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Wikipedia today introduced a program called QRPedia, a QR code creation service that lets users snap a picture of a QR code and be automatically directed to a linked mobile Wikipedia entry in whatever written language their phone uses. If there's no article in their language for the designated topic, the program directs them to the most relevant related article that is available in that language. If you don't have a QR reader on your phone, I use the Google iPhone app, myself.

I dare you to find a cooler example of QR codes in action than QRPedia. Originally built at England's Derby Museum and Gallery (by the museum's Wikipedian in Residence!) the service is now available to anyone online. Multiple museums around the world have already put it to use, posting QR codes on the wall next to items on display. That's what the Internet is for, people, for taking the reality we're standing in front of and exploding it with a world of additional information available on demand.

Wikipedia pushed a new mobile interface live today and though end-users probably won't be able to tell the difference (except the new Beta label) - it's the start of something big. The new mobile front end framework that's been pushed live, called MobileFrontend, replaces an older less agile front end for the mobile site and aims to enable a host of new developments.

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.

Wikipedia pages about big news events are edited so fast and furious it's hard to keep track of why decisions were made, to make sure the editing is really optimized and to ensure that the most trustworthy sources get trusted and cited. A new experiment with crisis mapping organization Ushahidi is looking to change that. Ushahidi announced this morning that it has launched a new project called WikiSweeper, a new version of its open source hybrid of Tweetdeck and Google Reader called Sweeper that's built for Wikipedia editors.

Sweeper aggregates all kinds of multimedia streams into an analytics-rich, real-time curation interface. As Wikipedians use the tool, analytics will be gathered to help Wikipedia study how high-pressure editing is being performed and to help Ushahidi further build out Sweeper.

Has the cognitive surplus begun to dry up? During the annual Wikimania conference in Haifa, Israel, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the Associated Press that the organization is "scrambling to simplify what he called 'convoluted' editing templates that may be discouraging people from writing and editing Wikipedia's entries."

This issue came up in 2009, and Wales shrugged it off, saying that the number of editors was "stable" and quipping that, "You can't keep growing forever - there are only so many people on the Internet." But by tweaking and simplifying the editing process, which has worked so far to maintain a quality of content trusted by hundreds of millions of visitors, Wikipedia indicates that something needs to change.

Love it or hate it, you can't say Wikipedia is slow to innovate. The giant encyclopedia site announced this weekend that it will now roll-out site-wide an article rating system that allows page visitors to rate an entry on a scale of 1 to 5 on trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness and quality of writing. Article raters have the option of self-identifying as a subject matter expert for whatever article they rate.

Wikipedia says that after limited testing of the feature, user response has been overwhelmingly positive; readers have said they found the rating system useful, that they felt compelled to give feedback and have been shown increasingly likely to begin editing articles for the first time after using the rating tool. Data about article ratings is also made available for export and outside analysis under a Creative Commons license. The feature is limited to English Wikipedia for now.

Kittens and beer for everyone!

Wikipedia is now an undeniably good source of information on almost any topic. In order to continue improving, the community-edited site needs a continuous flow of volunteer editors willing to put time and energy into making new edits. And studies show that people are more willing to do that if they have been shown support by other people on the site.

Wikipedia's getting pretty well-filled out, so compliments are getting harder to come by and criticism is more available than ever. In order to step up the love, Wikipedia announced tonight that it has begun experimenting with and plans on pushing site-wide on Wednesday a new feature: the WikiLove Button.

Mashup developer Jeffrey Winter was thinking about Wikipedia one day and specifically about a rumor that if you followed the first link on any Wikipedia entry that you'd eventually land on the page for Philosophy. So, nerd that he must surely be, he built a web interface to trace this phenomenon and visualize it. The end result is very cool.

Called "All Roads Lead to 'Philosophy'," Winter's mashup tests what he believed to be a reasonable theory and it seems to test well. The fact is that Wikipedia is more regularly structured than one might think and as one commenter on Winter's post said, most Wikipedia articles begin by saying that the subject of the page is a subset of a larger concept. As you click through those larger and larger concepts, you will eventually hit the ultimate abstraction: philosophy! It's pretty cool, give it a try.

Although Wikipedia has long been viewed with suspicion by many educators, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working hard to forge alliances with academia, to build a better reputation, but also to elicit strong content contribution for the collaborative online encyclopedia.

At the beginning of the school year, we wrote about Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program that introduced students to editing Wikipedia pages as part of their public policy college coursework. As its the end of the school year now, the Wikimedia Foundation has just published some of the results from its first year of the initiative.

Last week, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a highly idiosyncratic (read: inaccurate) portrait of American revolutionary figure Paul Revere to the media. Now, a struggle has broken out on Wikipedia over Ms. Palin's version of history.

Her version was that Paul Revere rode through Boston, ringing a bell, to announce to the British that the colonials were preparing to fight. This is not remotely true. He rode silently, to let the revolutionaries know the British were en route.

Update after the jump.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular and highly-trafficked websites in the world, with over 3.6 million content pages. While much of the discussion around Wikipedia involves those using the site for research, it's always worth noting - and praising - the tens of thousands of volunteers who actively contribute and edit the content. In fact, according to Wikipedia, there have been some 463 million edits to the site - roughly 19 edits per page.

Wikimedia's data analyst Erik Zachte has just unveiled a new visualization that shows exactly where in the world these edits are occurring on any given day for the various language editions of Wikipedia.