The Wikimedia Foundation’s first major new project in 7 years is now feeding the biggest project in that stable, Wikipedia itself. But anyone can take structured data from Wikidata, due to its open license. Read more »
Wikipedia is getting a new HTML5-based video player that will make it easier to add video clips to the millions of articles on the site. Of course, Wikipedia has been working on incorporating video since 2008. So why has it been taking so long? Read more »
Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more »
Crowdfunding has grown from a $33 million market to a $128 million market in the past two years and is expected to reach $500 million in 2012. While it won’t completely replace more traditional fund-raising methods, it’s nonetheless an important space to watch, with plenty of opportunities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When you mix a researcher, a massive online encyclopedia and a supercomputer, the result is a collection of insights and visualizations into what Wikipedia looks like mapped across time and space. It looks a lot like how our history books might look merged and graphed. Read more »
Planning a trip to Wales anytime soon? If so, put the town of Monmouth on your itinerary and be sure to bring your phone. On May 19, Monmouth officially becomes the world’s first Wikipedia Town and you’ll need your handset with you for the full tour. Read more »
The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea? Read more »
When they think about competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look mostly at media players such as the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. But the reality is that much of what is competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely recognize as journalism. Read more »
It’s tempting to get nostalgic about the disappearance of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition after two centuries, but as we have found with journalism, knowledge building of all kinds gets better when there are more people involved. It may be chaotic, but the result is superior. Read more »
Wikipedia’s website may have been dark yesterday in protest of SOPA, but now there is a new official Wikipedia app for Android 2.2 and up devices. You could use the mobile web for Wikipedia, but four key features make this app worth the download. Read more »
The furor over controversial anti-piracy legislation reached a climax on Wednesday as Republican lawmakers began disavowing the Stop Online… Read more at paidContent »
Numerous sites went black Wednesday to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. Participants included Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist, Greenpeace, Reddit, 4Chan and others, and many didn’t just stop at adding a black background. Check out our website gallery to take a look at some of the sites. Read more »
A small loophole for Wikipedia’s SOPA and PIPA protest, in which the English-language version of the site has gone dark for 24 hours: the mo… Read more at paidContent »
Critics of Wikipedia’s decision to shut the encyclopedia down as a protest against U.S. anti-piracy legislation say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, but if anything, that decision is a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions and why it’s important. Read more »
Instead of blacking out for the Jan. 18 SOPA protest, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) instead is using its power — and its most iconic communications t… Read more at paidContent »
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx), who is leading a push to pass a controversial anti-piracy bill, issued a statement today scolding Wikipedia over it… Read more at paidContent »
The anti-SOPA and PIPA demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants. People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Read more »
Wikipedia formally announced Monday night that the site will “go dark” this week to protest proposed anti-piracy legislation. The online enc… Read more at paidContent »
Capping a flurry of recent developments in the fuss over the Stop Online Piracy Act, Wikipedia’s founder said the site will go dark for 24 h… Read more at paidContent »
After years of employing an ad-hoc community-driven approach to mobile, one of the world’s biggest Web sites is going mobile in a much more… Read more at paidContent »
Two days after Aaron Swartz was indicted for allegedly trying to copy thousands of documents from a scientific archive, a torrent with close to 19,000 documents has found its way to the Pirate Bay. The leak is accompanied by a scathing critique of scientific publishing. Read more »
Apture, the San Francisco-based startup, has made a very useful addition to its “contextual exploration engine” technology with a new feature called “HotSpots” that automatically creates new visible hyperlinks within online content based on what readers are likely to want to know more about. Read more »
Wikipedia, which turns 10 this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. But it has become a crucial aspect of our lives, and in many ways it has shown us what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic. Read more »
