Wikipedia continues to experiment with access and control in relation to the most frequently vandalized pages. Previously it would simply “lock” the pages, removing the ability of anyone to just edit the page. This loses the advantage of dynamic creation which made Wikipedia great and now changes are afoot to enable editing. Instead of locking [...]

Despite being late I made it to the first talk which was by Erik Zachte speaking about Future of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. He was eloquent and offered both an interesting animated graphical (a la Hans Rosling) example of the growth of different language groups within Wikipedia. He also offered a critical analysis of [...]

Can you hear the hordes of Germans academics chanting fight, fight, figth in the background? Apparently the argument stems from the German Wikipedia newsletter Kurier which contained a this text: Im besten Fall werden Blogs von zweitklassigen Wissenschaftlern betrieben, im Normalfall vom Prekariat. For those of us language-challenged non-German speakers, there is google translation which [...]

Time Magazine has an interesting article on the decline of Wikipedia. It puts the blame where it belongs – squarely on the editors Wikipedia’s natural resource is an emotion. “There’s the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia… Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions [...]

Wikipedia is planning to add a feature called “flagged revisions” which will fundamentally alter the basic philosophy of WIkipedia. The plan will effect the articles of now living people and will require trusted voluntary Wikipedia editors to accept changes made to any article. Prior to acceptance the changes will not be visible. The New York [...]

Nothing surprising that academia studies the effects of Wikipedia on everything from online collaboration to coffee making (ok so the latter is an exaggeration, maybe) but it was very nice to see that Wikipedia has a page that collects academic research on Wikipedia. Now that I think about it – it seems obvious that Wikipedia [...]

There has been some suspense beforehand but now it’s official. In under nine years the English version of Wikipedia has created more than three million articles. The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honours taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen. (The Guardian) [...]

Martin Rundkvist is an unusual combination he is an archeologist and a wikipedia watcher. His recent blog post discusses censorship on Wikipedia in an article Wikipedia Cracks Down On Cult Propagandists. The article b eginning with Wikipedias decision in May to bar all Church of Scientology users from editing CoS articles on wikipedia. But the [...]

It’s almost hard to think of a time when Wikimedia was not the source of all knowledge. After having survived the quality wars (is Wiki as good as printed Encyclopedia), amazing growth, lawsuits & legal threats, internal squabbles and international expansion – today Wikimedia seems as permanent and natural as summer holidays. But Ed Chi [...]

The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig: “Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture [...]

Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title! Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. [...]