Wikimedia Foundation says the blackout reached 162 million people. Of those, 8 million used Wikipedia's tool to look up their congressional representatives. The blackout generated three trending Twitter topics when it started at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday. Twitter also revealed frustration and lack of understanding of the blackout. But this was all by design. Censorship is frustrating. Wikipedians wanted a campaign that was both symbolic and effective, and that's what its staff delivered.

Wikimedia Foundation has been tracking SOPA/PIPA as a threat since the hearings in November. After the first official markup of SOPA in December, Wikimedia published its first public stance against the bill, saying it would "hurt the free web and Wikipedia." At that point, the staff and the worldwide community of volunteers began to discuss some kind of concerted response.

The effort got its own dedicated Wikipedia page where the community hashed out the details. At the end of the process, volunteers examined the results. They presented a request to the Wikimedia Foundation proposing the community's vision of the blackout: Shut down English Wikipedia, leaving the mobile version accessible, but blocking access to all pages on the desktop except those for SOPA (the House version) and PIPA (the Senate version).

"It was challenging" for the organization to follow the will of a huge community, says Jay Walsh, Wikimedia's head of communications, "but they also helped us to keep it simple." The staff continued working with the community right up to the blackout figuring out how to word the messages. The final message was three sentences long and not specific. "Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet," it said. There was a link to learn more, but this basic explanation was all the landing page displayed.

This Is The World We Might Find Ourselves Living In

"We were presenting information, but we were also presenting a reality," Walsh says. "The community knew that a protest like this would establish that reality: This is the world we might find ourselves living in." For the millions of people who use Wikipedia every day, that was bound to be frustrating, but that was exactly the point.

Two days before the blackout, Wikimedia's executive director, Sue Gardner, posted the announcement of the blackout on the Wikimedia blog to prepare the community. It explains how Wikipedians arrived at the decision to protest and anticipated some criticism. "In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position," Gardner wrote. "But although Wikipedia's articles are neutral, its existence is not."

That post received over 12,000 comments. "I'm used to seeing so much dreck [in online comments]," Walsh says, "and yeah, a lot of people were angry and thought this wasn't going to work." Many of the criticisms were thoughtful, arguing that a blackout wouldn't work. Others expressed dismay that Wikipedia would be offline, even for a day (and despite the fact that using the mobile version or turning off Javascript would bring it right back). The most salient message Walsh got from the comments was "I hate that this has to happen, but I get it."

A Protest & A Demonstration

Not everyone got it. Once the blackout went up, a brilliant Twitter curator named @herpderpedia tracked confused and outraged tweets about it all day. "I think there's a lot of ignorance," Walsh says, "a lot of misunderstanding." People use Wikipedia as a utility, and the blackout was an effort to show users that it's not that simple. "And we're not saying, 'Don't take Wikipedia for granted,'" Walsh says. "We're saying there's more to it. You can continue to take Wikipedia for granted, but it has to exist in a legislative environment where it can work."

"This effort was about getting people to fight this bill," Walsh says, "but it also has resulted in people taking a little bit more interest in what SOPA/PIPA might do to the Internet as a whole."

Congress pissed off wikipedia and google. wtf?

— Juliet Adams (@xjulietadamsx) January 18, 2012

Wikipedia's blackout didn't have to drive every single user to study the bills and understand them. It only had to engage a few and cause the rest to make a lot of noise. By demonstrating the frustration of an Internet blackout, the issue attracted more attention than a more straightforward campaign would have gotten.

5% of the people who hit Wikipedia's blackout page looked up their representatives' contact information. That's 8 million people. Surely not all of them called, faxed or emailed. But ProPublica tracked members of Congress on their positions on SOPA/PIPA between yesterday and today, and look at the difference. The tactics employed yesterday by Wikipedia and other sites moved the needle.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

Whenever you divert a river through a narrow channel, the result is always raging and torrential. Google, Wikipedia, several blogs published through WordPress and Tumblr, and a few other sites yesterday successfully stuck a few logs in the river. They diverted people's attentions for a moment, and got quite a few of them to agree that changes in the Internet to divert traffic away from content (except for this one) are usually bad.

