Posts Tagged with ‘wikipedia’

I have just bumped into an interesting post on Powerset blog about a small survey they have carried out to see students’ attitude towards Wikipedia. Powerset is a semantic search engine recently acquired by Microsoft. The first product launched by Powerset is the tool to search Wikipedia to get more relevant results using the power of natural language processing technologies.
The reason for this study is that the guys at Powerlabs noticed substantial number of feedback emails sent from various .edu [...]

Recently I have noticed an interesting thing in the traffic stats for Profy. Specifically I have started to notice people arriving from Google (mostly) and some other search engines after they do a search for a single word - “internet”. And since I always find it amusing when people google “Google” to get the same link they are actually on (and yes, Google is quite a popular search term) I thought that googling “internet” was equally amusing. After all, what [...]

Over this week we've been listening to the discussions about international media demanding that the Chinese government rethinks its position on blocking a number of websites that were (and most certainly still are) considered by the government as hazardous to their citizens and their states of mind. What we see now is that under this pressure China is simply forced to lift the restrictions to a certain extent - the extent that can be viewed as acceptable by [...]

The Volokh Conspiracy notes that courts have cited Wikipedia in decisions over 300 times. That's three hundred times that the user-created encyclopedia has been used in documents that become part of the public record. And while Eugene Volokh doesn't usually see a problem with this, one particular use by the Seventh Circuit demonstrates just how questionable the practice may be, depending on your view of user-generated content.
In the decision for Rickher v. Home Depot, Inc., the Seventh Circuit uses the [...]

Google is a smart company - smart enough for many people to be surprised after they witness this or that move or an acquisition, surprised enough to say "Why has not anyone thought of that move earlier?" And now it seems that Google has finally realized that it sends way too much traffic from its search results pages to websites that do not contribute to Google's business. What would be the correct move for a business when faced [...]

I’m always game for a new search platform that offers a unique perspective on delivering search results. Even if they aren’t pulled off to perfection, good concepts are always worth a few laughs, at the very least. Centrif is a search platform that answers questions (reminiscent of Ask.com) with social bookmarks that users have submitted as fitting particular search queries.
Centrif is a small operation, created and maintained free of financial backing by Steve Wilson, a resident of the [...]

Henry Blodget and Peter Kaftka are in an uproar. The person who changed Russert's Wikipedia entry was determined to be a lower-level employee at Internet Broadcasting Services, which is a company that provides web services to television stations. Apparently, the employee heard the reports, and felt it was his or her civic duty to update Wikipedia, assuming it was "common knowledge."
Kaftka and Blodget and a slew of other bloggers are all upset about the firing, claiming that unless the story [...]

The legal standing of much of Web 2.0 is based on the U.S. concept of safe harbor, which essentially means that no web site operator can be held accountable for anything posted on their site by the users. I'm no lawyer, and turned to an excellent breakdown of what safe harbor is and what laws ensure it from Eric Goldberg, Assistant Professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, which he gave in an interview with ION Connection:
47 USC [...]

Is anyone else getting the feeling that safe harbor legislation for sites that host user-generated content are going to be changing soon?
The uber-conservative World Net Daily (WND) is reporting that the FBI is investigating reports of child pornography on Wikipedia, starting with a nude album cover from the 1976 Scorpions album Virgin Killer. The original album cover was banned in the U.S. when it was released because of its depiction of a naked pre-pubescent girl. As of the time [...]