A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

Wikipedia isn’t the only site considering a public demonstration of the evils of SOPA. Scribd has gone ahead and done it. Scribd has added a script to its page that blanks out documents word by word before users’ eyes, followed by a pop-up explaining what’s happening and why we should all be concerned about SOPA. This analysis of why SOPA is unconstitutional is cited as an example. (At least, in theory. It didn’t work on my computer, nor on those of some others who posted comments on Scribd’s post.) That puts me in mind of a tool I...

Torrentfreak reports that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blacking out the English version of Wikipedia as a protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, following the success the Italian Wikipedia community had with a similar protest against restrictive legislation in Italy. By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed. “My own view is that a community strike was very...

I’ve pointed out in other posts that Wikipedia has outlasted every attempt at developing a competing “better” community-sourced general-purpose encyclopedia. While that means Wikipedia has had excellent staying power, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s perfect or even necessarily very good the way it is. Case in point: a lengthy rant from Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Search Engine Land blog, which he posted on his personal blog Daggle. Sullivan learned that the Wikipeia page for Jessie Stricchiola, one of the pioneers in fighting click fraud, had been deleted for “non-notability”. Sullivan wanted to provide the editors with references and...

Ars Technica has an article about the overall failure of Citizendium, the attempted fork of Wikipedia by co-founder Larry Sanger that launched five years ago this month. (David Rothman covered Citizendium for TeleRead in September and October of 2006 when it launched.) Sanger was concerned that the freewheeling anyone-can-participate editorial style of Wikipedia could turn off actual experts in the fields they were editing about. He feared they would get fed up with having to defend their edits and stop contributing. So Sanger created Citizendium, which would be like Wikipedia (in fact, it forked its article database from Wikipedia...

A Canadian developer is creating a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy app for the iPad. Rather than an e-book version of the prose novels, however, this app will purport to be “the” Guide, giving multimedia presentations on the Babel Fish and so forth. It could turn out differently than I expect, but I have a strong feeling this will only end up being a novelty. Meanwhile, the actual true-to-life function of the Guide has been available for quite some time in the form of websites such as Everything2, h2g2 (which was actually modeled after the Guide’s true intent, and...

The Nieman Journalism Lab has just announced Encyclo, an “encyclopedia of the future of news.” With 184 entries at launch, the encyclopedia provides background on the various entities and people who are driving innovation in news publishing and e-publishing. There are a few entries on e-book matters (most notably Apple and Amazon) as they touch on journalism, as well. Although Encyclo has forms for submitting feedback, it seems to be meant strictly as a curated resource, rather than fully contributor-sourced like a wiki. This is understandable in a resource that is intended to be of full professional quality....

Due to budget cuts, the BBC has announced plans to “dispose of” the H2G2 website—a community-based Internet encyclopedia, created in 1999 (two years before Wikipedia!) by Douglas Adams and based on the idea of an electronic encyclopedia about “life, the universe, and everything” as depicted in Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. The Beeb originally bought it in 2001 after Adams’s company failed in the dot-com crash, and in 2005 produced a mobile version for smartphones and PDAs. BBC Online Social Media Executive Nick Reynolds hastens to explain that the BBC does not want to close H2G2, but...

Anyone remember Knol, the Google-backed, “expert”-authored system that was supposed to be a more reliable source than Wikipedia? Yeah, I’d almost forgotten about it, too. But it looks like so has everybody else. A post on the Google Operating System blog notes that it last received any updates in December, 2009, and since then has been more or less abandoned. As Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, it’s another example of how the big companies can’t always outcompete the community-driven efforts they try to improve upon. Masnick refers to this as “cargo cult copying,” referring to the Pacific tribes...

Today is the day that WikiLeaks—despite reportedly being under a distributed denial of service attack—sprang its biggest leak ever, releasing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and airing global diplomatic laundry for all to see. The Guardian has an interactive map of countries whose secrets have come out, and browsing it produces some interesting stories. But the most interesting thing to me is not the contents of those stories, which enough other people are going to be covering today, but what the WikiLeaks organization represents for journalism in the era of the Internet—or, rather, how the Internet makes...

I’ve mentioned that Wikipedia entries can be collected into bound books, thanks to Wikipedia’s partnership with a print-on-demand publisher. However, Read Write Web reports that boutique publisher James Bridle (whom we’ve mentioned a few times before for other reasons) has gone this idea one better: he has collected five years of the edit history of a Wikipedia entry into a rather handsome twelve volume set of hardcover books. The entry in question is “Iraq War”, and the reason Bridle did it was to point out that historiography is important. Because of Wikipedia’s change-tracking, he notes, we are able to...

John Scalzi has pointed out a problem with Barnes & Noble’s site search feature brought on by fly-by-night self-publishing firms. When you type “Scalzi” into the Barnes & Noble website search box, the first page of results is cluttered with what appear to be illicit republications of Scalzi’s works, but are actually something arguably worse. They are 32-page compilations of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s work, bundled by self-publishing firm “Books LLC” and sold for $12.72. (If you should for some reason want a printed compilation of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s works, you can get it a lot cheaper...