Two interesting tidbits to report on today. First up is an announcement being made by Google regarding their “Google Apps” product. It appears they are going to roll the various offerings into one umbrella here and, in effect, put themselves in a position to more seriously challenge Microsoft’s Office product line. The popular blog known as TechCrunch has a good article about this.
Next up is an article in the New York Times about a decision by the history department at the University of Middlebury to stop allowing students to cite Wikipedia in their papers or exams. The decision grew in part out of a recent incident in which numerous students in an Asian history course cited the same incorrect “fact” about the Jesuits supporting the Shimabara Rebellion in seventeenth-century Japan.
A new wiki-tool has launched, Scholarpedia. As the name suggests, and as the owners of the site make clear, it’s an attempt to develop a Wikipedia-like site, but with crucial differences: only scholars are invited to write, each article is peer-reviewed, and scholars have control and responsibility of their own articles after publication. Right now, the main thrust of the encyclopedia is in the areas of technology, mathematics, and neuroscience. In other words, it will offer highly technical articles aimed at a highly technical audience. Thus, it will hardly get Wikipedia-like use. Nonetheless, the effort and the tool itself are quite interesting and worth commenting on. First, this is yet another free scholarly encyclopedia offering, similar to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy now apparently housed at the University of Tennessee at Martin. It seems there is a trend for scholars to produce free, online encyclopedias for a scholarly audience. What does that mean for traditional scholarly encyclopedia publishers? Nothing good, I would suspect. Second, the tool itself is, of course, very cool. It makes a great use of the wiki technology and avoids the pitfalls of Wikipedia. As we launch our own content initiatives in 2007, you can bet we’ll be paying attention to these developments, as we try to carve out a viable, useful niche in the information marketplace.
Earlier this week various companies announced a new product offering called “SuiteTwo.” Despite the odd name, I’m actually quite excited about this service. What it will do is offer small businesses an integrated suite of online tools: a blogging platform provided by MovableType; a wiki platform provided by SocialText; an RSS aggregator provided by NewsGator; and RSS syndication featured by SimpleFeed. It may all sound like a lot of techno mumbo-jumbo. But for a business like ours, which is tiny and struggles to incorporate these new kinds of Internet tools (they’re referred to as “Web 2.0″ tools) into our daily lives, it is potentially a big deal. The blogging feature, for instance, promises to be far richer and more powerful than our current blogging tool. (Among other frustrations, I cannot track the number of readers of this blog. Not that there are very many. But the principle is important.) Being able to adopt wiki technology would be completely new for us, as would the ability to think more seriously about adding RSS syndication to some of our content/projects. We’re actually giving a lot of thought these days to how we can overhaul and streamline our existing project work with some of these and similar tools, and to how we can incorporate them into upcoming efforts to create some of our own proprietary content. In any event, SuiteTwo sounds very promising, and I look forward to its roll-out.
Information Today has another article on Wikipedia battles. In the latest go-round, a longtime Wikipedia critic has found more instances of plagiarism. Also, apparently some hackers did some damage, infecting the site with a worm that generated tons of spam for users.
Speaking of spam, we’ve been inundated by it ourselves in the past few months. We have finally found some relief with a new software program that is drastically reducing our spam levels, not to mention providing better security against those aforementioned worms. (This, after one of our computers was waylaid by a worm last week.)
Financial Times reports that a leading Chinese Web search company, Baidu, has launched an online encyclopedia modeled after Wikipedia. It’s called Baidupedia, and like Wikipedia it consists of user-generated content. Unlike Wikipedia, which was initially very popular in China but which was banned by the government last year because of unsuitable content, Baidupedia self-censors to avoid any content that the government would not like. It will be interesting to see how popular the site becomes. My guess is that, in the absence of any other competing product, it will quite popular. Users may miss the discussion of political realities, but they will welcome the nonpolitical content.
This article from Information Today provides an interesting and informative perspective of the various benefits and drawbacks of the Wikipedia and Britannica publishing models. The author’s conclusion is that both models are useful research tools.
You may remember that in December, Wikipedia launched a fundraising drive. In the new issue of Reference and User Services Quarterly, its editors (Connie Van Fleet and Danny P. Wallace) have written an interesting summary of Wikipedia’s purpose, methods, sources, authors, and so forth. On the fundraising front, they note the following: “A $161,200 budget shortfall at the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2005 suggests that the future of Wikipedia may be in question if donations are not forthcoming.” A page on Wikipedia’s site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-01-09/Fundraiser_ends) describes the results of the most recent fundraising drive and provides a glimpse of the financial challenges involved in running such a huge enterprise without any ongoing revenue stream. It will be interesting to see if the general public–and various foundations–step forward with enough money to keep Wikipedia operating under its current model.
Mary Gillaspy, our friend and colleague who is the director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Health Learning Center in Chicago, sent me this link to an article in Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/520070; registration is free but required). The article’s author offers a favorable opinion of Wikipedia and suggests that the traditional peer-reviewed medical/science paradigm may be outdated. Certainly, the peer-reviewed journal system has its flaws, and it wasn’t helped by the recent discovery that a Korean scientist faked his research in cloning human embryos and extracting stem cells from them, research that he published in the prestigious journal Science. But it’s worth keeping in mind that most librarians and educators still view Wikipedia with distrust and prefer more authoritative sources, whether these are peer-reviewed journals or encyclopedia entries that likewise go through a lengthy editorial review process before being published. But it will be interesting to see how this debate develops in the near future.
Today’s New York Times features a commentary about the Wikipedia vs. Britannica debate (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03comm.html; registration is required). The author makes some interesting points about the exceedingly minor nature of some of the so-called errors in both sources as outlined in the recent issue of Nature.
All of us in the reference industry watch Wikipedia with interest. Many in the publishing community ridicule it because it allows any user anywhere to contribute to it, and there is very little editorial oversight. All of our clients ban it from use as a source. However, the concept behind it is quite compelling, and its incredible growth–not to mention its obvious ability to connect with the general public–makes it a fearsome “competitor.” And in browsing through it, I have often been amazed at its breadth and depth while taking all of its content with a large grain of salt. Many organizations, including ours, are brainstorming ways to make use of wikis as a tool in the future.
Today comes word of another unfortunate incident with Wikipedia’s content. See http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/05/wikipedia.rules.ap/index.html. I’ll be curious to see how Wikipedia continues to respond to problems such as this as they inevitably crop up.