Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-06/Wales meets Brockhaus

Add a rallying call to vote Wikipedia! lots of issues | leave me a message 07:10, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is Brockhaus's "stub" on Wikipedia still available online anywhere? I would be interested to see it. Nice to know how seriously they are taking us these days. &mdash; Trilobite (Talk) 20:43, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I found out about this through the tip on the newsroom suggestions page. I'm not inclined to quote from or link directly to the text due to the concern over copyright infringement. --Michael Snow 21:09, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More notes, transferred here from the suggestions page:
 * On Sunday evening, it was discovered that an institute (Institute of Applied Information Sciences) at the University of Saarbrücken had an unsecured server on the internet which contained large portions of the new edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia (21st edition). The server is now shut down, after Brockhaus was notified. The new Brockhaus encyclopedia will contain an article about wikipedia (86 words) and it will mention wikipedia in the article about encyclopedias. A Wikipedian (Jakob Voss) asked German wikipedians to improve the article (meta:Kurzdefinition wikipedia). Heise is reporting: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/60323
 * Brockhaus has stated in public that they don't consider this "activity an example of respect, sportsmanship and fairness". They also stated that they don't want to consider this nor rule out to call this a criminal act". The complete web site of the Institute is still shut down.
 * This event also gave an opportunity at a new technology developed by Brockhaus which essentially leads to a user interface which allows "native queries" (such as "What kind of animal has two hunches?"). It appears that the software is currently still unable to answer the questions, it merely returns a list of articles that most likely contain the answer. The project, called LeWi (Lexikonbasierte Wissenserschließung), was funded by the ministry of education and research of the Federal Republic of Germany. The resulting technology will likely be licenced by the developing companies the usual (non-free) way.