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Wikipedia: Projects
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If Wikipedia is a celebration of crowd wisdom, then Google's newest project is a hat tip to the individual expert. The search giant has announced that it's launching Knol, a site that allows users to submit articles in areas of their expertise.
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Wikipedia claims to be a project to construct an encyclopedia based on the GFDL text corpus. It further asserts by claiming it is applying the terms of the GFDL that anything written and released under GFDL, including those directly submitted via the Wikipedia user interface which is based on mediawiki, can be legally included in the Wikipedia corpus.
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The free encyclopedia project Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.com ) celebrates its first anniversary today. In its first year, the collaborative project has created over 20,000 articles, organizers say. Wikipedia is a so-called WikiWiki, which means that anyone with an Internet connection can visit the website and edit an article without signing up. For such an open project, some may find it remarkable that many of the articles are reasonably good and that the project has attracted a large number of well-educated, articulate contributors. Wikipedia is not only free to read, it is free to distribute. It is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which ensures that anyone may reuse the entries on the site in any way they wish, including commercially, as long as they too preserve that right in their own versions.
To list material from Wikipedia, you should review the advice for organization websites. But Wikipedia merits additional attention because of its recent growth and popularity. Some professors will warn you not to use Wikipedia because they believe its information is unreliable. As a community project with no central review committee, Wikipedia certainly contains its share of incorrect information and uninformed opinion. And since it presents itself as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia can sometimes seem more trustworthy than the average website, even to writers who would be duly careful about private websites or topic websites. In this sense, it should be treated as a popular rather than scholarly source.
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A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was ... the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website.[125] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.
Community plays an important role in helping Wikipedia-the-project make Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is a wiki, a lot of communication and collaboration is needed to create the encyclopedia. Many hands make light work, but there must be some coordination between all those hands to make the work happen at all.
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