David Huynh completed his PhD at MIT CSAIL last year and joined MetaWeb a few months ago, where he has been working on new and better interfaces to explore the data encoded in their Freebase system. He recently released Parallax as a prototype browsing interface for Freebase. Here is a video that shows the interface in action.
The NYT Bits blog has a post, Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Reduce Vandalism on Pages on Wikipedia’s proposed Flagged revisions/Sighted versions policy. This policy is currently being used in the German version of Wikipedia.
Company’s site invites public to contribute, wiki-style, with rules to guard credibility
When I was young, encyclopedias were the Web. I was aware that there was a hierarchy of encyclopedias, with the World Book serving the low end for young students and the Encyclopedia Britannica for those in high school and beyond. The Britannica was so intellectual that they even uses funny letters in their name: Encyclopædia Britannica. My family had a mid-range Encyclopedia set (Colliers) and I spent many hours lost in browsing through it.
Faviki is a new social bookmarking system that uses Wikipedia articles for tags. It actually uses URLS in the DBpedia namespace that correspond to Wikipedia pages. The immediate benefits of this approach are several:
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and also the chairman of the “I hate Wikipedia club”. My split feelings towards Wikipedia depend on the keyword I’m targeting. In general I believe that it’s a great place to get free links for traffic. The links are “no follow” so they won’t help boost your search rankings [...]
Mike Bergman has a comprehensive list of about 100 papers on Wikipedia as a knowledge source.
“Since about 2005 — and at an accelerating pace — Wikipedia has emerged as the leading online knowledge base for conducting semantic Web and related research. The system is being tapped for both data and structure. Wikipedia has arguably replaced WordNet as the leading lexicon for concepts and relations. Because of its scope and popularity, many argue that Wikipedia is emerging as the de facto structure for classifying and organizing knowledge in the 21st century.”
This complements a similar list on Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia in academic studies.
Slate has an interesting article, The Wisdom of the Chaperones — Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy, that explores who controls some of the popular social media sites. It turns out that the social web is more hegemonic than we thought.
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Digg
Reddit
Technorati