Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Press coverage 2008

Wikipedia in the press

January

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  • "Wikia launch". Google News search results. Various media sources. 8 January 2008. Retrieved 2008-01-08.
  • 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
  • Besson, Pierre-François (25 January 2008). "What the future holds for Wikipedia". Swissinfo. Retrieved 2008-01-30.
    Interview with Florence Devouard, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Discusses the future development of Wikipedia.

February

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  • Cohen, Noam (5 February 2008). "Wikipedia Islam Entry Is Criticized". New York Times. Retrieved 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.
"The popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has come to play an important role in informing and also shaping public debates. Yet as a Florida-based, US creation, it brings its own baggage to those debates. US corporate media sources (Time, CNN, Fox, and so on) are privileged as reliable and “neutral” sources in Wiki entries, despite the fact that many of these bodies are intimately involved in many of the most contentious public debates, such as privatisation, intervention and war."
  • Metz, Cade (6 February 2008). "Wikipedia ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'". The Register. Retrieved 2008-02-07. But there's a catch. One of the site's leading administrators bears an extreme conflict of interest, but you can't expose him from the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. He created the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard.
Continuing The Register's singular coverage of Wikipedia, the article alleges that User:Jossi has a conflict of interest with respect to Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard and Prem Rawat. Discussion of the matter is available from the WP:COI archives
  • Anderson, Callum (February 2008). "The rise of wikidemia". inQuire. p. 4. 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 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.
  • "Wikipedia faces wrath of Islam". The Inquirer. 2008-02-11. Retrieved 2008-02-12. A petition claims to have amassed 132,000 signatures demanding that those wacky wiki weevils down the pic out of respect for the religion.
  • Dvorak, John C. (2008-02-01). "Why Wikipedia Just Gets Better". PC Magazine. Retrieved 2008-02-12. My advice: Enjoy it while you can.
    A wiki skeptic considers why Wikipedia works and why its success may only be short term.
  • Mark A. Shiffrin; Avi Silberschatz (2008-02-13). "Making Wikipedia available anytime, anywhere". The Industry Standard. Retrieved 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 (February 13, 2008). "Germany's Brockhaus Encyclopedia Goes Online". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 2008-02-28. 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 (2008-02-11). "Wikipedia and the New Curriculum". Science Progress. Retrieved 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 (2008-02-12). "The Bottom is Not Enough". Retrieved 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
  • "Area Man Honored To Be One Who Added Death Date To Heath Ledger's Wikipedia Page". The Onion. 2008-02-16.
    "CEDAR RAPIDS, IA—Blake Yardley, 34, told reporters Monday that he felt extremely humbled to have been the individual who, amidst the chaos and sadness of actor Heath Ledger's recent untimely passing, had the foresight and due reverence to add the death date to the star's Wikipedia page." (Note that The Onion is a parody newspaper publishing satirical articles.)
  • Caroline Davies (February 17, 2008). "Wikipedia defies 180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet". The Observer. London. Retrieved 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 (20 February 2008). "France's favourite encyclopaedia falls victim to Wikipedia". The Independent. London. Retrieved 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 (24 February 2008). "Scots finds home on gey muckle website". Scotland on Sunday. Retrieved 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. {{cite news}}: External link in |quote= (help)
  • Boran, Marie (28 February 2008). "The man who wove the web". SiliconRepublic. Retrieved 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 (2008-02-28). "3-Minute Interview: Jimmy Wales". The Examiner. Retrieved 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.
"[Fielding's] age has been the subject of some debate. She says she was 73 in November. Enemies, some of whom appear to have tampered with her Wikipedia entry, ungallantly ' assert that she has been with us slightly longer than that." (See also: discussion at Fielding's year of birth.)

