Posted 10/13/09 at 04:10:56 PM by Bart Salisbury

While not a banana, a good chuck of knowledge in your pocket might be the next best thing. Openmoko today announced the availability of the WikiReader, a palm-sized device that contains more than three million English language articles from Wikipedia, accessible at any time you please--no internet access required.

The WikiReader was crafted by former Apple Computer and surfboard designer Thomas Meyerhoffer. It has a large monochrome touch interface screen. Articles are scrolled, iPod Touch-like, with the swipe of a finger, and hyperlinks selected with a mere tap. Buttons are available for searching, reviewing your history, and pulling up a random entry. The WikiReader, it is claimed, will operate for “months” on a pair of AAA batteries.

Updates for the WikiReader will be available quarterly, and available for free download at the WikiReader website. Openmoko will also offer a yearly subscription plan that includes an updated microSD card.

The WikiReader is available at WikiReader.com and Amazon. The cost is $99. Annual updates via microSD card will cost $29.

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Posted 10/09/09 at 03:20:23 PM by Bart Salisbury

The free lunch of information on the Internet is about to end, if The Associated Press (AP) and Rupert Murdoch’s News Crop. have their way. Murdoch threw down the gauntlet during his opening address at the World Media Summit in Bejing, stating “the aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.”

The issue, for Curly and Murdoch, is the use of their content in search engines, by aggregators, and by bloggers. For too long, according to Tom Curley, chief executive of the AP, have the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook gotten a free ride on the backs of the “people who devote themselves--at great human and economic cost--to gather news of public interest.” It’s now time to pay up.

The AP’s position is logical given its present financial situation, and the shifting nature of advertising on the Internet. The AP saw a decrease of revenues, from $748 million in 2008 to $700 in 2009, in part due to a shifting away from traditional news sources. Murdoch, on the other hand, is just being Murdoch, advancing his long held views that news content, regardless of how provided, should be paid for. The Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal online already requires a subscription, and Murdoch is exploring similar options for his other holdings, including The New York Post and The London Times.

If the AP and News Corp. are successful, other news providers are certain to follow. This could be bad news for bloggers, many of who consolidate and interpret breaking information from a variety of sources to keep their readers informed. It would also serve to suppress the relatively free-flow of information the Internet now experiences.

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Posted 09/01/09 at 04:15:31 PM by Paul Lilly

Researchers from the Wiki Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz have devised a new way to help readers sift through Wikipedia's 12 million articles and separate potential fact from fiction. The optional feature is called WikiTrust, and when enabled, every word of the online encyclopedia will be color coded based on the reliability of its author and length of time the content has remained on the page.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology. "Everyone's injecting random crap into Wikipedia, and what people agree with more often sticks around. Crap that people don't like goes away."

The way it works is text from an unproven source starts out with a bright orange background. Over time, as more people edit and view the new text, it will slowly gain more "trust" and start to turn white. Text from trusted authors will start off with a lighter shade. But not everyone is on board with what Wiki Lab is working on.

"This isn't a trivial web architecture design and implementation issue," said computer scientist Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Group, who studies Wikipedia and social cognition. 

Chi is in part referring to the processing power and additional disk space required to implment a real-time reputation score to every word in an article.

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Posted 08/25/09 at 09:58:52 AM by Paul Lilly

In the very near future, Wikipedia will add a new feature called "flagged revisions," which will require that an experienced volunteer editor for the social encyclopedia approve any changes made by the public before the changes go live. This new layer will only be applied to articles about living people, at least initially.

"We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks," said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. "There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion -- whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now."

The new feature, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, will separate Wikipedia's contributors into two classes -- experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else, The New York Times points out. But advocates point out this is a small price to pay if flagged revisions prove effective in catching hoaxes and improving the overall accuracy of Wikipedia's content.

Is the flagged revisions feature a good idea? Hit the jump and tell us what you think.

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Posted 07/31/09 at 02:46:07 PM by Paul Lilly

Did your surgery take longer than expected? If so, maybe your surgeon was looking up tips on Wikipedia. Sounds far fetched -- and that example surely is -- but according to a report in April by U.S. health care consultancy Manhattan Research, 50 percent of doctors turn to Wikipedia for medical information.

Part of the reason for this may be that Wikipedia entries often dominate search engine results. In an unrelated study in this month's Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, it was discovered that Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 percent of medical queries across four different search engines.

"My overall impression is that the quality of health information varies wildly, almost ridiculously wildly," said Kevin Clauson, a pharmacologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "If [a website] is treated as an authoritative source, and there's evidence that it isn't, then it's potentially dangerous."

On the positive side, several studies have found that Wikipedia's medical content is almost entirely free of factual errors in many cases, but the risk remains for "vandalism" by malicious users.

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Posted 07/31/09 at 11:00:59 AM by Paul Lilly

You can look up almost anything on Wikipedia, including the 10 original Rorschach plates -- more commonly known as inkblots, which are used by psychologists to help understand their patients -- along with common responses for each of them. It's this latter part that has some psychologists up in arms, who equate it to an online cheat sheet.

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods.

Smith was quick to clarify that a coached subject wouldn't necessarily be able to fool the person giving the test into making a wrong diagnosis, but could "render the results meaningless."

Not everyone agrees with the above assessment, including  James Heilman, an emergency room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatcehwan, who posted the material under dispute.

"Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do," Dr. Heilman said. "Show me the evidence. I don't care what a group of experts says."

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Posted 07/23/09 at 06:24:59 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a recent presentation by Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet’s delicate and vulnerable nature is held together by random acts of kindness.

As a key example, he cited when Pakistan’s government took YouTube offline in 2008. It wasn’t long before it was back, thanks to a largely unknown, unpaid and unauthorized team of volunteers. “It's like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call,” said Professor Zittrain.

The same social structure of those helping without any intention of compensation is clear on Wikipedia. “It's like dark matter in the universe. There's a lot of it, you don't see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place.”

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Posted 05/31/09 at 02:45:32 PM by Justin Kerr

In an unprecedented attempt to maintain some form of creditability, the Wikipedia arbitration committee has unanimously voted to crack down on the Church of Scientology by banning all IP address assigned to the organization and its associates. The conclusion of this case marks the longest running dispute proceedings in the websites history, and the full ban goes into effect immediately. The ruling also represents the single largest ban handed down by the encyclopedia monolith, an accomplishment that I doubt the Church will be adding to their entry any time soon.

The accusations made by the Wikipedia board include several counts of failing to maintain impartiality, and using the service to promote its own personal agenda. Multiple editors from the same IP range were logged in and were accused of coordinating their efforts to force through changes. This type of behavior is clearly prohibited in the terms of service, and also prevents people from using the wiki to publish original research that cannot be properly supported.

During the dispute it was argued by the Church that those editing from Scientology IPs were acting without direction from the Church itself, however, a former member of the Scientology Office of Special Affairs suggests otherwise. "The guys I worked with posted every day all day," Tory Christman tells The Reg. "It was like a machine. I worked with someone who used five separate computers, five separate anonymous identities...to refute any facts from the internet about the Church of Scientology."

So did Wikipedia handle this properly, and more importantly, do you still trust their neutrality.

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