Starting Points: Wikipedia

Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts

Jun 4, 2010

Starved for New Net Search Tools? Some Whoppers...

Image via Wikipedia

Search Tools Compilations

May 7, 2010

Wikipedia Now Lets You Order Printed Books

Image via CrunchBase

Wikipedia’s launching a new feature for English readers: The ability to create custom books from Wikipedia’s huge bank of free content. Because of the way Wikipedia’s images and copy are licensed, they’re free for anyone to access, use and share in this way.

PediaPress is a book publisher for wiki content; it’s in a long-term business relationship with Wikipedia () to print these books. PediaPress now offers paperbacks and will soon add hardcover books to its catalog, as well.

The price of each book varies, depending on the number of pages; paperbacks start at $8.90. Users can also simply download a PDF of the “books” they create.

The book-creating tools are built into the website. Starting today, users will see a “create a book” button in the print/export section of the left sidebar.

“When I came up with the idea, my colleagues told me my shower was probably too hot,” said PediaPress Managing Director Heiko Hees in a release this morning. “But I was tired of reading on the screen. I believe that in this hectic age people cherish their offline moments more and more. You wish you could access the most extensive and up-to-date knowledge in offline moments – on the train, at the seafront, in your bed.”

Compared to other services that have attempted to tackle this problem, like e-readers, Wikipedia has the disadvantage of only offering non-fiction content and having content that can and does change periodically.

But PediaPress has two distinct advantages. First, content can be customized around any topic or topics the user desires. The ability to curate content is one of the hallmarks of the latest wave of digital creativity. Second, this medium is the absolute best for those who choose to spend time offline; you’ll never need a power adapter or an Internet () connection to enjoy a book.

PediaPress is already up and running in 17 languages, serving 33 countries.

Jan 26, 2010

Google Entices Africans to Contribute to Swahili Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

By NOAM COHEN

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

“THE farmer and the cowman should be friends” is the hopeful refrain of Oklahomans in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma.” After all, their activities rhyme: “one likes to push a plow; one likes to chase a cow.”

Alas, the cultivators and the grazers seem destined for conflict. The largest online grazer of them all, Google, has repeatedly come upon fences as it roams the Internet seeking new material for search results.

There is China’s corner of the Internet, for example. The government there allowed Google to enter but insisted that its computers ignore writing and photographs about the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, say, or the status of Tibet or political dissent in general.

Google agreed to those conditions — that material simply doesn’t show up when someone looks for it at google.cn — though it says it is now refusing to abide by those rules in light of a hacking attempt emanating from China.

Another barrier Google recently ran up against involves authors and publishers concerned by the company’s effort to digitize books in university libraries. Many of these are so-called orphan works, for which copyright holders could not be found, and so without securing permission, Google unleashed its page scanners. Only recently has it tried to settle with the authors and publishers so it can put the works online.

Image via Wikipedia

Then there are the gaps in the Internet, barren because large populations in the Arabic world, Africa and much of India lack the means or education to create Web sites and other online content.

But Google can do something that cowboys can’t: create more real estate. The company is sponsoring a contest to encourage students in Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia. The winners are to be announced Friday, with prizes including a laptop, a wireless modem, cellphones and Google gear.

So far the contest, Google says, has added more than 900 articles from more than 800 contributors.

“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”

Sitting in a Google cafeteria, Mr. Stricker outlined all the ways information eludes the search engine — wrong language, not digitized, too recent, doesn’t exist but should. Feeding the maw is clearly an obsession of Google’s. After all, the search engine’s comprehensiveness is an edge against a new, well-financed competitor, Bing from Microsoft.

In e-mail interviews, two of the finalists in the Swahili contest said the arrival of Google on their campuses changed them from passive users of Wikipedia to active contributors. Still, they expressed mixed feelings about receiving material rewards for sharing knowledge.

One of the finalists, Jacob Kipkoech, a 21-year-old from the Rift Valley of Kenya who is studying software engineering at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, has created 17 articles so far that were given points. Among the topics were water conservation, Al Qaeda and afforestation, the process of creating forests.

“Wikipedia has been a good online research base for me,” he wrote, “and this was a way I could make it possible for people who can’t use English to benefit from it as well.”

