Steven Pruitt has made nearly 3 million edits on Wikipedia and written 35,000 original articles -- all for free

When the tech giant helps Wikipedia, it’s also helping itself.

Google is pouring an additional $3.1 million into Wikipedia, bringing its total contribution to the free encyclopedia over the past decade to more than $7.5 million, the company announced at the World Economic Forum Tuesday. A little over a third of those funds will go toward sustaining current efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and the remaining $2 million will focus on long-term viability through the organization’s endowment.

For the researcher plagued from time to time by what Norman Mailer called the Swiss cheese effect (i.e., you reach for something in your head and find a hole), the Internet is invaluable. A question pops up, and you tap the computer for the answer.

Wikipedia editor and self-professed “bird geek” DocTree spends most of his time on the world’s largest encyclopedia editing the pages for long-dead ornithologists. So it was somewhat unusual when, in August 2012, he found himself working on the page for “CyberSafe,” a high-tech digital encryption company based out of Middlesex, England, with a pronounced dearth of ornithological relevance.

Next week, students, faculty and members of the public will gather in a room at Brown University. They will sit down, open their laptops—enjoy some light snacks and drinks—and then, for five and a half hours, edit Wikipedia.

Investigating the links between Wiki-PR, a company that specializes in editing Wikipedia on behalf of their paying clients, and the website's trusted editing hierarchy.

The community that built the largest encyclopedia in history is shrinking, 
even as more people and Internet services depend on it than ever. 
Can it be revived, or is this the end of the Web’s idealistic era?

Wikipedia is like little else in history. Relied on by students, scholars, journalists, and citizens, it’s one of the top 10 websites in the world and the not-so-hidden base of much of our informational infrastructure. It’s also the product of ridiculous inequality. To wit: It’s estimated that 90 percent of the encyclopedia’s top editors are male.

After Chelsea Manning row, Wikipedia bans transphobic editors

Wikipedia has named and shamed a Texas-based public relations company following an investigation into spin doctors and "sock puppets" falsely manipulating entries on the site.

This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.

The Wikimedia Foundation is liable for the contents of Wikipedia articles but does not have to fact check the contents before they are published, the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart ruled, a spokesman said Wednesday.

As a child I played video games and it's something I still do to this day. From time to time I would visit Wikipedia and check the articles about this or that console, always noticing the terrible pictures that filled the articles. "I can do better than that!" I thought to myself. So I started taking pictures and began to upload them to articles.

So this is how it begins. One day you’re perfectly content with your lot in life. The next, you’re browsing Wikipedia and thinking: Wait, how exactly did he get in there? Is he that much more noteworthy than I am? Paul Jolley, who finished ninth on “American Idol” last season with his rendition of “Eleanor Rigby,” has a page. Really?

Virtually everyone in the UK (and many an Engadget reader) is familiar with Stephen Fry's iconic voice, but will anyone remember it in, say, 50 years? He certainly hopes so, but just to be sure, Wikipedia has recorded it for posterity and pegged it to his bio page. The plan is to have a large number of well-known types do the same so that readers will know "what (those folks) sound like and how they pronounce their names."

The fight has raged for nearly 10,000 words at this point, and still Wikipedia’s editors aren’t sure whether to put an article about a 2005 sociopolitical documentary on its main page. Why such indecisiveness? Because the film in question is titled Fuck.

This is not a joke. PediaPress launched an Indiegogo campaign to print the entire English Wikipedia encyclopedia on around 1,000 books, representing more than a million pages. The startup printed the first volume to see how it would look — in it, you will find all the articles from “A” to “A76 motorway”.

Half of all edits to Wikipedia are made by bots. That stat, from a new study monitoring the site’s revisions, might seem like cause for alarm. But according to Wikipedia researchers, it’s key to the crowdsourced encyclopedia’s success.

At midnight on February 13th, 2014, a Wikipedia user named Lightningawesome added to the list of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters a lengthy biography of Lightning Dash, a capricious,...

People in the "holistic healing" community don't like how they're being written about on Wikipedia, so they started a Change.org petition asking that Wikipedia put policies in place for their nonsense to be taken just as seriously as actual science. Jimmy Wales responded and forever won our respect.

Scientists may have figured out the best way yet to track the spread of flu: Watch how many people visit Wikipedia articles about the flu and its symptoms. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, say the technique bests the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) estimate of flu levels by up to two weeks. It also bettered Google’s Flu Trends data by 17 percent, researchers said.

As he reflected on his life in a video interview with the Wikimedia Foundation on April 29, Jim Pacha beamed and smiled a lot. During the talk, Pacha was reminded of all the remarkable things that happened to him, including highlights in learning and career advancement. Pacha became a senior software engineer at a prestigious aerospace company, even though he never graduated from college.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, contains errors in nine out of 10 of its health entries, and should be treated with caution, a study has said.

"You can pop open a Wikipedia page and within a few minutes feign competence."

In 2012 Wikipedia endured a voluntary 24-hour blackout to advocate for a free and open Internet. It made a powerful statement, but probably the biggest accomplishment was simply reminding everyone of just how often they consult the site. And such a prominent source of information needs to be accurate.

Found this on wikipedia's featured picture of the day. Check it out on their homepage!.

You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Late afternoon moth sighting here in Western Massachusetts. Not nearly as large as yesterdays moth but just as beautiful. (From Wikipedia): The One-eyed Sphinx or Cerisy's Sphinx (Smerinthus cerisyi) is a moth of the Sphingidae family.

A Twitter bot that keeps watch on Wikipedia pages edited by those inside the Russian government spotted major changes to an entry about yesterday's crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which killed all 298 people on board. The Telegraph reports that a Russian language page about Boeing 777 accidents that mentioned flight MH17 initially included language pointing to "terrorists" before being changed to "Ukrainian soldiers."

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

I jokingly edited an author's page five and a half years ago. Today, it's still there, and cited by numerous well-respected sources. 

As WikiMania, the annual conference for the Wikipedia faithful, gets under way, there is bound to be much back-slapping over the successes of an encyclopaedia that has become, in the words of one devotee, "part of the assumed plumbing of society". But behind the scenes, or rather behind the screens, lies a world of incessant cyber-bickering, in which some editors of the site conduct "battles to the death for insanely low stakes" - as veteran contributor David Gerard puts it.

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales has revealed new details about what he describes as the site’s “censorship” under the EU’s “right to be forgotten” laws.

Wikipedia has revealed that more than 50 links to content on its website have been removed from Google's search results under the controversial Right to be Forgotten ruling. In response to this development, Wikipedia has created a dedicated page where it will be posting notices about attempts to remove links to the Wikimedia Foundation websites, which includes Wikipedia.