Tag Archives: wikipedia

Jimmy Wales speaks with Poynter about AP topic pages

By Michael Becker | Published: November 16, 2009
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke with Poynter about the Associated Press’s plan to pro­duce some sort of top­ics pages for news. This com­ment from Wales stuck out to me. People do often come to Wikipedia when major news is break­ing. This is not our pri­mary inten­tion, but of course it hap­pens. The rea­son that it hap­pens [...]
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Wikipedia institutes new editing policies for certain articles

By Michael Becker | Published: August 26, 2009
Today CNN is report­ing that Wikipedia has added a layer of over­sight to arti­cles about liv­ing peo­ple. The hope is that the extra layer of edit­ing on these arti­cles will help iron out inac­cu­ra­cies in these arti­cles, which often appear as the first search result for famous people’s names. The new fea­ture, called “flagged revi­sions,” [...]
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Farewell, Microsoft Encarta

By Michael Becker | Published: March 30, 2009
Microsoft announced today that it’s going to shut­ter its Encarta ency­clo­pe­dia because “peo­ple today seek and con­sume infor­ma­tion in con­sid­er­ably dif­fer­ent ways than in years past.” In other words, peo­ple want their ency­clo­pe­dias to be like the Wikipedia, liv­ing and con­stantly evolv­ing things — not a DVD-ROM. Still, it’s a sad day for me. When I [...]
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Information wants to be free... and expensive

By Michael Becker | Published: February 24, 2009
Given how many elec­trons have been spilled of late over the “infor­ma­tion wants to be free” ver­sus micro­pay­ments debate, I thought it would be help­ful to remem­ber what author Stuart Brand actu­ally (says he) said when he “coined” the phrase: On the one hand infor­ma­tion wants to be expen­sive, because it’s so valu­able. The right [...]
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Wikipedia makes this world

By Michael Becker | Published: October 23, 2008
Wikipedia’s def­i­n­i­tion of truth mat­ters, says Technology Review con­tribut­ing edi­tor Simson Garfinkel, because of the sheer num­ber of peo­ple who use the online ency­clo­pe­dia with­out a sec­ond though about its accuracy.
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