Another finalist, Daniel Kimani, also 21, is studying for a degree in business information technology at Strathmore University in Kenya. He said that contests were an effective way to attract contributors but that “bribing,” or paying per article, “is not good at all because it will be very unfair to pay some people and others are not paid.”

“I believe in Wikipedia,” he said, “since it is the only free source of information in this world.”

Swahili, because it is a second language for as many as 100 million people in East Africa, is thought to be one of the only ways to reach a mass audience of readers and contributors in the region. The Swahili Wikipedia still has a long way to go, however, with only 16,000 articles and nearly 5,000 users. (Even a relatively obscure language like Albanian has 25,000 articles and more than 17,000 contributors.)

Mr. Kimani and Mr. Kipkoech represent one of the challenges for creating material in African languages. The people best equipped to write in Swahili, or Kiswahili as it is sometimes known, are multilingual university students. And yet Mr. Kimani wrote that he used “the English version more than Kiswahili since most of my school work is in English.”

Translation could be the key to bringing more material to non-English speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English translation tools improve.

Mr. Kimani wrote one entry in English and Swahili about drug use in Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. It says that the “youth in this area strongly believe that use of bhang or any other narcotic drug could prevent one from suffering from ghosts attacks.”

Now the article lives in English and Swahili, although the English Wikipedia editors have asked for citations and threatened to remove it.

It is yet another obstacle as Google the cowboy becomes Google the farmer.

Jan 9, 2010

Social networking among jurors is trying judges' patience

Image via Wikipedia

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 9, 2010; C01

Al Schuler, one of 12 jurors weighing the fate of a 23-year-old charged with killing a homeless man in Maryland, was confused by the word "lividity" and what role it might have played in explaining the circumstances of the victim's beating death.

So, one night after deliberations, the retired engineer did what so many people do in the digital age: He looked up the definition on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "It was just a definition, like going to the dictionary," Schuler said. "It was very innocent."

A Maryland appeals court didn't think so. In throwing out the defendant's first-degree murder conviction and ordering a new trial, the court ruled that Schuler's inquiry violated an Anne Arundel County judge's order prohibiting jurors from researching the case.

Schuler's query is just the latest example of how modern technology and an information-saturated culture are testing centuries-old notions of how juries and judges mete out justice. The issue garnered national attention recently in Baltimore, where five jurors were accused of using a social-networking site to inappropriately discuss the ongoing trial of the city's mayor.

Judges and legal experts are particularly concerned about how technology and culture are affecting jurors and a defendant's right to a fair trial. The Internet has provided easy and instant access to newspaper archives, criminal records, detailed maps, legal opinions and social-networking sites, such as Facebook, all at the anonymous click of a mouse in jurors' homes or on the tiny keyboards of their cellular phones.

"This is a generational change, and I don't know if the legal system is ready for it," said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a law professor at the University of Dayton Law School, who closely studies jury issues.

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

Judges have long instructed jurors to avoid reading newspaper stories about trials and to not discuss the case with one another, aside from their deliberations. They also warn them not to conduct their own investigations. The rules are designed to ensure that jurors contemplate only the evidence admitted at trial and at the appropriate time. (Jurors are free to discuss cases when they are over.)

Still, in the good old days, the hurdles for industrious jurors were fairly high: They had to physically visit a crime scene or the library or the court clerk's office. To talk about the case with other jurors, they had to pick up a phone or meet in person.

Today, technology has wiped out those barriers, and people have become increasingly reliant on the Internet for information. They have also become more comfortable blogging about the most mundane aspects of their lives -- let alone a sexy trial.

Legal scholars and lawyers disagree about how to handle the problem. Some say judges should warn jurors more explicitly about the Internet, while others advocate giving jurors more information during trials.

Most throw up their hands. No matter what steps are taken, they say, jurors will probably just keep Googling and texting and tweeting.

"I'm not sure what you can do about it nowadays, to tell you the truth, especially for younger people," said A.J. Kramer, the District's federal public defender. "That's what they grow up doing. You just have to figure it's happening. They go home at night and look up whatever they can. That's what people do."