March

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  • 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:
  • McCarthy, Megan (2008-03-03). "Wikipedia Founder Hit With Relationship Trouble, Allegations of Excessive Spending". Wired Blog network. Wired. Retrieved 2008-03-05. Former associates of Wales' are using this scandal to bring up other worries they have about the organization at the foundation. Former Wikimedia exec Danny Wool, who left the foundation last year, wrote a blog post insinuating that Wales used the nonprofit foundation as his own personal piggy bank.
  • 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 (2008-03-06). "Wikipedia: A very modern encyclopedia". London: Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 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 (March 6, 2008). "Revenge of the Experts". Newsweek. Retrieved 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 (March 2008). "Artifact: The World Needs Citations". Reason Magazine. Retrieved 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 (March 10, 2008). "Wikipedia's tin-cup approach wears thin". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 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 (March 11, 2008). "More woes for Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2008-03-11.
    discusses deletion and protection of Jeff V. Merkey (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) 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 (16 March 2008). "Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban". New Scientist. p. 6. issue 2647. Retrieved 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 (March 16, 2008). "Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias". The New York Times. Retrieved 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. (Spring 2008). "Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?". Education Next. Hoover Institution. Retrieved 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 (2008-03-21). "How to Be a Model Wikipedia Contributor". PBS. Retrieved 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 (2008-03-22). "Wikipedia Questions Paths to More Money". The Associated Press. Retrieved 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 (March 22, 2008). "Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace". Reuters. Retrieved 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 (2008-03-27). "History of Hillsdale College wiki page". The Collegian. Hillsdale, Michigan: (official student newspaper of Hillsdale College). Retrieved 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 (2008-03-27). "Khoslas back Wikipedia to tune of $500K". NetworkWorld website. Retrieved 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.
  • "Wikipedia superó los 10 millones de artículos" (in Spanish). Clarín. March 30, 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-30. La popular enciclopedia online alcanzó esa cifra con una entrada publicada en su versión húngara. El artículo cuenta la vida de un pintor inglés del siglo XVI que retrataba a los reyes de la época.
    Article talks about Wikipedia reaching 10 million articles thanks to a Hungarian entry, Nicholas Hilliard.
  • Cellan-Jones, Rory (31 March 2008). "Will Wikipedia always win?". BBC News Technology. Retrieved 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.

April

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  • Gonzales, J.R. (April 1, 2008). "The joke's on Miss Ima". Houston Chronicle. Seems the folks at Wikipedia are having a little fun at Ima Hogg's expense this April Fools' Day.
  • McCarthy, Caroline (April 1, 2008). "Wikipedia fudges the truth for April Fools' Day". News.com. 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 (April 1, 2008). "Wikipedia remembers Ima Hogg". Houstonist.com. 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 (2008-04-03). "'Round the Clock: Obama, Clinton Wiki-Warfare". National Public Radio. Retrieved 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 (April 3, 2008). "Edits to gay soldier's Wikipedia entry traced to Pentagon". Washington Blade. Retrieved 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 soldier 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 (April 4, 2008). "China eases Wikipedia controls". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 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 (Spring 2008). "Information flow on Campus: A Closer Look at Wikipedia". 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 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.
  • West, Steve (2008-04-08). "Martin Luther King, Jr Wikipedia Page Defiled" (HTML). CinemaBlend. Retrieved 2008-04-10. Being such a good starting place for looking up info she went to Wikipedia and found that King's entry had been reduced to one phrase: "im a n----r."
  • "Wild Wiki Ways of Liam of the Lavaflow". Inside Cover. The West Australian. 2008-04-08. 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 (2008-04-09). "How the iPhone is killing the 'Net" (HTML). Network World. IDG. p. 4. Retrieved 2008-04-17. 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 (2008-04-10). "How I fell in love with Wikipedia" (HTML). The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 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. (2008-04-21). "Liberal web". National Review. Archived from the original (HTML) on June 19, 2008. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 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 (2008-04-10). "Publisher Compares Wikipedia to Oxford English Dictionary" (HTML). The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 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 (2008-04-16). "Wikipedia takes business approach" (HTML). BBC News website. Retrieved 2008-04-16. 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.
  • Laurent, Samuel (April 21, 2008). "L'étrange histoire du "phénomène Jin Jing"" (in French). Le Figaro. Retrieved 2008-04-21. 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 2008-04-21. 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.
  • Cohen, Noam (2008-04-23). "A Slice of German Wikipedia to Be Captured on Paper". The New York Times. Retrieved 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 (April 21, 2008). "Is there room for britannica.com & Wikipedia?". Search Engine News. Retrieved 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 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 (2008-04-29). "Violent threats on Wilson High's Wikipedia page went unchecked". LA Times. Retrieved 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 (2008-04-28). "Making Wikis Work for Scholars". Inside Higher Ed. Washington, D.C. Retrieved 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 (April 29, 2008). "Attention Bloggers: Now You Can Link to Actual Information". Wired. Retrieved 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.

