ReadWriteWeb

Some users are being shown links to Wikipedia articles about current events clustered in the lists of sources on Google News, Google confirmed today. Those collaboratively written and edited pages will now sit side by side with professional news reporting.

Is this another sign that a fact-based understanding of the world is being eclipsed by an amalgamation of aggregated collaborative thinking? Or is it the ascent of the best the internet has to offer - crowdsourced news gathering and fact checking as an essential part of the story? We argue it's the later, but it's easy to imagine many people seeing Wikipedia on a news page and feeling pretty cynical about it.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

The search engine market is obviously dominated by a small number of big players, but that doesn't mean that small companies with interesting ideas can't still get at least a small slice of this market. One of these services is Duck Duck Go, which has a rather silly name, but turns out to be a pretty interesting search engine. Duck Duck Go aims to get its users to their desired destinations in as few clicks as possible. Instead of long lists of results, Duck Duck Go simply tries to return the most relevant links about a given topic.

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing today. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco today. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless."

The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media.

The Creative Commons Blog today announced that the Wikipedia community is holding a vote to move to using Creative Commons for its primary content license. The license being discussed is CC BY-SA or Attribution-ShareAlike. Although Wikipedia is already covered by the Gnu Free Documentation License (or GFDL), which is similar (and was the best available choice at the time Wikipedia got started), it contains some 'potentially onerous provisions' according to the Wikimedia Licensing Update page.

Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.

The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but Wikipedia as a platform can't be taken for granted.

Did you know that the U.S. intelligence agencies use a wiki to share information? The Intellipedia project was launched in April 2006. Sixteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community have access to it and use it to share information. According to a new report, however, the Intellipedia project is going through a bit of a midlife crisis right now. Until now, the wiki has mostly been curated by early adopters and enthusiasts, but a lot of the agencies have not been able to make it a part of their regular workflow, as many potential users are not comfortable with contributing to it yet.

This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he'd tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: "The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted." After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as 'spam'! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don't think we've done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.

UPDATE, Sunday 15 February PST: RWW has now been removed from the Wikipedia blacklist. I still think that RWW should never have been on the blacklist to begin with, it was simply not justified. However it appears that my personal comments on Wikipedia, now and in the past, may have upset some people - so for that I offer an apology to the offended parties.

Hot on the heels of Encyclopedia Britannica's announcement that it is moving to a more open editing system, Wikipedia too seems ready for an about face. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Wikipedia is considering moving away from its free and open editing system to a method that delays changes from appearing on the site until an authorized user has verified them.

On Thursday Jimmy Wales proposed turning on the system of "flagged revisions" in an attempt to reduce the amount of vandalism on Wikipedia, stating that recent death announcements of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd on Wikipedia could have been "100% prevented" by this system.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica is about to open ups its articles to edits by its users. Jorge Cauz, Britannica's president, tells the SMH that readers will soon be able to make edits to existing articles and create their own content. These updates, however, will be vetted by Britannica's staff, which hopes to review every edit within 20 minutes.

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