Meanwhile I'm having a running battle with some idiots on the Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. One or more of these clowns keeps deleting any and all references to my websites and articles. Now I know what Dave Winer feels like when he criticizes Wikipedia. It's a great resource, but just like anything - a few idiots always end up ruining it for the rest of us.

Of course, this is only a first attempt and we laud the Wikipedia Mobile team for releasing this app as an open-source application. However, the fact that the search field is populated with "::Home" when you first open up the app shows that the app still needs a lot of polish before it can compete with the 'unofficial' apps. For now, if you just want a lightweight way of accessing Wikipedia articles from your phone and you don't want to install an app, just use the official mobile site.

The site itself is indeed very basic and has been stripped of all images, which means it works well on a slow connection, but also makes for a somewhat disappointing experience compared to other mobile versions like the Wikipanion iPhone app (iTunes link).

The mobile site also breaks the content of the articles down into separate chunks and puts them onto different pages. This, too, makes browsing faster, but also makes it harder to find information on the service.

Spoken Wikipedia?

Steve Rubel also found a link to a feature called the "Spoken Wikipedia" in the settings, though this functionality is not available yet. We assume that this will allow you to play recorded versions of articles in the future, though we don't know if this will be achieved through speech synthesis or (crowdsourced?) audio recordings. There are already about 800 spoken articles available on the site.

'Unintentional'

After assessing the damage he had done, Heilmann, according to a post on his own site, has now decided not to press any further charges against the non-profit organization behind the German Wikipedia project, though he might still press charges against the authors of the controversial statements in his Wikipedia entry. In this statement, Heilmann argues that he never intended for the whole site to be shut down because of this, but that he wasn't able to stop the German bureaucracy from taking its course during the weekend because of a legal error in his request to have the ban overturned.

Streisand Effect

Of course, the whole affair spectacularly backfired on Heilmann and turned out to be a boon for the German Wikipedia, which collected donations worth over 32,000 Euros during the weekend. The controversial article about Heilman was read over half a million times since last Friday.

As far as we are aware, this is indeed the first time an academic journal has created this kind of explicit link between the academic peer-review process and the Wikipedia. The relationship between academia and the Wikipedia has always been an uneasy one, and it will be interesting to see how the academic community is going to react to this experiment.

Here is an excerpt from RNA Biology's new submission guidelines for its authors:

At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author's userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion). This article will be reviewed alongside the manuscript and may require revision before acceptance. Upon acceptance the former articles can easily be exported to the main Wikipedia space.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

The plan is reportedly being funded by a donation from MIT Prof. Philip Greenspun. Greenspun says he gave made a $20,000 donation earmarked specifically for paying illustrators but was envisioning $5 payments to illustrators in the developing world instead of Wikipedia's stated plan to pay $40 per illustration. Greenspun says no one from Wikipedia has contacted him since his check cleared.

This sounds like a great idea to me. I presume some Wikipedia purists will argue against it and it could lead to some kind of slippery slope - but I expect the program to run smoothly in time. It reminds me of sports blogging site Sportingo's mixed model of free user generated content augmented with licensed sports images and statistical databases. Wikipedia already has a fascinating Graphics Lab department where images are improved collaboratively (for free!). I can't help but wonder about for Wikipedia is checking for copyright of visual images. That may become more difficult than it had been previously.

The filtered content involves the controversial 1970s record album cover from the German band Scorpions that features a naked prepubescent girl. The album, Virgin Killer, was banned in many countries when it was released until a replacement cover was created.

According to the report, when UK users attempt to edit content on Wikipedia, they receive this notice from the site:

"Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well."

Because the ISPs are routing Wikipedia traffic through proxies the majority of Wikipedia editors appear to be coming from the same IP range. The result is that if Wikipedia bans a single customer from one of the ISPs for vandalizing the site, it bans every customer from that ISP. British Telecom does not appear to be filtering.

