15 YEARS OF WIKI | George W. Bush page most edited on Wikipedia

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Former US president George W. Bush may no longer be able to change the course of history — but it has not stopped others trying for him.

To mark its 15th anniversary Friday, online encyclopedia Wikipedia released a ranking of its pages based on how many edits have been made by volunteers — edits can mount at Wikipedia pages when people or subjects incite passion or rival perspectives.

Bush, in office from 2001 to 2009, topped the list with 45,862 edits to his Wikipedia page, coming in about 3,000 edits ahead of the World Wrestling Entertainment roster page.

The list of the top-10 most edited pages went on to include, in order, the United States, Wikipedia itself, Michael Jackson, Jesus and the Catholic Church.

Rounding out the list were programs broadcast by Philippines television network ABS-CBN, US President Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler.

Since its launch on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown to more than 36 million articles, with approximately 80,000 volunteer editors contributing to the website, according to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation behind it.

Separately, Pew Research Center released a study detailing which subjects are most popular on Wikipedia in different languages.

The most visited article in the English version of Wikipedia was “List of deaths by year,” which racked up more than 20.8 million page views last year alone, the research showed.

The most popular Chinese-language articles included the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, mention of which is strictly taboo in China and heavily censored.

The top four Japanese language Wikipedia pages were devoted to pop groups, and the fifth was an article about organized crime group Yamaguchi-gumi.

Volleyball, basketball and football, along with Wikipedia itself and the periodic table of elements, were among the most popular articles in Spanish.

“Wikipedia seemed like an impossible idea at the time: an online encyclopedia that everyone can edit,” founder Jimmy Wales said.

“However, it has surpassed everyone’s expectations over the past 15 years, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world who have made Wikipedia possible.”

Wikipedia has expanded to include 280 languages and averages more than 18 billion page views monthly, making it one of the world’s most visited websites, according to Pew.

source: interaksyon.com

Wikipedia aims for billion users with mobile spread

TOKYO — Wikipedia is aiming to use mobile phones to reach a billion people by 2015, a senior executive has said, doubling the present number.

The rapid spread of cellular networks in the developing world is providing fertile ground for this expansion, even as it robs the site of potential editors, Jay Walsh, senior director of communications at the Wikimedia Foundation, told AFP in Tokyo.

Reaching people in far-flung parts of the world where computers are scarce requires a pared down, text-only version of the collaborative online encyclopaedia, he said.

“It’s surprisingly challenging to take your website and make it available on the simplest phone,” Walsh said on the sidelines of a conference in the Japanese capital on Sunday.

“In areas like the Middle East, opening your phone and accessing a project like Wikipedia could cost you the equivalent of the couple of US dollars, which is a serious amount of money in those countries.

“We’re trying to eliminate that barrier so people don’t have to think about that,” he said, adding the site’s global audience stood at around 483 million.

Tie-ups with telecommunications providers such as France-based Orange and VimpelCom of the Netherlands, are driving this expansion, penning deals that mean waiving data charges for customers accessing the site, in an initiative called Wikipedia Zero.

According to figures from Morgan Stanley, the number of mobile phones and other portable devices accessing the Internet will overtake the number of laptops and desktops this year.

But while browsing is easy on a handset, editing a page on a small screen and without a physical keyboard is more of a challenge.

The number of active editors — someone who edits a page at least five times a month — peaked on the English language site in 2007 at 50,000, he said, adding it has been in decline ever since and now stands at around 33,000.

“There’s a sense of the project being finished,” he said.

Executives hope Wikipedia Zero will help rebalance the editorial brain drain, expanding into markets where local versions of the site remain in the start-up phase. The Swahili language version of Wikipedia — one of the 285 available — has just 88 active editors.

But, admits Walsh, the constraints of the mobile phone as a tool for editing, remain a big hurdle.
“Our main focus is on the technological infrastructure to make it easy for this to work,” he said. “It’s about big ideas, bringing about change and making the world a better place.”

source: interaksyon.com