ReadWriteWeb

If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia and nearly a dozen other wiki-based projects, announced its five-year strategic plan today. The plan is the product of a collaborative effort that began in 2009 and involved more than 1,000 participants from around the world. In it, the organization lays out a number of goals it hopes to reach by 2015, including increasing the number of editors, articles, users and more.

After more than a year in the making, Wikimedia released the final version today, saying that it is "energized and enthusiastic about where Wikimedia is heading."

Video artist Ze Frank used to say that it would take him all day long to produce each of his five to ten minute long pieces. That's not unusual: creation of multi-media content is incredibly time and resource expensive, especially compared to the creation of text content. That's why I have a lot of interest in today's public launch of Qwiki - a service that combines speech-to-text and assembled multi-media to create little slideshows based on Wikipedia entries.

Geeks are engaged in heated debate, some arguing that the technology is lightweight, that the product is limited and that the funding of the company to the tune of $8 million by Facebook's exiled co-founder Eduardo Saverin and others is a sign that Silicon Valley has lost its mind like it did in the original days of the dot com bubble. You know what, though? Mainstream audiences are really excited about Qwiki. I am too.

DBpedia is a community driven effort that treats Wikipedia like a database, enabling people to do more sophisticated queries, distribute the open encyclopedia's data to the Web and add back to Wikipedia for the purposes of enriching it.

In a blog post this week, the community showed again what makes the service a unique effort with the launch of the latest version of the technology.

Creativity, they say, always builds on the past. So too do many wonderful things on the internet. What could be better to build the future on top of than our collective knowledge of the world as represented by Wikipedia? One startup technology company, recommendation service Hunch, announced today that it is dropping its use of Wikipedia data. Its stated reasons explain well why Wikipedia's incredible platform potential is not likely to be realized anytime soon.

Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th birthday tomorrow and while it's changed the world in incredible ways, it enters its second decade in the same position it began: as a destination website. In an era of web services and applications, Wikipedia could be so much more. Wikipedia as an organization would like it to be more. Unfortunately, it's not well positioned to realize its full potential yet - and the world isn't ready for it, either.

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."

This weekend, everyone's favorite massively-collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Wednesday morning, we got on the phone with Wikipedia founder Jimmy  Wales and Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner to find out about the site's past and, more importantly, its future.

While the site's meager origins are retold with anecdotes of entries like "Astronomer," which first read "Scientist whose area of Research is Astronomy," we expect a lot more from the online destination that now enjoys in excess of 400 million unique visits every month.

Wikipedia will turn 10 years old this weekend and its extended family is throwing it a birthday party in more than 300 different cities around the world. The full list of events is available at ten.wikipedia.org.

The significance of Wikipedia to the world can hardly be overstated. There was a time, not so long ago, when the most fortunate people in society would ride a horse for days to visit their nearest library, only to find a tiny fraction of the information that the internet makes instantly available to anyone today. Wikipedia is a primary place that information is neatly and collaboratively organized. That means you should take some time this Saturday night to make a toast to Wikipedia. How disruptive to our understanding of the world can Wikipedia be? Below, a particularly good example.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced this morning that it has reached its goal of $16 million in record time, more than doubling the $7.5 million the organization raised in 2009. The foundation, which is the non-profit parent organization of massively collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia and a multitude of other wikis, says that more than half a million people from all over the world donated to the effort this year.

The internet is a big place and a lot happens on it every day. We try to cover the things we find most interesting, but in case you disagree with our judgement, here are some other things that smart people might want to know about today. We offer each with a touch of editorial about what it means - and in some cases why we haven't written about it yet.

Today's almost-news-to-us includes: Amazon doing unnatural things with Wikipedia, Facebook plus Etsy makes me a power shopper, if Groupon is like the Borg - here's who might be the Baby Borg next in line, everyone is talking about an iPad RSS reader that got Facebook integration and Dora the Explorer gets new iOS apps. Awesome!