May

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  • Williams, Eesha (2008-05-01). "Wikipedia distorts nuclear history". Rutland Herald. Retrieved 2008-05-02. Printed out, Wikipedia's "Nuclear Power" article runs to about 20 pages. It serves as a good example of the famous Web site's flaws.
    Examines the wikipedia article Nuclear power.
  • Beam, Alex (May 6, 2008). "Wiki-war in the Middle East". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved 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.
  • Castaldo, Joe (2008-05-12). "Q&A: Wikimedia Foundation's Sue Gardner". Canadian Business magazine. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
    An interview with Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • Schilling, Chelsea (2008-05-06). "Is Wikipedia wicked porn?". World Net Daily. Retrieved 2008-05-07. If it wants to be viewed as being in the business of pornography, it is certainly doing a good job of labeling itself as a bunch of hard-core pornographers.
    Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues of the Concerned Women for America, a Biblically principled organization, fulminates at sexually explicit images on Wikipedia.
  • McElroy, Damien (2008-05-07). "Israeli battles rage on Wikipedia". London: The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 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 (May 21, 2008). "Is that so?". Haaretz Newspaper , Israel. Retrieved 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.
  • Mulholland, Helene (May 23, 2008). "Crewe byelection: The view from the blogs". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-05-24.
    "Lib Dem candidate Elizabeth Shenton's Wikipedia entry is already 'marked for deletion'. Bless."
  • Hutcheon, Stephen (2005-05-26). "HSC students to get Wikipedia course". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 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 (May 27, 2008). "Lies, damned lies, and the wickedness of Wikipedia". Irish Independent. Retrieved 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 (2008-05-29). "How Wikipedia can help schoolchildren". London: Times. Retrieved 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 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.

June

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  • Keen, Andrew (2 June 2008). "Andrew Keen on New Media". The Independent. London. Retrieved 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 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.
  • Arup, Tom (June 12, 2008). "Telstra CEO in web legal spat". The Age. Australia. Retrieved 2008-06-12. A Telstra spokesman has described comments that were posted on chief executive Sol Trujillo's Wikipedia entry as "highly defamatory and offensive personal comments". A US law firm reportedly threatened Wikimedia, which runs the Wikipedia website, with legal action in March this year unless it removed "defamatory statements" from the Wikipedia entry of the Telstra chief.
    Report of threatened legal proceeding against Wikimedia by Australian telecoms company Telsra for comments against its chief executive Sol Trujillo made in the article.
  • Newton, Jon (June 2008). "Online stalkers menace Wikipedia editors". p2pnet news. Retrieved 2008-06-19. A stalker drove former Wikipedia editor David Shankbone off the site. Mr. Shankbone describes the growing problem of harassment and stalking that targets the nonprofit encyclopedia's most dedicated volunteers....
    Reports on the stalking of and threats made to some Wikipedia editors.
Story also mentioned here.
  • A Wikipedia editor writes about his experience with the project over the last five years, what inspired him to become a contributor to articles on Seattle, Washington state, and the Pacific Northwest, and why he has recently become far less active.
  • McLaughlin, Martyn (21 June 2008). "Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia 'littered with inaccuracies'". The Scotsman. Retrieved 2008-07-04. Wikipedia and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland's falling exam pass rates. The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.
    The author supports the SPTC's view in blaming students' trusting and undiscriminating use of internet sources, especially Wikipedia for a decline in examination results in Scotland.


  • Cohen, Noam (2008-06-23). "Trying, and failing, to delay news in the Internet era". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
    Wikipedia's reporting of the death of news anchor Tim Russert. An IBS spokeswoman said Friday that "a junior-level employee made updates to the Wikipedia page upon learning of Russert's passing, thinking it was public record." She added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC.". NBC News said it had been told the employee was fired.


