Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-03-20/In the news

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In the news

By Catherine, 20 March 2006.

SXSW

On Monday, March 13, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were the joint keynote speakers at the South by Southwest conference and festival in Austin, Texas. Newmark did most of the talking and received most of the news coverage ("Craigslist, Wikipedia founders chat at SXSW", News.com), but Jimmy later took the microphone at the "20x2" event at an Austin nightclub to discuss his personal reasons for launching Wikipedia. ("The Secret of Wikipedia", San Francisco Chronicle).

Harvard debate

On Wednesday, March 15, David D. Weinberger, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discussed “The Authority of Wikipedia”[1] with Wikipedia steward Samuel J. Klein in front of about 25 people; the exchange was reported in "Fellow: Is Wikipedia Legit?" in The Harvard Crimson.

Economist and open source

On Thursday, 16 March, The Economist took a look at the open-source business model in "Open-source business: Open, but not as usual". Some quotes regarding Wikipedia:

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with around 2.6m entries in more than 120 languages, gets more visitors each day than the New York Times's site, yet is created entirely by the public.
Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality. This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule.
Openness has been both the making of, and a curse to, Wikipedia. [...] Yet two seemingly contradictory things happened: chaos reigned, and an encyclopedia emerged. So-called “edit wars” dominated the online discussions, biases were legitimised as “another point of view” and specialists openly sneered. Many contributors were driven away by the fractious atmosphere (including Mr Sanger, who went on to pen essays predicting Wikipedia's vulnerability to abuse). Still, the power of decentralised collaboration astounded everyone. After 20 days, the site had over 600 articles; six months later, it had 6,000; by year's end, it totalled 20,000 articles in a plethora of languages.

Further explanations of Wikipedia's processes were slightly skewed: like many others, the reporter interpreted daily business-as-usual against vandals and trolls as an increasing attack, and the tools Wikipedia uses against them as desperate last-ditch defenses; graphs accompanying the story unaccountably showed the number of articles and contributors falling in early 2006; Don't be a dick was mentioned as a new policy (despite being first created by Phil Sandifer over a year ago, on 27 January 2005); and it was stated (incorrectly) that only registered users are able to edit existing articles (although the article correctly mentioned that new contributors must wait several days before being able to create new articles).

Encyclopedia comparison

"Wikipedia and Britannica: The Kid’s All Right (And So’s the Old Man)" is an in-depth feature article in Information Today that analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. It includes an overview of the editorial processes of each, and extended excerpts of interviews with Jimmy Wales and Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications at Britannica.

Plagiarism

A student reporter at Weber State University in Utah was fired after a story submitted to the school newspaper was found to be heavily plagiarized from Wikipedia articles. A review of the reporter's previous work found further plagiarism. His dismissal was mentioned in a broader article on plagiarism in The WSU Signpost ("University to monitor plagiarism"). Earlier this year, a professional reporter at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was also fired for plagiarizing from Wikipedia (see archived story).