Hasta La Gadget!

Wikipedia‘s co-founder Jimmy Wales is no stranger to voicing his opinion, and has done such this week in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. During the talk, Wales discussed the issue of censorship, focusing extensively on China and saying that he’d rather Wikipedia not be available in the nation rather than having the website […]

Give a bunch of scientists a dataset like Wikipedia to play with, and it’ll keep ’em amused for a long old time. Now, a team of researchers from Oxford University have mined the rich seam to work out the ten most internationally controversial topics on the online encyclopaedia.

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The New York Times has a wonderful feature about Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales which you should go read. Spoiler: he’s not a billionaire.

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Wikipedia has launched its first location-based feature for mobile readers, Wikipedia Nearby, which pulls up articles related to your current position. Described as the learning equivalent of services like Yelp, which show nearby coffee shops and entertainment, Wikipedia Nearby sifts through historic sites, parks, museums, and other points of interest, and also allows the reader to add to them while on the move.

Integration with the mobile device’s camera means Wikipedia Nearby users can snap a shot of the location and add that to the record, helping the open encyclopedia to add to its collection of imagery. Uploads are automatically classified with a free use license.

Wikipedia Nearby also works on the regular, desktop version of the site, though it might be less useful that way than on your phone. However, the Wikipedia Foundation believes that it could be a good first step to encouraging new editors, prompting them with a familiar topic that they could enhance with local knowledge.

“Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image” Wikipedia Foundation

The new feature builds on existing location data that was already being added to Wikipedia’s many entries, though which until now had gone unused by any specific services. That includes theaters, religious buildings, points of natural beauty, and even famous or notorious restaurants and cafes.

Of course, something like Wikipedia Nearby will be even more useful when wearables like Google Glass grow in prevalence, augmented the real-world view of the wearer’s surroundings with snippets of historical and contextual data. So far, location-based services have focused more on transactions and entertainment, but there’s a huge space for more educational information to be added in.

[Thanks Toby!]

Wikipedia Nearby flags close-by curiosities on your smartphone is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Wikipedia allows users to check out edits made to an article via its accompanying history page, which lists changes along with the date and time, IP address or username, and an edit summary. Such is a useful feature, providing essential information to the crowd-created and updated online encyclopedia. It doesn’t, however, make it simple to see the big picture, and that is what two developers have partly changed via their open source project.

The project displays a global map, and updates in real-time when a change is made on Wikipedia, displaying it as a small circle that flashes on the editor’s location, as well as the name of the article that was revised and the editor’s IP address. Below the map is a scrolling text box containing more information, including a link to the article, the language of the article, and the city, state, and country where the edit was made.

So far, edits made on the English, Japanese, Russian, German, Spanish, Indonesian, and French Wikipedias are available, with users being able to select one or more to view. When watching the map under the English version of the website, it averaged about 500 edits per 33 seconds. While the edits shown are substantial, the project only tracks those made by unregistered users, which represent about 15-percent of the edits made to the online encyclopedia. The information is pulled via live feeds broadcast with Wikimon.

The programmers behind the project advise that, according to a survey done in 2007, edits made by unregistered users on Wikipedia are often of less value than ones made by registered users, advising that you can correct an issue if you happen to spot one while using their real-time visualization. The project was built using DataMaps, d3, and other services and libraries, and is open source for anyone to grab on github.

Watching the map provides an interesting passive sort of observation, giving us a peek into what articles are of interest to users and where those users are located. When observed long enough, shifts can be noticed, such as edits increasing and decreasing with the fluctuations of waking and working hours, topic trends, and more.

SOURCE: Hatnote

Project shows Wikipedia changes in real-time is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.