Thinkery has indeed had features before (witness the Redhead and Pulp Projects, which aren’t dead yet), but never one that actually appears on a schedule. Lately I’ve been mining a number of news alerts I set up, as well as the Wikipedia Signpost, and then dumping the links into Zotero (which I’m really loving, btw). Zotero doesn’t share, and I’m not willing to set up a duplicate link ranch through deli.cio.us. Thusly, the Friday Wikipedia News Roundup is born.

Veropedia, “a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time,” received attention for mere existence this week.

There was also quite a bit of brouhaha in various minor news sources about the fact that a professor required her students to write Wikipedia articles! And the students felt more invested! But then some of their articles were deleted! Haven’t quite a few of us in the Rhet/Comp field been doing this for years now? Why is this news?

Slashdot latched onto the Webcomic Deletion Controversy that raged among the webcomic folk much earlier this year. (I watched it happen through the Diesel Sweeties blog.) This wouldn’t be news either, except for the fact that Slashdotters called for a boycott of Wikipedia’s annual fundraiser until the notability policy changes. As far as I know, this is the first time that a digital community has organized a concrete protest of the notability and deletions policies instead of just complaining mightily about them.

Wired Monkeybites spotlighted WikiPediaVision, which, like TwitterVision and FlickrVision, visualizes contributions in real time.

Employees of San Joaquin County and the City of Stockton were ordered to quit contributing to Wikipedia while on the clock. The article notes that WikiScanner recorded significant daily activity on state-owned computers. (In fact, articles on WikiScanner were all over the place this week.)

Jimmy Wales is the inaugural speaker in iCommons’ Innovations Series. He’ll discuss the for-profit Wikia corporation and the launch of the South African Wikipedia Academies on Nov. 13. No word on a podcast/webcast, though one would assume there’ll be one.

Eastern Michigan U is conducting what they’re calling the first university-sponsored examination of Wikipedia. (Do we count Cambridge’s sponsorship of Wikimania 06 or not?) The English and History Departments are co-sponsoring a series of talks on the subjects. As far as I can tell the first talk is “Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or The Triumph of Amateurs?” by visiting prof Marshall Poe, formerly of The Atlantic Monthly.

Alternet has a nice piece on whitewashing, the increasing corporate practice of editing Wikipedia entries to remove unfavorable information. The Chronicle of Higher Ed also wrote about whitewashing by colleges.

The Signpost confirmed that page creation for unregistered users will likely be re-enabled this month on a trial basis. It was previously removed after the 2005 Seigenthaler Incident.