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Filed under: Web services

Wikipedia to color-code unreliable information

Wikipedia recently announced plans for a new feature that will color-code every word of every entry according to its reliability. Go ahead and make the obvious joke ("Aren't they all unreliable?" Ha. Ha.), but the way they're going about it actually sounds pretty smart. The optional color-coding feature is called "WikiTrust," and it codes each word according to how long it's been on the page and how reputable its author is.

The main worry when someone talks about reliability, or Wikipedia in general, is a serious lack of objectivity. Some controversial pages become battlegrounds that are changed back and forth daily, and all of those changes are (rightly, I think) going to hurt the pages' perceived credibility under WikiTrust. New text will start out with a bright orange background that fades gradually to white if it survives without editing for a while.

The only place I can see the system failing is in cases of vandalism. When a prankster seeds a page with fake information, it'll be new and labeled untrustworthy. That's good. When the correction suffers the same fate? Well, that might be bad. The saving grace is that a reliable registered user's changes start out with a lighter shade of orange than an anonymous vandal's, so they're not actually treated the same way.

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Internet, News, Education

Wikipedia will require trusted editors to approve changes

According to the New York Times, Wikipedia is making a move away from a democratic free-for-all system where anyone and everyone can edit any article. Instead, the site will require that changes to articles about living people be approved by trusted users.

As fans of Spider-Man are aware, with great power comes great responsibility. Wikipedia's massive growth over the past few years, and its emergence as a trusted source of information, has led the board of the Wikimedia Foundation (which oversees Wikipedia) to make changes that would put more power in the hands of the site's trusted contributors.

Apparently, the German-language Wikipedia has been doing this for about a year, and not just on pages dealing with living people. The English version seems to be moving in the same direction. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees this as a test, to make sure the new approval process will go smoothly before rolling it out to all articles. This could be a practical step toward improving the quality of Wikipedia, but it seems to signal a retreat from the philosophy on which the site was founded. It might be worth retreating, however, to deal with the frequent, sometimes high-profile, incidents of vandalism on Wikipedia.

Filed under: iPhone, Education

The official Wikipedia iPhone app is actually kind of lame

The good news is that Wikipedia finally has an official iPhone app. The bad news is that Wikipedia already had an iPhone-optimized website, and the app doesn't offer any compelling reason why you shouldn't just keep using that. Unlike some of the downloadable, offline-readable versions of Wikipedia we've covered before, the iPhone app isn't any more useful than a bookmark of the mobile site.

When I rounded up a bunch of ways to enhance your Wikipedia experience, I mentioned two good iPhone apps: Wikiamo and Wikipanion. I'd recommend either of those over the official app, as they offer options for searching, formatting, and offline reading that the official app simply doesn't. I hope to see the Wikipedia app improve over time, but for right now, it's just taking up space on your home screen.


[via AppScout]

Filed under: Internet, Video

Wikipedia to get better video support

Fortunately, Wikipedia's video options won't end up like this

When I first read the headline that Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, is preparing to offer editors lots of new video tools and support, I was immediately filled with dread. I instantly started imagining the types of videos that overly pedantic Wikipedia editors would create, on such scintillating topics like the "Mary Sue" archetype in fan fiction (and 3200 words on that, really?) or that really awesome episode of Battlestar Galactica (don't flame me BSG fans, Cylons rule and whatnot). Fortunately, the new video features that are going to be coming to Wikipedia aren't about content creation, at least not yet.

According to MIT's Technology Review, in the next two or three months, Wikipedia editors will have access to an "add media" button that allows them to find, annotate, choose the relevant portions of a video and then embed the resulting clip into any article. The whole thing will be web-based and will rely on open video standards. Three sources will be available in the beginning, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons and Metavid, but eventually Wikipedia hopes to allow users to scour the web for content.

Despite my early skepticism, the idea is actually pretty interesting. When I think about the first-wave of "book encyclopedia" killers, the CD and then DVD-ROM based multimedia offerings (like the late Encarta), the video content always sticks out as one of the biggest high points. Having quality video or audio content add context or augmentation to a text article can really make a subject more clear.

Of course, having to rely on copyright-free video or public domain works might make it difficult for Wikipedia to achieve those same goals.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Internet, Google, Education

Google's Translator Toolkit helps humans improve machine translation

Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.

Filed under: Search, Web

Wikia kills its search engine, now can Google please kill Knol?

Wikia Search
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced plans to kill off the Wikia Search project. Wikia Search was built to be sort of the Wikipedia of search engines. While a computer generates initial search results, users can adjust the order of results and even alter descriptions. When I checked out Wikia Search last summer I was actually pretty impressed with its feature set. And then I forgot about it and never visited the page again. Because the truth is that the search engine didn't really do a better job of helping me find what I was looking for than Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search.

Wales says the decision to shutter the service is a financial one. In the current economy it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend the time and money developing the service at the expense of other Wikia projects.

