Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-10/In the news

In the news

Wales joins Socialtext board of directors

The Socialtext wiki company announced on Monday, October 3 that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had joined Tim Draper, Joi Ito, and Ross Mayfield on the Socialtext board of directors. ([1], [2])

Sergey Brin lecture

Sergey Brin, multi-billionaire co-founder of Google, was a surprise guest speaker at UC Berkeley associate professor Marti Hearst's "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business" class on Monday, October 3. He remarked on Wikipedia: "This is a simple idea – one you would assume would not work, but it does, One reason is scale: it taps the power and potential of a global audience." (press release, link to video)

American national radio show

Newspaper columnist and radio commentator Craig Crossman recently interviewed Jimmy Wales on his nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers. On October 6, he wrote New Wikipedia truly the ‘encyclopedia of the people’, a glowing review of the site and a discussion of the ease of editing an article about his talk show, Computer America, while that show was on the air.

Article quality criticisms

Wikipedia was the center of a blog discussion started by Nicholas Carr (see related story). [3]

A related discussion on "Nitpicking Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities" was started by editor CowboyNeal on Slashdot on October 6. [4]

Wikipedia eats Google?

Sunir Shah posted on the Socialtext website on September 30 about the increasing dominance of Wikipedia in Google search results. This prompted a flurry of blog responses, some critical of Shah's conclusions, including Steve Rubel, Brad Hill, and Elliott Back.