You can’t innovate without collaboration, and without innovation, companies fail. There is now a whole new world of collaboration tools available to enable what can best be termed “high-impact collaboration.” These break-through tools — workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Central Desktop or customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction — are made possible through the convergence of cloud computing, social software and the ubiquity of mobile technology. With these new technologies, employees can channel their passions and work together more effectively — regardless of where people are located — to accomplish their mission. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Twitter, LiveOps and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Open Video Alliance is trying to jump-start the contribution of video to Wikipedia by getting educators and cultural institutions involved. The organization just published a white paper abut Wikipedia that, amongst other things, explains how exactly you get your video clips included in Wikipedia articles. Read more »
The Wikipedia’s Wikimedia foundation doesn’t want to be a slave to high video bandwidth costs. Instead, it is using BitTorrent-based P2P technology to distribute the growing amount of video on Wikipedia.org. Users can simply install a Firefox plug-in to help with the distribution of Wikipedia videos. Read more »
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says despite reports to the contrary, he is not stepping down or reducing his role with the user-generated encyclopedia. However, he has given up some editing privileges after a disagreement over the removal of images that Wikipedia critics say depict child pornography. Read more »
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he believes the benefits of taking an open approach to content outweigh the disadvantages, and says that something as large and influential as Wikipedia has become could never have been built unless the process was open to anyone to contribute. Read more »
Ever since we broke the news earlier this week that Google is going to open source its VP8 video codec at its Google i/O event next month, speculations have been abounded as to what this means for Ogg Theora, the video codec of choice of open […] Read more »
Cuil, a widely panned search engine that debuted in 2008, has launched an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia that produces articles on topics by generating them from pages found in its index. But the only thing Cpedia manages to do is make Wikipedia look really, really good. Read more »
Wikipedia says it is close to rolling out a new design for the site that it hopes will make the encyclopedia easier to use for new visitors and will encourage more contributions. The new design, code-named Vector, will start to be rolled out in April. Read more »
A new website aptly named Videoonwikipedia.org aims to get more users to contribute video clips to Wikipedia by demystifying some of the issues related to the site’s video format. Videoonwikipedia.org was launched today by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is also known for its Miro video […] Read more »
Google’s donation of $2 million to Wikipedia cements a long-standing symbiotic relationship between the search engine and the user-generated encyclopedia. But is that relationship a good thing or a bad thing? Some critics believe that Google gives Wikipedia preferential treatment in its search results. Read more »
This week, it almost happened. The servers hosting all of Wikipedia’s media were ready to burst, filled up to the max with almost six million files totaling close to eight terabytes of data. Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, was able to install a new server […] Read more »
Hunch, a New York-based startup whose founders include by Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake, has flown under the radar since it launched six months ago, which is strange considering its potential as a disruptor. Today, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined Hunch’s board. Read more »
Playboy Getting into TV Everywhere; adult network in talks with operators about wrapping an online option into the pay channel’s subscription. (Multichannel News) Shenanigans with Video Ad Delivery; some video ad networks being deceptive about the number of impressions they deliver by counting auto-playing ads that […] Read more »
Wikipedia Ramps Up for Video; expecting a crush of video uploads in the coming years, the sum of all human knowledge boosts its storage to 48 terabytes. (Network World) IPTV to Grow 32 Percent Annually Over the Next Six Years; cable and satellite growth rates will […] Read more »
If ever a conflicting topic needed a clearinghouse for all of the different rants, raves and theories, it would be the issue of “going green.” The co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, Jimmy Wales, hopes to crowdsource the discussion of “greenness” and has launched a green section […] Read more »
Mobile browsing has clearly moved beyond 9-to-5 users and made inroads among the happy hour set. A recent survey by Opera showed about 40 percent (and about 60 percent in the United States, South Africa and Indonesia) of Opera Mini users visit social networking sites when […] Read more »
It has been a long time coming, but Powerset, a San Francisco-based contextual-semantic search engine has finally launched. I urge you to try it out, for this is quite an impressive search effort, despite the fact it is currently limited to searching Wikipedia along with some […] Read more »