In recent years, a half-dozen cases have popped into public view because the misconduct was egregious enough that judges were forced to decide whether to grant new trials.

In June, for example, a federal judge denied requests by defense attorneys to throw out the conviction of a former Pennsylvania state senator because a juror had posted updates to Twitter and Facebook during the trial. "Day 1 has come to a close," the juror tweeted. In the days before the jury reached a verdict, he told his Facebook friends that they should "stay tuned for a big announcement Monday everyone!"

Last week, a New York appeals court upheld the second-degree murder conviction of a 30-year-old man despite a juror's Internet research into whether the victim's gunshot wound was inflicted at close range.

In both instances, the judges found the tweeting and research did not harm the defendants' right to a fair trial.

But that isn't always the case. In May, a Maryland appeals court ordered a new trial for a man accused of raping his 17-year-old daughter, because a juror had researched "oppositional defiant disorder" on the Internet. The court found the research, communicated to other jurors, "improperly and irreparably influenced the jury's deliberative process."

A New Jersey appeals court in July overturned the aggravated manslaughter convictions of three cousins because a juror had done Internet research about the victim, the defendants and the amount of prison time they faced and had told her colleagues about it. The men will get a new trial.

In Baltimore, defense attorneys for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, who was convicted of embezzling about $500 in retail gift cards, accused five jurors of improperly becoming friends and chatting about the case on Facebook.

The attorneys alleged that the "Facebook Friends" may have bullied other jurors into the guilty verdict, contending that they were "a caucus separate and apart" from their colleagues. The counselors wanted Circuit Judge Dennis M. Sweeney to throw out the conviction and hold a new trial.

The issue nearly forced Sweeney to question jurors about their conduct, but Dixon and prosecutors reached a surprise plea deal that ended her appeals.

Jurors would probably have faced a less-than-sympathetic audience with Sweeney, who is considered one of the state's leading authorities on jury issues. He penned a newspaper column in June that examined the collision of the Internet and the nation's trial system.

"Modern jurors, so used to instant access, may not fully appreciate the need to divest themselves of the trappings of information-gathering and communication that otherwise dominate their lives," the judge lamented in Baltimore's Daily Record.

Sweeney urged judges to order jurors to specifically avoid discussing their cases on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter -- a warning he repeated during Dixon's trial.

It appears that such admonishments were not enough for the "Facebook Friends."

Oct 23, 2009

How an amateur historian rescued D.C.'s Wikipedia page - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Friday, October 23, 2009

The historian largely responsible for summing up Washington, D.C., for millions of Wikipedia readers digs for facts from his tiny bedroom in Dupont Circle. He sits on a chair borrowed from his four-piece dinette set at a desk he bought from Target, footnoting away on an old Dell computer. He is 24 years old. Sometimes he makes his bed.

His name is Adam Lewis -- a fact sure to surprise his closest friends and even his parents, who are unaware that, for a year or so, Lewis has been staying up late to rescue the District's Wikipedia page from vandals and mediocrity. Having grown up in the area, Lewis felt an obligation to do the work but not to brag about it.

"I just really don't think anyone would care," Lewis said.

Lewis joined thousands of other amateurs toiling in obscurity on Wikipedia, where facts are more important than the star historians who tend to dominate the popular view of history. On Wikipedia, anyone can be a historian. It's easy: Most pages are edited just by clicking on a button that says "edit this page."

More than 150,000 users made changes in the past 30 days, according to the site. Some, like Lewis, have user names and Wikipedia profiles. He goes by EpicAdam. Others are anonymous. Almost everyone has a specialty. There are editors who just fix punctuation. Some defend content against vandals. Others, like Lewis, pull the content together. It is an assembly line of nobodies.

"One of the things Wikipedia does really well is allow people to do distributed work," said Fernanda Viégas, a former MIT Media Lab researcher who studies digital information. "You can just go in and fix small things. But then you can really get hooked and get into ever more complex work as well."

Getting sucked in

That's what happened to Lewis. In spring 2008, he checked to see how his home town was presented to the world. This is a common way Wikipedia editors get sucked in. They look for topics they know about to judge whether the information is dependable.

