Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-08/In the news

Michael Knigge of Deutsche Welle recently conducted an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales. The interview touches on a number of current issues, including potential competition from Knol, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Brockhaus, the recent Kennedy-Byrd incident and flagged revisions, the role of the Internet in today's society, and funny German words.

In an extensive article, The Independent discusses the future of Wikipedia. In light of various acts of vandalism, including the recent Kennedy-Byrd incident, The Independent considers the ongoing discussion of Flagged Revisions as a crossroads between access and accuracy. The article also discusses the financial difficulties associated with Wikipedia's ever-increasing "hunger for bandwidth". Reid Priedhorsky, quoted in the article, has posted about problems with the article.

An article published in Technology Review discusses the launch of the newly improved WikiDashboard, which analyzes trends and promotes "social transparency" in Wikipedia. By searching for an article through WikiDashboard, anyone can see a list of the most prolific contributors to that article, along with a chart showing the distribution of their edits over time. The team of researchers is currently discussing ways to make the data more usable and easier to read.

An article on the possibility of flagged revisions called "The wiki-snobs are taking over" was published February 8 in The Sunday Times. In it, Giles Hattersley interviews Jimmy Wales about errors in Wikipedia, and writes about his own impression of the site as being full of errors and problems. Hattersley also mentions that there are mistakes in his own entry. However, at the time that the Times article was published, there had never been a Wikipedia article about Hattersley. The Daily Telegraph blog picked up on this discrepancy, publishing a short entry about the lack of a Wikipedia article. An article on Hattersley was created after the article appeared but was quickly deleted pending further investigation. Discussion is ongoing at Talk:Giles Hattersley.