Archive for wikipedia
“It is not the sort of thing I’d expect from a western democracy” – Jimmy Wales on snooping bill
This week Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales was one of the people giving evidence to the committee looking at the Draft Communications Data Bill, aka Snooper’s Charter: Wales told the select committee which was scrutinising the Draft Bill, that the plans are “technologically incompetent”, and explained that it would be very simple for Wikipedia to avoid monitoring [...]
5 things you shouldn’t miss: the bots behind Wikipedia, spotting cancers and more
Welcome to the latest of my monthly collections for the Engine Group of five links that you shouldn’t miss. The bots that edit Wikipedia http://bbc.in/PtlLTJ Behind the scenes of the international encyclopedia which anyone can edit is a small army of automated programs that keep the site going. An app – to check for [...]
Wikipedia Guidance for PR Professionals
Out today is a very useful set of guidelines from the CIPR about how PR professionals should and shouldn’t use Wikipedia. It’s got a lot of detailed tips about how best to find your way around Wikipedia’s rules and features including the often neglected point about how to ensure your work and private online activities [...]
The wonder of Wikipedia: Broccoli
Whilst preparing my post earlier this week on Michael Gove and broccoli, I happened across Wikipedia’s talk page on broccoli. Why do I share this with you? Well, because it contains such gems as: That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard. It was also the exact same question I was going to ask. Is [...]
Gender imbalance amongst contributors to Wikipedia
From the New York Times: Surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of [Wikipedia's] hundreds of thousands of contributors are women… Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the [...]
Wikipedia: surprisingly old school
Having been using Wikipedia more than usual in the last few days, and even made a couple of minor edits (there’s now one less surplus space in the world, yay!), I’ve been struck by how old school it now feels. There’s no ‘login with your Facebook or Twitter account’ option – instead it’s got a [...]
When two hypes colide: Wikipedia and user-generated data
Martin Belam is one of those who has picked up on the story about the number of people contributing to Wikipedia falling away. He makes the reasonable comment: Not entirely convinced by this argument. Yes edit wars and holier-than-thou editors on Wikipedia can be frustrating, but frankly, with over 3 million English language articles already [...]
Is Wikipedia in decline? More evidence in
I previously blogged about how some of the key statistics for Wikipedia suggest the site is stagnating or declining. This picture is reinforced by new evidence: A sharp drop in Wikipedians, the volunteers who write and edit the online encyclopaedia, is a disturbing and inevitable trend, the Toronto man who was once their top contributor [...]
The stalling and decline of Wikipedia?
These two graphs are taken from the statistics at stats.wikimedia.org, using data up until 31 July 2009. The trends for other languages not shown in the graphs varies considerably, but for the English version of Wikipedia there are clear – and long running – signs of stagnation and decline when it comes to the generation [...]
How not to judge a political website: the top six mistakes
Whether it is outsiders commenting on how parties and politicians use the internet, or people comparing their own party with others, or an individual looking to assess different website suppliers, reviews of political websites are a frequent occurrence. Across these reviews there are several very commonly made mistakes. Watch out for those explained below and [...]
