Wikipedia:Press coverage 2005

If you add an article, please cite both the title and the source. Note that if you're listing an article from a traditional press wire service that ran in your local newspaper, it may not have the same title everywhere; be cautious about duplicates.

Articles that reference Wikipedia content but which do not discuss the project itself should be recorded at Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a press source. Great quotes from articles should be included in our Trophy box.

Web-only sources do qualify to be included in this section.

Searching for Wikipedia in the press

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Formatting

January

"Wikipedia is blurring the lines of production with astounding success."
"I have never used an encyclopedia as much as Wikipedia and I thank the Wikipedia community for what they have created. Countless others share these sentiments. Wikipedia has enhanced my life and brought considerable progress to society."
"One of the more robust wikis is at www.wikipedia.com, which bills itself as "the free encyclopedia." It is a multilingual, open-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
"You can get a really good consensus picture of what's going on that's stronger than any one news organization could offer," Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, told Silicon Valley. "So many people are on the ground in different places. And people pick up very quickly which are the bloggers to read, and they bring that information to the forefront and amplify it."
"Alex Steffen from worldchanging.com and Jimmy Wales of wikipedia have been drafted into the programme [the Doors of Perception design symposium] to assist."
"The only instant reference work is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia written by anybody who wants to contribute. If you look now (www.wikipedia.org), there is a first draft of history, with a simulation of how the tidal wave spread across the ocean, a table of estimated deaths in different countries and links to entries on related subjects." (entire article about Wikipedia)
"Within a few hours of the quake, users were logging on to communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia and compiling a breakdown of what had occurred, including scientific analysis, links to news articles and ways to give aid."
"Wikipedia recently celebrated its one millionth entry which, I am delighted to reveal, was a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag - well, someone's going to be interested".
A quote from The Guardian on vandalism and reversions follows.
"I have found the most fascinating website titled Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and you're going to love it." (entire column about Wikipedia)
Writing about the current debate about Wikipedia Naughton opines: "five years from now, when the Wikipedia is essential infrastructure, we'll hardly remember what the fuss was about."
On the tension between academic credibility and collaboration, and concludes with, "The question, then, is what people should expect of Wikipedia. As it grows and becomes a repository of 2 million entries from more and more contributors, more of whom are experts in their fields, it probably will be seen as on par with the Britannicas of the world. But first it must convince those experts to become involved, and that will likely mean finding a way to make them feel welcome.."
Regardless of its risk of inaccuracy, Wikipedia exists as a noteworthy experiment relating to the idea of Internet users to come together in the spirit of knowledge and learning. What had the potential to become a public toilet of misinformation exists instead as one of the most successful examples of a human oriented, self policing collaborative education effort.
I cannot, because of the reasons pointed out by various resources, plug Wikipedia as the be-all-end-all research tool. However, Wikipedia itself represents a noteworthy use of the Internet and its growing pool of users. Coordinated development projects, as well as national and international Internet based communities and the technologies used in their operation, offer a fascinating look into the lesser known value of how the world's premier communication tool deals with information.
Wikipedia, despite its potential flaws, builds upon the noble foundation upon which the Internet was formed - A digital world in which the free exchange of information and knowledge brings the world together through the sharing of ideas and concepts.
Well ... perhaps wikis won’t quite take off this year to the degree that weblogs did in 2004, but there is not doubt in my mind that you will be hearing much more about wikis in the months to come. If you are not familiar with wikis, they are open-editable web pages. That is, pages which you can edit the content by simply clicking on one button (usually an ‘edit’ tab) from within your browser. Take a look at Wikipedia to find out a bit more.
If you want to begin experimenting with Wikis right away and you have Firefox installed on your machine, then I’d urge you to visit Wikalong.org and download the wikalong extension. This extension embeds a wiki in the sidebar of your browser, indexed off the url of the current page you are visiting. That is, wikalong builds a ‘parallel’ wiki for any page you visit. Thus, you can comment, discuss and wax philosophical about any issue on a page you are visiting.
In terms of how you and your students could use wikalong, on the simplest level it can be used as a running commentary or parallel blog to whatever page you are looking at. Of course, you can embed links to point to other interesting pages. Simple note-taking or really anything else that you might use a blog, wiki or discussion board for. In addition to the panoply of possible uses, the other strength of wikalong is that you-as-the-user don’t have to install anything on a server or rely on any IT support beyond having Firefox and knowing how to surf the Web.
Tim Lauer originally pointed me towards this tool so as you get it installed you’ll see a bit of commentary between he and I on some of these pages. You’ll notice that Wikalong has a log-in feature which allows posters to connect with each other.
"Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia on the Web, containing hundreds of thousands of articles in more than fifty languages. Unlike other encyclopedias, the text is written by the users themselves. In the case of the Montreal metro, there can be no doubt about the quality of its information, as the page was written with the collaboration of none other than [Montréalais]!"
note: This is an information page prepared by the STM, printed in the Métro free newspaper as a condition of its distribution in metro stations. The article, on websites about the metro, had previously referred to my website on the metro. -- Montréalais 19:21, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
"In the future, PR professionals - and even consumers - will create their own media directories. For a glimpse of this today, check out this page on Wikipedia. They are starting to index journalists, including Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times. The paid services better evolve fast. Because in the near future as wikis become more popular and easier to set up, we may end up forming our own tool that enables us to share our knowledge. "
"There are some downsides to Answers.com. It has answers for only about a million available topics so far. And it relies heavily on Wikipedia, which has been criticized because it isn't written or edited by experts. But unlike some recognized sources like the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Answers.com is free and instantly searches multiple reference works from multiple publishers."
Details a controversy at Perverted-Justice.com.
"Then there was Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia written and edited on the Web by thousands of people around the world (wikis are software that allow groups to work together online). The free encyclopedia is trustworthy, huge, multilingual and growing, and is produced for only a fraction of what gets spent by traditional competitors."
"Truly informed people know more than what CNN feeds them—they take the time to look into the background of topics, to learn about how things come about, and how they interrelate. Which is why you are now heading to wikipedia.org, an Internet-compiled, completely free, community-written encyclopedia."
"In addition, Clusty includes thumbnail images from www.wikipedia.com with selected results, which breaks up pages and makes them easier to read."

