Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-04/In the news

Financial Times on Wikipedia
The Financial Times ran a long story on Wikipedia and various quality issues that have been in the news lately, including the possibility of flagged revisions, the potential decline in editorship, and ways to detect the quality of articles. The article includes quotes from Sue Gardner, Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, Craig Newmark and Andrew Lih, but also a few people who are less often quoted about Wikipedia; Marissa Mayer, head of search at Google, notes that the company could potentially analyze the editing histories of individual editors and rank articles accordingly, but she says "Google has no plans to do that."

Premature death report
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh was hospitalized due to chest pains on December 30. He is alive and recovering, but his article was edited to claim that he had died that day. Although the edits were reverted within minutes of being saved, the error was reported by Examiner.com and later by [ http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=120608 WorldNetDaily].

Google Maps adjustment
According to this article, Google Maps has tweaked the way it selects local search results. Although there already exists a wide range of information available on local businesses, there is often a lack of information available for non-business points of interest (such as local parks). Wikipedia's articles on these non-business locations are now being featured in the top spots for Google Maps searches.

Briefly

 * User:Ken Gallager was featured as the subject of a Nashua Telegraph article on Wikipedia, the people who contribute to it, and New Hampshire articles.