Now that Wales is pulling out of the search business, I can't help but wonder whether Google will take the hint and pull out of the encyclopedia biz. Google is also dealing with a tough economy. This week the company laid off 200 people in its sales and marketing division. And in January Google closed the door on Jaiku, Google Notebook and Google Video.

But the company hasn't closed Google Knol, a service that many people see as Google's answer to Wikipedia. Knol isn't really an encylopedia. Rather, it's a spot for experts to publish pages about topics they're well versed in. But it doesn't have Wikipedia's user base, visibility, or influence. Perhaps in a better economy it would make sense to continue developing Knol, but right now I'm not sure it makes any more sense for Google to compete with Wikipedia than for Wikipedia to take on Google.

[via CNet]

Filed under: Utilities, Features, Productivity, Web services

5 ways to enhance your Wikipedia experience


Wikipedia is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, for very good reason. If you're like me, and Wikipedia is your starting point for research on any topic -- and your starting and stopping point for quick facts -- then you might be interested in a handful of ways to make your Wikipedia experience faster, more attractive or more integrated. Give Wikipedia a boost with these great apps and add-ons:

1) Save a trip to Wikipedia.com with AQwikWiki or QuickWiki

Sometimes you run across a term on a webpage that you want to check out on Wikipedia, but you'd also like to finish reading the rest of the page. If you install these add-ons for Firefox, you can have both. AQwikWiki lets you highlight a term and right-click to insert the Wikipedia definition into the text in a yellow highlight. QuickWiki uses a customizable key combo plus a click on a word, and pops the definition up in a box. They're two different methods of doing basically the safe thing, but either way, you don't even have to bother leaving the page.

2) Access Wikipedia quickly from your iPhone with Wikiamo or Wikipanion

Both of these iPhone apps are designed to browse Wikipedia more efficiently from your iPhone. They each have their own unique feature sets, so you'll have to decide which one works better for you. This is much is for sure, though: they both make Wikipedia faster to search and easier to read than if you just browsed to it in Safari.


Read more →

Filed under: Design, Freeware, Browsers

Userscript makes Wikipedia pages look more encyclopedic

Wikipedia is a great resource, but the layout is a bit much if you're only there to do a little reading and learn some things that might, in reality, be actual facts. As is the case with most big-name sites, a userscript is available that cleans up the cluttered default layout and makes Wikipedia items look more like pages from a printed encyclopdeia.

Load an article, then install Simplepedia and reload. Gone are the logo, tabs, navigation sidebar, edit links, and just about everything else that isn't actual information related to your topic. The end result is a much tidier page layout that is free of unwanted distractions - except words like "hammer pants" in the article I captured.

To see how the result compares to the original article, just click the image. Contrary to what Hammer might tell you, you can, in fact, touch it.

Filed under: Web services, Google, web 2.0, Android

Android First-look: WikiMobile

If you had asked me yesterday if I thought I would get any use out of the WikiMobile Encyclopedia for Android, I probably would have rudely laughed in your face. The joke is on me, because WikiMobile is actually a pretty fantastic. It's also free -- something that cannot be said for the $19.99 BlackBerry version (and I'm not paying $19.99 to access a free website on my Curve).

Bonfire Media really did a bang-up job bringing WikiMobile to Android. Just looking at the BlackBerry screenshots (apparently, it is also available as a subscription service on some AT&T and Verizon phones), the Android version is much easier on the eyes.

I'm not a huge Wikipedia fan -- I tend to trust it as far as basic time and date skeletons and for information on popular culture -- but I can't deny having found the service helpful. WikiMobile really accentuate and captilizes on those features.

Read more →

Filed under: Google, Browsers

Google Chrome, the web chimes in

google chrome
Yesterday might have been a US holiday, but the Twittering and blogging masses were awakened (by quacking claxons, I'm sure) to the inadvertent leak of Google Chrome, the oft-rumored browser from the search giant. Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action. Here are a few of the stories we're digesting:

TechCrunch has some juicy first pics of the browser. They snagged a few blurry YouTube screenshots before the demo video was pulled as well. Is "blurry" and YouTube in the same sentence redundant?

Not everyone is enamored with Chrome. Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine provides tonic to those who think this is a real game-changer. He makes some great points.

At the moment, the Google Chrome comic book page on Blogoscoped is down because the "server is a bit stressed right now." I need 90cc's of Google juice, stat!

If you think Quikboy has something to say about Chrome, you haven't read the thread over on Slashdot. Go ahead, we can wait.

Yes, there's already a Wikipedia page!

Don't forget Mashable's take, our old buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick runs down the top features and Ina Fried (Webware) points out what everyone has been repeating: Redmond, volley off the port bow.

Google News has a little over 1,000 stories on Chrome, all within 24 hours. So who's not interested in this thing?

The read link on this post takes you to our Google Chrome page, and we'll be liveblogging around 2pm to cover the press conference via those who are there. Will September 2 be a watershed day online, or is Google's browser destined to be an also-ran? Leave your thoughts in the comments, as always.

