The Wikipedia profiles of women in technology and engineering will be updated at an "edit-a-thon" held at the Royal Society next month. The profiles chosen to be updated will all be of historical figures. Read more
Wikipedia seems benign and geeky, so eager to share its awkwardly written knowledge. Let us tell you about Atari 2600, Impressionism, and orcs! The nerd orientation, however, distracts from what the site has become: an information battleground. Type "Exxon" into Google and the first two hits are official Exxon sites; the third is the company's Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is the fourth hit for "Philip Morris," the third for "Starbucks," the fifth for "New York Times." The Wikipedia page has become a public face for corporations, and they have an incentive to polish and scrub their entries. Read more
Paradigm Shift: The Wikipedia Revolution The first attempt at collecting all human knowledge was the ancient library of Alexandria. The attempt was admirable, but it pales in comparison to the exponential growth and limitless potential of Wikipedia. What might we expect from a world where people can find out the answers to virtually all of their questions? Greg Allen weighs in with another edition of Paradigm Shift.
Nearly 2,000 Wikipedia articles will be sold on compact disc to give people without a net connection access to highlights of the popular web resource. The Wikipedia Version 0.5 CD collection includes topics such as geography, arts, literature, science and history. The articles were selected by software that rated their quality and importance to the Wikipedia community. Martin Walker, a senior academic from the US also helped set the selection criteria for the £7 disc.
China's lifting of the of ban on access to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has been reversed. The site has again been blocked to several parts of China, barely a week after it suddenly became accessible. China first banned access to the English and Chinese versions in October last year, over concerns on information about Tibet, Taiwan and other sensitive topics.