Wikipedia once again is diving into Internet politics.
Remember earlier this year when Wikipedia went black in protest of anti-piracy legislation moving through the U.S. Congress?
In 1982, we went to movie theaters, bought albums in record stores and did our research in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (which was sold to us by a door-to-door salesman). In households with kids, Saturday mornings from 8-11 were cartoon time -- the only part of our week that the three networks programmed for children. In politics, we chose from two parties: Democrat or Republican.
The comment on the Facebook page of the Norwegian tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang last July was unequivocal. "The death penalty is the only just sentence in this case!!!!!!" it said. Written by Thomas Indrebo, the "case" to which the message referred was the meticulously planned mass murder of 77 people in Oslo on July 22, 2011by Anders Behring Breivik.
Ronnie Oldham could sell encyclopedias. He was named National Rookie of the Month in 1988 for his ability to push the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The world received word yesterday that the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica would stop producing hardbound, paper copies of their venerable reference.
updated: Thu Mar 15 2012 12:49:00
After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will end its print editions and publish exclusively online.
The online realm is replete with a vast cornucopia of information, just waiting to provide the hungry masses with nourishing nuggets of knowledge -- or (as in "The Hunger Games") scary-ass weapons of mass destruction.
On this week's Tech Check podcast, Doug Gross, John Sutter and Stephanie Goldberg explain the internet blackout that saw sites like Wikipedia voluntarily go dark to protest SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), the bill before Congress targeting online piracy.
The growing number of foreign websites that offer counterfeit or stolen goods continues to threaten American technology, products and jobs. Illegal counterfeiting and piracy costs the U.S. economy $100 billion and thousands of jobs every year. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while some of America's most profitable and productive industries are under attack.
updated: Thu Jan 19 2012 17:36:00
MPAA's Christopher Dodd defends SOPA's ability to eliminate internet piracy and save American jobs.
Some lawmakers are rethinking their support of controversial anti-piracy bills that led to some websites shutting down in protest.
Go to Wikipedia at midnight, and you won't find any of the usual encyclopedia articles.
Wikipedia was one of several websites that were shut down Wednesday in protest of anti-piracy bills before Congress that critics say could amount to censorship.
A handful of large websites will go dark on Wednesday to protest an anti-piracy bill that critics say will wreck the Internet as we know it.
updated: Thu Nov 17 2011 12:03:00
VICE looks at the "forgotten" nuclear fuel thorium, its passionate followers and its second life courtesy of the internet.
Amazon has clarified that the next generation of its 3G Kindle, the Kindle Touch 3G, will not be able to browse the Internet without a WiFi connection. Users will still be able to use 3G to sync book and document purchases, but anything beyond Wikipedia will be off-limits.
The Internet is both a blessing and a beast when it comes to finding sources and fact-checking. There's a lot of information out there, but it can be tricky to know what is reliable and what you should avoid. Being a researcher at CNN means regularly vetting huge amounts of information in short time spans. Having to do so has forced us to become cynical Web gurus of sorts. Allow us to share with you some tips to avoid headaches:
A recent graduate is suing a high school she attended, claiming it allowed a "racist" and "bigoted" school spirit event to occur.
"Being an actor is like being in prison," the British bad boy says in an explicit new interview
"When your body is being dragged across a dance floor," the Dancing contestant says, "it can take a layer of skin off"
Wikipedia is just the latest in a long line of encyclopedias. In fact, encyclopedias have been around in some form or another for 2,000 years. The oldest, Naturalis Historia, written by Pliny the Elder, is still in existence.
Wikipedia turns 10 Saturday, a decade during which the globally crowdsourced online encyclopedia weathered fierce criticism about its reliability and banishment from academia.
Manonamission.blogspot.com has a great collection of corporate mission statements. I recently used its search function to find examples of companies that prominently and publicly state something close to "people are our most important asset."
Amazon, Google, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter -- we've all experienced firsthand the innovative power of the Web's global network.