Lewis didn't like what he found. There was misinformation and missing information, and the page had been demoted from "good article" status, meaning a group of experienced Wikipedia editors thought the page was shoddy.

"The page had really fallen by the wayside," said Lewis, who was born in the District and grew up in Potomac. "But this is my home town. I felt like it should be presented well."

His first edit was tiny. He thought a Washington Post article shouldn't be the source of information about the District's population, so he changed the citation to the U.S. Census. (Every change can be viewed through a search feature.)

During the next few days, he made other seemingly trivial edits, which led to larger changes about, among other things, how much money the city gets from the federal government.

In May, Lewis left a note on the discussion portion of the D.C. page, telling other editors that he was overhauling the entry. "Hi all," he wrote. "I'm sure you've noticed many changes to the page over the last few days. Hopefully these changes are for the better and will help the article regain it's 'good' rating."

Lewis wanted the D.C. page to present the city as a city, not just the U.S. capital, a goal in line with the wishes of many Washingtonians.

To that end, Lewis has made sure the page includes a good deal of information about the city's demographics. The page notes: "Unique among cities with a high percentage of African Americans, Washington has had a significant black population since the city's creation. This is a result of the manumission of slaves in the Upper South after the American Revolutionary War."

Some information about the city is not pretty: "A report in the year 2007 found that about one-third of District residents are functionally illiterate, compared to a national rate of about one in five."

But on culture: "Washington is also an important center for indie culture and music in the United States. The label Dischord Records, formed by Ian MacKaye, was one of the most crucial independent labels in the genesis of 1980s punk and eventually indie rock in the 1990s."

To be included on the page, Lewis said, events and people must have a close relationship to life in the District. So, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln doesn't make the cut. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (in Memphis) does because of the ensuing riots in the city.

Praised and panned

Other editors on the D.C. page have been pleased with Lewis's leadership. Josh Howell, whose user name is (because, he says, it's true) AgnosticPreachersKid, said Lewis is "very, very courteous" when it comes to making changes.

But Lewis can also come down hard on what he considers silliness. Another editor recently wrote: "I think we should split this article into two pages: Washington (City) and District of Columbia, as they are not the same thing. The District of Columbia is a separate thing from the city, as Washington, D.C. is only a part of the federal district."

Lewis's reply: "The argument that the District of Columbia is a separate entity from Washington, D.C. is erroneous and perpetuates a misconception of the uninformed."

Lewis has been on the other side of such criticism. Zachary Schrag, a George Mason University historian who studies the District, reviewed the page and found a blunder: the assertion that building heights in the city were limited to the height of the Capitol. Wrong, Schrag said. (The information was attributed to a Washington Post article. Oops.)

Lewis, alerted to the error, quickly made a fix. "That's the problem/success with Wikipedia," he said in an e-mail. "You may have a reliable source that's still wrong. It's hard to weed that stuff out until you have an expert (like Dr. Schrag) take a look at it. But, unfortunately, there are many like him who don't bother with Wikipedia."

There are historians who embrace Wikipedia. Last year, after using the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., as a resource, Lewis began volunteering there. Now he is membership coordinator. One day, he asked special collections librarian Colleen McKnight where she sent callers for information on the District. She said the D.C. Wikipedia page. Lewis was tickled. He revealed his editor identity to her.

McKnight remembers telling him, "Well, you did a good job."

And his work has paid off. The D.C. article not only regained "good article" status, but it also became a "featured article," the Web site's highest ranking.

"Oh, I was really pleased at that," Lewis said. "It was like getting a first-place ribbon at the state fair."

Aug 31, 2009

Link by Link - Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By NOAM COHEN

BUENOS AIRES

EUGENE KIM left his conference here on Thursday afternoon to visit the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s march silently, their hair swept under white scarves.

The weekly marches began in 1977 to remember “the disappeared,” those who were snatched and killed by the dictatorship in an attempt to destroy the political opposition. Today, the mothers represent a movement — they are joined by supporters as they march, and there are key chains and T-shirts for sale. People like Mr. Kim come to take photographs.

“They have been professionalized,” Mr. Kim observed. It’s inevitable, he says. He should know; he is in the professionalization business. Or consulting, as it is also known.