There is an ongoing discussion over on Wikipedia's administrators' noticeboard with a list of affected IP addresses, workarounds and updates.

Powerset is a much-hyped semantic search engine that uses natural language processing to "understand" concepts in web content and match pages to queries. Right now it only searches Wikipedia (and Freebase). We put it through some early paces last week.

Wikiwix

Wikiwix calls itself the "ultimate Wikipedia articles search engine." It searches all of the Wikipedia sites at once (i.e., Wikiquote, Wikiionary, Wikinews, etc.) and has a very handy Wikipedia image search.

AskMeNow

AskMeNow is a mobile-targeted Wikipedia search engine that does some natural language processing similar to Powerset and then attempts to cull your answer directly from Wikipedia. Like any NLP search, it's not perfect, but often enough it is right on the nose.

Similpedia

Similpedia lets you find related content on Wikipedia. Paste a URL or a paragraph of text and it will dig up articles on Wikipedia that are in some way related.

Gollum

Gollum is a Wikipedia browser that supposedly "[reduces] the complexity of information" and makes it easier to browse the online enclyclopedia. To be honest, though, we can't really see any benefit over just browsing Wikipedia in Firefox.

Qwika

Qwika doesn't just search Wikipedia -- it searches wikis. 1,158 of them. Wikipedia is included in those it searches, however, and the site makes it easier to search across multiple languages.

WikiMindMap

WikiMindMap is one of the coolest Wikipedia search mashups out there. Enter a search term, and the site will generate a mindmap based on related Wikipedia entries allowing you to easily explore a topic and its related articles in full.

Wikiwax

Wikiwax gives Wikipedia search the AJAX suggestion treatment. Get search suggestions while you type and find that Wikipedia article a fraction of a second faster.

Lexisum

Lexisum takes Wikipedia articles and summarizes them to a smaller, more digestible format that are better set up for printing. You can choose from a number of standard print sizes to display your article summary (A4, A6, etc.).

Ask.com & SearchMash

Ask.com and SearchMash (a test sandbox for Google) each augment their search results with information from Wikipedia. Not a pure Wikipedia search, but interesting stuff from a couple of major search players.

Bonus site: Wikirage

Wikirage is something like Google Trends for Wikipedia. The site shows trends on Wikipedia based on edits. Hot this week for example, the Sichuan earthquake and American Idol. We gave the site a full review last August.

The research is only live on a cached copy of Wikipedia right now, but it targets what's possibly the biggest need Wikipedia has as it tries to grow into greater mainstream use - trust in an open system.

First blogged about on the fantastic group blog SmartMobs, WikiTrust has the potential to be applied to any wiki anywhere. The researchers building it say they are now working on a version that will process the live content of Wikipedia in real time.

For now you can navigate around the WikiTrust dump of Wikipedia, including using the search box. It's very fun to use. The entry for file format RSS, for example, is written by solid authors with relatively little history of contested text. The entry for "God", on the other hand, is almost entirely written by authors whose reputations are highly suspect! That's the case with the version of the God article saved in WikiTrust at least.

We think that this system for determining author reputation seems like a good one - do readers agree?

Britannica is trying to a take a hybrid approach which combines Britannica's editorial expertise with Wikipedia's principles of transparency and openness.

In the interview with the SMH, Jorge Cauze also bemoaned that Google's search results consistently ranked Wikipedia higher than his own Britannica. The reason for this, however, is simple: you need to be a subscriber to get access to the full content of the Encylopedia Britannica. If you are not, the site will constantly pester you with overlay ads for its premium membership and only give you access to a limited range of features. Given a choice, most writers will link to the free Wikipedia instead of the Britannica, which, in turn, enhances Wikipedia's standing in Google's index.

There are many reasons why Wikipedia trumped Britannica on the Internet. For one, Britannica took a long time to open up to the Internet, which gave Wikipedia a chance to become the de-facto Internet encyclopedia.

Difference in Quality?

