Mixed views on Wikinews

If the votes are reflecting anything meaningful, then support for Wikinews has dropped slightly since I last wrote about it. Current support is 174 out of 244 votes. The number of people who are voting but do not hold an account on Meta has increased dramatically, probably as a result of the attention Wikinews has been getting in the blogosphere this week. The support for the project is just as mixed in the blogs as it is within the Wikimedia projects. Dan Gillmor says it strikes him as naive in parts but also claims it is "well-meaning and thoughtful". Joi Ito worries it will change the tone of the project, and at the Wikinews talk page on Meta says "you will need a new community" since Wikinews will require more aggressive activities which he does not see as a traditional Wikipedian trait. Ross Mayfield says the exact opposite, claiming "this is just the community to do it". A recurring criticism of the Wikinews proposal is that the wiki process is not fast enough for news reporting. Rebecca MacKinnon writes: "It's going to be hard to present yourself as an alternative news source to AP and Reuters unless you can compete with them on speed of reporting. They turn breaking stories around in minutes sometimes... I find it hard to imagine that Wikinews' story-editing-by-committee approach would be very fast." Anthere expresses many doubts about the proposed rules of the project, and, whilst saying "Wikinews... est une id�e fantastique", is voting against it. She says that she agrees completely with Rebecca's comments about the speed issue, and adds that, by definition, the neutral point of view is something which is built gently, patiently, with delicacy. Not in a few hours: "la neutralit� de point de vue est quelque chose qui se construit doucement, patiemment, avec d�licatesse. Pas en quelques heures." Neil McIntosh also picks up on the speed issue, saying "news is perishable - the process of collaboratively assembling a report might take too long". For Tom, the lack of speed is one of six of the worst case scenarios for Wikinews. He explains how too much argument could cause articles to be not published quickly enough, which could set Wikinews far behind other news organizations in speed of reporting. Whether or not Wikinews can or should be "neutral" is one of the major points of contention over the project but my computer crashed without saving what I'd written on that...

OpenOffice macro to search Wikipedia

Another addition to the Wikipedia tools list is an OpenOffice macro to search Wikipedia. It integrates into the OpenOffice toolbar and the right-click option lets you look up the word on Wikipedia. According to the OpenOffice mailing list, the macro works with 1.1.3, but will not install under 1.9.58.

Biojack, A Biographical Information Wiki

There was a suggestion recently that a biographical database called Wikipeople ought to be a new Wikimedia project. Compared to Wikinews, the proposal seems confused and lacking in enthusiasm and support. The basic goals of the project, and whether or not it should incorporate the Sep11 wiki, have yet to be worked out. In the mean time, Jason Banico of Neuracom, has launched his own vision of a similar project at biojack.com. Using MediaWiki, but with no affiliation to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site claims to be "the Global Human Registry, a free biography database written collaboratively by contributors from around the world". In a press release published on the social software weblog, Jason claims that wiki is the best model for indexing the social web, and that biojack will provide a place to consolidate the user profiles found on social networking sites such as Friendster, LinkedIn and Orkut. The site has been criticised by Greg Narain for being too public, insecure, free-form, burdensome, and unscalable. Having one place to keep a profile is a nice idea, but I've yet to be convinced why I'd want that profile on a wiki.

It's Like a Blog, But It's a Wiki

"Like a Blog, But It's a Wiki" is Newsweek's description of Wikipedia. Along with the best use of a floating head, the article cutely describes Jimmy Wales reminiscing about the green-bindered World Book Encyclopedia of his youth. It's also the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that I've been quoted talking about Wikipedia! :-) Ok, so it's not really a quote since I'm sure I wouldn't say anything quite so oddly worded, but the meaning behind it is true enough: "A collaborative encyclopedia sounds like a crazy idea, but it naturally controls itself," says Angela Beesley, a volunteer from Essex, England, and a self-confessed Wikipedia addict who monitors the accuracy of more than 1,000 entries.

