Michael Zimmer.org

The Times.uk reports that Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia wants to build and open, wiki-based web search engine to rival Google. The search engine will be called Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.
At the current project page, Wales explains his motivations:
Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack …

Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, announced yesterday his plans to fork the project into a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as “an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.”
The Citizendium will take all of Wikipedia’s current articles (allowed under the rules of the GNU Free Documentation License) and edit them under a new model that differs substantially from the model used by what Sanger calls the “arguably dysfunctional” Wikipedia community. “First,” says Sanger, in explaining the primary differences, “the project …

Wikipedia has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales also challenged other Internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with China’s repressive policies, noting that censorship is:
antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: …

I was quoted in today’s Washington Square News about recent edits to NYU President John Sexton’s article on Wikipedia. Since the recent labor disupte with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, various additions were made to Sexton’s page that, IMO, violated Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policy. You can review the article’s edit history and discussion page for more information.
My colleage, and Wikipedia expert, Joseph Reagle, was also quoted in the WSN article.
UPDATE: For my efforts to help maintain NPOV in this article, an anonymous user has now referred to me …

danah boyd has an excellent post on the recent Seigenthaler-Wikipedia controversy, focusing particularly on the academic community’s response:
What pissed me off more was how the academic community pointed to this case and went “See! See! Wikipedia is terrible! We must protest it and stop it! It’s ruining our schools!” All of a sudden, i found myself defending Wikipedia to academics instead of reminding the pro-Wikipedians of its limitations in academia. I kept pointing out that they wouldn’t let students cite from encyclopedias either. I reminded folks that the …

According to News.com, Esquire writer AJ Jacobs put a badly written and error ridden article on Wikipedia and let the Wikipedian community have at it. Within days, the article had received hundreds of edits, was cleaned up, proof read and fact checked. The resuling entry is here.
(I hope my students don’t see this)

John Battelle points to a piece (reg required) by Max Kalehoff noting the striking increase in traffic driven to Wikipedia from search engine queries.
A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search engines placed Wikipedia at 146 in June 2004. But in September 2004 it jumped in the ranking to 93; 71 in December 2004; and in March 2005, it was the 33rd most popular site in terms of visits received from search engines.
That means Wikipedia is impacting not only the trivial …

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google’s offer to donate bandwidth and servers to Wikipedia. John Dvorak at PC Magazine provides helpful commentary, warning that the “nice guy” attitude of Google might not last forever:
…let’s say that Google is as honorable as it claims and has no intention of doing anything more than making life better for everyone. I know most of the principals there, and they are as normal and sincere as can be expected. Nice guys, actually. But Google itself is a public corporation. It’s its …

I’ve been thinking about Wikipedia quite frequently lately, mainly due to a colleague who is crafting his dissertation around an investigation of the collaborative nature of decision making and consensus on what consistutes “knowledge” within the Wikipedia community. It will prove to be a fascinating dissertation, which I’m sure I’ll continue to comment on as it progresses.
Meanwhile, I came across this post by Dan Gillmor today, where he takes to task an academic critic:
One critic is a Big University professor — a former professional journalist with significant online experience …