UPDATES:

Chris Messina chimes in, explaining why this is important to Mozilla and the open web at large.
Forgot to include Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who references her awesome interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly.
VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson pulls up a three-legged stool to explain what this means.
Switched has a post about Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts has a liveblog going of the announcement (thanks Ryan!)
Jack Flack deciphers the Googlespeak.
Ryan at CybernetNews asks if Chrome will eat all other browsers for lunch.
OStatic's Mike Gunderloy has a terrific browser scorecard with his predictions on how other browsers will fare after the Chrome hits the fan.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Search

Need Wikipedia when you can't get online? Get Wikitaxi


Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it's getting bigger every day. If you're like me, you'd be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access -- devastating, I know! -- and you still need to know whether there's a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word "buffalo." Well, it's a good thing there's Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.

With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia -- or, if you're pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller -- and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker suggest that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment's notice!

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Windows, Freeware, Search

Kallout Adds Pop-Up Search Integration to Windows

Kallout
Because copying and pasting is just too much effort sometimes, the fine developers of Kallout have been kind enough to create a tool that improves the ease and convenience of performing searches.

Download the 3.2mb installer (Windows Vista and XP only), and Kallout will nestle itself into your system tray and go to work. To activate it, just highlight some text in any program and Kallout's blue balloon icon will appear, bestowing upon you its numerous search options. Some results (like Wikipedia, Google, and Google Maps) are overlayed directly on your current window. Others, like Facebook and MySpace, launch in your browser.

Results can be a little iffy, which stands to reason for a piece of software supporting so many different searches (41 as I'm writing this). Testing Williams College on Facebook, for example, probably won't find you any alums because it's tied to display names. Some results are incredibly slow to arrive - eBay, I'm talking to you - but you can hardly blame Kallout for that. Highlighting iPod gave me an almost instant list of reference books from Amazon, but the eBay results took so long to appear I nearly fell asleep.

Unfortunately, it's a bit on the beastly side, consuming about 24 megs of memory on my XP system. Still, if you like having a vast array of search options constantly at the ready, Kallout is tough to beat.

[via MakeUseOf]

Filed under: Web services, Google, web 2.0

Google Knol goes live, Wikipedia hardly quaking in its boots

Google Knol
Google has finally pulled back the curtain on its so-called Wikipedia killer, Google Knol. We first heard that Google was looking at launching a user-editable encyclopedia-style web services late last year. But to be perfectly honest, a lot's happened in the last 7 months and we kind of forgot about it. Now that it's here, we're not entirely sure it's fair to call it a Wikipedia-killer.

Knol provides a place to find information about topics ranging from lung cancer to toilet clogs. What makes it different from Wikipedia is that while any user can suggest alterations to articles, the original author gets to decide whether or not to include those changes. In theory, this will help prevent people who don't know what they're talking about from ripping apart an article from an authority on a topic. In practice, since anyone can write an article on any topic, whether they know what they're talking about or not, it could be even harder to find reliable information on Knol than Wikipedia.

Knol's saving grace might be that users can write multiple articles on the same topic. So if you think you know how to build a better mouse trap than the 20 other writers who have published their own methods, you can write your own article. Readers can then rank stories so hopefully only the most accurate and/or helpful "knols" will find their way to the top of the pile.

Creating a Knol is fairly straightforward. You just sign in with your Google account and start writing. You can also import documents create in Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF or TXT file.

[via Official Google Blog]

Filed under: Internet, Search

Put Wikipedia In Your Pocket

Pocket WikipediaSure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.

The download includes about 24,000 images and over 14 million words covering about 5,000 articles. Each one has been carefully hand-picked from Wikipedia's massive repository of community-assembled knowledge to avoid some of the more important omissions from Wikipedia's own Cd-Rom version Pocket Wikipedia is currently available for Windows, Linux, and PocketPC only.

Want it? Keep in mind the old adage "All good things come to those who wait." None of the mirrors we found were all that fast, but it's too good a download to ignore.

[via Best Freeware and Lifehacker]

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Six degrees of Wikipedia
Ever wonder how many clicks it takes to get from the Wikipedia page for Bill Gates to the page for Mark Shuttleworth? The answer is three. How about from "ice cream" to "cone?" Surprisingly, the answer is four. We know this not because we've been wasting hours clicking on every possible Wikipedia link and tabulating the results, but because somebody's done all the hard work for us by creating a Six Degrees of Wikipedia page.

Just type in any two items, and the web service will dig through a database of Wikipedia articles and figure out how long it would take to get from one to the other. The Wikipedia page for "2007" is apparently the closest to the "center" of Wikipedia, meaning that you can get to any other page from 2007 with an average of 3.45 clicks. When you take out Wikipedia pages for dates or long lists of items, the page for "United Kingdom," is the closest to the center, since it's an average of 3.67 clicks away from any other page.

[via Digital Inspiration]

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