weekly Wikipedia roundup
The biggest development this week was the French court decision that Wikipedia is not legally responsible for information published on the site. Judge Binonche ruled that Wikipedia is a web site and not a publisher, and that “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature.” The official Signpost synopsis and commentary is here.
Yet another piece on whitewashed articles, but this one profiles MyWikiBiz, a company that offers to write Wikipedia articles for hire. The owner/writer, Gregory Kohs, has been permanently shut out of Wikipedia. Quite a bit of commentary from Wales is included.
A roundup and commentary of government edits to Wikipedia. NASA tops the list with 6,846 edits.
Wales’ talk in Florida drew quite a bit of attention this week, particularly for his prediction that MySpace has two years to live.
A VCU student screened and deleted a new contribution by Wales. Much commentary has ensued.
An ongoing study by University of Minnesota researchers has revealed that only one-tenth of 1 percent of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content value of the free online encyclopedia, as measured by readership. In addition, the computer science and engineering faculty and students have discovered that few edits inflict damage on the content and damage is typically fixed quickly. Their findings on vandalism corroborate Viégas, Wattenberg and Davé’s 2004 findings developed through history flow visualizations.
CNN says nothing new, but it says it to a bigger audience: Use With Caution: The Perils of Wikipedia. Similarly, The Associated Press picked up last week’s “teaching with wikis!” topic, so it also hit a zillion additional outlets in the past few days. Veropedia continues to receive attention for existing.