It’s widely accepted that Twitter is where news breaks, and apps like Instagram and even Vine have become complementary tools in a contemporary journalist’s arsenal. But Wikipedia? Researchers, including an engineer over at Google, have built what might be the first breaking news app that feeds off of Wikipedia edits to point out the power of Wikipedia for identifying breaking news as it happens.
As of today, Wikipedia is open to HTML5 video uploads.
The video project is a collaboration with video start-up Kaltura and Google, and it’s actually been in the works since 2008, but was delayed by infrastructure upgrades, personnel changes and other problems over the past four years.
“Wikipedia has more than half a billion unique monthly visitors, so any new feature that is deployed needs to be really sustainable and fool-proof,” said Kaltura president Michal Tsur.
Today, there are only about 6,000 videos on Wikipedia, a mishmash of beta testing and uploads in an older and more limited format called Ogg Theora. You can see an example of a Kaltura video on the page about polar bears.
You didn't think Wikipedia was all original content, did you? According to Webempires, the online encyclopedia cites and references over two million different websites. You can find the entire exhaustive list here if you've got a couple of weeks to spare, or check out this handy infographic which highlights just the top 50 sources.
People like to read funny and bizarre encyclopedia entries. History is full of strange people, objects and ideas that will make you laugh. Wikipedia has provided the Internet with a platform to share information. In this article, we will examine a combination of bizarre Wikipedia pages and funny concepts. Comedy can be a difficult emotion to capture. For this reason, you rarely see funny posts. Some of the entries in this article are more shocking than comedic, but hopefully something will make you smile.
Wikipedia will pull its plug on Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA, controversial bills in Congress that could seriously change the way the Internet works if they get passed.
Wikipedia's protest is sure to get some attention from those who are still unaware of the issue -- Alexa pegs Wikipedia as 6th most heavily trafficked site in the world and in the US.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted that comScore estimates that the English version of Wikipedia receives an average of 25 million daily visitors globally.
Wikipedia will blackout all 3,847,673 of its English-language articles in protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA), according to co-founder Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia is going black on Wednesday, January 18, to help fight the contentious Protect IP Act (PIPA), which is set to go for a vote before the Senate on January 24. The move, first reported by Neal Mann, digital news editor at Sky News, was confirmed by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the far-reaching online encyclopedia, on Twitter. Wales says the blackout was a “community decision.”
Wikipedia visitors can now leverage a new level of security and privacy regarding their reading habits, thanks to the site's newly announced support for HTTPS browsing. Ryan Lane, a Wikipedia Operations Engineer, writes that HTTPS "allows you to visit our sites without having your browsing habits tracked, and you can log in without having your password or user session data stolen." Visitors seeking to navigate the site securely can simply visit https://en.wikipedia.org to begin.
Wikipedia pushed a new mobile interface live today and though end-users probably won't be able to tell the difference (except the new Beta label) - it's the start of something big. The new mobile front end framework that's been pushed live, called MobileFrontend, replaces an older less agile front end for the mobile site and aims to enable a host of new developments.
