In a post on The Signpost, Wikimedia Foundation Senior Designer Brandon Harris outlined a radical set of goals to improve Wikipedia over the next year. In short, the encyclopedia is a broken, disorganized mess and the whole system for creating and editing articles needs a fundamental overhaul. Here’s how he plans to fix it. More »
Twenty native speakers of Yucatec, Mexico’s most widely spoken Mayan tongue, met last Thursday to help bring the language to Google, Mozilla and Wikimedia projects. The event, dubbed Mozilla Translathon 2012, was organized to provide translations for Firefox, Google’s Endangered Languages Project, the WikiMedia software that powers Wikipedia and 500 crowdsourced articles, to boot. Finding the right words, however, can often be a tricky proposition. “There are words that can’t be translated,” Mozilla’s Mexico representative Julio Gómez told CNNMéxico. “In Maya, file doesn’t exist. Tab doesn’t exist.” Gómez continues to explain that the group may keep foreign words as-is, or find other terms to represent the same ideas. In addition to software localization, it’s believed that the effort could allow Maya speakers to “recover their identity and their cultural heritage,” according to Wikimedia México president Iván Martínez. If you’d like to peruse wiki articles in the indigenous language, check out the source links below.
Filed under: Internet
Google, Mozilla and Wikimedia projects get Maya language translations at one-day ‘translathon’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wikipedia has been around for a long time been and is one of the most popular places for people to learn about all sorts of subject matters. While the content is suspect at times, Wikipedia is generally a friend of students and anyone else searching out information on a particular topic. Last night Wikipedia was off-line for several hours, and the reason for the outage is now known.
Apparently, someone unintentionally cut through fiber cables that connected Wikipedia’s servers located in Florida to the Internet. Wikipedia denies any foul play in the outage, and a spokesman noted that two overland cables had been severed between Tampa and Virginia. The slashed cables took Wikipedia off-line for over an hour and once the lines were fixed it took another hour to get servers back up and running.
Wikipedia has been having an interesting year. The company took itself off-line as part of a protest against SOPA laws intended to help prevent piracy. Wikipedia’s parent company Wikimedia has suffered from controversy surrounding a key executive in its UK division recently after Ashley Van Haeften resigned as the chairman of Wikimedia UK.
Van Haeften stepped down in the middle of a controversy over personally posting links to pornography in the biography of a living person. As a response, he was banned indefinitely from contributing to the English version of Wikipedia by ArbCom, which is elected committee of senior Wikipedia editors. ArbCom also found that he had violated editing rules by using multiple accounts to change pages.
[via Telegraph]
Cut fiber-optic cables put Wikipedia offline last night is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Wikipedia went down for a couple of hours yesterday. The reason? Some dumb ass managed to sever the fiber cables connecting the site’s servers in Florida. More »
I was about to search for more information regarding the updated OpenGL this morning via Wikipedia when I noticed that it didn’t return any search results. It turns out that the world’s beloved free online encyclopedia has experienced a technical outage. Basically, I noticed an error message on the site’s homepage (seen above) saying that Wikipedia servers are experiencing some sort of a technical problem. The outage, which lasted for about an hour and a half, started around 6:30 AM PST and it was finally restored by 8:30 AM PST.
Wikipedia confirmed the outage via Twitter, saying, “We’re having some technical issues, but our engineers are working on it. We’ll be back soon!” If you’ll check out Wikipedia’s Performance and Availability History, you’ll notice several service disruptions on its API, https services, Images and media, Mail (SMTP), and many others. A Wikimedia spokesperson has confirmed in a statement that the outage was due to some networking issues with its servers in Tampa, Florida. When asked if the site has been recently hacked or attack, the spokesperson denied the assumption saying, “We certainly haven’t been hit by a denial of service attack.”
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Wikimedia launches new prototype “visual editor” for Wikipedia, Wikipedia banner ads could mean that your PC has malware,
You didn’t think Wikipedia was all original content, did you? According to Webempires, the online encyclopedia cites and references over two million different websites. You can find the entire exhaustive list here if you’ve got a couple of weeks to spare, or check out this handy infographic which highlights just the top 50 sources. More »
Wikipedia is probably the most impressive crowdsourced endeavor in history, but if you think that every little edit is being clacked out in the basement lair of some volunteer, you’re way, way wrong. Wikipedia relies on an army of bots to keep the quality of articles high and trolls at bay. More »
Just about everyone you know uses Wikipedia. But that deep library of information—nearly 4 million entries—didn’t get there by accident. In fact, a surprising number of them came from Justin Knapp, who is the first person to make more than one million edits on the site. We’ve got him here live taking your questions. More »
Wikipedia, a triumph of human effort, knowledge and collaboration… or so we thought. Turns out that along with the tens of thousands of brains regularly editing the online encyclopedia, hundreds of bots also patrol the virtual aisles keeping us in check. Some of the bots take care of the boring stuff — organizing, formatting and other admin. Others correct the wrongdoings of wiki-villains, such as removing off-topic vandalism and naughty language. In the beginning, pages were even created by select bots, pulling data from various sources to create bare bones records for our keystrokes to flesh out. They do a pretty good job, but there are fears that a rogue bot will one day ruin a lot of hard work, although due to the privileges needed it would have to be an inside job. So now you know — the machines not only have access to the largest single collection of human knowledge, but they edit it for us too. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Bots edit Wikipedia, clean up your nonsense originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This week is not a fabulous one for Facebook as its stock price dipped to nearly the lowest price its been since the company’s IPO and a customer satisfaction analysis placed it amongst the 5 lowest major social networks on the web. As the ACSI notes, this year’s study collected information from users of Internet Social Media outlets such as Wikipedia, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook showed the recently public web-based network to be at the bottom of the list for customer satisfaction. Satisfaction was recorded at 61 percent for Facebook, this 2 points below the next lowest score, 63 percent for LinkedIn.
The list published by the analysis group also showed Google+ to be tied for first place in this list for customer satisfaction with Wikipedia, both groups grabbing an impressive 78% rating. Of course one must consider that Facebook has million more users than Google+ while Wikipedia has been at the top of this list since the company started recording such tests. Twitter was also low at 64%, with YouTube grabbing 73% and Pinterest ringing in at 69%.
The group ForeSee, partnering with ACSI for this survey, note that Facebook users mentioned the Timeline layout as one of their main reasons for being dissatisfied in this modern iteration of the social network. Furthermore Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee, had the following to say:
“Facebook and Google+ are competing on two critical fronts: customer experience and market penetration. Google+ handily wins the former, and Facebook handily wins the latter, for now. It’s worth asking how much customer satisfaction matters for Facebook, given its unrivaled 800 million user base … if Facebook doesn’t feel the pressure to improve customer satisfaction now, that may soon change.” – Freed
Of the three years this study has been run, this is Facebook’s lowest approval rating with 64% being their first year in 2010 and 66% showing up in 2011. This is accompanied by Facebook’s stock prices this week which have once again fallen as low as 27.04 a share – the lowest this stock has gotten is a bit below 25 a share.
Check out the timeline below to see how Facebook has done over the past few weeks, and keep in mind that the stock price is once again rising here in the middle of the week, currently reading out at 29.04 at the time of this posting – keep running!
Facebook reaches new satisfaction low while stock dips is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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