wikipedia

Wasting time on Wikipedia is a crime that we're not ashamed to admit. How else would we have found this totally trivial — but amazing — list of the handedness of US presidents? How else would Aziz Ansari have learned everything there is to know about Joe Pesci?

Jumping into a Wikipedia wormhole is a beautiful thing but, the truth is, the open-source, online encyclopedia is not. Wikiweb ($3) is an app for iPhone and iPad that takes all the content Wikipedia has to offer, and displays it in a clean, design-forward interface with fun animations.

Wikiweb also enhances the knowledge quest experience by showing a web of how disparate articles are connected. The app shows different areas of inquiry and articles related to that field's history. Curious minds can investigate further by zooming in on high-resolution images, quickly swiping through different articles, or changing between 100 different languages.

So dig in, information huntsman! Download the app and go where your curiosity takes you.

While recently searching for an "evil" emoticon (don't ask), I stumbled on an unlikely resource. Or, rather, the resource is pretty popular, but I hadn't thought about it until now. Worth checking out: the emoticon Wikipedia page. With a full list of emoticons ranging from basic smiles to more complex faces like a backwards baseball cap — d:-) — the page is a great resource for creative digital expression.

Emoticon listings are even broken down into eastern and western, listing all sorts of interesting emoticons I had no idea existed. (I'm particularly partial to this "not amused" emoticon: (*_*), and plan to use it often.) Check them out for yourself on Wikipedia, and happy emoting!

The Polish foundation that runs user-supported knowledge site Wikipedia plans to increase its staff in preparation for an expansion. The company is planning to add 44 new positions — which doubles its current staff — and raise $20 million to support an enhanced vision for the site. The announcement came from Wikipedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner at the annual Wikimania conference this year in Poland.

The foundation plans to focus on expanding in Africa, Asia, Central America, and will set up offices in Brazil and India. Additionally, the company hopes to support more languages (though Klingon's probably still out), envisioning 100 different Wikipedias with at least 125,000 articles each. In addition to volunteer-submitted content, Wikipedia has recruited volunteers in the past to help with community management.

• Wikipedia drops Klingon character from logo, nerds outraged — Urlesque
• It has arrived: the solid gold iPad —Gizmodo
• Cute little animated lightboxes from Andrew O'Malley — BoingBoing
• Tivoli radios get revamped — Unplggd
• Google helped get him the interview, but creativity got this guy a job — Lifehacker
• Francis Ford Coppola hates 3D — Switched
• Is Fable III coming to the PC? — Joystiq

Now you can create an actual printed book from your favorite or most-read content on Wikipedia with PediaPress, an online service allowing you to create a printed book from any online wiki content. To get started, enable the Book Creator, a bar that will appear on any Wikipedia entry you're reading. To add that page to your book, simply click the button marked "add this page to your book."

You can add pages without visiting them, too. If you're reading a page on one topic and want to include the page written about a certain link on that page, hover over the link until the add page button appears. You can add whole categories in similar fashion. Book prices vary depending on the number of pages, and start at $8.90 for a paperback; hardcover books will be offered soon.

I don't think that I'll be making a printed book any time soon, though this could be a fun gift for a history buff, band or celebrity superfan, or just a kooky keepsake for a friend with an eclectic interest. For a cool video tutorial on creating your own, visit the PediaPress site.

Volunteers who edit Wikipedia each day are quickly teaching the online encyclopedia that freedom and fun are crucial to the democratization of information. Burdened by complicated restrictions and uninterested in the more mundane topics (the most popular entries have already been written), volunteer editors are leaving Wikipedia faster than new ones are joining.

Wikipedia is under constant pressure to police the accuracy of its information, and that typically means leaving the moderation to millions of engaged users. That approach is fine with me, since I usually use Wikipedia to find out what everyone else knows about something; whether or not the info is true is a secondary consideration. But if less people engage in the content creation and moderation the quality of the information could go down. And that's a problem when these pages embody, and perhaps create, conventional wisdom. It's safer when there are more people who edit the entries, and thus more people who hold the power of truth (or truthiness) in their hands.

Luckily right now there are more than three million people who write, edit, and check the information, guaranteeing some level of oversight. Let's hope Wikipedia figures out how to keep them coming back. Have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?

With over three million entries, Wikipedia is the ultimate online encyclopedia. Most of you said that you regularly use it, but that you don't ever contribute or edit articles. But what happens to all of the entries that are considered for deletion by the Wikipedia gods? A website called WikiDumper pools together some of the Wiki articles that get flagged as inappropriate submissions or ones that have been nominated to be deleted. I'd have to say "The Purple Diet" entry that Mariah Carey supposedly followed — which involves eating only purple foods like plums and beetroot — is pretty hilarious.

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Although I reference Wiki on a regular basis for fun facts and trivia, I know that anyone can contribute information, which leaves me at a high risk of quoting inaccuracies. But yesterday, Wikipedia announced that they will be rounding up trusted users to create a pool of volunteer community managers, who will approve data before it's published.

But Wiki won't be covering all its bases — the rule will only apply to submissions on living people. So you can still offer up your insider knowledge on the subplots of BSG (if you are so inclined), but you can't just start publishing deets on Ashton Kutcher without getting it approved. Wiki is hoping that this will curb the amount of false data and keep the site clean, while others think that the extra step shouldn't be necessary. What do you think of the new Wiki rules?