ReadWriteWeb

Few websites have made a bigger impact on the world than Wikipedia has and today the organization is celebrating its 8th birthday. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wikipedia is gearing up for the future with new a new structured data search integration with Yahoo!, 24 times as much media storage space as it had this time last year and goals to integrate with media sites like Flickr.

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the immensely popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia, just announced that it has reached its fundraising goal for 2008, which will allow the foundation to cover its operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009. Overall, a total of 125,000 donors gave over $6.2 million during 2008, though in December alone, after a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, 50,000 individuals contributed more than $2 million.

Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

While the Wikipedia is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it surprisingly lacked an official mobile version until today. Over the years, a number of companies released their own mobile versions of the service, but an official version the Wikipedia itself was never available through a dedicated mobile interface. Now, you can surf to mobile.wikipedia.com to see a stripped down but highly functional version of the Wikipedia on your favorite mobile device.

ZDNet is reporting that six British ISPs are filtering access to Wikipedia as a result of the site being added to the Internet Watch Foundation after accusations that it is hosting what some consider child pornography.

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the immensely popular Wikipedia, just announced a new project that is meant to make it a lot easier for inexperienced authors to contribute articles and edits to the project. To do this, the Wikimedia Foundation just received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. The project will focus on making the user interface for editing and writing Wikipedia articles easier to use for less tech-savvy contributors.

After it had been unavailable in Germany for more than two days, the Wikipedia's German portal is finally back online. The local German version of the Wikipedia had become unavailable after a member of the German parliament, Lutz Heilmann, pressed charges against the German Wikipedia because of defamatory statements in his biography on the site. Heilmann argued that the article was "false and slanderous." A German judge then ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de.

To kick off our new Gritty Entrepreneurs interview series, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York we sat down with Jim Fowler, the Founder and CEO of Jigsaw, a business information and networking service that we noted in our recent review was a complement to LinkedIn rather than a competitor. As we sat sipping espresso in the Starbucks in the lobby, the CNN screen above us told of market mayhem. Ho hum, just another day in the life of a gritty entrepreneur. Let's find out how this particular web 2.0 company is competing in this climate...

Earlier this year, we reported about a contentious debate among Wikipedia authors about whether writers should be paid if their articles were used in printed versions of the online encyclopedia. Today, that question has been answered.

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.

Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.