July

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  • "Wikipedia expands into Romansh". swissinfo.ch. July 5, 2008.
    "Wikipedia has introduced Switzerland's fourth language Romansh. The Romansh project was the work of two brothers from the eastern canton of Graubünden, Gion-Andri and Martin Cantieni, supported by a dozen other contributors. The first two years of the work were financed by a contribution of SFr60,000 ($58,502) from the canton and the federal government, according to the daily Romansh language newspaper La Quotidiana." This relates to the creation of rm.wikipedia.
  • Cohen, Noam (2008-07-19). "A Book With 90,000 Authors" (HTML). The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2008-07-20.
    Bertelsmann to publish a volume containing the 25,000 most popular articles from the German Wikipedia, with all 90,000 contributors listed.
  • LONGMAN, JERÉ; JULIET MACUR (2008-07-27). "Records Suggest Chinese Gymnasts May Be Under Age" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2008-07-27.
    There has been considerable talk about the ages of Chinese gymnasts on Web sites devoted to the sport. And there has been frequent editing of He’s Wikipedia entry, although it could not be determined by whom. One paragraph that discusses the controversy of her age kept disappearing and reappearing on He’s entry. As of Friday, a different version of the paragraph had been restored to the page.
  • Serrano, Carlos (2008-07-29). "Google's Alternative to Wikipedia Mostly Mirrors It" (HTML). South Korea: OhmyNews International. Retrieved 2008-07-29.
    Except for the times when I found a long list of highly personal essays unrelated to my search, most of the themes that are covered display mirrored versions of Wikipedia articles on the same subjects. This would not be remarkable if only a handful of users were doing this. But the unabashed mirroring extends through an incredible amount of articles.
  • de Braeckeleer, Ludwig (July 30, 2008). "Rumors of High Level US-Iran Direct Talks" (HTML). Canada: Canada Free Press. Retrieved 2008-07-30.
    On this day in 2007, OMNI published a piece regarding suspicious edits made to certain articles on Wikipedia. As this writer was researching his next piece on the Lockerbie bombing, he noticed that some information regarding a Palestinian terror group had been erased. Upon closer inspection, I came to the conclusion that intelligence agencies were editing sensitive information on Wikipedia.

August

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  • Bindley, Katherine (August 10, 2008). "That's Yesterday's News, Residents Tell Wiki". The New York Times. New York City. p. CY6. Retrieved 2008-08-21.
    Some residents of the Hunts Point, Bronx neighborhood complain that the Wikipedia article is too negative, for example by using out-of-date information. The Times reports that an officer of Bronx Community Board 2 has been in touch with Wikipedia over the issue. "Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, said that the site aimed to be neutral, but he added that the foundation did not censor information."
  • Addley, Esther (2008-08-13). "Diary". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-08-13.
    Short diary piece reporting Sky News coverage of fighting in South Ossetia which included a briefing telling readers that "Georgia was one of the 13 colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution", taken from wikipedia.
  • Liefting, Alan (2008-08-26). "The Wikipediholic's fix". The Press. New Zealand: stuff.co.nz. Retrieved 2008-08-26. Wikipedia is part of a growing online community where software and information is created in the free open source format and it is giving the commercial world a run for its money. It will be interesting to see how the two sides square off over the coming years.
    Friendly description of Wikipedia's project by Wikipedia User Alan Liefting.

"The coincidence of the user’s name, and the sudden spurt of activity just before news broke of Mr. McCain’s choice, has raised suspicions that YoungTrigg was a campaign operative tasked to make sure that her Wikipedia article was ready for prime time, much as handlers have been assigned to do the same for the candidate."