His latest client, as of July, is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco responsible for Wikipedia projects around the world, which is spending $600,000 to create a five-year strategic plan. And the conference he briefly left was the annual Wikimania gathering, held last week in the General San Martín Cultural Center, just off Corrientes Avenue, one of the main arteries of Buenos Aires, and a short subway ride to the Plaza de Mayo.

He and the other newly hired wiki-consultants tended to stick out. They were a bit older. They were a bit better dressed (O.K., a lot better dressed). They tended to travel in packs of two or three. And they were taking notes. Few had been to this conference before, and they were clearly trying to figure out where to begin in remaking a miraculous project that had become among the top five Web sites in the world, with a total of more than 330 million visitors a month, without the benefit of consultants.

In addition to Mr. Kim, there was Jelly Helm, a former executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy who worked for clients like Nike before leaving to focus on nonprofit work, and three members of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that will help analyze trends within the Wikipedia community.

In a similar role is Matt Halprin, a partner of the Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investing firm” created by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, which in August announced a $2 million grant to the foundation over two years. Mr. Halprin, a former vice president at eBay in charge of global trust and security, was just named to the Wikimedia board.

•

The presence of the wiki-consultants was the most tangible sign of soul-searching among Wikipedians, and certainly at the foundation. Wikipedia has never been more influential but this success has come with burdens — errors or vandalism can resonate around the world, while the largest projects, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, were losing steam, adding fewer articles and scaring off potential new contributors. And to a certain temperament, great success naturally leads to the question, how long can it last?

“There is a spirit and culture that is starting to shift,” Mr. Kim said of the need for a strategic plan. “That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale without losing sight of your essence.” A student of collaboration, Mr. Kim, whose consulting business is called Blue Oxen Associates, says any plan will have to “do it the wiki-way.”

“We will put those questions up on the wiki and have them go at it for an extended time and hope that we get something,” he said.

He will be soliciting proposals from the community, which will have its own wiki pages, and Wikipedians are being asked to commit 10 hours a week for four months to join task forces divided by issues of concern.

Jimmy Wales, the public face of the project, was unsparing in his criticism in addressing the conference. “We are mostly male computer geeks,” he stated, adding that there might be a measure of diversity, but only in that “we are from different parts of the world.”

As he spoke, a chart showed the self-reported demographics of Wikipedia contributors — more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.

Some Wikipedias are dominated by articles about pop culture, Mr. Wales pointed out, especially Japanese Wikipedia; according to one of his slides, barely 20 percent of the articles on Japanese Wikipedia are about anything else.

More profoundly, he said that Wikipedia was losing sight of its commitment to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia, particularly people in sub-Saharan Africa. “Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” he asked.

In her speech, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was effusive in her praise for all that Wikipedians have created, but she too thought there was reason for concern.

“I believe we are pretty suspicious outsiders,” she said, adding that there were good reasons for that. “We are vulnerable to exploitation — people want to monetize the traffic that comes to Wikipedia, or pursue a political agenda.”

“People want to help us,” she said. “We need to open ourselves up to external resources. It is important we open those doors and let those people in.”

•

Walking through Buenos Aires, Mr. Helm said this was unlike any communications assignment he had taken on. “It is an awesome story to tell, but I have no idea what we’ll do in terms of tactics,” he said. “My hope is that no one will be able to say who did they hire to do this work.”

Mr. Kim said one issue Wikipedians would need to examine would be “the introduction of bureaucratization,” as represented by outsiders like himself. “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end,” he said.

Aug 27, 2009

Omidyar Network Grants $2 Million Dollars to Wikimedia Foundation

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, we posted about $500,000 in Operational Support from the Hewlett Foundation.

Today, news that the Omidyar Network has committed a $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation.

Omidyar Network today announced a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 5 most visited websites. The Wikimedia Foundation has also appointed Matt Halprin, a partner at Omidyar Network, to its Board of Trustees.

[Snip]

Before joining Omidyar Network, Halprin was most recently Vice President of Global Trust and Safety at eBay. Prior to eBay, Halprin served as a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on strategy issues.

