Cody Taylor

This is only one data point. But at least the Wikipedia entry on TechCrunch doesn’t state that we sell corn and oat cereal, and it wasn’t written by someone whose bio simply reads “Troll“. Other than that, it’s pretty accurate. So much for units of knowledge.

An anonymous reader writes “A group of powerful Wikipedia insiders are pushing for FlaggedRevisions which will require a ‘trusted user’ to approve of edits before they go live on the online encyclopedia. There is also opposition but with support of founder Jimbo Wales it is likely to go through. The German version has tried the system, leading to three-week delays between edit and publication. The English wiki with its higher number of anonymous editors per trusted user is expected to suffer longer queues if FlaggedRevisions is implemented on all articles. This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?” Note that, according to the quote from Jimmy Wales in the linked article, this system would only be used “on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery: Starting tomorrow, the Encyclopedia Britannica will be adding user-submitted content to its website in a bid to give Wikipedia a run for its money.

kzieli writes “Britannica is going to allow viewers to edit articles. with changes to be editorial reviewed within 20 minutes. There is also a bit of a rant against Google for ranking Wikipedia above Britannica on most search terms.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened to Knol? Announced by Google in late 2007 and launched in July 2008, the site was meant to bring more credible (read: not written by anonymous Wikipedians) “knowledge units” to the web, and it would allow the authors to cash in on their work. But it’s 2009, and Knol appears to be notable largely for its non-notability.

It’s hard to believe that Google Knol’s 6th month anniversary is fast approaching. The Wikipedia direct competitor, which launched to the public back in July of 2008, is reporting that Knol users have collectively produced 100,000+ knols. That’s no small feat for a site that most of us wrote off almost immediately.

Wikipedia is gearing up for an explosion in digital content with new servers and storage designed to handle larger photo and video uploads.Wikipedia has since scaled up from 2TB to 24TB and now 48TB of storage for its primary medial file server, and recently raised file upload limits from 20MB to 100MB.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com.