Wikipedia in the press |
---|
An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts.
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has again stirred up controversy — this time over a biographical entry on the prophet Muhammad.
But there's a catch. One of the site's leading administrators bears an extreme conflict of interest, but you can't expose him from the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. He created the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard.
Does anyone know the collective noun for hawks? No, well it's a kettle. That's right a group of hawks is called a kettle of hawks. Or at least that's what Wikipedia says, so it must be true. Well not quite, because I have actually spent most of today editing the collective nouns database on Wikipedia to falsify it with the, including the two above; such absurdities as: a shard of whales, a jive of jelly fish and, worst of all, a stir of spoons. We seem to live in the age of information, yet as far as the collective nouns database on Wikipedia is concerned, an age of false information.
Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, literally, no matter how uninformed or unduly enthusiastic, and there's a great lack of oversight of any kind, [Sanger] told the several hundred people who attended.
Since 2001, Wikipedia has refused to restrict Chinese visitors from accessing certain materials prohibited by the PRC...However, if corporations like Microsoft and Google have the power to impose their policies by absorbing companies as large as Yahoo!, the same could just as easily be done to Wikipedia.
MELBOURNE teenager Corey Worthington, also known by the surname Delaney, is set to finally get his own page on Wikipedia after an earlier entry was vetoed by users. A heated debate among the website's contributors over whether or not the 16-year-old party boy deserved his own entry in the user-generated encyclopedia took place last month.
A petition claims to have amassed 132,000 signatures demanding that those wacky wiki weevils down the pic out of respect for the religion.
My advice: Enjoy it while you can.
There is an inherent value of knowledge freely compiled by the marketplace of thinking people, without the oversight of any government or individual society. This is knowledge any of us can take on our own terms and accept or reject in our judgment, without having been told by any government filter what we can or cannot think.
The 21st edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia was likely the last in printed form. "Now, everything will happen online," the spokesperson said. "But, we will clearly distinguish ourselves from providers like Wikipedia, by banking on relevance, accuracy and reliability," the spokesperson said. "And, our information cannot be manipulated."
I would guess that in 50 years a significant portion of Wikipedia articles will have controlled edits, peer review, verification locks, authentication certificates, and so on.
The traditional reason given for the Islamic prohibition on images of prophets it to prevent them from becoming objects of worship in a form of idolatry. But, say the editors, the images used were examples of how Muhammad has been depicted by various Islamic sects through history and not in a religious context.
The 2008 edition of Quid, France's favourite encyclopaedia, has been cancelled by its publisher for lack of interest. ... Quid, produced by a family team for the past 45 years, has suffered especially at the hands of the French-language version of Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself web encyclopaedia.
AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA in the language of Rabbie Burns is now available at the click o' a moose. A Scots-language version of Wikipedia has already attracted more than 2,200 entries on subjects as diverse as "airchaeology" and "sodgerin". The English-language edition of the free online encyclopaedia has become one of the great success stories of the internet age with more than two million contributions. Scots enthusiasts, already buoyed by the SNP's decision to add the "mither tongue" to the school curriculum, have hailed the site as another shot in the arm for the long-neglected language. But the Scots Wikipedia has also been ridiculed as an embarrassing parody of the language used by Sir Walter Scott and Hugh MacDiarmid.
((cite news))
: External link in |quote=
(help)Wikipedia is one of the most heart-warming things about the web. It is not the technology itself: it's humanity.
Q Is there anything dangerous about having all that information? A I don't think so. I tend to be a very big fan of the notion that as citizens in a free society, we need access to information to make good decisions.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast.
Former associates of Wales' are using this scandal to bring up other worries they have about the organization at the foundation. Former Wikimedia exec Danny Wool, who left the foundation last year, wrote a blog post insinuating that Wales used the nonprofit foundation as his own personal piggy bank.
The site can't always reflect what people know any more; it reflects what people think.
The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.
Wikipedia's detractors criticize the online, user-written, constantly changing encyclopedia's sometimes dubious sourcing, which they say makes it unreliable. Wikipedia's defenders counter that the site's mutable, fluid nature engenders a valuable skepticism toward all manner of too-trusted authorities. Nothing conveys Wikipedia's openness to revision quite like "[citation needed]," the bracketed phrase sprinkled throughout its pixellated scrolls.
With about 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn't. Wikipedia's business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often.
Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.
It has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it's an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don't count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.
As a K–12 educational tool, then, Wikipedia appears to pass the test, at least to the limited degree that any encyclopedia assists the learning process. Still, that doesn't mean the site is perfect. As a resource about hot-button political issues, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to manipulation and spin. This is apparent in its treatment of education policy issues.
