Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Puts the Focus on Female Scientists

Last month we reported that Royal Society was planning a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in conjunction with Ada Lovelace Day to beef up the pages about female scientists, engineers, and mathematicians unfairly ignored by history. Well on October 19th that edit-a-thon happened, with members of the Royal Society combining their efforts with others working remotely to create or expand approximately 40 Wikipedia entries.

Microsoft Sends DMCA Requests to the BBC, Wikipedia, and More

The world of internet piracy and online copyright enforcement is rife with stories of incompetence, especially on the side of major corporations and copyright holders. Many of those problems stem from the fact that the most frequently used weapon of copyright-holders, sending DMCA takedown requests to remove sites illegally sharing copyrighted material from search engines, is automated. The systems in place send an obscene number of notices, including duplicate requests for sites that have already been removed and now, apparently, random requests to remove any site even slightly connected to a company's copyrighted material. For example, a recent rash of DMCA notices from Microsoft asked Google to delist a series of popular, most-likely non-infringing sites, including TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, BBC.com, and Wikipedia.

Royal Society to Hold Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Female Scientists

Teachers might not like it, but most of us, students and non-students alike, get at least some of our information from Wikipedia. So what happens when a historical figure has a Wikipedia page with barely any information on it… or worse, no Wikipedia page at all? Can they really have been that important? Snooki's entry is approximately 1,500 words long with 40 citations… if someone had an actual, measurable impact on, say, science and technology, shouldn't we be able to type in their name and read more than a few sentences about it? There's a Schrödinger's cat joke here—I can't quite reach it, but you know what I mean.

Wikipedia, Your Gender Bias is Showing

Women of the Internet, start your editing engines. If it's one thing we've learned recently from go-to Web info source Wikipedia, it's that what the user-edited encyclopedia could use more of is you. Researcher Santiago Oritz has developed Wikipedia Gender, "an interactive visualization that shows which articles have more male or female editors". The graph matrix runs the spectrum of user ratio against female-to-male, with scrollover dots and a color key that help identify specific subjects. Two things immediately become clear: First, that the number of male editors far outweighs female editors (as reported by the New York Times earlier this year, women make up just 13% of total contributors). Two, that, apparently, the only subjects where the ratio almost levels out are on drastically female-body-oriented subjects like menstruation, or, for reasons that could perhaps merit their own article, gender identity. In fact, of the 3,000 articles analyzed by Ortiz, the only article that has a female majority is the one for the Cloth Menstrual Pad. Understandable, but….yikes.

Things We Saw Today: A Picture of Stan Lee Wearing Nothing But A Comic Book

My advise is not to read into it much, but that is a Hulk comic. Here's where to go if you want to know how this happened. (Tumblr)

Wikipedia Heading Towards a Serious Admin Shortage

Wikipedia is something of a modern day miracle. It's a free, perpetually up-to-date, nigh-all-inclusive, readily accessible encyclopedia that has long proven to be about as accurate as more traditional alternatives. The easy thing to forget, however, is that this is only because an army of Wikipedians is dutifully editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing the site's myriad pages. Unfortunately, there seems to be a downward trend; the number of new Wikipedia Admins has dropped off, and if the pattern continues, the site could face a very serious shortage.

Wikistats Lets You See What Parts Of Wikipedia Are Morphing Right Now

You might not be allowed to use it for school papers, but Wikipedia is effectively the go-to source for information in most of the non-graded sectors of the world. The thing we tend to forget, or at least not think about very often, is that Wikipedia isn't written in stone. In fact, it changes faster than you can imagine.  Wikistats, a new site that tracks the "trending pages" on Wikipedia, can give you good idea of what's changing at any given time, and by how much. The results might not be what you'd think.

Competitive Wikipedia Searching Makes For An Oddly Compelling Sport [Video]

If you're young enough that Wikipedia existed while you were in highschool, you've probably played WikiWars in a library computer lab. The game is simple: Two users start on the same page and attempt to be the first to navigate to a second random page using nothing but internal links. It's a blast. This video by thegregorybrothers shows a match in progress and acts not only as an informative tutorial for would-be WikiWarriors, but also an amazing proof of concept for WikiWars as a televised sport with commentary. While it's surprisingly fun to watch, it's obviously better to play. So grab a friend, start at "string beans" and get to "alternating current." Ready? GO!

The UK Pledges to Make All Publicly Funded Research Publicly Available With the Help of Wikipedia

The scientific community has been in a bit of a stir this year, ever since mathematician Tim Gowers wrote a post on his blog stating his intention sto abandon publishing his findings with any journal run by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher, citing the stranglehold a publisher that large can have on the world's peer-reviewed scientific information, controlling not just how it's published, but what it costs to read or even obtain a copy. One step in the right direction, according to many, is to create laws or programs that would ensure that all publicly funded scientific studies were eventually (or immediately) made publicly available. Well, England's Science Minister just struck decisive blow for what's being called the Open Science movement, by promising just that.

Things We Saw Today: A Unicorn Cupcake!

How -- how, I ask you -- is anyone supposed to eat this? (via Geeks Are Sexy)