The result was a logjam of public support, a signal of concerted public opposition to government altering the mechanism of the Internet. Principal sponsors of the SOPA and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) legislation publicly withdrew their support of both bills in their respective houses. Now, despite new markup hearings scheduled for next month, it is extremely unlikely that anti-piracy legislation will emerge from Congress this term.

Victory, it would seem, for the SOPA and PIPA opponents. But we need to ask ourselves, do millions of Internet users truly know more today about the efforts to preserve the Internet and the industries that depend on it, than they did 48 hours ago? Or did Google and Wikipedia just present everyone with yet another popup (like the one with the green button and the red button where the green one says, "YES, I'M 18 OR OVER") and people click the one closest to the content they're really looking for.

But you can surely step in it once

You've often told us this yourself: We in the media are too full of ourselves; we think we're so clever. We can stick our foot in the river, and when it changes direction we proclaim ourselves God and say we, too, can change the course of mighty rivers. We're always trying to make ourselves "mainstream," and we scratch and claw for any means necessary to have Google make us "mainstream."

But we typically fail to keep track of where the river goes from here. Which makes the report this morning from Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood an ominous and foreboding indicator of future events for anyone preparing a "Mission: Accomplished" banner for the victory party. Finke cites an "anonymous" memo from an unnamed Hollywood studio executive (who, despite not being named, openly states he produced a TV series called "24") as making clear that Hollywood's campaign contributions are not guaranteed to anyone. After last Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration, the content industry may be rethinking its support for Democratic Party fundraising efforts in the near-term.

Hollywood, which is in California, the home state of Rep. Darrell Issa, who has become the loudest SOPA opponent in the House. California, with 55 electoral votes. The state where recent polls expressed a preference for that nice fellow who worked with Hollywood to help produce the Salt Lake City Olympics.

In the two decades-plus that I've covered anti-piracy legislation in the U.S., as well as other countries, I've provided the nasty details, the ironic twists, the points of conflict where the legal, creative, and technology worlds fail to connect. And in all of that time, I've been told by editors (when I've had editors), and even frequently by some readers, that folks like you simply don't care. I can still hear the words of one editor who hosted a media workshop resounding in my head: "The Internet is not about facts," he said. "It's about traffic. And you don't get traffic by publishing a bunch of facts, facts, facts, facts."

If anything is less about facts than that particular editor's view of the Internet, it's politics. You can't garner public support or opposition to an issue, I've been told, through a technical recitation of every use case. Instead, it's been suggested, to make an issue popular, you should boil it down to two words that fit on a protest sign. Case in point: Easily the most convincing explanation I've ever read about the potential effects of the anti-piracy system SOPA suggested comes from the blog of an ISP named SoftLayer. It's a detailed technical description of the mess that any DNS server would have to wade through if it were to be amended with instructions preventing it from resolving only certain domain name requests.

As an optimist, I'd think a reasonable person would come away from that blog post convinced that SOPA's suggested remedy was not viable. But you can't fit "DNS Pre-emption Would Break Name Resolution Cycles" on a campaign banner.

Insert cause here

You need something else. Up until 2009, the two-word slogan that anti-piracy opponents went with was "government conspiracy." (Which still made for a big protest sign.) Yet it did not resound with a broader audience, probably because none of the players in the alleged conspiracy had any direct relationship with you, the everyday user. It was all taking place in soundproofed, smoke-filled, underground bunkers, probably with Peter Sellers playing at least three roles.

What ended up working was something more like this: "Censorship bad."

And you know, it's true. Censorship bad. You don't want censorship? Of course not. Here's a nice popup for you. Click the button that says censorship bad. You can do it. Good boy.

Never mind that none of the bills are really about censorship. If they have the same effect, I've been told, it's the same thing. As you go forth about your business today, and as you take heart in the very probable fact that the Internet will not be ruined by an ill-considered bill from folks who didn't comprehend the technology, ask yourself this: How long will the Web maintain its integrity as a source of unfettered, unfiltered facts, facts, facts, facts as long as congresspeople, service providers, content providers, artists, publishers, journalists, political candidates, and you continue to let yourself be used as a tool for someone else's two-word-slogan, private interests?

