Box.net has gotten a face-lift that shows more files and menu choices in the same amount of space. They've also completely gotten rid of the sidebar (which once housed navigation options), and added some neat previews for any photos that have been stored. There's also the option to send any file that's on there to one of your Box.net widgets without having to leave the page. Previous Box.net coverage here.

MySpace partners with Bodog. Online sports gambling, TV, and music service Bodog has partnered with MySpace to tweak the … Read more