ReadWriteWeb

An apparent data center outage has put Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, under for about two hours now. Visiting the site gives a user an error message, "Meta has a problem. Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties."

Steven Walling, a Wikipedia volunteer (and former ReadWriteWeb reporter), explains in a comment on NextWeb.

Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing - community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.

Wikipedia will roll out the latest changes to its editing policy later tonight, called Pending Changes. The constant struggle to find a way to limit vandalism without a chilling effect on legitimate editing will take a more permissive turn with the change.

Pending Changes is an experimental policy that will put edits made to controversial pages by new or unlogged-in users into a special tab on each page, viewable but not live on the primary page until approved by users given simple editing privileges. In other words, people who haven't logged in will be able to edit the George Bush page again, their edits will just be held in a public place for approval.

Jimmy Wales has withdrawn from actively editing, as a "founder," (ie, under a "Founder's flag") Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia he helped to create, and its allied and subsidiary websites. (Wales remains the Founder-Member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees and has all the same editorial rights as any other of the organization's volunteer editors. )

Last week, Fox News started asking representatives at companies that have donated to the group's Wikimedia Foundation for comment on their discovery that Wikimedia Commons had a large collection of photographs that could be described as pornography, even as child pornography. On hearing this, Wales apparently began unilaterally to delete images from the group's servers. This set off a great argument among the encyclopedia's editors.

The businesses of the 21st century are rapidly evolving to incorporate radical new methods of running a business and managing employees, and no group knows this better than the startup community. Startups have been at the cutting edge of innovation not only in the products they create, but in the way they run their companies and treat their workers. In this week's Weekend Reading selection, we look into how years of scientific research has uncovered what motivates people to be outstanding employees and how successful companies are incorporating these methods.

Wikipedia is rolling out new changes this month to all its users. They include a new theme (Vector), an editing toolbar and a simplified navigation and search.

Wikipedia started testing these changes and others in March, according to the Wikipedia blog.

Wikipedia, the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit.

This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site.

Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative?

In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we've mentioned in the past, Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that.

In the summer of 2008, J.R. Johnson sold Virtual Tourist to Expedia for $85 million dollars. While Johnson seems like the type of laid back Los Angeles entrepreneur that would take some vacation time, his quest for relevancy had him launching a new community the following March. Lunch.com is Johnson's attempt to cut through the noise that has proliferated since he first started in the user-generated-review space in 1999.

Says Johnson, "When I started, people asked me why anyone would want to read an amateur review. Now the environment has changed and there's even pay-per-post happening across the net. Virtual Tourist is travel-specific and you increase relevancy by picking a niche topic on which to base your community. With Lunch I'm trying to solve something new." Johnson spoke to ReadWriteWeb about some of the ways he's managed to ensure that his community is more than just search engine bait.