February

"Firefox's assault on Internet Explorer isn't the only attack Bill Gates is facing. A ragtag coalition of open source projects is steadily chipping away at the Microsoft empire. Here's a look at market share on eight different fronts. …
"Web encylopedias – Encarta Premium: 68,000 entries; Wikipedia: 431,195 entries" – Illustration, "Storming Redmond"
"Already, internet blogs and communal internet pages known as wikis (from the Hawaiian word for "speedy") are pushing the boundaries of what was known as "user-generated content". Results from Wikipedia, a free encyclopaedia maintained over the internet by volunteers, may not match the standards of publications produced by professional editors, but the service still manages to answer many common questions."
Follow-up to the author's previous article from November 2004, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia".
"One of course should never rely completely on online information and should always check other reference sources for accuracy. However, Wikipedia seems to actually work most of the time because of the amount of users on the lookout for errors."
"Go to any Wikipedia entry you choose—"Hindu philosophy," "drunk driving," "pataphysics"—and click on the Edit This Page tab. Bingo: Whatever you write immediately becomes the last word on the subject. And if this sounds like a recipe for mob rule, that's because it is. But mob rule turns out to be a surprisingly good way to write an encyclopedia."
"Wikipedia is an Open Source encyclopaedia (recently recognised by the Press Association) containing 1.3 million articles in eight different languages, all written, developed and maintained by regular people around the world."
"[Wikipedia logo; www.wikipedia.org; 5-star rating] Not the most visually striking site but very easy to navigate and you'll struggle to find a subject it can't provide information on. Highlighted keywords guide your search to more detailed information, related subjects or interesting tangents. Subjects can be edited and added to by users, which means the site continues to grow and cover increasingly diverse topics." [Review was on page 31 in the MetroLife feature. The 5-star rating was the best rating (5/5) of the three encyclopaedias reviewed. The others were www.probert-encyclopaedia.co.uk (3/5) and www.iep.utm.edu (4/5). This was typed out from the London Metro edition, though other editions of Metro are published in other UK cities.]
"Wikipedia.org, a website dedicated to all things knowledge, doesn't have very much on the City of Kenora." (Talks about Wikipedia and suggests expanding the Kenora article)