With an estimated 25 million daily visitors, Wikipedia is the largest site to take part in the blackout. Reddit, a wildly popular website with massive traffic, only garners a fraction of the pageviews that Wikipedia gets in a month, and even those page views are typically dominated by a certain subset of the Internet community. Wikipedia is viewed by a much more mainstream audience, a fact certain to propel SOPA further into the consciousness of everyday, non-geek Web users.

Even so, its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is alive and well and many SOPA opponents fear that the legislation could return in another form. That may not be likely to happen in the current legislative season, but it's not unthinkable considering the political reach of the big media organizations backing SOPA.

The apparent demise of SOPA as we knew it comes after a remarkable display of concerted opposition among Silicon Valley companies, technology thought leaders and a conglomeration of Web-based communities of which Reddit is only one example. Growing opposition to the proposed law first caused companies to rethink their stance, then politicians.

The bill was already as good as derailed by the time the Obama administration spoke out against it, partly in response to anti-SOPA petitions on the White House website.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia and others are moving forward with Wednesday's blackout, in the hopes of heightening public awareness about the proposed legislation even further. Not only does Wikipedia.org get a ton of direct traffic, but the site's articles often rank quite high in search results so even some of the most casual Web surfers are prone to run into blacked-out, anti-SOPA pages on Wednesday.

That awareness is already being raised, as mainstream news outlets like CNN have begun covering the story. For anybody who happens to miss the news, perhaps they'll notice if a thing or two looks different on the Web Wednesday.

Wikipedia serves more than 470 million unique visitors every month, and it doesn't pay for all that bandwidth with advertising. This annual fundraising campaign provides the bulk of Wikimedia's funding, and the rest comes from gifts and grants like the one Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki made for $500,000 in November.

As usual, creepy Jimmy Wales pics adorned Wikipedia pages throughout the campaign. This year's pleas also featured volunteer editors from all over the world. You may find it creepy, but these sultry faces and their hilarious juxtapositions must be working.

"Our model is working fantastically well," says Wikimedia's executive director, Sue Gardner. "Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive."

As the volunteer-run encyclopedia has grown, it has shown signs of stress. Editorial work has fallen behind, held back by a difficult markup language and some snooty veteran editors. But Wikipedia is an irreplaceable online institution now, and the ongoing success of its fundraising campaigns proves it. If Wikimedia can scare us into donating to keep its vast resources alive and ad-free, more power to it.

Check your browser history. How many times did you visit Wikipedia in the past week?

Wikimedia's annual spending tops $20 million, and the campaign funds a majority of its operations. So the Brin Wojcicki gift isn't a majority stake, but it's surely appreciated. The gift is not affiliated with Google directly, but it's worth noting that Google once donated $2 million to Wikimedia. As the end point of so many search queries, donations are not the only way Google supports Wikimedia's websites.

Wikimedia sites receive 477 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and is the fifth most popular website in the world. It is available in over 280 languages, and it contains over 20 million articles supported by more than 100,000 volunteer contributors.

But the site is under stress. There's an enormous backlog of unfinished editorial work, and one in 20 articles are missing references entirely. Furthermore, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that difficult controls and an inscrutable markup language are "discouraging people from writing and editing Wikipedia's entries." In short, if you use Wikipedia, it could use your help.

Despite its challenges, Wikipedia is working on some truly cool stuff. It introduced a program called QRPedia in September that lets mobile users easily link to Wikipedia entries for real-world things they come across. It's also busy building out a new mobile interface to go along with it. Wikimedia is building the future, and Brin and Wojcicki have decided to help.

What do you think? Is Wikipedia worth it? Before you answer, go check your Web history and see how many Wikipedia pages are in it.