September

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  • Madeo, Cathy (2008-09-04). "The Gods Cheat Too". New York, NY: Columbia Spectator. Retrieved 2008-09-04. [O]ne day, I plugged "positivism" into Wikipedia's search box and, dumbfounded, read a definition that was exactly like the one written in my notebook! I had the most disheartening of realizations. My professor, whose intellect I had raised to god-like stature, was plagiarizing Wikipedia in her lectures. The proof was too black and white to deny. As I typed in more and more phrases, more and more periods of history, it became blatantly clear to me that a considerable amount of my professor's lecture came verbatim from Wikipedia.
  • Schliebs, Mark (2008-09-09). "Wikipedia users divided over sexual material". News.com.au. Retrieved 2008-09-09. Child protection campaigners say Wikipedia has "crossed the line" by allowing graphic videos and photographs of sexual acts on its articles - and even some of the site's own editors say the content is dressed-up porn.
    Reports a debate within Wikipedia of how much illustration should accompany sexuality topics. Quotes Childwise head Bernadette McMenamin as saying that sex education is "a good thing", but displaying sexualised images in an online encyclopaedia "crosses the line".
Also at Newsblaze Canada
"Wikipedia is democracy's answer to the encyclopedia - but even in democracies - wars break out. And during a heated campaign - "creative edits" that so pervade the site can cross over - into virtual vandalism. Susan Ormiston heads into the virtual battlefield of the leaders' wikipedia pages"
  • Finkelstein, Seth (2008-09-25). "Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says". UK: The Guardian. Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.
    Article in the Guardian Technology section critical of Jimmy Wales professed belief in Ayn Rand's "fanatical capitalist intellectualism" and its contradiction with the altruism that motivates the massive amounts of free labour that build Wikipedia.
  • Brown, Alex (2008-09-30). "Italy eyes Gower, warts'n'all". Australia: The Sydney Morning Herald. Mallett initially turned to Wikipedia to research Gower, and was aghast to note the majority of the Australian's profile fell under the sub-category, "Controversy", detailing his numerous brushes with officialdom in Australia.
    Italian rugby coach Nick Mallet initially reluctant to recruit player Craig Gower because of the chequered past outlined on his Wikipedia entry.

October

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"Most hockey-related Wikipedia vandalisms are the Internet equivalent of a prank call to a bowling alley: Make the easy joke about 12-pound balls, hang up and high-five your buddy."
"Wikipedia users debate Wurzelbacher’s newsworthiness and notability."
  • Hutchins, Matt (2008-10-16). "Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0: Benkler says networks can outperform Leviathan". Harvard Law Review. Retrieved 2008-10-21. describes the political and economic significance of the social networks which are possible on the Internet and emphasizes the importance of commons-based production, such as Wikipedia.
    Reports a lecture by Yochai Benkler entitled "After Selfishness: Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Halftime" which explored how the success of the Creative Commons model should guide the development of a new model of human behavior which discards the narrow assumptions of twentieth century economic models.

November

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"The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview."
  • Semuels, Alana (2008-11-05). "Wikipedia parent launches fundraising campaign". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2008-11-09. Executive Director Sue Gardner said she hoped that by 2020 the Wikipedia user base would reach one in three people around the world and that one in 10 people would be active participants.
    Report on Wikimedias annual fund raising campaign which hopes to achieve $6 million by 15th January.
  • Heater, Brian (2008-11-06). "Obama Gets a Landslide of Wikipedia Edits". PC Magazine. Retrieved 2008-11-11. While millions of Americans were out partying or drowning their sorrows during Tuesday night's election returns, plenty of Wikipedia editors were busy updating crucial election-related pages of the free encyclopedia.
    Reports the editing of the candidates' Wikipedia articles on the night of the US election.
  • About news coverage on Wikipedia on election night in the U.S. Mentions several editors and other languages.
"Sure. Stephen Colbert did that once, right on his show in front of millions of people, and everybody laughed at the joke, ha ha, until they actually went to Wiki and saw that Colbert's changes were real."
  • Wroe, David (17 Nov 2008). "German MP injuncts Wikipedia over Stasi claims". London: Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-11-17. A far-left German politician has been forced to withdraw an injunction against online encyclopedia Wikipedia after it revealed details of his Stasi past.
    The action caused a sharp increase in donations to the German Wikipedia.
Reported in multiple media sources. AP Deutsche Welle Speigel Online
"It's Wikipedia, you see. It's just perfect for stand-ups because we can inhale Wikipedia and chuck it out in stupid form." [...] "But it's a real people power thing - you get on there and there's information on everything. You type in spoons, there's stuff on spoons; Cats, there's stuff on cats; Monkeys - all the monkeys. All the different monkeys."
 
