Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-02/In the news
Wikipedia in the news
Wikipedia quality initiative tested on German Wikipedia
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
CIO magazine covered the flagging system that will be tested on the German Wikipedia (see also Deutsch Hauptseite) that has been called a "stable version" feature. Implementation is described as "users who have been registered for four days or more will be able to flag a recent entry as being correct and unvandalized... People will be able to update the entry with new material, but it won’t be visible as part of the main entry until another trusted contributor has flagged the updates as being correct." However, Wales is quoted as saying, "The exact details are still being worked out and the flagging system may be updated even after it goes live, depending on what works best."
International Wikipedia
At Red Hat's Knowledge Symposium in New Delhi, Computer Reseller News (CRN) India reported that Wikipedia was used as an example of what can be accomplished with the "open source model, based on collaboration and sharing of knowledge." New Wikipedias in Indian languages were also announced at the symposium.
CyberMedia News reported that Jimmy Wales, speaking at Infovison 2006 in Bangalore, India, reconfirmed Wikipedia's commitment to its "anyone can edit" tagline. Wales spoke about the flagging system (above) and lamented that content in Indian languages is minimal. Additionally, India eNews reported that the Bengali Wikipedia had crossed the 10,000 article milestone in September after having only "500 articles in March 2006."
Reputation of Wikipedia
American Chronicle reported on an interview with Encyclopædia Britannica's Director of Corporate Communications, Tom Panelas. "Britannica has indeed become an alternative - not just to Wikipedia but to all of the unreliable information ... on the Internet," Panalas said. He also defended EB's approach, "It's a myth that professionally edited reference works are limited or elitist. ...[Our] rigorous editorial method ... produces an excellent balance in perspective."
Arizona State University's online campus newspaper, the Web Devil carried an article and an editorial on Wikipedia's reliability. The article, titled Database a deceitful academic source discussed the pros and cons of using Wikipedia in doing research. Meanwhile, the editorial challenged not only Wikipedia's reliability but the validity of information available on the internet in general.
Local impact of Wikipedia
The Boston Globe reported on the impact Wikipedia articles have on local towns. The suburbs of Newton, Framingham and Medfield are mentioned, along with interviews of local politicians and their view of the content available on Wikipedia. Local residents, and Wikipedians, Tom Parmenter and Brian Corr were interviewed for the article, noting that a sentence Parmenter "wrote three years ago... has survived hundreds of cyber editors." Corr mentioned the addictive nature of Wikipedia, "It does tend to suck you in a bit."
Other articles
- The New York Times, in an article on Fred Turner, reports that Turner feels that Wikipedia "can be traced to [the] idea" of a "peer-to-peer, collaborative society, interlinked by invisible currents of energy and information."
- An article in The Guardian, by Seth Finkelstein, titled I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here discussed the impact vandalism to the Seth Finkelstein article had on him. Finkelstein argues that the potential for vandalism should justify deletion because "any libel, defamation, or smear... will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia."
- The Shenandoah Valley Herald referenced Wikipedia's article on slacklining in its article on the activity.
Discuss this story
I chose not to cover the The End User: A wiki way to profit from the International Herald Tribune as it is mostly about Wikia not Wikipedia. It does however, mention the relative strength of the Polish Wikipedia given its high articles to speakers ratio and also the implementation of the flagging system on the German Wikipedia. --Trödel 22:34, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to those that proofread and corrected the article!!! --Trödel 15:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Local Media Report About Wikipedia
I was interviewed for the article in our local newspaper, The News, The World According to Wiki that appeared this morning. The article is an example of local press coverage about Wikipedia. It stresses the immediacy of the information. I am not sure if it is useful for ITN and I am also not sure of the process for the production of ITN, so I thought I would mention it here. KenWalker | Talk 20:10, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Links and info on 'stable versions'
In case anyone is interested in the details of this, as I was... I dusted off my German skills and wandered through their 'Cafe' and 'Community Portal' until I found a link to it at 'looked at versions'. There is apparently a 'two tiered' approach with the higher level being called 'closely examined versions'. From what I gather, a particular edit is classified as a 'looked at' version if any 'trusted user' (which is defined as 30 days + 30 edits on the German page, but 4 days in the news article) created it, updated it from what was previously a 'looked at' version, or specifically clicks a box to mark it as having been looked at... which is supposed to be done any time there is no vandalism in the article. The 'closely examined' version is going to be limited to some more select group and would indicate that all of the facts in the article are properly referenced. Logged in users apparently see the current version and it can be set up so that anons see either the 'looked at' or 'closely examined' version by default (or the current version if none are tagged) with buttons to view the other two types. The 'automatic updating' of the 'looked at' version makes a big difference, but I'd see potential problems with defaulting anons to the 'closely examined' version. Hopefully it will also not be possible to edit the 'tagged' versions to avoid confusion where people add information to the 'closely examined' copy which was already in the current page (and simultaneously remove other improvements) or click to edit the 'looked at' version and are taken to the current and find that the text they were going to change isn't there at all. Presumably in most cases they'd have to view the current version first and make changes to that, but I didn't see anything about it in the text. --CBD 13:07, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
NYTimes piece about AfD
Giving the Heave-Ho in an Online Who’s Who -- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 21:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]