I don’t know whether this is the right response to the challenge of Wikipedia, but Encylopaedia Britannica seems to think so, according to The Boston Globe : To respond to competitive challenges from Google, Yahoo, and the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Britannica today will announce it is returning to an old practice after a lapse … Read more
I’m a huge fan of Text Monkey, a small program which allows you to clean up text copied from elsewhere. It’s a godsend, but it’s not the only one out there. Text Cleanup does the same thing, but also cleans up Acrobat PDF files, particularly all the extra line breaks that Acrobat puts in, and restor[ing] … Read more
Techdirt points to an effort by Slate’s Paul Boutin to Make Website Annotation Cool Again. As Techdirt points out, this idea — where surfers can add their comments to websites so that others who use the same annotation software can view them, and add their own comments — is not new. (The semi-official term is … Read more
Into this debate about the reliability of Wikipedia leaps the 12–year old figure of Lucian George from north London, who found five errors in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. BBC reports that A schoolboy has uncovered several mistakes in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – regarded by readers as an authority … Read more
The guys at Wikipedia, the collaborative encylcopedia, have taken on news, Wired reports. Wikinews is still in beta, but fully functioning. For those familiar with South Korean news site OhmyNews (an English version is here), the idea is similar: Authors are able to add their content irrrespective of who they are. Unlike OhmyNews, however, other people … Read more