Dartmouth researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia
The News Review:
- Dartmouth researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia
- Marketers need to respect online communities to earn respect: Wikipedi…
- State’s Wikipedia tampering exposed by journalists
- California workers edit encyclopedia on the job
- Speedy continental collision explained
Dartmouth researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia
RxPG NEWS – Oct 17, 2007
Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous infrequent contributors the Good Samaritans are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain. The answer is surprisingly yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content as do the active registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.
Marketers need to respect online communities to earn respect: Wikipedi…
DM News – Oct 17, 2007
Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia spoke about the goals behind the social site which was designed to offer every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. He said that there are ways marketers should use the social encyclopedia site and ways that should be avoided. "There are good and bad ways to think about Wikipedia but if you think about it as a marketing channel then you are making a mistake" he said referring it to a "non-commercial channel" and giving an analogy from the offline world. "If you go to the grocery store and there is someone giving out free samples of chicken then you accept that. But if they set up shop at the local church on Sunday morning and try to pitch you the chicken in church you feel that that is the wrong place.
State’s Wikipedia tampering exposed by journalists
Legalbrief – Legalbrief (subscription) – Oct 17, 2007
AP Arkansas News Editor Kelly Kissel and reporter Jon Gambrell filed the lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court against Governor Mike Beebe Attorney-General Dustin McDaniel and officials with the state’s Department of Information Systems. The Washington Post reports that the lawsuit asks the court to order state officials to reveal the physical locations of five computers that were used while editing information about politicians on the popular online encyclopaedia that allows anyone to submit or make changes to articles. In August Gambrell reported that state computers were used to edit information about Republican presidential candidate and former Governor Mike Huckabee Beebe and others. Using a Web site called WikiScanner that tracks changes to Wikipedia Gambrell could see that the edits were made by computers with numeric Internet addresses assigned to the state.
California workers edit encyclopedia on the job
Scripps News – Scripps News – Oct 17, 2007
national By PHILLIP REESE and CARRIE PEYTN DAHLBERGSacramento Bee Wednesday ctober 17 2007As the online reference Wikipedia soars in popularity Sacramento government workers are doing their part to shape how we all see the world — inflating reputations dabbling in pornography and whiling away work hours. California Department of Justice computers were used to alter Wikipedia entries about submarines battleships and vintage airplanes roughly 1100 times a Sacramento Bee analysis found. Someone from the state legislature thought it was a good idea to remove a reference to state Sen. Leland Yee’s 1992 booking in Hawaii on suspicion of shoplifting. Another of the legislature’s computer users prettied up a section on Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez citing his penchant for creating budgets that are “lean but not mean” and deleting a summary of his conflicts with Gov… Virgil Griffith the Caltech graduate student who created the WikiScanner program hoped it would be “a cannon” that anyone could aim at a favorite target. Yet The Bee found it also paints a portrait of human nature illustrating the way private passions whether ugly or whimsical break into the workday. Someone at the California Department of Health Services for example edited encyclopedia entries about pornography stars in late 2005. Many of the edits to entries for Annabel Chong Linda Lovelace John Holmes and Nina Hartley offered profane accounts of their sexual skills. And those were the nicer changes. In the same department someone vandalized the encyclopedia entry of lesbian tennis legend Billie Jean King inserting a homophobic joke and apparently made up a racist demeaning quote for Chong. Because of the way its network is set up the health department cannot trace exactly which computer made those changes said spokesman Mike Bowman.
Speedy continental collision explained
Nature.com – Nature.com (subscription) – Oct 17, 2007
For more controversial topics we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published. For comparison of drift rate Wikipedia says South America and Africa are drifting apart at 5. 7 cm per year and that the fastest seafloor spreading is 17. 2 cm per year along the East Pacific Rise. India is moving at 20 cm per year.
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