Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/In the news

Ward Cunningham: Wikipedia is like "my child grown up and become richer than me"
Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, was interviewed by "The Pragmatic Bookshelf", a programmers' podcast. He recalled how he arrived at the idea of wikis after "playing around with HyperCard" (an early hypertext software), and emphasized the importance of (the equivalent of) redlinks and the recent changes page, and how he got rid of the illusion of a "developer review process that couldn't be abused", arriving at a wiki's "anyone can edit" philosophy. Another important idea taken from HyperCard was "[7:02] that anybody could write anywhere, you did not have to write in chronological order. (... With) so much of collaboration software you spend most of your time quoting whoever you wanted to respond to ... I wanted it to be able to evolve to be something that was worth reading. The Wikipedians actually turned that up a notch by having a talk page or a discussion page behind every page, so you don't actually have to see the discussion and it makes a much more finished product. .. I'd say everything I really cared about has been carried forward in Wikipedia and everything that was just an expedient choice I made, that got in the way of writing the encyclopedia, they changed. I met those guys maybe three or four years into their project, which they started 5 years after mine, and they were very concerned: 'Ward, is what we built really a wiki?'" Interviewer: "They wanted your blesssing!" Cunningham: "Oh yes, approval... they knew they changed a lot, and I said: Oh yeah, absolutely. Because it has the feel. It's all about the feel, it's how you write. And of course, they have been so wildly successful, in a global sense, that it's (like) my child grown up and become richer than me."

"Fleeting" fame from listing oneself on Wikipedia
Mary Bufe wrote on the Webster and Kirkwood Times Online that she has always encouraged her 17 year old son Sam to "make his mark on the world". However, it seems that his way of making his mark on the world doesn't agree with Wikipedia's notability guidelines for people. One look at the revision history of his home town will tell you that he is keen to have his name recognised on the list of notable residents of Webster Groves, Missouri. Sam's claim to fame is being the founder of a wiffle ball club and the co-founder of a wiggle ball league. The Wikipedia sports notability guidelines state that "A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has been the subject of multiple published non-trivial secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject". Until there are sources besides those written by his mother, it is unlikely that he will be qualified to be on that list.

India Joins Top Donors Club
The Economic Times and The Hindustan Times report that India has become the sixth largest donor to the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010–2011. $193,657 was given to the Wikimedia Foundation by just under 11,000 Indians. Indians donated just under 2% of what the US donated, and made up just over 1% of global donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. The 5 countries donating more than India were the US, Canada, Japan, Spain and the UK, with the US giving over $10m. The Hindu reported that donations in India leapt from the 16th position, contributing $52,156 from 2956 donors in 2009–2010. These amounts do not include donations made by the country chapters of Wikimedia, which also help in local fund-raising.

Data Mining Wikipedia
An article titled "The FullWiki Offers Reference Linking And Other Wikipedia Tools" on Lifehacker Australia briefly portrayed TheFullWiki, "a set of Wikipedia search and mining tools", offering features such as a map of places mentioned in an article, a collection of deleted articles, or finding references for a statement by searching Wikipedia for a similar, referenced sentence ("Students, we find sources for your essay, so you don't have to"). The site's founder Luke Metcalfe describes it as "the result of over 5,000 hours of programming work". Earlier, he founded NationMaster, known to Wikipedians as a longtime mirror of Wikipedia content. In an interview a few months ago, he said that "Wikipedia is a fantastic encyclopedia but the reality is most articles don't get read from beginning to end. So on The Full Wiki we show the data by other dimensions; timelines, maps, top charts. It brings the info to life."

Briefly

 * Musician uses Wikipedia to prank media: The Daily Mirror reports that musician James Blunt edited his own Wikipedia page to say he "was classically trained as a church organist" in his teens, in order to bolster his claim that he would play organ at the upcoming royal wedding, "and then there were 4,150 articles about it!"
 * How to get a link on Wikipedia: Search Engine Watch explained "How Small Businesses Can Get a Link from Wikipedia" by becoming a trusted editor. A few weeks earlier, a smaller SEO blog had explained another trick to achieve that goal, by uploading images sourced to one's own site.
 * Wikipedia cited as reference for supermoon, spoofing and cricket: US student news website The SOP used Wikipedia as a reference in its article about the Supermoon phenomenon that occurred on 19 March 2011, and Patch.com used Wikipedia as a source for the definition of spoofing. pamil-visions.net used a table from 2011 Cricket World Cup Group B in their article about the India vs West Indies game.
 * Wikipedia coverage of current events recommended: Arms Control Wonk praised Wikipedia's article entitled Timeline of the Fukushima nuclear accidents for being "quite good and easy to read". The Oye! Times also referred to Wikipedia's coverage of the Fukushima I nuclear accidents.
 * Bishop's COI edit: Virtue online, a website that calls itself "The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism", reported that US Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori had her Wikipedia page edited by a staffer.
 * Paper encyclopedias obsolete: Hollandsentinel.com asked the question "why do today’s students even need to know where to find the encyclopedia in the library when they can access Wikipedia right in the palm of their hand?".