Tag: WIKIPEDIA

Today, about a month after we first caught wind of it, Wikipedia unveiled a revamped look, dubbed Vector, and some improved features. According to Wikipedia, the site spent the last year beta-testing these improvements on about 635,000 users, and experienced an 83-percent retention rate. You'll first notice a redesigned globe logo. The world's biggest time waster overhauled the site navigation ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently turned snitch on his former Wiki-compatriots, but he probably won't make too many enemies for doing so (outside of the Wikimedia Commons circles, at least). Wales reportedly alerted federal authorities to the presence of child pornography under two separate Commons categories, saying "I ...

Who says print is dead? In an inspired move sure to make reading Simpsons trivia feel more scholarly, Wikipedia, along with publishing partner PediaPress, is letting users create custom books from Wikipedia's enormous wealth of articles. The service is now built directly into Wikipedia via the "create a book" link featured on the sidebar of all Wikipedia articles. After starting the book ...

Never one to shy away from change or the addition of a new feature, Facebook has now introduced Community Pages to the social networking world. Community Pages, which are still in beta, are basically a spin-off from Fan Pages. As you might recall, Fan Pages were created to help people connect and interact with musicians, businesses and other brands. But people soon began creating Fan Pages for ...

When established and enormously popular Web sites implement aesthetic changes or programming upgrades, devoted followers inevitably voice their disapproval. Amid constant progression and technical evolution, though, such redesigns are absolutely necessary for services to remain relevant and user-friendly. It won't be news to 500,000 lucky beta previewers, but Wikipedia, one of the Web's most ...

With the decade coming to a close in less than two months, expect to see plenty of "Best of" lists. It's awful fun to think back on marquee moments from years past, especially when those moments occurred on our beloved Internet. Plus, it's shocking to recall just how much the Web has changed since the start of the millennium. In that spirit, the Webby Awards has released its list of "The Ten Most ...

Typically, Wikipedia is lauded as a gateway to pretty much everything you'd ever want to know. But when the free dissemination of information butts heads with governmental legislation, censorship rears its ugly head, and things get complicated. Such is the case in Germany, where a man convicted of killing Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr in 1990 is now suing Wikipedia for the removal of his name ...

In a blog post for the New York Times, writer Noam Cohen reflects on the challenges that Wikipedia faces in the coming years, as brought up at last week's Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires. One of the major points of discussion was the incredible growth the site had, and why it's currently slowing down. One of the theories offered suggests that most general topics have entries now, and future ...

Dr. James Heilman of Moose Jaw, Canada recently created a stir in the psychology and psychiatry fields when he posted to Wikipedia 10 inkblot images used in the Rorschach test. Relying on how an interviewee describes what they see in the blots, the blotchy images can supposedly reveal the workings of a human mind. The copyright on the images (published in 1921 by a Swiss psychiatrist of the same ...

A drama has been playing out on the Web involving Wikipedia and Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief and author of the book 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price.' Anderson's book doesn't hit store shelves until July 7th, but copies have already landed on the desks of reviewers at several publications. One of them, the Virginia Quarterly Review, published an article on June 23 revealing ...

Wikipedia, which characterizes itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," might need to tack a slight addendum on to the end of that description: "unless that anyone happens to log in from a computer owned by the Church of Scientology." According to the Register, the administrators of Wikipedia have decided to ban all editors who log on to the site from IP addresses owned by the ...

The times they are a-changing, and so, too, are the encyclopedias. It wasn't that long ago that an encyclopedia set cost thousands of dollars and was delivered by a truck -- a big truck. Then, when the multimedia computer found its way into the home, the encyclopedia morphed into (relatively) cheap discs full of information, often given away for free with a new computer. Microsoft's Encarta was ...

The Internet generation's resource of choice may soon be toning down the radical nature of its editorial process, according to the New York Times. After anonymous visitors edited the Wikipedia entries of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, only to falsely read that they had both passed away on Inauguration Day, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales implied -- via his user page -- that the online ...

The errors of omission in drug information found on Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia, can be dangerous, doctors say. While most of the details on what a pharmaceutical can do are accurate, it's the missing pieces that can cause harm – and some drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe. Dr. ...

Wikis (and Wikipedia in particular) are wonderful tools that show the potential of Web 2.0. Because wikis are editable by anyone, they are particularly vulnerable to attacks and "digital graffiti." The most recent attack is captured in this screenshot on COED Magazine's Web site, in which fans of the University of Florida football team went to town on the Wikipedia entry for their rivals, the ...