Category Archives: Wikipedia

The Electronic Intifada: New evidence about Amina, the "Gay Girl in Damascus" hoax

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"In a comment on that post, Paula Brooks, executive editor of LGR, gave two IP addresses which she said had been used by Amina to access LGR’s servers. The whois records for these IP addreses both have descriptions that indicate they are allocated to UoE or The University of Edinburgh. One of these IP addresses was the source of a number of edits to various articles on Wikipedia. These edits from 188.74.110.134 begin in October 2010. The edited pages all involve Middle East, Arab, Islamic and historical topics."

ReadWriteWeb: Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

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"Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation ... discuss[ed] how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. ... by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. ... 'There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation,' Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site."

Nieman Journalism Lab: How The Associated Press will try to rival Wikipedia in search results

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"[The AP plans] to build 'news guide landing pages' that will aggregate the AP’s content around subjects, places, organizations, and people. Think of the topic pages on sites like The Chicago Tribune, BBC, and others — except that the AP will be harnessing its vast network of members and customers in what could amount to a brilliant SEO play."

currybetdotnet: The tyranny of chronology: Part 2 – On the subject of topics

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Martin Belam: "One of the consequences of [news organisations'] focus on chronology is that when our children want to do research on topics that news organisations have produced acres of coverage of, they find themselves turning to Google and Wikipedia, not The Times and the BBC."

SEOmoz: A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web

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"The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google's homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want."

New York Times: TMZ Was Far Ahead in Reporting Jackson’s Death

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"On Thursday, [TMZ] not only scooped every other outlet by announcing Michael Jackson’s death, it apparently beat the coroner’s office, too — by six minutes. ... The blog ... seemed to have sources everywhere: at Mr. Jackson’s mansion; in the ambulance; and in the corridors of the U.C.L.A. Medical Center. TMZ’s short post about the death was published at 5:20 p.m. Eastern time. For more than an hour, TMZ was essentially the only outlet claiming that Mr. Jackson was dead. "

New York Times: TMZ Was Far Ahead in Reporting Jackson’s Death

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"On Thursday, [TMZ] not only scooped every other outlet by announcing Michael Jackson’s death, it apparently beat the coroner’s office, too — by six minutes. ... The blog ... seemed to have sources everywhere: at Mr. Jackson’s mansion; in the ambulance; and in the corridors of the U.C.L.A. Medical Center. TMZ’s short post about the death was published at 5:20 p.m. Eastern time. For more than an hour, TMZ was essentially the only outlet claiming that Mr. Jackson was dead. "

WSJ: Digits: Google’s Mayer To Dispense Advice to Newspapers At Senate Hearing

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"Google believes, and has been arguing behind the scenes to some major newspaper publishers, that instead of newspapers publishing multiple articles on the same topic throughout the day, they ought to combine the entries under a permanent Web address. Doing so, Google argues, can help publishers–which often complain that their journalism is getting buried amid other less serious content–increase the authoritativeness of their articles and surface higher in Google search results."