Kevin Clauson presenting results of the study about the accuracy of drug information on wikipedia at the medicine 2.0 conference, Toronto 5th Sept 2008
Article details various drugs which have articles on Wikipedia; says "Consumers who rely on the user-edited Web resource Wikipedia for information on medications are putting themselves at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse effects"; persons doing the study "found few factual errors" but "entries were often missing important information", about side effects or effects of drug combinations.
This story was also covered in Hoeksma, Jon (2008-12-03). "Wikipedia can omit key drug information". E-Health Europe. Retrieved 2008-12-03. The stories are based on a paper Clauson, Kevin A; Hyla H Polen; Maged N Kamel Boulos; Joan H Dzenowagis (2008). "Scope, Completeness, and Accuracy of Drug Information in Wikipedia". The Annals of Pharmacotherapy. 42 (12): 1814–1821. doi:10.1345/aph.1L474. PMID 19017825. Retrieved 2008-12-03. which says "No factual errors were found in Wikipedia, whereas 4 answers in Medscape conflicted with the answer key; errors of omission were higher in Wikipedia than in MDR. There was a marked improvement in Wikipedia over time, as current entries were superior to those 90 days prior." I challenged Kevin Clauson, the lead author, when he presented interim results of this study at the Medicine 2.0 conference, about why he & his team hadn't corrected the errors and omissions they had detected - he said he was going to take that question back to the regulatory professional bodies.

December

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"Concerned that many would-be contributors to Wikipedia are being scared away, the foundation that runs the Internet encyclopedia is getting an $890,000 grant to try to make the editing process more user-friendly."
  • Cellan-Jones, Rory (8 Dec 2008). "Wikipedia is censored". BBC News. On the one side, a body which has been fighting to free the web of child abuse images, waging a war which has the support of the vast majority of web users. On the other, the digital libertarians who believe that once we let a group of unelected regulators decide what is fit for us to see on the web, we are on the road to Orwellian thought control.
    Wikipedia is blocked by the UK's Internet Watch Foundation for an image of the German rock band The Scorpions album "Virgin Killer" .
See the Wikipedia Administrators' noticeboard for a full up to date list here
The German Federal Archives has provided online encyclopedia Wikipedia with 100,000 historical images for free public access.
  • Finkelstein, Seth (18 December 2008). "Sting in the Scorpions tale is the exposure of Wiki's weakness". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 18 December 2008. The Virgin Killer image may have done a disservice by channelling discussion into well-worn channels of free speech versus censorship. There are deeper issues here which will continue to fester: the structural problems of accountability and responsibility, which are intrinsically poor in Wikipedia.
    The author claims the Scorpions album cover controversy has exposed weaknesses and contradictions in Wikipedia's editorial process.
"A Pulaski County Circuit judge on Thursday derailed efforts by The Associated Press to determine which state employees changed information about former Gov. Mike Huckabee and other state officials on the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia."
"In increasing numbers, scientists are reasoning that, if people are going to look at the Wikipedia page anyway, the scientific community should probably ensure that the information there is good. In the latest manifestation of this trend, the journal RNA Biology is requiring that authors of a specific type of paper submit a Wikipedia entry for peer review..."
See wikinews: for more information, n:RNA journal submits articles to Wikipedia
  • Caitlin, Moran (2008-12-22). "Wikipedia's limitless knowledge means unlimited fun". London: The Times. Retrieved 2008-12-22. But the interesting thing about Wikipedia is that, unlike a similar printed resource, or an online equivalent written by a small group of necessarily time-restricted experts, its entries are, theoretically, unlimited. If someone has it within them to write 20,000 words on, say, the different types of tarmacadam available, then they may write, and then post, those 20,000 words. This jump into infinite detail proves, over the pages of Wikipedia, to be deeply revelatory about the nature of humanity. Take, for instance, the entry on Waitrose. It appears to have been written by someone who believes passionately that one of the crucial, stabilising forces of the Universe is disseminating as much information about the uniform policy of Waitrose, and to as many people as possible. The detail is merciless, and unending.
"When Steve Smith first learned about Wikipedia, he thought it was a stupid idea...Four years later, [Smith has become] a Wikipedia page administrator with more than 13,000 edits to his name..."
"Contributions to Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, are on track to double this year after its founder, Jimmy Wales, posted a pitch for more funds on Christmas Eve, the organization said Friday."
  • "Wikipedia pulls in flood of cash from users". Globe and Mail. December 30, 2008. Retrieved January 1, 2009. The result is remarkably similar to the online fundraising efforts of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, who raised an unprecedented campaign war chest by collecting thousands of small contributions from supporters over the Internet.
    Reports the 892 per cent rise in daily donations following Jimmy Wales' appeal.
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