(Much Wikipedia news catch-up is due after the holidays and the impromptu trip. Bear with me.)

The NYT reports that Wiley & Sons "Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors" plagiarized five paragraphs of the 2005 version of a relevant Wikipedia entry. The publisher is much more upset about veracity than copyright issues: “Wiley’s concern is not over copyright trouble,” Mr. Godwin said. “They want to represent their work as scholarly work. Their name is on the line in terms of scholarly ethics, more than the copyright issue.”

NYT fan-boy interview of Jimmy Wales. Favorite movie/prized possession/morning routine/etc/etc/etc. Throwdown quote: “Wikia.com ... is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open.”

The Official NYT piece on the Wikia Search launch. “Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.” Also included: some discussion of susceptibility to manipulation.

The NYT piece on wikiscanner. Nothing new to see there.

A Rocketboom interview with Garrison Keillor in which he discusses Wikipedia as a standard writer’s tool. (It’s also an excellent demonstration of his prescient grasp of developing media distribution channels.) I’ll be teaching with this.