In reading entries on the site, I recently found some where I thought I might be able to help, so I took it upon myself to get more involved in Wikipedia and try to add something, but I quickly found that I wasn't doing things correctly and that my contributions weren't well-received by the community.
With 2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia "anyone can edit," stormed the Web's top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that means Wikipedia has far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.
According to data provided to Billboard from Yahoo -- the second-most popular search engine on the Web after Google -- those searching for artist information are selecting the Wikipedia entry link over artists' MySpace pages by a factor of more than 2-to-1. The Wikipedia entries are also more popular than artists' Web sites.
The Wikimedia Foundation has picked up $3 million in grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The philanthropy will parcel out its grant in $1 million installments over three years to the non-profit group that runs Wikipedia.
Now nearly four years old, the Hillsdale College entry at Wikipedia has a led a relatively calm life for an encyclopedic entry open to revision by anyone with an Internet connection.
Professors light up at the mention of Wikipedia, whether they support or criticize the seemingly ubiquitous site.
The Wikipedia administrator has worked on several thousand pages, including the Hillsdale College article.
Perhaps that's about to change, however, witness this afternoon's just-announced donation of $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, by heavyweight venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru.
La popular enciclopedia online alcanzó esa cifra con una entrada publicada en su versión húngara. El artículo cuenta la vida de un pintor inglés del siglo XVI que retrataba a los reyes de la época.
La enciclopedia colaborativa más grande del mundo llegó a tamaña cifra gracias a un artículo acerca de un orfebre y pintor inglés del siglo XVI.
Of course, the brutal truth is that it is the reference entry which comes highest in a Google search which will win the readers. And for the foreseeable future that is likely to be the Wikipedia version - whether it is accurate or not.
Seems the folks at Wikipedia are having a little fun at Ima Hogg's expense this April Fools' Day.
Whoever wrote the fake Ima Hogg bio might want to think about pursuing a career in screenwriting. It sounds more amusing than any of the movies I've seen recently...
Anybody who is worth their salt about Houston history knows Ima Hogg. You don't even need to be a Bayou City scholar in order to know of Ms. Hogg. Case in point, Wikipedia is shining a spotlight on the notoriously named philanthropist as its featured article of the day.
Wikipedia describes itself as the free encyclopedia anyone can edit — and by anyone, they mean anyone — which is a problem for Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY). After all, a Web search for either candidate will return his or her Wikipedia page, often as the second result. With so many eyes viewing those pages every day, the stakes are high — and for two unofficial minders, attempting to police those pages has become a 24-hour job.
Wikipedia has realized that this type of damage [vandalism] is a social problem that calls for social solutions. It polices itself according to an ethical code that encourages users to do the right thing rather than the required thing.
A look at the travails of maintaining heavily-viewed pages - Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama - in an increasingly volatile political season, and keeping them neutral, fair and comprehensive in the face of constant vandalism and inappropriately partisan attack editing. Interviews with a leading editor, Wasted Time R and others.
A Wikipedia article about Maj. Alan Rogers, a gay soldier who was killed in January in Iraq, was apparently edited by someone in the Pentagon, who removed any mention that Rogers was gay. ... Rob Pilaud, a patent agent and a friend of Rogers who attended the soldier's funeral, restored the information to the Wikipedia article the next day. Pilaud was among Rogers' friends who created the Wikipedia page. ... Pilaud is asking Rogers' friends for biographical information on the fallen soldier to enhance the Wikipedia article. ... "With Wikipedia, at least, I simply want to present objective information about Alan — about who he was, what he did with his life and what he would have wanted," he said.
Chinese censors seemed today to have relaxed their control of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, as reports from users suggested it was accessible in at least parts of the country.
... Wikipedia has grown enormously since its inception, and is fast becoming widely accepted as a verifiable academic resource. How reliable is Wikipedia? How does it work? And, can it be manipulated by third parties? ... In theory, Wikipedia is a collaborative internet encyclopedia which relies on peer review and procedure to keep a neutral point of view (NPOV). The evidence from my experiments and experience inside the Wikipedia social structure point to a slightly different reality. ... Quite simply, since the system is based on collaboration, it does not matter who is right; it matters who is agreed with the most. Therefore the Wikipedia system is flawed.- [Article not available on line.]
Phorm has admitted that it deleted key factual parts of the Wikipedia article about the huge controversy fired by its advertising profiling deals with BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse.
Being such a good starting place for looking up info she went to Wikipedia and found that King's entry had been reduced to one phrase: "im a n----r."
Some miscreant has being fiddling with Liam of Lebanon's Wikipedia entry. When we checked yesterday the former Perth shock jock was described as a "robotic journalist from Bikini Bottom".
