Tag: jimmy wales
Jimmy Wales says he'd go "ballistic" if NSA tried to gain backdoor into his new mobile operator
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has told TechDigest that he will go "ballistic" if the NSA try to gain backdoor access into The People's Operator, the new mobile phone network that it has just been announced Wales will become co-chair of….
Wikipedia founder calls for meeting with Home Secretary following streaming student's extradition to the US
Jimmy Wales, founder of online crowd-soured encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has called for a meeting with Home Secretary Theresa May following the extradition of a British student to the US on the grounds that he facilitated piracy. Richard O'Dwyer faces ten years…
Wikipedia may switch off US pages if Senate's anti-piracy bill gets green-lit
Wikipedia, the free online crowd-sourced encyclopaedia, is preparing to potentially switch off its American pages in protest to a bill on the verge of being passed by the US senate. The bill in question is the "Stop Online Piracy" act….
Wikia Search project abandoned
Following poor traffic, Wikia Search will be shut down, says Jimmy Wales, trustee of the Wikimedia foundation. It was originally intended to be a search engine where users could influence the ranking of results, but recently it’s struggled for traffic – attracting just 10,000 unique users per month ovedr the last six months.
Wales says: “This one is too far away. It was going to take at least a another year to two before it’s usable by the public, and we can’t afford that right now. I’ll return to this again when the economy is good.”
Part of Wikia Search’s decline can probably be attributed to Google SearchWiki, launched last November, which allows users to comment and influence, though not fully determine, the rankings of individual results on Google searches.
Wales also discussed Microsoft’s shuttering of Encarta, commenting that it’s “disappointing to see a center of knowledge going away”. He said that he’d been attempting to contact Microsoft about integrating some of Encarta’s content into Wikipedia. Due to Encarta’s relatively small size, however, “the community probably wouldn’t find it useful. However, the images might be useful.”.
Wikia Search (via Cnet)
Wikipedia eyes introduction of 'flagged revisions' worldwide
Wikipedia is considering banning unregistered users from making alterations to certain articles. It would be a radical policy change for the Encyclopedia whose slogan is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.
Last week, during President Obama’s inauguration lunch, US Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were both taken ill, quite seriously in the case of Kennedy. They have both since recovered, however shortly after the event, their Wikipedia entries read that they had died.
Although the changes were removed within five minutes of going up, the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, went on record saying that a “flagged revisions” system would have prevented the problem. Such a system has been trialed on the German Wikipedia, and means that any unregistered edits have to be approved by a ‘trusted editor’ before they appear to the public.
Wikia Search – another search engine trying to take on Google
Another week, another search engine trying to take Google on. This time it’s Wikia Search. It’s the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and he’s been speaking about his people-powered search engine at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.
