ReadWriteWeb

The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia often gets a bum rap for being a poor source of information, and many educators discourage - or even ban - their students from using the site. But the Public Policy Initiative is a pilot program undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation that, in conjunction with a number of universities, is making verifying and updating Wikipedia pages part of college coursework.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced earlier this week that it would need to raise $16 million to keep Wikipedia ad free, double the amount that it raised last year. That sounds like quite the challenge, right?

Well, according to the real-time statistics on its fundraising effort, Wikimedia has managed to raise in a week what took a month last year and it has a few guesses as to why.

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation managed to raise more than $8 million in its yearly fundraiser. On Monday morning, the non-profit behind Wikipedia is announcing that it aims to raise $16 million this year "so that Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to people around the world."

Keeping Wikipedia free is no small feat, however, and the foundation has released a few stats about the world's fifth most popular Web property that help illustrate the challenges it faces.

In order to help offset the costs of delivering an increasing amount of video, Wikipedia is experimenting with BitTorrent P2P technology.

As Michael Dale notes in the foundation's announcement, "One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships."

Wikipedia, the massively collaborative online encyclopedia, has started testing an article feedback tool that allows Wikipedia users to rate articles on four primary characteristics.

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.

Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.

"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle

You could have the greatest idea for a startup in the world. You could even have the best team working together to build a great product. That's all fine and dandy, but for first-time entrepreneurs, if you don't have traction, you're not going anywhere. Traction means having a measurable set of customers or users that serves to prove to a potential investor that your startup is "going places." The tricky part is actually gaining that traction and knowing when you have enough to approach potential investors, so here are a few tips that should help.

When mobile augmented reality experiences started popping up on smartphones in the last year, the majority of the apps helped people find businesses and other points-of-interest. Now as the social Web becomes increasingly mobile, the data it provides is more likely to contain location information. Foursquare and Gowalla are obvious examples of the growing social location trend, but even Twitter and YouTube can now link tweets and videos to a specific location. Today I had the opportunity to chat with Chetan Damani, CEO of acrossair, makers of several AR apps for the iPhone, about the trends his company is seeing in mobile AR.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, but the sparse design of the service isn't likely to win awards. On the iPad, on the other hand, we are now seeing a trend towards beautiful apps like Flipboard, which combines design and functionality. With Discover, Cooliris is now launching a free Wikipedia app with a magazine-like interface that allows users to browse and search Wikipedia on the iPad in a whole new way.

With its translation efforts now recognizing more than 30 languages, what better partner to work with the user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia than Google?

The search engine touted its efforts last week at Wikimania 2010, claiming that its translation tools have been used to translate "more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide".