Wikipedia:Press coverage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia in the media
edit
Wikipedia as a topic:
In the press
In academic studies
In blogs
In books
In cartoons
In press releases
In webcomics
In comics
On TV and radio
Heaps of praise
Wikipedia as a source:
In academic studies
In books
In conference
In court cases
In the press
In webcomics
On TV and radio
Elsewhere
Shortcuts:
WP:PC
WP:PRESS
"WP:PC" redirects here. For establishing context in articles, see WP:PCR.

This page lists press coverage of Wikipedia that mentions or discusses Wikipedia as a project – that is, any aspect of Wikipedia overall, such as its structure, success, information, goals, history, or views on Wikipedia in general, and so on.

Articles that reference Wikipedia content but which do not discuss the project itself should be recorded at Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a press source. The template {{press}} may also be used to document mention of specific articles on their talk page. Great quotes from articles that enhance the reputation of Wikipedia should be included in our Trophy box.

Note: If there are errors in a news articles, then please post the matter to the Wikimedia Communications Committee's talk page. This way, the Wikimedia Foundation can send an official letter to the editor, or request for a correction.

Contents

[edit] Searching for discussion of Wikipedia online

The easiest way to search is to subscribe to a realtime Google Alert or Yahoo! News Alert for "Wikipedia."

[edit] How to add cites to this page

If you add an article, please cite both the title and the source. Note that if you're listing an article from a traditional press wire service that ran in your local newspaper, it may not have the same title everywhere; be cautious about duplicates.

Please add your entry to the end of the page, using Template:Cite news. The template, with the most commonly used parameters, is:

  • {{cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= |url= |work= |publisher= |date= |accessdate=2008-06-08 }}
    "Relevant/representative quote here."

[edit] Previous dates

[edit] 2008

[edit] January

  • The launch of Wikia gets extensive reportage in the media with frequent mention of its relationship to Wikipedia. Many are critical.
Financial Times, Business Week, Reuters, BBC News

[edit] February

  • Cohen, Noam. "Wikipedia Islam Entry Is Criticized", New York Times, 5 February 2008. Retrieved on 2008-02-05. "An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts." 
  • Anderson, Callum. "The rise of wikidemia", inQuire, February 2008, p. 4. (English) "Does anyone know the collective noun for hawks? No, well it's a kettle. That's right a group of hawks is called a kettle of hawks. Or at least that's what Wikipedia says, so it must be true. Well not quite, because I have actually spent most of today editing the collective nouns database on Wikipedia to falsify it with the, including the two above; such absurdities as: a shard of whales, a jive of jelly fish and, worst of all, a stir of spoons. We seem to live in the age of information, yet as far as the collective nouns database on Wikipedia is concerned, an age of false information." 
    Unfortunately, this one isn't available on Inquire's web site, I checked. This is the student newspaper of the University of Kent at Canterbury. After admitting he was a vandal on Wikipedia, he goes on to talk about professors who ban Wikipedia and Google for research purposes and cites one Professor Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton who not only bans Wikipedia and Google for research purposes, but also provides her students with excerpts to replace such research. By the way, the bad punctuation and grammar in the quote is copied directly from the printed version.
  • Johnson, Daniel. "Webopoly to World: Resistance is Futile", New Unversity. Retrieved on 2008-02-11. "Since 2001, Wikipedia has refused to restrict Chinese visitors from accessing certain materials prohibited by the PRC...However, if corporations like Microsoft and Google have the power to impose their policies by absorbing companies as large as Yahoo!, the same could just as easily be done to Wikipedia." 
    Analysis on the possible future oligopolies on the net and its effect on censorship, comparing large web corporations to Wikipedia on the issue.
  • Mark A. Shiffrin; Avi Silberschatz. "Making Wikipedia available anytime, anywhere", The Industry Standard, 2008-02-13. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. "There is an inherent value of knowledge freely compiled by the marketplace of thinking people, without the oversight of any government or individual society. This is knowledge any of us can take on our own terms and accept or reject in our judgment, without having been told by any government filter what we can or cannot think." 
    A Yale professor and a lawyer consider how even static copies of wikipedia are a revolutionary concept.
  • DW staff. "Germany's Brockhaus Encyclopedia Goes Online", Deutsche Welle, February 13, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-02-28. (English) "The 21st edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia was likely the last in printed form. "Now, everything will happen online," the spokesperson said. "But, we will clearly distinguish ourselves from providers like Wikipedia, by banking on relevance, accuracy and reliability," the spokesperson said. "And, our information cannot be manipulated."" 
    Brockhaus, the most popular Encylopedia in Germany ceases paper publication because of competition from online information sources, specifically German Wikipedia.
  • Parry, David. "Wikipedia and the New Curriculum", Science Progress, 2008-02-11. Retrieved on 2008-02-15. 
    A professor says banning Wikipedia is not "just a silly policy", but "It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies such as Wikipedia."
  • Kelly, Kevin. "The Bottom is Not Enough", 2008-02-12. Retrieved on 2008-02-16. "I would guess that in 50 years a significant portion of Wikipedia articles will have controlled edits, peer review, verification locks, authentication certificates, and so on." 
    The piece isn't about Wikipedia per se, but it is quite relevant. It discusses the encyclopedia building process in wikipedia at present and speculates how it might evolve in the future. via guardian article
  • Caroline Davies. "Wikipedia defies 180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet", The Observer, February 17, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-02-19. "The traditional reason given for the Islamic prohibition on images of prophets it to prevent them from becoming objects of worship in a form of idolatry. But, say the editors, the images used were examples of how Muhammad has been depicted by various Islamic sects through history and not in a religious context." 
    More on the petition to remove images of the Prophet Muhammad.
  • Lichfield, John. "France's favourite encyclopaedia falls victim to Wikipedia", The Independant, 20 February 2008 . Retrieved on 2008-02-20. "The 2008 edition of Quid, France's favourite encyclopaedia, has been cancelled by its publisher for lack of interest. ... Quid, produced by a family team for the past 45 years, has suffered especially at the hands of the French-language version of Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself web encyclopaedia." 
    France's most popular paper encyclopedia delays its next edition because of a sudden drop in demand attributed to the French Wikipedia. (See Quid (encyclopedia))
  • Horne, Marc. "Scots finds home on gey muckle website", Scotland on Sunday, 24 February 2008 . Retrieved on 2008-02-24. "AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA in the language of Rabbie Burns is now available at the click o' a moose. A Scots-language version of Wikipedia has already attracted more than 2,200 entries on subjects as diverse as "airchaeology" and "sodgerin". The English-language edition of the free online encyclopaedia has become one of the great success stories of the internet age with more than two million contributions. Scots enthusiasts, already buoyed by the SNP's decision to add the "mither tongue" to the school curriculum, have hailed the site as another shot in the arm for the long-neglected language. But the Scots Wikipedia has also been ridiculed as an embarrassing parody of the language used by Sir Walter Scott and Hugh MacDiarmid." 
  • Boran, Marie. "The man who wove the web", SiliconRepublic, 28 February 2008 . Retrieved on 2008-02-28. ""Wikipedia is one of the most heart-warming things about the web. It is not the technology itself: it’s humanity."" 
    In an interview Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, gives his view of Wikipedia.
  • Rosenberg, Mike. "3-Minute Interview: Jimmy Wales", The Examiner, 2008-02-28. Retrieved on 2008-02-29. "" Q Is there anything dangerous about having all that information? A I don’t think so. I tend to be a very big fan of the notion that as citizens in a free society, we need access to information to make good decisions."" 
See also: discussion at Fielding's year of birth.

[edit] March

  • Baker (User:Wageless) reviews Wikipedia - The Missing Manual and ruminates on his experience and impressions as a user of and contributor to the encyclopaedia
  • One of the many reports of the consequences of the end of an affair between Rachel Marsden and Jimmy Wales. A write up of the story is available on the Wikipedia Signpost. Other outlets picking up the story include:
  • A report combining the Rachel Marsden incident with postings by Danny Wool on his blog. A write up of the story is available on the Wikipedia Signpost. Other outlets picking up the story include:
  • Warman, Matt. "Wikipedia: A very modern encyclopedia", Daily Telegraph, 2008-03-06. Retrieved on 2008-03-06. "The site can't always reflect what people know any more; it reflects what people think." 
    Asks if Wikipedia is becoming a victim of its own success and wonders if the fact that Britannica was always a little bit out of date was its main strength. A response to this piece was made:
  • "The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?."
  • Dokoupil, Tony. "Revenge of the Experts", Newsweek, March 6, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-08. "The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." 
    Argues that the demand for reliable information will work against sites like Wikipedia to take traffic to new sites like Knol that pay professional experts to edit and produce online content. It calls this move Web 3.0.
  • Howley, Kerry. "Artifact: The World Needs Citations", Reason Magazine, March 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-10. "Wikipedia’s detractors criticize the online, user-written, constantly changing encyclopedia’s sometimes dubious sourcing, which they say makes it unreliable. Wikipedia’s defenders counter that the site’s mutable, fluid nature engenders a valuable skepticism toward all manner of too-trusted authorities. Nothing conveys Wikipedia’s openness to revision quite like “[citation needed],” the bracketed phrase sprinkled throughout its pixellated scrolls." 
  • Semuels, Alana. "Wikipedia's tin-cup approach wears thin", Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-10. "With about 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn't. Wikipedia's business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often." 
    Looks at how Wkipedia's budget is run on a shoestring. Includes an interview with Wikimedia Foundation, Executive Director Sue Gardner.
  • Moses, Asher. "More woes for Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales", Sydney Morning Herald, March 11 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-11. 
    discusses deletion and protection of Jeff V. Merkey (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) by User:Jimbo Wales allegedly in return for donations. Merkey has alleged on the Wikia mailing list that I am notifying the foundation I was approached on Friday by the Associated Press regarding statements attributed to me which are in some way, perceived to be related to Mr. Wales private affairs which seem to have gotten a great deal of press coverage ... he then follows with a statement to Associated Press which includes the assertion: According to Merkey, in 2006, Wales agreed that in exchange for a substantial donation and other financial support of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wales would use his influence to make Merkey's article adhere to Wikipedia's stated policies with regard to internet libel "as a courtesty" [sic] and place Merkey under his "special protection" as an editor. The newspaper article links to the wikia mailing list thread and also to the revision history of the article.
    Associated Press do not appear to have picked up Merkey's press release and only a few independent news sources have also mentioned the incident. Wales responded on the mailing list that the allegation is nonsense and this too was reported by the SMH although noting The claim is the most damning yet against Wales
  • NewScientist.com news service. "Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban", New Scientist, 16 March 2008, pp. 6. issue 2647. Retrieved on 2008-03-11. "Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums." 
    "A group of excellent scientists" are involved in battle with the prestigeous science publisher Physical Review Letters over their right to also publish the material in a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia.
  • Cohen, Noam. "Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias", The New York Times, March 16, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-19. "It has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it." 
    Looks at the world wide demise of print encyclopedias and how Wikipedia has come to dominate.
  • Petrilli, Michael J.. "Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?", Education Next, Hoover Institution, Spring 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-20. "As a K–12 educational tool, then, Wikipedia appears to pass the test, at least to the limited degree that any encyclopedia assists the learning process. Still, that doesn’t mean the site is perfect. As a resource about hot-button political issues, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to manipulation and spin. This is apparent in its treatment of education policy issues." 
    Compares ten articles in world and US history with their equivalents in Britannica.
  • Maderazo, Jennifer Woodard. "How to Be a Model Wikipedia Contributor", PBS, 2008-03-21. Retrieved on 2008-03-22. "In reading entries on the site, I recently found some where I thought I might be able to help, so I took it upon myself to get more involved in Wikipedia and try to add something, but I quickly found that I wasn’t doing things correctly and that my contributions weren’t well-received by the community." 
  • Bergstein, Brian. "Wikipedia Questions Paths to More Money", The Associated Press, 2008-03-22. Retrieved on 2008-03-22. "With 2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia "anyone can edit," stormed the Web's top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that means Wikipedia has far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content." 
  • Bruno, Antony. "Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace", Reuters, March 22, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-24. "According to data provided to Billboard from Yahoo -- the second-most popular search engine on the Web after Google -- those searching for artist information are selecting the Wikipedia entry link over artists' MySpace pages by a factor of more than 2-to-1. The Wikipedia entries are also more popular than artists' Web sites." 
    In the last six months Wikipedia has become the first choice for music fans seeking information on artists because of its tight, focused and vetted overview of the subject.
Further coverage at:
  • Gonzalez, Tony. "History of Hillsdale College wiki page", The Collegian, Hillsdale, Michigan: (official student newspaper of Hillsdale College), 2008-03-27. Retrieved on 2008-03-27. "Now nearly four years old, the Hillsdale College entry at Wikipedia has a led a relatively calm life for an encyclopedic entry open to revision by anyone with an Internet connection." 
related content surrounding Wikipedia and the college's article on Wikipedia:
  • McNamara, Paul. "Khoslas back Wikipedia to tune of $500K", NetworkWorld website, 2008-03-27. Retrieved on 2008-03-27. "Perhaps that's about to change, however, witness this afternoon's just-announced donation of $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, by heavyweight venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru." 
  • Cellan-Jones, Rory. "Will Wikipedia always win?", BBC News Technology, 31 March 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-02. "Of course, the brutal truth is that it is the reference entry which comes highest in a Google search which will win the readers. And for the foreseeable future that is likely to be the Wikipedia version - whether it is accurate or not." 
    The BBC's technology correspondent looks at the status of Wikipedia on achieving its 10 millionth article and compares its strengths and weaknesses with Knol and Citizendium.

[edit] April

  • Gonzales, J.R.. "The joke's on Miss Ima", Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2008. "Seems the folks at Wikipedia are having a little fun at Ima Hogg's expense this April Fools' Day." 
  • McCarthy, Caroline. "Wikipedia fudges the truth for April Fools' Day", News.com, April 1, 2008. "Whoever wrote the fake Ima Hogg bio might want to think about pursuing a career in screenwriting. It sounds more amusing than any of the movies I've seen recently..." 
  • Soria, Chester. "Wikipedia remembers Ima Hogg", Houstonist.com, April 1, 2008. "Anybody who is worth their salt about Houston history knows Ima Hogg. You don't even need to be a Bayou City scholar in order to know of Ms. Hogg. Case in point, Wikipedia is shining a spotlight on the notoriously named philanthropist as its featured article of the day." 
  • The Bryant Park Project. "'Round the Clock: Obama, Clinton Wiki-Warfare", National Public Radio, 2008-04-03. Retrieved on 2008-04-03. "Wikipedia describes itself as the free encyclopedia anyone can edit — and by anyone, they mean anyone — which is a problem for Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY). After all, a Web search for either candidate will return his or her Wikipedia page, often as the second result. With so many eyes viewing those pages every day, the stakes are high — and for two unofficial minders, attempting to police those pages has become a 24-hour job." 
  • Johnson, Chris. "Edits to gay soldier’s Wikipedia entry traced to Pentagon", Washington Blade, April 3, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-03. "A Wikipedia article about Maj. Alan Rogers, a gay soldier who was killed in January in Iraq, was apparently edited by someone in the Pentagon, who removed any mention that Rogers was gay. ... Rob Pilaud, a patent agent and a friend of Rogers who attended the soldier’s funeral, restored the information to the Wikipedia article the next day. Pilaud was among Rogers’ friends who created the Wikipedia page. ... Pilaud is asking Rogers’ friends for biographical information on the fallen solider to enhance the Wikipedia article. ... “With Wikipedia, at least, I simply want to present objective information about Alan — about who he was, what he did with his life and what he would have wanted,” he said." 
  • AFP. "China eases Wikipedia controls", The Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2008 . Retrieved on 2008-04-04. "Chinese censors seemed today to have relaxed their control of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, as reports from users suggested it was accessible in at least parts of the country." 
    Reporting a relaxation of the blocking of non Chinese language Wikipedias.
  • Brown, Barrett. "Information flow on Campus: A Closer Look at Wikipedia", 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Spring 2008, pp. 54-57. "... Wikipedia has grown enormously since its inception, and is fast becoming widely accepted as a verifiable academic resource. How reliable is Wikipedia? How does it work? And, can it be manipulated by third parties? ... In theory, Wikipedia is a collaborative internet encyclopedia which relies on peer review and procedure to keep a neutral point of view (NPOV). The evidence from my experiments and experience inside the Wikipedia social structure point to a slightly different reality. ... Quite simply, since the system is based on collaboration, it does not matter who is right; it matters who is agreed with the most. Therefore the Wikipedia system is flawed."  - [Article not available on line.]
This is a 3,225 word article critical of Wikipedia. The author talks about his experiences editing five specific Wikipedia articles and ends with a suggestion of how the CIA or al-Qaeda could gain increased control over Wikipedia's content. Copy with publisher's permission to reproduce is available here.
  • "Wild Wiki Ways of Liam of the Lavaflow", Inside Cover, The West Australian, 2008-04-08. Retrieved on 2008-04-13. "Some miscreant has being fiddling with Liam of Lebanon's Wikipedia entry. When we checked yesterday the former Perth shock jock was described as a "robotic journalist from Bikini Bottom"." 
Referring to this revision.
  • Duffy Marsan, Carolyn. "How the iPhone is killing the 'Net" (HTML), Network World, IDG, 2008-04-09, p. 4. Retrieved on 2008-04-17. (EN) "In Chapter 6, Zittrain offers a glowing review of Wikipedia, from its humble origins to its success as one of the Internet’s most popular Web sites." 
    Review of The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
  • Baker, Nicholson. "How I fell in love with Wikipedia" (HTML), The Guardian, 2008-04-10. Retrieved on 2008-04-10. (EN) "Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast." 
An abridged version of the Baker's New York Review of Books article "The Charms of Wikipedia", listed above under March.
  • Miller, John J.. "Liberal web" (HTML), National Review, 2008-04. Retrieved on 2008-04-10. (EN) "Wikipedia calls itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” It has become the most influential reference site on the web. It may even be the most influential reference source available anywhere, online or off. Its English-language edition carries more than 2.3 million articles, written by thousands of contributors who call themselves “Wikipedians.” These entries almost always rank high on Google searches... A couple of years ago, the journal Nature compared a sampling of scientific entries found on Wikipedia with those published in Encyclopedia Britannica. It determined that the newcomer was almost as trustworthy as the old hand... The most egregious examples of vandalism tend to be corrected quickly by devoted Wikipedians... Plenty of controversial subjects are handled with an exquisite sense of fairness, and Wikipedia provides a special forum for editors to debate each other on how best to treat topics. There are vigorous debates between “deletionists” who seek to eliminate material they consider irrelevant and “inclusionists” who believe that more information equals richer content." 
  • Rampell, Catherine. "Publisher Compares Wikipedia to Oxford English Dictionary" (HTML), The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008-04-10. Retrieved on 2008-04-10. (EN) "Over at the Oxford University Press’s blog, OUP publisher Niko Pfund paid Wikipedia the ultimate compliment: He compared it to the Oxford English Dictionary." 
    Refers to a a short Q&A by Niko Pfund, Vice President and Publisher of the Academic and Trade division of Oxford University Press in New York, on the Oxford University Press USA blog, in which he compares the method by which the early OED was compiled with the wikipedia method.
  • Shiels, Maggie. "Wikipedia takes business approach" (HTML), BBC News website, 2008-04-16. Retrieved on 2008-04-16. (EN) "I thought if we are really successful we might make the top one hundred websites and now we are like number eight on the internet and much bigger than I would have ever thought." 
    Relatively bland overview of the current state of things in wikipedia, based on an interview with Jimmy Wales.
  • Tozer, James. "You've been Wikied! Medieval village accused of having tapeworm outbreak becomes latest victim of online encyclopædia", London Daily Mail, Daily Mail and General Trust, 20:51pm UTC on 17 April 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-17. (English) 
    According to many who live there, the village of Denshaw is a little piece of paradise tucked away in the Pennines. But Wikipedia readers have been receiving a rather different message.
    According to the world's most-used online encyclopaedia, its population was devastated by a tapeworm outbreak ten years ago. Those who remain relax by throwing sheep or shooting cows. It gets no more than four hours of sunlight a day because of the surrounding hills. And the total population is four, none of whom is a "fit girl".
    Located via this entry at Fark.com
  • Laurent, Samuel. "L'étrange histoire du «phénomène Jin Jing»", Le Figaro, April 21, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-21. (French) "Créée juste après les incidents des Paris, une longue fiche Wikipedia en anglais est disponible sur elle. Mais elle fait l'objet d'une controverse, la plupart des sources citées étant des médias chinois." 
    French newspaper Le Figaro analyses what it calls the "Jin Jing phenomenon", and mentions that Jin has a Wikipedia article. The Figaro article provides a direct link to the Wikipedia article. The press article notes that coverage of Jin in Wikipedia is currently subject to controversy (it has a neutrality tage), and links this to controversy over Jin in the wider media.
  • "EI exclusive: a pro-Israel group's plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia", Uruknet, 21 April 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-21. (English) "A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged." 
    Reports an exposé of an alleged conspiracy to set up an undercover pressure group within Wikipedia to give certain articles a pro Zionist slant.
  • Casa Editorial EL TIEMPO. "'Dios' de la web pasa a ser de papel", El Tiempo, 22 April 2008, p. A1. (Spanish) 
    El Tiempo, Colombia's highest circulation daily newspaper, calls Wikipedia "'God' of the web" on its front page.
  • Cohen, Noam. "A Slice of German Wikipedia to Be Captured on Paper", The New York Times, 2008-04-23. Retrieved on 2008-04-24. "[T]he German-language Web site has more than 750,000 separate articles; the printed volume will have only about 25,000, with 1,000 or so photographs. [...] The printed work will include brief summaries (about 15 lines each) that can fit in about 1,000 pages." 
    Reports German publisher's plan to publish articles on top most searched terms in German Wikipedia. (Google news had 23 news articles on this story at 2008-04-24 [1].)
  • Altoft, Patrick. "Is there room for britannica.com & Wikipedia?", Search Engine News, April 21, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-24. "Last week Britannica.com decided to adopt a “first click free” strategy allowing web publishers to link directly to article pages. Readers who clicked through to the page were allowed to see the content of that article for free and if they wanted to explore further they need a subscription. This is a very interesting piece of linkbait from britannica.com and one that could see them challenging Wikipedia if they can sort out their on site SEO strategy." 
    Reports that Britannica may be seeking to generate a higher search engine ranking by offering free access to its articles for the first click only.
  • "Crimes on Wikipedia: A Wikinews interview", Wikinews, April 25, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-26. "A 15-year-old boy, arrested last Friday in conjunction with criminal threats made on Wikipedia, was charged Thursday with seven felonies in Pomona Juvenile Court in Pomona, California. Prosecutors stated that the teen posted two threats on Wikipedia, saying that six named students as well as members of his school's badminton team would be shot." 
    A school student is arrested after Wikipedia admins reported to police a threat to shoot other school students in an edit to the Glen A. Wilson High School article. The admin involved is interviewed.
    • Hennessy-Fiske, Molly. "Violent threats on Wilson High's Wikipedia page went unchecked", LA Times, 2008-04-29. Retrieved on 2008-05-08. "High school threats: An article in Tuesday's California section said threats posted on Glen A. Wilson High School's Wikipedia page came from an anonymous e-mail address. The threats were posted by a user who had not registered with Wikipedia. He posted to the site using an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a number generated by the computer or device he was using." 


  • Guess, Andy. "Making Wikis Work for Scholars", Inside Higher Ed, 2008-04-28. Retrieved on 2008-05-06. "For computer science, especially, many topics on Wikipedia are in a form polished and accessible enough to assign to students as reading, and the subjects aren’t controversial in a way that would inspire the sort of back-and-forth citation wars that cause some articles to fluctuate wildly between competing versions. But other topics get assigned from Wikipedia as well — not least in courses about digital culture itself." 
    Despite ongoing controversy over students using Wikipedia as a source for papers, professors are finding some articles (Complexity classes P and NP and Chernoff bound are specifically linked to), useful enough to refer students to for basic information on a topic. Larry Sanger and others involved in more academic wikis are quoted.
  • Tweney, Dylan. "Attention Bloggers: Now You Can Link to Actual Information", Wired, April 29, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-29. "Old-school encyclopedia Britannica is giving bloggers free subscriptions to Britannica Online, the internet version of its multivolume masterpiece. What this means is that bloggers no longer have to rely on Wikipedia's crowdsourced and sometimes questionably factual encyclopedia entries when they want to insert a quick link to background info on, say, Bosnia, or circular polarized light, or the grammatical structure of Klingon." 
    Britannica will vet the blogger's standing before granting requests for a free link to one of its pages.

[edit] May

  • Beam, Alex. "Wiki-war in the Middle East", International Herald Tribune, May 6, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-05-07. "What if they decided to pursue the Arab-Israeli conflict by other means? Inevitably, it would take place on the Internet. And inevitably Wikipedia would be involved." 
  • McElroy, Damien. "Israeli battles rage on Wikipedia", The Daily Telegraph, 2008-05-07. Retrieved on 2008-05-08. "The conflict in the Middle East has spread to the internet with Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups using Wikipedia, the electronic encyclopedia, to push their message." 
    Further reporting of the pro-Israel group, Camera's call for volunteers to edit entries that it sees as displaying bias.
  • Ilani, Ofri. "Is that so?", Haaretz Newspaper , Israel, May 21, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-05-24. "Yaari hopes that Wikipedia users will soon not have to rely on their instincts concerning the reliability of a Wikipedia entry they are reading." 
    Reports research by Eti Yaari of the Information Science department at Bar-Ilan University in her doctoral thesis on the possibility of automatically evaluating the veracity of Wikipedia entries, in order to provide an efficient scale for surfers to judge the quality of an entry.
  • Hutcheon, Stephen. "HSC students to get Wikipedia course", The Sydney Morning Herald, 2005-05-26. Retrieved on 2008-05-30. "In an Australian first, NSW HSC students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.. ..Wikipedia should be seen as a first port of call that can "point you in the direction of more authoritative resources. Because of that, I have high hopes that it will be a very valuable experience for high school students," he said, one that would expose them to the "good, bad and ugly sides" of Wikipedia." 
    A view of the inclusion of Wikipedia on the NSW English syllabus.
  • Myers, Kevin. "Lies, damned lies, and the wickedness of Wikipedia", Irish Independent, Tuesday May 27 2008. Retrieved on 2008-05-27. "And so -- do these wretched Wikipedia people ever lie awake worrying at the damage that the evil or the impressionable might inflict upon those who have been maligned in their uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an "encyclopedia"? I doubt it extremely: for of all the lies of our time, Wikipedia is surely the greatest." 
    Irish Jounalist, Kevin Myers , complains about the inaccuracies in his Wikipedia article.
  • Garlick, Hattie. "How Wikipedia can help schoolchildren", Times, 2008-05-29. Retrieved on 2008-05-30. "At the start of the next academic year, high school teachers across New South Wales will be intoning a new education mantra: “Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic and Wikipedia”." 
    A new course in the high school English syllabus in New South Wales called “Global Village”, examines how modern communities interact and has Wikipedia as an example of how modern communities interact. The article then takes a satirical line about what the lessons might be.
  • "Six degrees of Wikipedia -- come and play", Los Angeles Times, 2008-05-28. Retrieved on 2008-05-30. "Here's a fun news site from Stephen Dolan at Trinity College Dublin: He's found a way to show the smallest number of Kevin Bacon steps separate any article on Wikipedia from any other." 
    Concludes the article United Kingdom is at the centre of the shortest route to any other article.

[edit] June

  • Keen, Andrew. "Andrew Keen on New Media", The Independent, 2 June 2008. Retrieved on 2008-06-02. "Wikipedia – with its 10 million articles in 253 languages created by hundreds of thousands of contributors – is the architectural and pedagogical antithesis of Balliol College." 
    Reports a debate at Oxford University, Balliol College, between Wikipedia co-founder Dr Larry Sanger and Andrew Keen on the proposition that "the internet is the future of knowledge".
  • "The free-knowledge fundamentalist", The Economist, 2008-06-05. Retrieved on 2008-06-05. "He is the closest thing it has to a spokesman, the occasional monarch who intervenes in editing disputes, and the ambassador—both inspiring and controversial—of the Wikipedian idea." 
    Article focusing on Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales
  • On the latest development concerning Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne accusations that financial journalist Gary Weiss has gamed Wikipedia over the past two-and-a-half years to discredit him and his campaign against the controversial Wall Street practice of naked shorting. Article dsecribes the dilemma between the principles of sockpuppeting and privacy protection. Article describes the process leading to the banning of User:Mantanmoreland, an alleged sockpuppet of Gary Weiss. Two administrators, David Yellope and User:FT2, are interviewed.

Please use Wikipedia Template:Cite news for entries here.


[edit] See also