Items tagged with Wikipedia
Wikipedia's greatest strength is also it's inherent weakness. We're of course referring to the ability of anyone and nearly everyone being able to hop into an article and edit its contents, assuming it's not locked, creating a collective treasure trove of information that may not always be accurate. Wikipedia gets a...
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Looking for imagery on your mobile? No need to just randomly search the Web any longer; Wikipedia has just released the official Commons app for iOS and Android. Commons is a free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects, and now it's being transported to the smartphone arena. The official Wikimedia...
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It's hard to understate the global importance of Wikipedia. While many traditional university professors still won't allow the crowdsourced site to be listed as a source, only a fool would deny the site's impact on educating the world in areas they may have otherwise never stumbled upon. Particularly in developing...
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It appears Internet users living in the U.S. are most interested in social networking, steamy books, and popular movies. That's one of the many conclusions you can draw from a Top 10 list of the most viewed articles on Wikipedia in 2012. Johan Gunnarsson, a former student in Computer Science and Engineering at Lund Institute of Technology...
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After 244 years of publishing what many worldwide viewed as the definitive encyclopedia of the world, Encyclopaedia Britannica has announced it will cease publishing a paper series. To put that in perspective, this is a research initiative that predates lolcats, door knobs, germ theory and at least some of leftovers...
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Amazon.com has quietly begun a project to duplicate Wikipedia content and use links in the content to point to books that can be purchased on Amazon.com. The so-called Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Page was reportedly created in November. Amazon spokeswoman Anya Waring told CNET the following: "Shopping-enabled Wikipedia pages are a new introduction...
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Printed encyclopedias are pretty much dead, and so even are DVD-based encyclopedias such as Microsoft's Encarta. So too might be the printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), according to Oxford University Press (OUP), its publisher. The second edition of the OED was printed in 1989. The third edition hasn't even completed the...
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Isn't it ironic? Or maybe that's not even the best term to use here. Isn't it...weird? Wikipedia has quickly become the go-to place for knowledge on the Internet, and while it cannot always be trusted completely, it's usually a great place to start searching for information on pretty much any topic you can think of...
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Wikipedia. What would you ever do without it? It really makes you wonder how difficult homework is these days given that nearly every subject on the planet is covered in one form or another on the know-it-all website. Of course, that "easy homework" is really only easy if the information that one finds is accurate...
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The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the online encyclopia-like wiki Wikipedia, has launched its own iPhone application. While there were third-party iPhone Wikipedia applications, this is the first official release from the Foundation. Wikipedia Mobile is free, just as the site is, in the App Store. Here's how the app is described:...
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Wikipedia has decided enough is enough. After too many self-serving edits by the Church of Scientology, Wikipedia has decided to ban edits from IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.Here's a word for the church though: proxy server. At any rate, regardless of whether or not the Church manages to get...
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A post on Microsoft's Encarta website notes that the Encarta website, as well as the software products bearing the Encarta name, are being discontinued. The posting was first noticed by Ars Technica. Microsoft said said it will discontinue its online Encarta products by October 31, except for Encarta Japan, which will run through the end of...
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Two different applications have taken Wikipedia and compressed it into smartphone-digestible form. Both sell the resulting database for $10. WikiPock takes up about 4GB of storage, and is currently available for Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. It's $9.99 for the basic version, but you can opt for a version that includes updates for...
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Access to editing a Wikipedia article in the U.K. has been effectively blocked after the U.K.'s Internet Watch Foundation added a Wikipedia article on Virgin Killer, an album from German heavy metal group Scorpions, to its blacklist. The album's cover art image, depicting what appears to be a nude underage girl, is what caused the blacklisting....
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Much to the chagrin of teachers and librarians, Wikipedia has become a primary source of research and information for many seeking answers to questions with just a few quick key presses and mouse clicks. Since its debut in 2001, Wikipedia has outgrown other objective informational sites, such as About.com and Encyclopedia Britannica Online...
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In the super-fast world of the Internet, if a story breaks, you can expect the Wikipedia entry for that subject to be updated faster than you can blink. In the case of Tim Russert's sad death on June 13th, NBC contacted other networks and media outlets in an attempt to hold back the news long enough to notify his family vacationing in Italy....
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What won't Google do with their maps?If you go to Google Maps, you’ll notice there is now a “”More” button right next to “Street View”" and “Traffic.” If you click on it after getting a map, you will be given the options to tick “Photos” or “Wikipedia.” Ticking the first option populates teh map with geo-tagged photos provided by Panoramio....
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Jimmy Wales has broken a lot of ground in his day. The founder of Wikipedia has turned the online collaborative encyclopedia into a household word. Wales was contacted by Canadian political commentator Rachel Marsden about defacement of her Wikipedia page, and apparently one thing led to another. In another first, he's announced the breakup...
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Too bad it's today, January 15th. Today being the day of Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld, this is going to get missed by many. But not by us: Happy Seventh Birthday Wikipedia (all right, we'll admit it: they emailed us about it).Yes, Wikipedia was founded on January 15th, 2001. There's not much to add, except that despite Jimmy Wales'...
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I'm a big fan of Wikipedia. It's easy to find foolish or inaccurate things on it of course, but on the whole it's a fantastic and useful utility. If you do a lot of websearches on Google, you'll notice that Wikipedia has become a sort of default top of the page result for a lot of queries. That might be set for a big change, now that Google...
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To be quite honest, it's Wikipedia's two millionth English article, and it happend on Sunday. Wikipedia, the sixth most visited network of Web sites worldwide behind commercial operators Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and eBay, is available in 250 languages. Combined, Wikipedia has published more than eight million articles....
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The Wikipedia entry for Microsoft's upcoming Halo 3 has been edited by none other than somebody in the Liverpool offices of Sony Computer Entertainment Studios Europe.Without further ado, here is the edit: “The original entry stated: 'Halo 3, the third game in the best-selling Xbox game franchise Halo, is a highly anticipated first-person...
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