"Whatever people may say about declining participation, Wikipedia still generates a lot of new content," Manguard begins. "We add articles and upload dozens upon dozens of files every day, and that is unquestionably a good thing. However, as a community, we tend to neglect a large variety of problems that have cropped up in older articles. We sweep them under the rug, so to speak, and that is unquestionably a very bad thing."

"The fact of the matter is that Wikipedia has swept so many problems under the rug that we now have a monster on our hands," he writes.

"We have backlogs that are in the hundreds, in the thousands, and in a few cases, in the hundreds of thousands, that have sat relatively untackled for months or years. These aren't petty issues either. There are 250,000 articles that need references. By that, I don't mean that they need more references, I mean that there are, at last count, a quarter million articles that do not have a single citation to support them, and those are just the articles that are tagged as such. Some of these completely unreferenced articles were tagged as far back as October 2006, a half decade ago. There are an additional 250,000 articles that need additional references, and over 200,000 with unsourced statements. Less absurdly high in count but just as important, there are almost 10,000 articles tagged as containing original research, over 8,500 with disputed neutrality, and over 5,500 with disputed accuracy.

For context, the English section of Wikipedia contains 3.77 million articles. That means that the 250,000 articles that need references but have none make up 6.6% of the site's articles.

Manguard's write-up of the situation concludes with a plea for people to jump in and take a big bite out of the problem. He crossed off 1500 items in a single month on his own, he writes.

Wikimedia Foundation staff member Neil Kandalgaonkar says that it's a workflow management issue that ought to be a solvable problem.

"This discussion hasn't really made it to the wikis yet, but at the Foundation, some of us are trying to start a movement towards documenting and re-examining how Wikipedia handles workflows. Firstly, the Foundation employees are hired for skill and availability, so they are rarely wiki-insiders, and often unaware of how complicated some of the processes are. Secondly, once you document these workflows, certain weaknesses in them become apparent.

"It seems that this pattern comes up over and over again; where things are seriously broken, it's because there's no system to channel resources appropriately. So you need to make appeals for heroic behavior. This is unsustainable.

"The wiki model is great when, in one person, you can combine a lot of roles: noticing a problem, doing research, scheduling a time to do the work, and the requisite technical skill. All that comes into play, even if you're just fixing a typo. But when the problems are larger and more difficult, it starts to make sense for there to be different roles and stages to the work, and maybe even different incentives.

"A site of our size should not be frightened of a queue of work that is several thousand items long. We just have to figure out how to activate our readers' interest. What do you think?"

Manguard points to Germany, where all kinds of beautiful complex concepts are wrapped up in powerful, singular and really long words. There, Wikipedians participate in an annual competition to clean up backlog called Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb.

Perhaps all we need is a good dose of Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb, world wide. (I once had a cat named Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb. That's not true but I did once meet a cat named Weltschmerz, the German word for "feeling the pain of the world." Poor cat.)

Either way, it should probably be no surprise that the world's largest and richest encyclopedia struggles with a backlog of editorial refinements and improvements that need to be performed. It should probably also be no surprise that a community-driven project like this has some struggles with management.

It should be noted, however, that despite its many challenges and problems - Wikipedia is an awesome world-changing phenomenon that represents a huge net win for humanity. Everyone who works to keep it that way deserves meaningful commendation.

Wikipedia has made several steps away from the growing trend of encouraging users to share their data with one another, in some cases explicitly contrasting the giant encyclopedia's policies and ethos with Facebook's.

Facebook itself began offering HTTPS as an optional setting in January. Twitter did the same in March.

There are down sides to using HTTPS connections, however. Some third party apps that you do want to allow access to your browsing data, the fabulous Apture for example, are unable to access and thus provide services on top of data on HTTPS pages.

Many people will welcome the change none the less.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Google Plus, Facebook and Kindle Fire - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

This week's Google Plus traffic win was a favorite of ReadWriteWeb readers. Contrasting that to Facebook's re-design, which also garnered much attention, shows you the impact of this rivalry for social networking domination.