In addition to direct financial support, Omidyar Network will dedicate internal resources and engage its network to support Wikimedia’s strategic planning process, communications work, and recruiting.

Source: Wikimedia Foundation

Aug 17, 2009

English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles

August 17th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Beate Marie Eriksen (born 19 October 1960) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She acts in Hotel Cæsar, a popular Norwegian soap opera. The article about her on Wikipedia is the three millionth article there; another important milestone in the history of the people’s encyclopedia.

This latest milestone was announced on the front page of the English Wikipedia, but searching Wikipedia for itself reveals other interesting stats (for even more stats, read about the history of Wikipedia). It has about 10 million registered users and over 17 million pages. For comparison, the oldest English language encyclopedia, Britannica, has 40 million words on half a million topics. And yes, I also found that on Wikipedia ().

Although the growth of Wikipedia has slowed down somewhat in recent years, it is, without question, one of the most important sources of knowledge today. The number of articles will never grow as explosively as it did in the early days, for obvious reasons: so many topics have already been covered.

It is important to note that Wikipedia actually has 13 million articles, if you count the versions in other languages, which still have tremendous room to grow. Therefore, I’m sure that the largest online encyclopedia hasn’t will reach many more milestones in the future.

Jun 22, 2009

Google News Experimenting with Links to Wikipedia on Its Homepage

Source - Nieman Journalism Lab

By Zachary M. Seward / June 9 / 2:51 p.m.

The discrete news article, it has been said, is a framework that worked well in print but doesn’t make much sense on the web. News sites can offer context in a variety of ways that explode the story model, from visualizations to comment threads to what might be called the Wikipedia model of news. No, not collaborative editing, although that has its own advantages, but merely the structure of a Wikipedia article: one page devoted to an ongoing topic that’s updated throughout with new developments but can always be read, from top to bottom, as a thorough primer. Compared to a folder of chronological news clippings, well, I would always prefer the Wikipedia model.

So, too, would readers. Wikipedia became the Internet’s most popular news-and-information site in 2007, and its dominance in search results attests to the demand for authoritative topic pages over individual articles. Now, in a small but potentially crucial moment for the evolution of storytelling, Google News has quietly begun experimenting with links to Wikipedia on its homepage.

“Currently, we’re showing a small number of users links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events,” Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google, told me in an email this afternoon.

Sadly, I’m not one of those users, but I was alerted to this development by blogger Michael Gray, who viewed Wikipedia’s presence on Google News in a more-sinister light but helpfully provided screenshots. I grabbed the one above from Gray, highlighting a link to the Wikipedia page for the mysterious disappearance of Air France Flight 447. As is typically the case, there is no single page on the Internet with a more thorough, helpful, or informative synopsis of the crash.

Google News redesigned its homepage last month and began integrating YouTube clips from news organizations. Its cluster pages for individual news stories also got a makeover that more closely resembles a topic page than the old list of articles.

In his email to me, Stricker called the links to Wikipedia an experiment, which it is, but Google has made clear that it prefers the Wikipedia model of storytelling over discrete articles. In her testimony to Congress last month, Google vice president Marissa Mayer (that’s a link to Wikipedia, natch) said, “The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media.” She continued:

Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

It’s not a new concept, and news organizations like The New York Times have been working on it for years. (Kevin Sablan recently summarized the latest literature on all this — a topic page for topic pages.) And yet, the article and its close cousin, the blog post, remain the dominant frameworks for news reporting on the web. Radical reinventions of storytelling are, surprisingly, few and far between: Matt Thompson, the leading thinker on this subject, is trying “a completely different type of news site” in Columbia, Missouri, that’s worth keeping an eye on. And, now, Google News is toying with links to Wikipedia. Here’s hoping for more developments like this.

Jun 20, 2009

Wikipedia to Add Video Options to Articles

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Wikipedia Logo Wikipedia is a great knowledge base, containing tons of text and lots of photos, but it’s lacking when it comes to videos, which are, well, quite scarce. This is all going to change in a couple of months, as Wikipedia has big plans for video; both in the sense of having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, this should happen within two or three months. Wikipedia editors will get a new option, Add Media, which will let them search for videos, and insert portions of the video (via a simple drag and drop interface) into the article. Further plans include annotating the actual videos, and editing as well as reorganizing Wikipedia’s video collection – similar to what is now done with Wikipedia’s articles.

