The Wikimedia foundation, those folks behind Wikipedia, announced last week the Bookself Project, which is designed to encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia. As you might expect, it’s spawned its own wikispace at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project.
The project is in its pilot phase so there are a limited number of
materials available. Worth browsing are the guiding principles and timeframe (the expected
rollout for the project is Q4 in 2010) as well as the positioning messages for different target audiences.
Named target audiences include journalists and participants in secondary and higher education. “Corporate
Communicators” are named as a target audience too, which makes me uneasy. I’m sure that the message is not
going to be, “Have at it! Spin your clients left right and forward on Wikipedia!” but I still worry.
Another “target audience” that the Bookshelf project is looking for is people willing to make
screencasts about editing Wikipedia. I thought there must already be resources like that available; a
quick look at YouTube shows that there are least a few screencasts already made, like this
well-made video from the American Society for
Surgery of the Hand.
The Bookshelf Project Wikispace also has resources for discussion and development of tools as well as
“open questions.” Actually there’s only one open question at the moment but I’m looking forward to the
answer — what’s a good open source alternative to Camtasia?
Happy to see Microsoft working on doing its thing with Bing. I’m referring of course to the new Bing Reference page, which was launched earlier this month. The new page, at http://www.bing.com/reference, aims to provide visitors with information about what’s/who’s in the news, as well as easy access to Wikipedia articles.
The front page has an “on this date” feature, an article from Wikipedia, and a feature that probably wasn’t intended to make me laugh. The reference page has a “People in the News” feature listing, well, people in the news. The first one was Lil Wayne. The second one was Shakira. The third was … Dave Barry? I don’t know what Dave Barry did to be in the news — clicking on the name took me to his Wikipedia article which didn’t have any current information — but I love that he ended up on a list with Shakira and Lil Wayne. You GO Dave Barry.
So anyway. You can also use Bing’s reference page to ask natural language questions ala Ask Jeeves. I asked my usual Why is the Sky Blue?
Bing returned the first nine of over 46,000 Wikipedia results in a 3×3 grid that I quite liked. The pages in the grid contain title, sometimes an image, and a brief snippet that serves well for context. The results page also has the option to turn off the highlighting for your search terms, as well as get the results in a much more boring list form — no thanks. Clicking on article title takes you to the Wikipedia article, but the content is contained on the Bing site.
I tried a different search: What is the best cabbage roll recipe? The search results page said, “Searching Wikipedia and Freebase” but I still got results only from Wikipedia. This set of search results didn’t do as well — Bing seemed to get hung up on the word “roll” and the first page had results like “Spring Roll” and “Jiaozi.”
I like this grid layout! I think though I’ll have to do more searches to get a better idea of what Bing’s semantic search is looking for. The results were okay — and presented in a far more usable format than I’d get searching Wikipedia itself — but I might have to adjust my questions a little.
Wikipedia is such a huge resource, and has so many people both reading it and citing it, that I was glad to hear about Wikirank. Wikirank, available at http://wikirank.com, allows you to search for topics and get a chart of how many views their Wikipedia pages have gotten. Furthermore, you can compare different pages against each other to see which is more popular.
You can see an dramatic example of a Wikirank view chart when looking at Natasha Richardson’s page. (Note that Wikirank’s search engine appears to be case sensitive; searching for “Natasha richardson”, for example, gets no results.) Readership is steady with an astounding spike on March 19, the day after her unfortunate death. Other charts I looked at tended to be steady or with much lower spikes (Take Stan Lee for another example.)
You can also do comparative searches. Start with the Wikirank page on Jon Stewart (which also has a short spike.) Once you have that page up you can click on the “Compare This Topic” button, and Wikirank will invite you to search for another topic. In this case I searched for Jim Cramer. You’ll get a chart that shows the readership of both pages. In this case Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer both have a spike on the same day (I suppose for the famous Daily Show interview) but Cramer’s spike is higher. You can compare up to four topics at a time. (I tried to add CNBC to this search and was interested to see that it had no spike at all — just a steady, comparatively low readership.)
You can view 30-, 60-, or 90- day charts, with buttons that allow you to page forward and back. You can also embed charts on your own site via a JavaScript widget. From the front page you can look at the most-viewed pages (The Beatles? Really?) and topics that are currently trending higher (The Lloyds Bank coprolite? REALLY? Today’s vocabulary word, kids, is paleoscatologist.)
I would love to have RSS for trending data, or even an API (which the site says is coming soon.) Excellent site if you’re at all interested in Wikipedia.