For Stanford University student Feross Aboukhadijeh, what started off as a bet fueled by youthful ambition and technical bravado, ended up an Internet hit and quite possibly a job.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has threatened Wikipedia with legal action if the online encyclopedia doesn't remove the FBI's seal from its site.
WikiLeaks isn't much to look at.
If Facebook already tells you who's got big plans for this weekend (or what they planted on their FarmVille farm), why not ask it where to grab dinner or whom you should vote for in the next election?
Wikipedia's "crowdsourced knowledge" model has created a spectacular resource, but everyone knows the big caveat: If the data's important, don't trust the online encyclopedia without verifying it first.
Google Inc., owner of YouTube, said an outage of the popular video-sharing site Thursday was technical and not caused by outside tampering.
Democrats opposed to Meg Whitman's gubernatorial campaign are hoping to get an assist from the public in their latest bid to push voters away from the Republican candidate.
As 2009 draws to a close, the Web's attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
One of the Web's basic tenets is that small contributions from lots of people can amount to something powerful in the aggregate.
When Jimmy Wales visited the headquarters of Hudong.com last month, he had one question for its founder: is it possible for Wikipedia to be the number one online encyclopedia in China?
Where does one begin in making a list of the greatest hitters ever? Well, I put together a spreadsheet, and using my very special grading system that I only just invented, I came up with a Top 10 list of hitters. In fact, I have a Top 538 hitters -- those are the 538 hitters in baseball history who compiled more than 6,000 plate appearances. The bottom 10, in case you are curious:
NEW YORK -- Three thoughts from Day 1 before getting to your questions ...
Today's Internet is governed by the idea that crowds of people can create the news, share information and collaborate on online projects.
One of the Web's basic tenets is that small contributions from lots of people can amount to something powerful in the aggregate.
How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson.
updated: Fri Jun 26 2009 18:04:00
AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis discusses Michael Jackson's death and its effect on the Internet.
It's one of the top 10 most-visited sites worldwide, with over 2 million articles in its English language edition. But is online encyclopedia Wikipedia's strength -- that anyone can edit it -- also its greatest weakness?
Here's an underrated great part of my job: The mail. Every week, more or less, I will get two or three great things in the mail. Often it will be a fun book -- like I got this terrific book the other day called, Odd Man Out, by (apparently) a brilliant reader of this site named Matt McCarthy. Matt is now an intern at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, but the book is about the 15 games he pitched in the minor leagues in 2002, and how they altered his life. That's a hard kind of book to write ... I've read quite a few failures on that front. But this one is outstanding.
The Internet age's philosopher-king, Lessig argues in favor of abolishing the anti-piracy laws corporations have pushed so hard to install
Jimmy Wales began the successful peer-reviewed encyclopedia Wikipedia in 2001.
updated: Fri Oct 10 2008 04:58:00
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, tells CNN that he believes Wikipedia will give the world free access to the sum of human knowledge.
A few years ago I made the rather bold and yet admittedly bewildering claim that former Kansas forward and now longtime NBA journeyman Raef LaFrentz was the greatest athlete ever named Raef. You would not expect anyone to care enough about this to disagree, but it turned out that Mark Zieman, the former editor and now publisher of the Kansas City Star, disagreed vehemently. He pointed to Rafer Johnson, the former decathlete. I explained that LaFrentz was RAEF while Johnson was RAFER -- that's like the difference between raze* and razor**. But you cannot win a fight with an editor soon to be publisher, and he went back into the archives and found some ancient story where some unnamed coach called called Johnson "Rafe." I weakly pointed out it was spelled differently.
If you've been slandered on the Web, your bad reputation may follow you offline too. Here are some tips for burnishing your online image
Plucked from obscurity by John McCain, Sarah Palin has scrambled the presidential race. An intimate look at how a frontier mom learned to play the political game
You probably arrived here via a hyperlink. We hardly think about it now, but the hyperlink is a neat trick. It turns a word in a browser into an object that leads to more information.