Where will the videos come from? Wikipedia has a plan. First, there’s the Metavid, a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings; Internet Archive and its 200,000 videos, and Wikimedia Commons, which is currently mostly holding photos but has a collection of video files as well.

However, once this initiative takes place, Wikipedia hopes that its users and editors will be more keen on uploading videos to Wikimedia. There is a catch, however: the videos added to Wikipedia’s database will have to be based on open-source formats. Since Wikipedia offers great exposure and traffic to everyone, this will surely motivate more people to use or convert their videos to these formats, and more open source is always a good thing.

Jun 10, 2009

Wikipedia Articles Appear in Google News Results

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 9 - Google News has built a strong reputation on its ability to quickly find, sort and deliver news information and sources. It takes information from news websites like CNN and Reuters, newspapers like The New York Times, and news blogs like Mashable (

). This provides you with a broad overview of the news.

Wikipedia (), on the other hand, is the world’s largest collection of collaboratively-edited information online. Because the articles are built by the hands of so many users, Wikipedia articles can quickly become comprehensive, detail-rich, and filled with sources and info on major news stories and events. Google () apparently sees great value in that information. So much so, in fact, that Wikipedia articles are starting to appear in Google News results.

While Wikipedia ranks highly in standard Google results, they have never appeared in Google News until now. After all, Wikipedia isn’t a news organization. Yet an article from CNN may provide you with a headline and a few paragraphs of information, but not provide the background and depth that a Wikipedia article can have. If you’re looking for the background on Tienamen Square or the Air France tragedy, you’re likely to find all you need there.

Image Credit: Nieman Lab

Google recently told the Nieman Journalism Lab of Harvard University that they’re currently experimenting with displaying Wikipedia articles as a reference and complement to current events news. That means that you might not see the links yet, and Google could end the experiment and remove Wikipedia results at anytime. Yet it seems that Google has an affinity for the community collaboration model, and we’d be surprised if Google doesn’t continue the integration after it collects enough data.

Are Wikipedia articles better sources of information than credible news sources? No, but they’re not worse, either. Wikipedia articles are an aggregation of news information sources to build a comprehensive picture. And having that information available along with news results provides the user with a different option for finding the information he or she is seeking.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/09/wikipedia-google-news/

Jun 9, 2009

Will the Real TNI Stand Up, Please!

This morning, a Facebook friend (teman FB) asked me if the TNI had reformed. I could only give a very incomplete brief reply. No, I'm not going to tell you what I said (privacy considerations). Fwiw, here's what Wikipedia writes about TNI, and what TNI writes about TNI. Can you answer the question any better?

Wikipedia ource - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Indonesia

TNI source - http://www.tni.mil.id/index.php?

Jun 6, 2009

American Studies Briefs #2

Slower Job Losses Lift Hopes (unemployment)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124420479347588831.html#mod=todays_us_page_one

It Was, Like, All Dark and Stormy (teens)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203771904574173403357573642.html#mod=todays_us_weekend_journal

US History (major Wikipedia article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_History

Feminist Movement in the United States (Wikipedia article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Movement_in_the_United_States

Jun 5, 2009

American Studies Briefs #1

Can Obama Tame the Democrats? (news analysis)
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1898166,00.html

The WayWe'll Work (series of short essays)
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898024_1898023,00.html

A Race to Keep Up with the Tightwads (news feature)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404577.html

Sotomayor Speeches Woven with Ethnicity (news)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060403265.html

Obama Mid-East Speech Supports Rights, Democracy (critical analysis)
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/04/obama-mid-east-speech-supports-rights-democracy

Barack Obama Speech at Cairo University, 2009 (Wikipedia entry, includes reaction citations)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_speech_at_Cairo_University,_2009

New Attention on Late-Term Abortions (news)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404267.html

Almanac of American Politics 2010 (ad for upcoming July edition of annual classic)
http://www.nationaljournal.com/almanac/2010/?APE06049C