Wikipedia also impressed this week with a very cool QR implementation. Take a photo of a QR code and you'll be automatically routed to a linked mobile Wikipedia entry about the object, in your language. As ReadWriteWeb Lead Writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick said, "I dare you to find a cooler example of QR codes in action than QRPedia."

Amazon announced their Wi-Fi only, 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. The $199 device is full-color, backlit and weighs 14.6 ounces. While it may not be an iPad killer, as one ReadWriteWeb reader pointed out in the comments, Netflix may be in for some serious competition once this thing arrives. Look for the KIndle Fire to ship on November 15.

More Kindle Fire Coverage

• The Implications of Amazon's Silk Web Browser
• What Did Amazon's Kindle Fire Just Do To Android?
• Amazon's New Cloud-Fueled Web Browser Will Predict Your Browsing Habits
• Why the Kindle Fire is No iPad Killer
• Poll: Will You Develop Apps For the Kindle Fire?
• Big Question (Answered): Who is the Intended Market for the Kindle Fire?

ReadWriteWeb Meetup in Portland

Imagine an evening surrounding by cool folks, like yourself, discussing important technology stories, debating the merits of data portability and net neutrality, thumb wrestling over browser preferences and your favorite phone OS.

If that sounds like your idea of the coolest evening ever, and you're local to Portland, OR, please come and hang out with many of the ReadWriteWeb staff, and a group of the most awesome readers a blog could have, at the Green Dragon on October 13, 6:30 - 8:30.

RSVP for the Portland Meetup

To plan a ReadWriteWeb meetup in your area, check out our ReadWriteWeb Meetup Everywhere page. There are already half a dozen meetups being planned in November for St Louis, Savannah, Boston, New Zealand and Palo Alto. If your city isn't there, please list it asap.

More 'Don't Miss' Posts

• Microsoft's Non-Response to the Secure Boot Problem
• Firefox Creator Says the Web is Dead Meat; Android Creator Disagrees
• Here's What Spotify's New Facebook Integration Looks Like
• Google Analytics Finally Goes Real Time (Plus New Premium Accounts)
• The Implications of Amazon's Silk Web Browser
• Infographics: Why Your Company's Intranet is Failing
• How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere

ReadWriteWeb Channels

Cloud

• PwC Survey Says: Telecoms Are Overconfident About Security
• The Implications of Amazon's Silk Web Browser
• Are You Ready for Windows in Your Things?

Enterprise

• Hotel Lobbies Become More Social
• First Challenge to FCC Net Neutrality: Is Splitting Hairs Legal?
• Infographics: Why Your Company's Intranet is Failing

Hack

• Sencha Likes IE10: A Native Apps Library for JS is Coming
• "Testing" Your Code With Myers-Briggs
• Microsoft Makes the Case for More jQuery, Fewer Dependencies

Mobile

• PhoneGap Applies to Apache Software Foundation, Contemplates Name Change
• Mozilla Brings WebSockets API to Firefox for Android
• How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere

ReadWriteWeb Community

You can find ReadWriteWeb in many places on the web, a few of which are below.

• ReadWriteWeb on Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb on Twitter
• ReadWriteWeb on LinkedIn

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

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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.

This is sci-fi stuff. In the movies there would be a button on real world objects that you could click, and then a projected 3D Princess Leia or whatever would offer you a lecture about everything humanity knows about the object you're in front of, and everything that's related. In whatever language you speak. Instead, it's here now and it's on our phones. And it's Wikipedia.

I sure hope this catches on all over the place. Its adoption may be limited by the bravery required to point people to the collective consciousness, publicly editable discussion online about yourself or your organization.

Do people use QR codes? Outside the US they do and have for years. Inside the US, I believe it's becoming increasingly common. Last week for example, I was in New York City and saw a real estate company with a big poster of its listings in its front window, with QR codes for each home you could buy. Passers by could snap that code and save the particular listing on their phones, to learn more and follow up. Imagine if that same display included a QRpedia code for the neighborhood each home was in. There are lots of possibilities.

