If you look up and see red weather balloons this weekend, take note. You’ve unwittingly entered into a social experiment.
The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, launched 10 balloons, each eight feet wide, around the country as part of its “Network Challenge.”
In 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Friday that the online encyclopedia aspires to be a higher-quality source of information but added that mainstream publications could learn from its disclaimers and community features.
“Our goal is to make Wikipedia as high-quality as possible. Britannica or better quality is the goal,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the ad:tech conference in New York.
The council of elders that runs Wikipedia confirmed last week that, sometime soon, the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people.
A broad new survey of Wikipedia users found that only 13% of the online encyclopedia’s contributors are women.
The November survey, which had some 175,000 valid responses, was conducted in multiple languages by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the site, and United Nations University’s tech-research program MERIT. They presented the initial findings last week at Wikimania, an annual conference held this year in Buenos Aires.
Wikipedia wants to be legitimate so badly I can almost taste it.
I Can Has Cheezburger, the Web site that popularized the “art” of matching cat photos to misspelled captions, is the inspiration for a new independent musical that debuts Friday.
Kristyn Pomranz and Katherine Steinberg, both online editors at AOL, created “I Can Has Cheezburger: The MusicLOL” out of a mutual appreciation for the site.
Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due–within the next week or so–to hit the mark of 3m articles in English.
Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That’s the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s arbitration committee ruled to permanently block contributions and edits to Scientology articles from Internet addresses originating from the Church of Scientology’s headquarters.
The decision follows six months of debate among administrators of the user-edited encyclopedia, who found conflicts between Wikipedia editors who were Scientology enthusiasts and those who disliked the religion.
Google, which been pruning some early-stage products amid slower growth and the downturn, introduced two experiments Monday: a service that displays news search results in a chronological timeline and a way to find more relevant images.
Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, a database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today: It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.”
Law professor Eric Goldman loves Wikipedia, but he’s also convinced that the site contains the “seeds of its own destruction.” In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, Wikipedia will fail.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently announced an $890,000 grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation to simplify its very techie user interface for editing posts. It’s a big chunk of change on top of a new $6 million budget for the nonprofit encyclopedia, who some argue needs major restructuring rather than a simple cash infusion.
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