Where Do They Find The Time?

April 30, 2008 – 11:21 am

Clay Shirky recently posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)



Introducing Phonepedia, a Voice-Activated Wikipedia Mashup

January 21, 2008 – 11:11 am

The Phonepedia concept is simple: take Wikipedia’s rich content and add voice recognition. It’s as easy as calling a number and asking your question, the answer will be returned via SMS and email. Go ahead and try it for yourself.
The voice recognition is powered by Jott, and thanks are due to Heidi for writing so [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

Wikipedia The Wonder

May 11, 2007 – 12:24 pm

Middlebury College banned it, but 46% of college students and 50% of college grads use it.
Twelve year olds point out errors in its competition, while those over 50 are among its smallest demographic — just 29% (Just! 29%!) say they’ve used it.
It’s Wikipedia, of course, and the numbers come from a recent Pew Internet Project [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (7)

Please, Not Another Wiki

April 24, 2007 – 12:02 pm

Ironic secret: I don’t really like most wikis, though that’s probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another wiki.
Putting it tersely: if wikis are so great, why do we need more than one [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (9)

Middlebury College vs. Wikipedia

February 21, 2007 – 11:05 pm

Middlebury College is proud to have taken a stand against Wikipedia this year:
Members of the Vermont institution’s history department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations.
Without entirely dismissing Wikipedia — ?whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful…? [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (25)



The Onion Greets Wikimania

August 4, 2006 – 2:02 am

Wikimania is about to start, but here, the ever-topical Onion folk are poking fun at Wikipedia.
What is there to say when ?America’s finest news source? casts aspersions on the world’s newest encyclopedia with the headline Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence?
Extra: watch out for Meredith Farkas‘ panel presentation on wikis and enabling library knowledgebases. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (2)

Looking At Controversy Through The Eyes Of Britannica and Wikipedia

January 5, 2006 – 5:07 pm

The argument about Wikipedia versus Britannica continues to rage in libraryland. The questions are about authority and the likelihood of outright deception, of course, and a recent round brought up the limitations of peer review as exemplified in the 1989 cold fusion controversy, where two scientists claimed to have achieved a nuclear fusion reaction at [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

Nature Concludes Wikipedia Not Bad

December 14, 2005 – 3:38 pm

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

Who’s Afraid Of Wikipedia?

December 5, 2005 – 1:52 pm

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.
On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (6)

Is Search Rank Group-think?

November 1, 2005 – 12:22 pm

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries

October 12, 2005 – 10:06 pm

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of ?authority.?
The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (2)

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

August 29, 2005 – 7:13 am

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.
Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy
?Google Economy? identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Wikipedia API?

August 21, 2005 – 11:39 pm

I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (9)

Jimmy Wales’ Free Culture Manifesto

August 8, 2005 – 7:31 am

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is working on his keynote for the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt. Ross Mayfield at Many2Many posted a preview and gives some background. What should we expect? Wales’ speech touches on ten things necessary for Free Culture:

Free the Encyclopedia!
Free the Dictionary!
Free the Curriculum!
Free the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Copyrights & Intellectual Property, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (2)

The Google Economy Vs. Libraries

June 7, 2005 – 1:10 am

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):
…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (3)