QRPedia codes can be generated now at QRPedia.org. Maybe you should go print up a thousand of them about the neighborhood you live in on stickers and stick them around on the street. Imagine visiting from another country and finding those. If I ever get to visit another planet with life on it, I hope I find something like this there.

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.

A Wikipedia that supports mobile editing and image uploading will be a much more inclusive and real-time Wikipedia in the future.

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.

Below, the stream of news - click for full size.

The idea of pared-down old Wikipedia getting some custom-built and self-aware news power tools from Ushahidi - and of Ushahidi getting to learn from observing the thriving community of news editors in Wikipedia - is really exciting. If they can get User Experience taken care of well (something both organizations have struggled with) then I think the combined efforts of the two organizations could make them both all the more powerful sources of international real-time news. CNN just might eat their dust.

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.

Frederic Lardinois has pointed out a range of barriers in Wikipedia's editing process, such as the intimidating Wiki markup language and unending internal politics. He also speculates that Wikipedia might be starting to feel complete, having been around for so long, so fewer users feel their contributions are necessary. Wikipedia has stood as an example that people on the Web can be motivated to work out of sheer inspiration, but that inspiration may have begun to fade. Taylor Buley summed up the problem on Twitter: "Simple case of declining marginal returns?"

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.

Rating articles looks like an even easier way for people to give feedback - and once you've started contributing that much, why not go a step further and improve the article you just rated?

That's the funny thing about Wikipedia. More than six years ago, Wikipedia famously went head to head with the Encyclopedia Britannica in a study published in Nature magazine. The scientists who published the study found that in most, though not all, matters of fact and science - Wikipedia entries were superior to Britannica entries. That only begged the question: when they found areas the Wikipedia articles could be improved upon - did they hit the Edit button and do it?

That was six years ago; the site has grown and improved substantially since then. It's grown more trusted and more used. Not everyone likes it, of course. See the comments on my post about the Love button, for example: some commenters called Wikipedia elitist, agenda-driven, filled with convenient untruths and they called me naive for calling the site an incredible asset to humanity.

We are, of course, all still figuring this internet thing out. Some of those critiques I would rate as low on objectivity but high on quality of writing, others as trustworthy but not terribly complete!

On balance I'll call Wikipedia a big democratic net positive, with regular flashes of brilliance. I look forward to expressing that opinion in one through five start, article by article, along with the millions of other opinionated people who regularly visit the site that strives for a neutral point of view.

Wikipedia says that after an initial test on 100,000 articles, the rating feature will now be rolled out in 370,000 page increments until it is live across the 3.6 million articles written in English.

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.

A click of the button will result in the launch of a Love Interface, in which the button clicker is presented a number of options for what kind of love to send and images to append to a free-text compliment area. The resulting declaration of support is published to the receiving user's account discussion page.

It's all semi-structured and closely monitored by the top nerds at Wikipedia in order that a more hospitable environment can be optimized.

I think it sounds like a very good idea. This kind of gentle social engineering to create a structure for the site that's more welcoming, accessible and effective could help produce a better product for us all (more edited Wikipedia content) and could help the site better serve us as people. Ultimately that is the point of all this, right?

Below: Semantic analysis of message text concludes that Wikipedians are too seldom nice and that they need a button.

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.

Thanks are due to the always enjoyable blog Flowing Data for finding this one.

So on some level this is a statement about life and the world (and Philosophy), surely, but on another level it's a statement about Wikipedia.

Two and a half years ago I wrote that Wikipedia's future could be as a development platform. 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.

At least one prominent startup since then, however, has stopped using Wikipedia content as a part of its service because of the site's tendency to explain things either too generally or too technically and the penalty that search engines impose on duplicate content around the web.

But if what was becoming a web of pages is becoming a web of applications, perhaps duplicate content isn't so bad anymore. Perhaps content can become a commodity and platforms like Wikipedia can serve up what they do best (create content) and then its users can do with it what they do best (everything else).

The potential applications go well beyond fun head-scratchers like the Philosophy mashup above, but a project like this does demonstrate just how structured the wild-west of Wikipedia, and of the human experience, really is.