In this (long) entry, i want to make 3 points:

March

April

May

June

Wikipedia's many volunteer editors weren't napping on the job as the W. Mark Felt story broke on Tuesday. A new entry (created yesterday, in fact) on the former associate FBI director and bona fide Deep Throat went up with great dispatch. A glance at the entry shows a clean, dry biography on Felt along with the circumstances of his involvement with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate series. It is not the first time that Wikipedia has tried to function as a sage tome of encyclopedic knowledge on breaking events, but it almost certainly is one of the most prominent, at least on its English-language site.
And here's a little something you won't find in editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (or on the Britannica Online site which has not updated its Watergate references): A note at the top of the Wikipedia page says: "This article or section contains information about a current or ongoing event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses." The entry on " Deep Throat" also was updated a few hours after the news broke.
"One of the most extraordinary websites on the Internet is that of Wikipedia, an encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute... Since the contributors don't have to prove their competence, the Wikipedia may not be as authoritative as the established encyclopaedias, but you will probably find in it all sorts of interesting things that won't be in the others. As with Creative Commons you don't get any payment, but it sounds much more fun." (Sadly Legat also encouraged writers to add vanity articles about themselves :(
"I applaud them for trying a bold experiment," said Steve Outing, senior editor with the journalism think tank Poynter Institute. "That being said, I'm not at all surprised (by the problems). Wikis are pretty new, and we don't entirely understand them and know how they are going to work out yet."
He said Wikis "are most suited for factual information where the content can become accurate because of the power of the intelligence of the group."
"Trying to do that with an opinion piece doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense," Outing said. "People with competing views would just try to get their particular viewpoint published and someone would go in and change it."
In fact, it's one of the chief challenges facing the best-known Wiki, Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where any visitor can add, change and erase someone else's entry.
Some contributors have attempted to impose their personal viewpoints - for instance, by replacing an article on abortion with the word "murder" written 143 times.
Positive mentioning of Wikipedia on a national radio program (~8 million listeners).
"Once in a while we'll use Wikipedia, which is an online encyclopedia. We'll use it for different facts. We just used it there for Scientology..."
"Looking on this online encyclopedia, you can look up just about anything. Stu just ran a search on me. It's the most accurate. Bizarrely so. I mean it almost gives the dimensions of my house. I mean it's weird. Most accurate bio of me. I think it's more accurate than the bio that is on my own website...[It definitely has additional] brand new facts."

July

  • "Some people are afraid of products which are free, but you would be making a big mistake if you avoided the Wikipedia, one of the most remarkable creations on the Internet. A wiki is a web site users can both contribute to and edit. "Wiki wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian. The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with more than 1.6 million articles under active development in over 120 languages. The site gets more than 60 million hits per day. The Wikipedia`s article about itself admits that since anyone can edit the content, inaccuracy and vandalism is a problem. But the community of users polices that sort of activity so the content tends to be self-repairing. Volunteer editors strive to make sure the articles are objective. In addition to the usual encyclopedia topics, the Wikipedia contains a wide array of social and cultural entries. The Wikipedia is not a refereed academic publication, but it is a fascinating example of collaborative development and social interaction growing live, virtually before your eyes on the Internet. Scott Gurvey, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, New York."
"Whoever wrote it, t(he)y knew what they were talking about. "

