wikipedia

Wikipedia.com is planning to introduce a feature which will color-code parts of its articles in order to show how reliable the information is likely to be. It's a solution to an ongoing problem that has led to a planned freeze on edits to entries ... about living individuals. The WikiTrust feature analyzes the text on a page and ranks each piece of text based on how recently it was edited. This is based on the idea that the longer a piece remains unchanged, the more likely it is that it is trustworthy -- otherwise (it is reasoned), Wikipedia's users would have overturned the edit. The feature ... (view more)

One of the most powerful figures at Wikipedia has resigned after it was discovered he'd been editing entries under bogus names. David Boothroyd, who is also a British politician, had even used the fake account to edit the pages of political ... opponents. As well as being a registered volunteer editor, Boothroyd had been elected to the powerful Wikipedia Arbitration Committee: a group of around 15 editors which make final and binding decisions for any disputes on the site that cannot be resolved informally. In some cases, the committee could even overrule Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. ... (view more)

Wikipedia DVD Selection Wikipedia for your hard drive. Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has ... about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words). http://www.schools-wikipedia.corg Text Mining Tool Text Mining Tool is a freeware program for extraction of text from files. The beauty of the program is that it works, extremely ... (view more)

Wikipedia is everyone's one-stop-shop for quick answers online. The name, an amalgamation of 'wiki' (a collaborative website) and 'encyclopedia', is the "biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet." Once virtually alone in its ... field, the site faces new competition from Google. The seven year-old site has over 75, 000 contributors and over 10 million articles published in over 250 languages. Allowing people from all walks of life to write, contribute to and supplement articles has allowed it to amass a truly global, if not academically sound, archive of information. There ... (view more)

One of Wikipedia's co-founders has just announced major changes to Wikia, the search engine he launched earlier this year. Jimmy Wales describes the relaunch as "a complete overhaul of everything", applying the Wikipedia philosophy of user ... involvement to search. This all means that users can add or delete the results appearing for any particular search. They can also rank the relevance of results, which will affect how high up in the list they appear. They'll also be able to edit the headline and description which appears alongside the web address for each result. This means people ... (view more)

If you're a Wikipedia fan, you've probably noticed that the site's biggest drawback is its search facility. That's because the internal search tool appears to be largely based on early search engines, which simply measure how often and how ... prominently a particular phrase appears on any given page. While it's still a useful technique, such systems can feel quite ineffective now that we're used to more sophisticated searches such as Google, which takes into account how prestigious and respected each site is in the Internet community. And the Wikipedia system has a big drawback in that it doesn' ... (view more)

Along comes Jimmy Wales with a $4 million (not billion) investment from Bessemer Ventures, an investment from Amazon of an undisclosed amount, and some private money from a handful of angel investors that include Marc Andreesen (cofounder of ... Netscape), Josh Kopelman (Half.com), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), and Ron Conway (an early investor in Google, PayPal and Ask Jeeves). And while no one knows the exact amount of funding that Jimmy has received, it's probably safe to guess that, altogether, it's less than $100 million. In a relatively short span of technology history, Google has achieved revenues ... (view more)

Google is launching an ambitious project to become the Internet's leading source of information on just about every subject. Their plans appear to be a direct attack on Wikipedia's popularity. According to a blog by Google's Vice President of ... engineering, the company wants to make it easier for experts to share knowledge. They plan to do this through a project titled 'knol' (a term they are also using to refer to each entry). The idea is for Google to take care of the hosting and formatting, leaving the experts to concentrate on the information. The goal is for the 'knol' to be "the first ... (view more)