(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.

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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.

A semi-related press release announces that the current issue of Selling Power Magazine “shows how large companies are using the Wikipedia software and model to bring customers and sales teams together in an easy, open space where knowledge and needs combine to offer resources and solutions.”

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.

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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.

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From the Associated Press release:

Two Associated Press journalists sued Arkansas officials Friday for allegedly violating the state’s Freedom of Information Act by withholding information about which government computers were used to edit entries on Wikipedia.
In August, Gambrell reported that state computers were used to edit information about Republican presidential candidate and former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Beebe and others. Using a Web site called WikiScanner that tracks changes to Wikipedia, Gambrell could see that the edits were made by computers with numeric Internet addresses assigned to the state.
Huckabee’s entry was changed to delete information about a controversial pardon and his frequent use of a state-owned airplane while Beebe’s was changed to eliminate an inaccurate reference to his having a male “life partner” rather than his wife Ginger.

One of the local news stations reports on the state’s refusal to comply:

The director of the Arkansas’ Department of Information Systems said in court papers Thursday that revealing which computers were used to edit entries on the Wikipedia Web site would pose a security risk to state computers.
In the filing, Bailey said that security consultants told the department’s attorney that revealing the physical locations of five computers used to edit information about politicians on the popular site “heightens the vulnerability of that state agency and heightens the security risk to the state network.”

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Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site. ... Brooker said Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands — but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission. Brooker said Microsoft had never previously hired someone to influence a Wikipedia article.

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Britannica has issued a 20-page rebuttal to the December Nature study, claiming it was fundamentally flawed.

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It seems that some congresspersons have been having their staffs edit their Wikipedia entries.

Also, Wikipedia announced today that that they have corrected all of the errors identified in the December Nature study. This means they were fixed in 42 days — an impossible task for codex encyclopedias.

Update: More reactions from political staffs.

Posted at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)