Wikipedia celebrates its tenth anniversary on January 15. Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a great source for research and browsing, and one of the most spectacular examples of success in the field of community-generated content. What’s not always obvious are the social benefits you can derive from actually being a contributor to it, as I learned during a rather odd edit war with an ill-mannered Nolans fan a couple of years ago.
Wikipedia’s long-in-testing “new look” went official this week, with all users moved over to the cleaner, easier-to-use interface.
Chrome: Searching random bits of Wikipedia information usually involves abandoning your current page and/or opening up a new tab. Wikipedia Companion, a Google Chrome extension, gives you Wikipedia access via a small drop-down window for quick-reference look-ups.
A few months back we ran a basic guide to Wikipedia editing for beginners. In the wake of a scandal this week involving presenter Naomi Robson and her manager Max Markson, it seems worth revisiting the topic of Wikipedia policies.
Drawing on the enthusiasm of crowds is critical to the success of open source projects. However, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — no stranger to the virtues of collaborative enterprises — reminds us that there are limits to how far this can be taken.
Spotted a stupid typo or a factual error on Wikipedia? Don’t just laugh or say “that proves you can never trust the Internet” — get in and correct it yourself.
Wikipedia has its share of detractors who question the reliability and accuracy of the site’s entries. To appease critics and combat bias, Wikipedia will institute an optional feature called WikiTrust, which according to Wired Magazine “will colour code every word of the encyclopaedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page”.
Google’s familiar practice of offering popular sections within a site as part of its search results has a new twist with Wikipedia: for longer articles, it offers direct links to the main sections, making it quicker to jump to the relevant material. How effective that is depends on the article structure, but for well-maintained topics, it’s a handy time saver. [via Google Operating System]
Search engine aggregators which combine results from multiple sites are nothing that new, but Heapr combines the expected Google results with Twitter, Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia for a pretty contemporary mix of results.