Virtually anyone can edit an entry on Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. But its founder is finding it's not so easy to cover his tracks after a messy breakup with a TV personality and a dustup over his expenses began playing out on the Web.It's not the first time that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's de facto leader, has found his behavior questioned -- especially since no subject appears too arcane for dissection by Wikipedia's passionate community of users. The latest episodes, however, reverberated beyond the usual die-hards.A former lover -- political pundit Rachel Marsden -- let out steamy and embarrassing online chats with Wales, and dumped his clothes on eBay. Wales, 41, also became the subject of an eyebrow-raising blog entry by Danny Wool, who until last year worked for the nonprofit, donor-supported Wikimedia Foundation that runs the encyclopedia.Wool wrote that Wales had asked the foundation to reimburse him for costly items like a $1,300 dinner for four at a Florida steakhouse. Wool alleged
Egged on by his colleagues, Ben Sutton snatched $1,000 from his company's safe late last year. It was no heist, but the culmination of a fierce competition at Rosen Law, a firm that specializes in divorce cases in Raleigh. In an effort to get his employees to collaborate more effectively, owner and chief executive Lee Rosen had decided to put his entire operation on a wiki - with a $1,000 cash prize as an incentive to use it.
The Web used to be a place where we went to seek information. But with the rise of social networks, we're barraged with a constant stream of data, requested or not
Even for a January splatter-fest movie, the Diane Lane gorefest is cruel and unusual punishment -- both for the cast and crew, and defenseless moviegoers
Her proposed talk-show deal with MSNBC may have fallen through, but life remains, well, rosy for Rosie O'Donnell.
What's the most valuable lesson you've learnt? Has school or life taught you more? What do you think is the future of education? Share your thoughts and we'll print the best ones here.
You can't expect to compete as a small business today without taking advantage of online marketing tools. These links can help.
The links below can help you in your quest to launch a successful business.
Working from bed usually gets a bum rap. But when you've created the world's biggest community-written encyclopedia, with more than seven million entries in 143 languages, no one can accuse you of being lazy. Jimmy Wales, 41, is the brains behind Wikipedia, which, with the help of the thousands of unpaid contributors who create and edit its content, has reshaped how the world finds, shares, and debates information. His organization, now part of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, employs just ten people. Yet the Alabama native - who made his money trading futures but still swears by his Hyundai Accent - now spends much of his time working with Wikia, Wikipedia's for-profit sister site that plans to launch a search engine he hopes will one day rival Yahoo and Google. Fortune's Julie Schlosser sat down with Wales - on a couch - to discuss how to manage workers remotely, the benefits of wearing black, and why he compares himself to David Hasselhoff.
Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly. Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
In an era when information is cheap, what price do you place on the truth? That's one of the quandaries sports reporter Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) faces over the course of "Resurrecting the Champ," a solid, surprisingly absorbing character drama based on an article by J.R. Moehringer (the best-seller "The Tender Bar").
What edits on Wikipedia have been made by people in congressional offices, the CIA and the Church of Scientology? A new online tool called WikiScanner reveals answers to such questions
Can an open source project improve online searching? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales thinks so
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said Friday he is putting the building blocks in place for a community-developed Web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
The debacle over posts by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey shows that message boards, relics from the 1980s, continue to thrive. And who's on them may surprise you
In preparation for the iMeme: The Thinkers of Tech conference, Fortune asked dozens of technology gurus the following question: What, for you, has been the most surprising infectious idea of the past year? Click on the names to read how Esther Dyson, Bill Joy, Jonathan Schwartz, among others, answered, or simply scroll down.
The father of Chris Benoit spoke out Friday, saying he had no idea why his son killed his wife and child and then committed suicide - but is anxious to see the results of toxicology tests.
Somebody altered Chris Benoit's Wikipedia entry to mention his wife's death - before her body was found.
Police said Thursday they are trying to determine who altered the entry on the reference site before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their son
This past April's shooting spree at a U.S. campus showed a psychopath's twisted path toward revenge, the intent of which -- despite a plethora of information -- still appears apparent only to himself.
1. Spurs star Tim Duncan says that referee Joey Crawford challenged him to a fight while ejecting him from Sunday's game against the Mavericks. That's strange. Usually the refs and players settle disputes by footraces.
