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+15 +4
The rise of Wikipedia: The decline of student writing
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.
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+12 +2
The battle to destroy Wikipedia's biggest sockpuppet army
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.
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+9 +3
To Fix Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance: A Big Editing Party?
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.
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+14 +2
Is Wikipedia for Sale?
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.
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+17 +5
The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
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?
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+10 +4
90% of Wikipedia's Editors Are Male—Here's What They're Doing About It
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.
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+17 +5
Everything you never needed to know about bras (but Wikipedia will tell you, anyway) | Wikipediocracy
After Chelsea Manning row, Wikipedia bans transphobic editors
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+17 +2
Wikipedia names Texas PR firm over false manipulation of site entries
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.
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+28 +3
List of inventors killed by their own inventions
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.
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+10 +1
Wikimedia is liable for contents of Wikipedia articles, German court rules
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.
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+8 +1
Digital Library of game consoles
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.
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+18 +3
Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?
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?
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+9 +3
Wikipedia to store famous voices for posterity, starting with Stephen Fry's
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."
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+22 +4
Wikipedia's 10,000-word war over the word 'f*ck'
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.
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+18 +1
PediaPress Wants To Print The Complete English Wikipedia In 1,000 Books
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”.
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+22 +1
Wikipedia Is Edited by Bots. That’s a Good Thing.
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.
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+13 +2
This machine kills trolls
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,...
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+17 +1
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds to Change.org Petition
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.
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+8 +1
Wikipedia Proves Useful for Tracking Flu
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.
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+14 +1
Wikipedian donates his estate to the Wikimedia Foundation
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.
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