August

"Wikimania, a four-day gathering of those behind the successful on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has taken over Frankfurt. The main topic of the meeting: Where will Wiki go from here?"
Fun quote: "It's telling that Wikimania is taking place in Germany. Wales recently wrote in his blog "Like the great artist ... David Hasselhoff, I'm only appreciated overseas."
"I happened to wonder about the first recorded term of the term 'personal computer,' so I Googled around and ended up at Wikipedia, the hit-or-miss user-developed encyclopedia, whose 'personal computer' entry declared authoritatively that 'The earliest known use of the term was in New Scientist magazine in 1964, in a series of articles called 'The World in 1984'.' I still don't know the answer to my question, but I do know —no thanks to Google—that Wikipedia got it wrong."
After this slam, the author went on to laud the online use of local public libraries. He did not choose to improve our civilization by correcting the Wikipedia article; User:Lllll took care of this for him, replacing the above with information that Manes alleges is correct. - Tempshill 03:58, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
"But one event this week has received scant mainstream coverage, even though it has enormous implications for tech-heads and global village idiots alike."
"A Wikipedia article, posted from within the BBC, appeared about a British pop singer, Jamie Kane, which contained all you could possibly want to know about him except for the fact that he didn't exist."
Wikipedia, the user-generated net encyclopaedia, provided video coverage of the hurricane and regularly updated reports on the storms history and effects.
Robert Love calls Wikipedia, "probably the single greatest thing on Earth."

September

"You will not only find scholarly reports like those in a fact-checked encyclopedia, but entries on nearly anything in mainstream popular culture, from politicians to famous buildings to weather terminology."

October

  • In his column The Geek Arthur says " Overall Wikipedia is becoming the online resource to resolve disputes; if another site is more authoritative on a subject then Wikipedia links to that. Gradually though , one can see the temptation for a cadre of full time staff to begin searching for ways to improve the content."
  • "...Companies are drawing on collaborative models ... from online games ... to the so-called wiki encyclopedias and blogs to speed up innovation. ... Projects range from Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia, to ... an open-source initiative in biotechnology. Corporations are rapidly adopting software tools intended to nurture collaborative work, including wikis, blogs, instant messaging, Web-based conferencing and peer-to-peer programs. ..."
  • The artice lists Wikipedia.org as one of the three "can't-do-without search engines", the others being Dictionary.com and TheFreeDictionary.com(a Wikipedia mirror). It describes Wikipedia.org as "a multi-lingual encyclopaedia launched in 2001". "The entries...are written, updated and maintained by volunteers enthusiastic about any particular subject". Furthermore, it says that Wikipedia is useful for "information-hungry Netizens who revel" in its "free-for-all system". "That approach has attracted criticism for arbitrary standards of accuracy, but Wikipedia articles are now frequently cited in the media and in academic circles". Finally, it gives a verdict that "the idea of creating an encyclopaedia written wholly by non-expert enthusiasts is cool enough for us to give this website the thumbs-up".
  • "Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster! -- Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work."
  • "American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have used advertising campaigns, catchy slogans and dueling consultant studies to settle a dispute over air service in North Texas, and now their eye-gouging fight has spilled over to an online encyclopedia."
  • "An increase in students using the on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia in essays and research papers is causing concern among academics… [Victoria University law lecturer Dean] Knight is concerned that Wikipedia "should not be used as a shortcut for actual research," but recognises that it may be appropriate to cite Wikipedia "where qualifications as to its integrity are less important.""
  • Fold-out section in "G2" supplement. Panel of Guardian 'experts' assess articles in their field. Includes comment by Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica. Article ratings : Steve Reich 7/10, Haute couture 0/10, Basque people 7/10, TS Eliot 6/10, Samuel Pepys 6/10, Bob Dylan 8/10, Encyclopedia 5/10.
  • "The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are 'a horrific embarrassment'. What did our panel of experts think of the entries for their fields?"
  • Despite what you might think from the title and the low scores, most of the criticism is for literary merit or incompleteness, not for factual inaccuracy.
"Entries from Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users, may soon be available in print for readers in the developing world, founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday."
"Wales also described as incorrect reports, one of them from Reuters, that certain pages of the Wikipedia could be subject to tightened controls or 'frozen' for good to prevent vandals and pranksters from tampering with them."
The syndicated article was reprinted as:

November

  • The artice discusses the phenomenon of Wikipedia. It also defines wiki terms such as 'NPOV', 'Wiki', and 'Wikipediholic'.

December

'It's not just this crazy place on the internet where people post nonsense'.

See also