Wikinews

Wikinews is a proposed Wikimedia project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view. The free content news site aims to have a formal review process using an article stages system. The full proposal by Erik is on Meta and a vote is underway to see if there is agreement within the Wikimedia communities to launch Wikinews. The vote currently stands at 93 votes out of 120 in favour of the project. Wikipedia does not allow original research, and it will never be the ideal venue for in-depth news reporting. In contrast, Wikinews will allow original reporting, and also provide an opportunity for far more detailed news articles that the popular current events pages on Wikipedia do. After Hurricane Ivan and the Main Page, current events was the most visited page last month, and of the 20 most edited pages across all Wikimedia projects, the current events page, and its equivalent in other languages, shows up four times. This demonstrates a huge interest, not only in reading the page, but also in collaborating in its creation. I believe this level of interest is a good indicator that Wikinews will be a success. Having a free, neutral, news resource will be of great value to Wikipedia's topical articles and I strongly support the proposal.

Wikipedia tools

There are some new Wikipedia tools out this week. Scott Evans has extended Stef Magdalinski's WikiProxy with the creation of the Wikipedizer. The tool returns a list of Wikipedia entries related to the page you feed into it. Try viewing Google news via Wikipedizer for example. The source code is available at wikipedizer.php.txt. In addition to the list of most edited articles I mentioned before, Kate has now created a list of the top 5000 users by edit count, a user edit counter, and a six degrees tool which finds the shortest path between any two Wikipedia articles in the main namespace using wiki links. As a fix to bug 190 in Mediazilla, Jesse has created a bookmarklet to hide your own edits on a MediaWiki watchlist. It has some odd effects in Firefox 0.9.3 though. When I tried it, parts of the navigation disappeared and it had no effect on my watchlist. Perhaps its time to get the new Firefox...

Wikipedians who blog

Lots of Wikipedians have been starting new blogs this month, so now I feel bad about practically giving up on mine. Alterego has made a list of blogging Wikipedians page on Meta and I've converted it into a blogroll at Bloglines. Highlights include the newly started blogs by Jimmy Wales and Anthere.

Most edited pages on Wikipedia

Kate Turner published today the list of most edited pages for every Wikimedia project. Here's the top twenty: October 2003 (5007 edits, is an archive of the English current events page) George W. Bush (3953 edits) Main page, English (3432 edits) John Kerry (3238 edits) Actualit�s (French current events) (2474 edits) Main Page, French (2228 edits) In het nieuws (Dutch current events) (1875 edits) Sexual slang (1874 edits) Jesus (1857 edits) Jew (1634 edits) Adolf Hitler (1624 edits) Main Page, Japanese (1568 edits) Recent deaths (1556 edits) Saddam Hussein (1547 edits) United States (1528 edits) Main Page, Italian (1519 edits) September 2003 (1491 edits, is an archive of the German current events page) India (1478 edits) Main Page, Dutch (1461 edits) New York City (1444 edits) Coming in closely after these were the article about Wikipedia itself with 1443 edits and the bug reports page on the Meta wiki with 1410 edits. Update: Jamesday has created a list of the most edited articles this year divided by month. So far, the top five for October are Current events, George W. Bush, Fan Changjiang, John Kerry, and Liang Qichao.

Wikiproxy introduces Wikipedia to BBC News Online

Stef Magdalinski has produced a great new tool called Wikiproxy which enhances BBC News Online with links to Wikipedia. Stef writes "don't get me wrong, I really like BBC News Online" but claims they have failed to innovate and that "by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works". Wikiproxy apparently demonstrates what a more open News Online could be. Stef said he was inspired by meeting Jimmy Wales and believes Wikipedia "illustrates how the collaborative, great unwashed web can create more value than 'authoritative' institutions". The proxy parses News Online for proper nouns and checks these against a database of Wikipedia article titles and links to the article if it exists. It also adds links to blogs referencing the story via the technorati API. The database of the English Wikipedia's 644974 article titles is available to download from Wikimedia (see allentitlesinns0.gz) and the source of wikiproxy from Whitelabel. Thanks to Tim Starling, Jeronim and Jamesday for their help in making the list of article titles available. Hopefully the list will be available in other languages in future. Whether the BBC will approve of the idea, adopt it, or ask Stefan to take it down remains to be seen, but personally, I think the proxy adds huge value by way of providing context and background information on current events. One suggested extension to the wikiproxy is a Mozilla plugin to wikipediarise the whole web! I can't wait.

