Sunday, December 18, 2005

Wikipedia Class Action Lawsuit

I haven't seen too much else about this, but I'm fascinated that a group of unidentified people (as far as I could tell from the site) has initiated a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia. IANAL, but I don't see how you can sue when you have the power to change any comments on the site you believe to be libelous or otherwise incorrect.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica

For all the Wikipedia doubters, Nature compared science entries on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica and found them to have about the same number of errors.

Here's the best quote about the study, from Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:


People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Twidale adds. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."

In other words, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

EFF launches blogger's rights campaign

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking bloggers to publicize their new blogger's rights campaign with graphical links like this one:


Clicking the button leads to a page that details blogger's rights, such as the right to blog anonymously, the right to make fair use of intellectual property, and the right to access public information.