Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-21/In the news

List appearances
Time magazine named Wikipedia as one of the "25 Sites We Can't Live Without". The accompanying description reads, "A real Web wonder: this massive, collaborative online encyclopedia is written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers; some 1.3 million articles in English, and millions more in 228 other languages". Meanwhile, The Observer included Wikipedia in its list of "Websites that changed the world" (a group of 15, to coincide with the web's 15th anniversary &mdash; they incorrectly called us wikipedia.com, however).

Coverage from Finland
The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest subscription newspaper in Finland and the Nordic countries, published a feature on Wikipedia editor Timo Jyrinki. The article focuses on the Finnish Wikipedia, but is available to read in English. Among the items noted is an incident involving the article on Finnish MP Jari Vilén (English article). When a paragraph dealing with reported plagiarism in Vilén's master's thesis was removed last year, the edits were traced to an IP address assigned to the Finnish Parliament.

Even at Microsoft...
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropped an interesting tidbit into a report on a program conducted by Microsoft to boost the presence of women in the tech industry. Microsoft brings a group of young women to its campus for a weeklong camp. Describing the students using technology to work on complex equations, the article said, "rather than using the built-in Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia for research, another girl quietly used the Wikipedia site instead to finish the project."

More quality news
More sources are reporting news stories about Wikipedia's quality, such as one that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a follow-up to Wikimania 2006. According to the article, Jimbo Wales said that with Wikipedia having come so far, contributors should now turn "away from growth and toward quality." The story went on to provide more background about Wikipedia, such as earlier praise from Nature magazine, proposed improvements including a stability experiment underway in the German version of Wikipedia, as well as the quality concerns raised by pranks.