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 official Wikipedia Twitter account just tweeted that Wikipedia and all 11 other Wikimedia projects are currently down.

The tweet reads "Experiencing site outage across all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Operations team is working on the issue."

Update: Just a few, short Wikipedia-less minutes later and Walsh says the site is back online. According to Walsh, Wikipedia generally experiences a 99% uptime. You can go back about your previously scheduled Web browsing...or read this selection of favorite Wikipedia articles on ReadWriteWeb:

Wikipedia Goes 3D - Wikipedia recently traded in its flat, 2D logo for a shiny 3D one, with special character sets and everything!

Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source - The news gathering process on our favorite, massively collaborative encyclopedia is quite impressive.

Somebody Broke Wikipedia - While downtime is not common for Wikipedia, it's not entirely unheard of. At least it was while all of the U.S. was out drinking beer and grilling stuff instead of looking for knowledge, right?

Wikipedians to Throw 300 Parties to Celebrate 10 Years of World-Shaking Knowledge Sharing - I'll be at the party in San Francisco this weekend. See you there?

For the super-technically inclined, you can keep track of the situation at @wikimediatech. We will update here as we find out more.

It appears that the site is working intermittently as it will load one time and not another. Looking at the logs for its Down Or Not page, it appears that the site may have been down for a total of 20 minutes, but is showing as back online now. Wikipedia itself has more than 400 million unique visitors each month and is the 5th most popular property on the Web.

While you're waiting, why not see what Wikipedia says it will look like in 10 years?

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.

First, the new mobile front end will be deployed across all the Wikipedia sister sites and projects, right now it's just Wikipedia that has a specially formatted mobile interface. Next, this new front end will support forthcoming mobile developments like mobile editing, image uploading from mobile devices and offline support for Wikipedia on your phone. Those sound like great directions for Wikipedia mobile to go. Mobile has long felt like a second class citizen, but perhaps that will change soon.

A Wikipedia that supports mobile editing and image uploading will be a much more inclusive and real-time Wikipedia in the future.

Steven Walling, a Wikipedia volunteer (and former ReadWriteWeb reporter), explains in a comment on NextWeb.

About 20 minutes ago, Wikipedia Tweeted that "data is slowly coming back online."

The tool allows users to rate articles on sourcing, completeness, neutrality and readability, on a five-point system. A test run of the tool began yesterday and will run through December on a small number of articles.

Moka Pantages, communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that "what's really exciting about this tool is that it's a way to increase reader engagement at a very basic level by gathering feedback from readers on what they think [...] and at the same time, it provides Wikipedia editors another easy way to see which articles might need improvement."

Putting article assessment directly in the hands of the readers can also have a downside, of course, as noted in the blog post announcing the pilot program. "The potential downside is also clear," notes Wikipedian Sage Ross in the introduction entry, saying that "non-experts may submit low-quality ratings, or there may be attempts to game the system."

Could Wikipedia fall victim to the same alleged fates as social bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg, where groups of users with common interests band together to highlight or bury certain topics? Somehow we doubt it, but for now the site will test out the tool on a select 400 articles before letting it run free.

While Wikipedia is often touted as the online encyclopedia that anyone can make changes to, the reality is that there is a solid core of members and editors that do a lot of work on the site. An article feedback tool could bring a level of quick, surface-level interaction with the Wikipedian readership that has not been previously possible.

What do you think - will this inherently change the workings of Wikipedia? Or will Wikipedia march on, resilient as usual?

'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.

Wikipedia has made several steps away from the growing trend of encouraging users to share their data with one another, in some cases explicitly contrasting the giant encyclopedia's policies and ethos with Facebook's.

Facebook itself began offering HTTPS as an optional setting in January. Twitter did the same in March.

There are down sides to using HTTPS connections, however. Some third party apps that you do want to allow access to your browsing data, the fabulous Apture for example, are unable to access and thus provide services on top of data on HTTPS pages.

Many people will welcome the change none the less.

Wikipedia started testing these changes and others in March, according to the Wikipedia blog.

• New look - new theme, called Vector
• Improved navigation - tabs at top of each page more clearly define whether you are viewing the page or discussion page, and whether you are reading or editing a page
• Editing toolbar improvements - simpler and more intuitive.
• Link wizard - allows you to add links to other wiki pages as well as links to external sites
• Search improvements
• Table wizard to make creating tables easier
• Find and replace feature to simplify page editing

This is part of Wikipedia's "Usability Initiative," devoted to "measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation."

The number of new editors registering on the site has grown from 60 on an typical day in 2004 (when the site was 3 years old) to now 1800 people joining English Wikipedia and making at least 1 edit in a given day today. Vandalism is way up but still makes up less than 25% of edits from new editors. 55% of first edits by new editors today meet the site's (increasingly) stringent quality controls and require no clean-up by other editors. While that's down from 72% in 2004, it's still pretty good.

I'm a little surprised by these numbers, but it's also remarkable to think about how many people visit Wikipedia every day and don't sign up to edit anything. Twitter wishes people loved reading Tweets that much. It's interesting that a medium famous for making encyclopedic knowledge writable remains in the largest part a read-only phenomenon for most people.

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.