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Category Archives: Wiki

How 9/11 turned a new site called Wikipedia into history’s crowdsourced front page

Fast Company: “The volunteers who documented the attacks on the fledgling site were also laying a foundation for its future…Wikipedia.org had only been launched nine months earlier by a digital ad entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales and a graduate student in philosophy named Larry Sanger. By July, hundreds of visitors were arriving a day, many brought by links that appeared on Slashdot and Kuro5hin and in the results of a new, fast-growing search engine called Google. Many articles were short, amateurish, questionable. But there were a lot of them, and by the start of September, Wikipedia already boasted versions in French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian, and some 10,000 articles in English. On the morning of September 11, its prospects as a long-term project were far from certain. But as the attacks exposed the weaknesses of America’s 21st century communications, with cell phone networks struggling, first responders’ radios failing, and the world wide web slowing to a crawl, Wikipedia managed to hold up—mostly. At some point, a link to Wikipedia’s 9/11 page appeared on Yahoo’s popular news portal. Traffic began to spike…Whatever you think of it, if you’re online, Wikipedia is now almost impossible to avoid. It’s a modern wonder, a monument to collective sense-making, a bizarre counterexample to the rest of the internet. With over 1 billion visitors a month, it now sits just behind Yahoo.com in terms of traffic. Google, the most visited website, depends on Wikipedia for its Knowledge Graph, while YouTube and Facebook help users detect fake news by suggesting links to Wikipedia articles. (Lately, the “September 11 attacks” page makes regular appearances.) There are now over 300 non-English editions, a dozen spin-off Wikimedia projects, and thousands of volunteer-run WikiProjects…”

Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge

OCLC Research: “The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” Libraries need not see Wikipedia as competition; rather, failing to leverage its omnipresence in the online world constitutes a missed opportunity. As a senior program officer at… Continue Reading

Paper – Wikidata: a platform for your library’s linked open data

Wikidata: a platform for your library’s linked open data by Stacy Allison-Cassin, Dan Scott. code{4}lib Issue 40, 2018-05-04 “Creating and using linked open data (LOD) in library and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) projects has historically been associated with a high level of institutional requirements. Erik et al (2015) asserted “the fact that LAM institutions… Continue Reading

What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.

Wikimedia: “Citations are the foundation of Wikipedia’s reliability: they trace the connection between content added by our community of volunteer contributors and its sources. For readers, citations provide a mechanism to validate and check for themselves that what Wikipedia says is sound and trustworthy: they act as a gateway towards a broader ecosystem of reliable… Continue Reading

OCLC Research’s Merrilee Proffitt Shows How Libraries Can Leverage Wikipedia

OCLC: “In Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge, published by ALA Editions, Merrilee Proffitt of OCLC Research shows how libraries can contribute to Wikipedia to improve content quality and make library services more visible. The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the… Continue Reading

New on LLRX – An Exploration of WikiLeaks: What has Taken Me So Long!

Via LLRX.com – An Exploration of WikiLeaks: What has Taken Me So Long! Sarah Gotschall explored WikiLeaks for a few hours and identified effective ways to search the site that include an efficient advanced search engine and search operators to target your research even further. She includes example of her searches and the results. Continue Reading

200,000 Volunteers Have Become the Fact Checkers of the Internet

NexrGov: The creation process of Wikipedia is largely transparent – “Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is on the verge of adulthood. It’s the world’s fifth-most popular website, with 46 million articles in 300 languages, while having less than 300 full-time employees. What makes it successful is the 200,000 volunteers who create it, said Katherine Maher, the… Continue Reading

Paper – The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network

The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network – Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeoFuture, Internet 2016, 8(2), 14; doi:10.3390/fi8020014 “Social norms have traditionally been difficult to quantify. In any particular society, their sheer number and complex interdependencies often limit a system-level analysis. One exception is that of the network of norms that sustain the online Wikipedia community.… Continue Reading