In Chapter 6, Zittrain offers a glowing review of Wikipedia, from its humble origins to its success as one of the Internet's most popular Web sites.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.
Wikipedia calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It has become the most influential reference site on the web. It may even be the most influential reference source available anywhere, online or off. Its English-language edition carries more than 2.3 million articles, written by thousands of contributors who call themselves "Wikipedians." These entries almost always rank high on Google searches... A couple of years ago, the journal Nature compared a sampling of scientific entries found on Wikipedia with those published in Encyclopedia Britannica. It determined that the newcomer was almost as trustworthy as the old hand... The most egregious examples of vandalism tend to be corrected quickly by devoted Wikipedians... Plenty of controversial subjects are handled with an exquisite sense of fairness, and Wikipedia provides a special forum for editors to debate each other on how best to treat topics. There are vigorous debates between "deletionists" who seek to eliminate material they consider irrelevant and "inclusionists" who believe that more information equals richer content.
Over at the Oxford University Press's blog, OUP publisher Niko Pfund paid Wikipedia the ultimate compliment: He compared it to the Oxford English Dictionary.
All I can say is: beware! What a vile world our children will grow up in if the acid drip, drip, drip of the insidious, secular amorality and disinformation of these colossi of the internet, posing as "neutrality", are allowed to erode the Judeo-Christian foundations of our civilisation.
I thought if we are really successful we might make the top one hundred websites and now we are like number eight on the internet and much bigger than I would have ever thought.
Créée juste après les incidents des Paris, une longue fiche Wikipedia en anglais est disponible sur elle. Mais elle fait l'objet d'une controverse, la plupart des sources citées étant des médias chinois.
A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.
Wikipedia is more comprehensive, more current and available everywhere for free. It's a tough competitor
[T]he German-language Web site has more than 750,000 separate articles; the printed volume will have only about 25,000, with 1,000 or so photographs. [...] The printed work will include brief summaries (about 15 lines each) that can fit in about 1,000 pages.
Last week Britannica.com decided to adopt a "first click free" strategy allowing web publishers to link directly to article pages. Readers who clicked through to the page were allowed to see the content of that article for free and if they wanted to explore further they need a subscription. This is a very interesting piece of linkbait from britannica.com and one that could see them challenging Wikipedia if they can sort out their on site SEO strategy.
Griffith University vice-chancellor Ian O'Connor has admitted lifting information straight from online encyclopedia Wikipedia and confusing strands of Islam as he struggled to defend his institution's decision to ask the repressive Saudi Arabian Government for funding.
A 15-year-old boy, arrested last Friday in conjunction with criminal threats made on Wikipedia, was charged Thursday with seven felonies in Pomona Juvenile Court in Pomona, California. Prosecutors stated that the teen posted two threats on Wikipedia, saying that six named students as well as members of his school's badminton team would be shot.
High school threats: An article in Tuesday's California section said threats posted on Glen A. Wilson High School's Wikipedia page came from an anonymous e-mail address. The threats were posted by a user who had not registered with Wikipedia. He posted to the site using an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a number generated by the computer or device he was using.
For computer science, especially, many topics on Wikipedia are in a form polished and accessible enough to assign to students as reading, and the subjects aren't controversial in a way that would inspire the sort of back-and-forth citation wars that cause some articles to fluctuate wildly between competing versions. But other topics get assigned from Wikipedia as well — not least in courses about digital culture itself.
Old-school encyclopedia Britannica is giving bloggers free subscriptions to Britannica Online, the internet version of its multivolume masterpiece. What this means is that bloggers no longer have to rely on Wikipedia's crowdsourced and sometimes questionably factual encyclopedia entries when they want to insert a quick link to background info on, say, Bosnia, or circular polarized light, or the grammatical structure of Klingon.
Printed out, Wikipedia's "Nuclear Power" article runs to about 20 pages. It serves as a good example of the famous Web site's flaws.
What if they decided to pursue the Arab-Israeli conflict by other means? Inevitably, it would take place on the Internet. And inevitably Wikipedia would be involved.
Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia -- an Administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment.
If it wants to be viewed as being in the business of pornography, it is certainly doing a good job of labeling itself as a bunch of hard-core pornographers.
The conflict in the Middle East has spread to the internet with Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups using Wikipedia, the electronic encyclopedia, to push their message.
((cite journal))
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)Yaari hopes that Wikipedia users will soon not have to rely on their instincts concerning the reliability of a Wikipedia entry they are reading.
In an Australian first, NSW HSC students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.. ..Wikipedia should be seen as a first port of call that can "point you in the direction of more authoritative resources. Because of that, I have high hopes that it will be a very valuable experience for high school students," he said, one that would expose them to the "good, bad and ugly sides" of Wikipedia.
