The office is silent when our small film crew arrives at Wikimedia’s San Francisco headquarters. There’s none of the newsroom buzz one might associate with the operators of one of the world’s largest sites. Hell, the day I started at AOL, there wa…
Wikimedia Commons, which acts as Wikipedia’s media repository, has pushed its Android and iOS app out of the beta phase, giving photo collecting for the digital encyclopedia a workflow that isn’t chained to a browser. By registering an account onl…
Wikipedia has been working on new ways to bring its 25 million articles to more users in developing markets, where smartphones and internet connectivity are still sporadic. The latest plan is let users request specific article…
Are you old enough to remember when doing research at school meant opening up incredibly boring encyclopedias or, even worse, flipping through your library’s card catalogue? Well, American kids these days don’t have to put up with such indignities as they’re turning to more modern tools to help them write research papers. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has conducted a survey of over 2,400 middle school and high school teachers showing that 94% of teachers said their students were “very likely” to use Google (GOOG) to conduct research while 75% said the same of Wikipedia. Meanwhile, just 18% of teachers said their students were very likely to consult textbooks and only 12% said their students were very likely
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…
Not all mobile news is destined for the front page, but if you’re like us and really want to know what’s going on, then you’ve come to the right place. This past week, Verizon announced that its LTE service now covers two-thirds of the US population,…
Not all mobile news is destined for the front page, but if you’re like us and really want to know what’s going on, then you’ve come to the right place. This past week, CyanogenMod gained a new logo, Google acquired a mobile payments company and we lea…
It was probably inevitable, but on Tuesday, it became official: the Encyclopaedia Britannica is finally going out of print. The news was confirmed yesterday by Jorge Cauz, president of Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., who told the New York…
The RIAA’s CEO Cary Sherman said that he hopes the Stop Online Piracy Act protest were a “one-time experience.” In an op-ed piece written in The New York Times earlier this month, Sherman accused companies such as Google and Wikipedia of exploiting their popular status to “misinform” the public. He also claimed that by opposing the bill, these companies “were supporting foreign criminals selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals to Americans.” In a separate interview, Sherman said he believes that “readers online” accepted misinformation being spread by Google and Wikipedia about SOPA and PIPA based on the assumption that “if it comes from these sources, it must be true.” He claimed members of Congress were “very frustrated that they couldn’t get out their side of the story.” Sherman continued,
You know the drill, you’re browsing an article about volcanos on your phone and want to know more about Eyjafjallajokull. You’ve got two options, commit that bad-boy to memory, or fiddle with copy and paste. Well, Google not only feels your pain, but…