As for the actual difference in quality between the two sites, that question still remains to be answered. A 2005 study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia (at that time) was about as a good a source as Britannica, but the study was heavily criticized by Britannica (see Nature's rebuttal of Britannica's rebuttal for more details about the discussion).

Britannica Can't Scale

In the end, however, whenever somebody discovers a mistake in the Wikipedia, those edits can be made public within seconds. Currently, the Wikipedia sees more than 150,000 legitimate edits pre day. The most active Wikipedia users have made over 200,000 edits. There is simply no way for Britannica's editors to approve this many edits - the process simply wouldn't scale unless they hired a lot of highly qualified (and fast) editors.

This year Wikipedia survived the launch of Google's Knol, a product many feared Google would give favorable treatment, served up its pages to nearly 700 million unique viewers and launched its first official mobile version of the site. What's next? Big, tech-centered plans.

Yahoo! announced today that Wikipedia has now been added to its semantic and structured data "Search Monkey" program. Yahoo! searchers will now be served up some nicely organized links, summary information and images from Wikipedia when they are available about a search query. We'd sure love to see Google do this same thing.

A Whole Lot More Media Servers and Flickr Integration?

According to an interview this week by Network World with Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brion Vibber, the organization started 2008 with 2 Terabytes of storage for media like images, music and movies. Today that's been increased to 48 Terabytes with the donation and discounted sale of a pile of Sun servers.

Wikipedia expects to see huge increases in media uploads in the coming months and years. Vibber's goals include support for full length, high quality feature film upload to Wikipedia and integration with 3rd party media sites, possibly including Flickr.

That all sounds really exciting to us. We're excited to see what the next year will bring. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

In order to compute an author's standing within the Wikipedia community, WikiTrust analyzes how long an author's contributions stayed live on the site before they were changed or reverted. The longer an editor's contributions last on the site, the higher that editor's reputation will be. In addition, WikiTrust also looks at the text itself and examines the reputation of all the author's who edited this portion of the text.

The basic assumption here is that the more people look at an article and decide that it doesn't need editing, the more trustworthy the text must be. For a more detailed look at how exactly WikiTrust computes an author's and text's reputation, have a look at this presentation (PDF) the WikiTrust team gave at the recent Wikimania 2009 conference.

As Wikipedia doesn't want to deter new editors, the implementation of WikiTrust on the English Wikipedia will not display a user's reputation but focus on the trustworthiness of the text instead. By default, WikiTrust will also be turned off and users will have to turn it on themselves if they want to see the color-coded version of an article.

If you want to try out WikiTrust today, before the system goes live on the English Wikipedia, you can try out this Firefox add-on. For a slightly different view of who edited an article and how often it was edited, also have a look at the WikiDashboard GreaseMonkey script.

Looks like this is a brand new entry. They include a link to my blog, so I'm happy ;-)

German publisher Bertelsmann just released a printed, 992 page version of the German Wikipedia. It will sell for 19.95 Euros, of which 1 Euro will go to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Abbreviated

Of course, the printed version could not include every keyword in the online version of the German Wikipedia, so the publishers restricted themselves to about 50.000 keywords and 1000 illustrations. Overall, the printed version includes about 20.000 articles, which were abbreviated by the editors.

It's important to note that this printed version is not an encyclopedia, but instead a dictionary that is based on the 20.000 most read articles in the German Wikipedia. Most entries are only a few words long. If you wonder about what this book looks like, Google Books already includes a preview of the text and, in keeping with the GPL license, the publisher has made the text available for download.

Why?

The real question, however, is why anybody would want to buy a printed and abbreviated version of Wikipedia. After all, you lose all of the advantages of full-text search and the ability to edit articles in this printed text.

It is worth noting, too, that this is not the first time the German Wikipedia has been published. German publisher Zenodot tried to market a Wikipedia-based encyclopedia in 2005, but the project was cut short because there was simply no demand for it.