And so -- do these wretched Wikipedia people ever lie awake worrying at the damage that the evil or the impressionable might inflict upon those who have been maligned in their uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an "encyclopedia"? I doubt it extremely: for of all the lies of our time, Wikipedia is surely the greatest.
At the start of the next academic year, high school teachers across New South Wales will be intoning a new education mantra: "Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic and Wikipedia".
Here's a fun news site from Stephen Dolan at Trinity College Dublin: He's found a way to show the smallest number of Kevin Bacon steps separate any article on Wikipedia from any other.
Wikipedia – with its 10 million articles in 253 languages created by hundreds of thousands of contributors – is the architectural and pedagogical antithesis of Balliol College.
He is the closest thing it has to a spokesman, the occasional monarch who intervenes in editing disputes, and the ambassador—both inspiring and controversial—of the Wikipedian idea.
A Telstra spokesman has described comments that were posted on chief executive Sol Trujillo's Wikipedia entry as "highly defamatory and offensive personal comments". A US law firm reportedly threatened Wikimedia, which runs the Wikipedia website, with legal action in March this year unless it removed "defamatory statements" from the Wikipedia entry of the Telstra chief.
A stalker drove former Wikipedia editor David Shankbone off the site. Mr. Shankbone describes the growing problem of harassment and stalking that targets the nonprofit encyclopedia's most dedicated volunteers....
Wikipedia and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland's falling exam pass rates. The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.
Wikipedia is part of a growing online community where software and information is created in the free open source format and it is giving the commercial world a run for its money. It will be interesting to see how the two sides square off over the coming years.
"The coincidence of the user’s name, and the sudden spurt of activity just before news broke of Mr. McCain’s choice, has raised suspicions that YoungTrigg was a campaign operative tasked to make sure that her Wikipedia article was ready for prime time, much as handlers have been assigned to do the same for the candidate."
[O]ne day, I plugged "positivism" into Wikipedia's search box and, dumbfounded, read a definition that was exactly like the one written in my notebook! I had the most disheartening of realizations. My professor, whose intellect I had raised to god-like stature, was plagiarizing Wikipedia in her lectures. The proof was too black and white to deny. As I typed in more and more phrases, more and more periods of history, it became blatantly clear to me that a considerable amount of my professor's lecture came verbatim from Wikipedia.
Child protection campaigners say Wikipedia has "crossed the line" by allowing graphic videos and photographs of sexual acts on its articles - and even some of the site's own editors say the content is dressed-up porn.
Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.
Mallett initially turned to Wikipedia to research Gower, and was aghast to note the majority of the Australian's profile fell under the sub-category, "Controversy", detailing his numerous brushes with officialdom in Australia.
describes the political and economic significance of the social networks which are possible on the Internet and emphasizes the importance of commons-based production, such as Wikipedia.
With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word "truth."
Executive Director Sue Gardner said she hoped that by 2020 the Wikipedia user base would reach one in three people around the world and that one in 10 people would be active participants.
While millions of Americans were out partying or drowning their sorrows during Tuesday night's election returns, plenty of Wikipedia editors were busy updating crucial election-related pages of the free encyclopedia.
A far-left German politician has been forced to withdraw an injunction against online encyclopedia Wikipedia after it revealed details of his Stasi past.
On the one side, a body which has been fighting to free the web of child abuse images, waging a war which has the support of the vast majority of web users. On the other, the digital libertarians who believe that once we let a group of unelected regulators decide what is fit for us to see on the web, we are on the road to Orwellian thought control.
This page has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:
|
The public had a right to access the photos, said Angelika Menne-Haritz, vice-president of the Federal Archives in Berlin, adding that the deal with Wikipedia would facilitate public access to the material.
The Virgin Killer image may have done a disservice by channelling discussion into well-worn channels of free speech versus censorship. There are deeper issues here which will continue to fester: the structural problems of accountability and responsibility, which are intrinsically poor in Wikipedia.
This page has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:
|
But the interesting thing about Wikipedia is that, unlike a similar printed resource, or an online equivalent written by a small group of necessarily time-restricted experts, its entries are, theoretically, unlimited. If someone has it within them to write 20,000 words on, say, the different types of tarmacadam available, then they may write, and then post, those 20,000 words. This jump into infinite detail proves, over the pages of Wikipedia, to be deeply revelatory about the nature of humanity. Take, for instance, the entry on Waitrose. It appears to have been written by someone who believes passionately that one of the crucial, stabilising forces of the Universe is disseminating as much information about the uniform policy of Waitrose, and to as many people as possible. The detail is merciless, and unending.
The result is remarkably similar to the online fundraising efforts of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, who raised an unprecedented campaign war chest by collecting thousands of small contributions from supporters over the Internet.