Wikimedia raises $50000

As announced this morning, Wikimedia's $50000 fundraising drive has completed successfully! Over the past 14 days, hundreds of people across the world donated $51,177, most of which will be spent on new hardware. Comments made by donors on the final day of fundraising included With Wikipedia, the Internet is finally starting to realize its potential! I hope that this will become the greatest repository of knowledge since the Library at Alexandria. There is a very real chance that it will become one of humanity's greatest achievements. Many thanks to you all who gather the collective word--the collective will of man, to share between ourselves for the betterment of all. History will sing of this. Thanks to everyone who donated, and to the thousands of editors who created a product worth donating to.

Clustering with Clush

First demonstrated in August, Clush formally announced this week its arrival on the clustering scene. Following shortly after the launch of Clusty, Clush is another "clustering" search engine. Claiming to be a deep clustered directory built around linguistic analysis, Clush offers automatically categorised results and thumbnail screenshots for each search result. The current screenshot of the English Wikipedia dates back to May 2004 but for paid submissions, Clush claims to update these every other day. Search results are presented in boxes which offer further options, along with the visual representation of sites. I found the design less intuitive than Clusty's folders and the results seemed arbitrarily scattered among the four clusters shown. Unlike the meta-search engine Clusty, Clush is building its own search index, which is made up of an unspecific "millions of pages" according to eWeek. By creating an account, you can vote for a site on a 10 point scale. You get no feedback as to how others have voted but the results apparently play a role in the index's relevancy rankings. Clush claims it will only index "unique and relevant content" and "webpages that have the same content or duplicate content of other webpages" are against their rules. It'll be interesting to see if Wikipedia's mirrors show up in the results. Currently they don't, but neither do many Wikipedia pages, so it's a little early to tell.

Wikipedia triumphs in c't study

c't, a German computer engineering magazine, have published a comparison of the German language editions of Brockhaus, Wikipedia and Microsoft's Encarta. Wikipedia came out the clear winner! The study by c't rated the three encyclopedias on a total of 66 topics along scales of breadth, depth, comprehensibility, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content. Sj reported to the Wikipedia mailing list that Brockhaus must concede defeat to Wikipedia. I ought to point out that Wikipedia is well aware that it still has a long way to go in terms of gaining consistent quality across its one million articles and, as Erik M�ller points out, "the road to credibility is long and requires constant innovation", but the study is a great defense against the recent criticisms levelled at Wikipedia from those claiming it can't stand up to the traditional encyclopedias. 24 Wikipedia articles gained a top score of five marks: Kategorischer Imperativ, Asymptote, Banach-Raum, Tr�gheitsmoment, Massenwirkungsgesetz, Fourier Transform IR, Algorithmus, Kryptographie, Backus-Naur-Form, Hyperventilation, Black Smoker, Epeirophorese, DVB-T, Hartz-Konzept, Jukos, Horst K�hler, Leverage-Effekt, Rochade, Eishockey, Ouzo, Schupfnudeln, Kapaun, Bauhaus, and Leprechaun. Britannica achieved full marks for 17 topics and Encarta gained top marks in just 12 areas. Wikipedia's Qualit�tsoffensive is a project aimed at qualitatively and quantitatively improving German language articles in specific topic areas and is just one of the methods being used to improve upon, and keep a check on, the quality of the articles. An article validation feature is expected to be part of the next major release of MediaWiki, which will further ensure that Wikipedians can focus on maintaining the quality c't found Wikipedia to have.