Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-03/In the news

Multiple news sources relay Wikipedia's fundraising success
After it was announced that the 2010–11 fundraiser had concluded with more than $16 million raised (see this week's "News and notes"), up from $7.5 million in 2009, the news was promptly spread on New Year's day by mainstream news sources, including CNET News and The Atlantic, where Nicholas Jackson blogged "I had grown so used to seeing his face over the past couple of months during the site's annual drive that I was shocked he had disappeared". ReadWriteWeb observed: "A look at the real-time statistics shows that while the average donation remained around the same as years past, the number of people donating was far greater." An ArsTechnica article was titled "For a good cause: Half a million people fund Wikipedia" and a blog posting on MSNBC "Jimmy Wales' creepy stare rockets $16 million in Wikipedia donations". An Examiner.com article (URL blacklisted) summed up the fundraiser's success: "The sheer number of donations seems to show that people are starting to 'get it,' that Wikipedia is an endless sources [sic] of (mostly correct) information."

Briefly

 * Canadian Wikipedia use: An article on Internet usage in Canada by The Canadian Press stated that "the average Canadian web surfer reads 16 Wikipedia pages a month, which is the most in the world — one more than German users, two more than Polish users and four more than Americans" (numbers which agree with the Wikimedia Foundation's "Wikipedia page views per country" overview, although the Foundation page lists other countries with a higher monthly page view average, most of which are small nations that may be statistical outliers, but also Finland with 17 monthly views per Internet user). The article remarked that "Canadian users generate about 217,000 edits a month, which ranks eighth among the most productive countries." Etech05 Doc.jpg
 * Wikipedia "canonical and durable": In a posting on his blog at Harvard University's Berkman Center, US technology writer Doc Searls talked about his geography-related photographs that he had been uploading to Flickr under a CC-BY license, noting that nearly 200 of them had been copied to Wikimedia Commons ("Big thanks to the Wikipedians who have put them there"). On the occasion, Searls recommended fellow Berkman fellow Joseph Reagle's recent book about Wikipedia, Good Faith Collaboration (Signpost review), and explained why he was linking to Wikipedia frequently: "One reason is that Wikipedia is the closest we have come, so far, to a source that is both canonical and durable, even if each entry changes constantly, and some are subject to extreme disagreement. Wikipedia is, like the protocols of the Net, a set of agreements. Another reason is that Wikipedia is guided by the ideal of a neutral point of view (NPOV)."
 * Good Faith Collaboration review: The Californian alternative weekly newspaper North Coast Journal also reviewed Reagle's book last week, concluding that it is "short on drama and personality, and so it’s probably destined to be a source document if a publisher is ever convinced that Wikipedia is sexy enough to merit a more narrative-driven treatment. Since that seems unlikely, this may remain the best opportunity for learning about this remarkable project."