Baseball has returned, and with it, watching sports has become a peaceful crawl. This is not basketball, with screaming broadcasters and artificially generated excitement. This isn't hockey, with its violent collisions and dentally challenged warriors. This is baseball, which is all, you know, pastoral. The announcers are older men who sound like our grandparents, speaking in muted voices, recalling stories from spring trainings of yore. The fans are laid-back, keeping score on a pad in their lap while shucking peanuts onto the cement floor. Most exciting to me, there's ample strategy to observe, as pitchers try to outfox batters who are trying to outfox the same pitchers.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was in the Web 2.0 business before there was such a term. He has five rules for tapping the enthusiasm of users.
Jimmy Wales may have created the world's largest encyclopedia, but he can't keep his inbox in order. In the back of a black London cab, careening from one high-powered meeting to the next, Wales si...
Imagine a baseball coming at you at some extraordinary speed that you think is going one way but just before it connects with the bat it heads in the opposite direction.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Condolences flowed for U.S. comedian Sinbad after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced his death Thursday, but it turned out the grieving was premature and the comic was alive and well.
If there is one phenomenon that defines modern business and makes it so utterly different to commerce in the past, it is technology.
1. It turns out that the Galaxy will only be paying David Beckham about $27.5 million in salary over five years, a far cry from the $250 million figure that was widely circulated. Surely, this is the first that Beckham's value has been overestimated.
At my daughter's New York City high school her teachers tell her to not to use Wikipedia. When I talked to Jimmy Wales in Davos a few weeks ago, I expected him to be dismissive, perhaps even contemptuous, about such attitudes.
Nowadays, the all-powerful Web user, recently anointed as Time's Person of the Year, is both creator and consumer of every last bit of content at some of the Web's fastest-growing destinations. Witness the success of Flickr (the photo-sharing site), YouTube (the video-sharing site), Deli.cio.us (the bookmark-sharing site) and Wikipedia (the knowledge-sharing site).
It's one of the most basic questions in management: How do you know how effective you are at squeezing labor out of office workers?
Startup: Spock
You've bought the odd thing on eBay, watched the Dove Beauty model get a quick fire makeover on YouTube and the verb "to Google" is part of your everyday speech -- but how do you take your Internet usage to the next level and become a fully-fledged member of the Web 2.0 digerati?
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
After blocking Wikipedia for nearly a year, Chinese authorities in October allowed access to most of the online encyclopedia's English-language entries and, in some cities, to the Chinese-language ...
You've bought the odd thing on eBay, watched the Dove Beauty model get a quick fire makeover on YouTube and the verb "to Google" is part of your everyday speech -- but how do you take your Internet usage to the next level and become a fully-fledged member of the Web 2.0 digerati?
Bloggers are the new opinion-shapers and trendsetters, according to... well, bloggers, mainly. Here's how to set up your own virtual soapbox and get heard amid the cranks and loudmouths of that online Speakers Corner, the "Blogosphere."
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has become one of the fastest-growing and buzziest destinations on the Web, thanks in large part to the devoted community that slaves over its authoritative entr...
The problem: an epidemic of shoddy patents.
On June 15, Bill Gates announced his retirement plan, and the software world turned its eyes in unison to Ray Ozzie, his chosen successor.
It is one of the great paradoxes of business: All too often, the companies that boast market-leading positions, huge number of "touch points" with their consumers and all kinds of other advantages often are the least likely to innovate. They are the ones that say, "Oh, that market is too small for me to address," or, "That's not how we do business."
It seemed like a typical company holiday party. The brandy and eggnog flowed freely, although it didn't seem to loosen up any of the attendees.
A Georgia gubernatorial candidate accepted the resignation of her campaign manager Wednesday after he was accused of changing the online Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary.
EVER SINCE the first book review was written on Amazon.com in 1995, online shoppers have relied on one another for product intelligence. Whether it's a flat-screen TV or a Crock-Pot, someone somewh...
Investors, entrepreneurs and people across the tech industry are partying like its 1999, but this time the music isn't likely to stop.
Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There's the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?).
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