Wikia has passed a new milestone of 20 featured wikis. These wikis are nominated and voted on by the Wikia community and then featured on the home page for around a month. Featured wikis serve as good examples for the new wikis to learn from. For example, the wiki might show great support for newcomers, fast membership growth, a creative use of categories, innovative templates, or the best use of various wiki techniques and practices. Thanks to CocoaZen, who has been doing a great job of organising the featured wiki process since it started in early 2005.
Here is Wikia’s official top 20, from the most recent to the oldest:
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It’s my Australian anniversary. I’ve been here a year! 50 weeks longer than I expected this time last year. :)
The photo by Jasabella shows me meeting the Sydney Wikipedians in front of Sydney Harbour Bridge on my first full day in Australia.
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It looks like Wikipedia is yet again blocked in China. :(
Andrew Lih had some ideas of why the unblock happened, but whatever the reason, the decision seems to have been reversed. See Andrew’s blog for updates and theories on why this happened.
Related posts:
See also:
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So many milestones; China, the Commons, and now Wikizine. Wikizine has published its 50th newsletter. If you want a short summary of the most important goings on across Wikimedia, I strongly recommend that you subscribe to Wikizine by email or RSS. Walter Vermeir does a great job of gathering wiki news from a range of sources including mailing lists, blogs, IRC, and the wikis themselves. His weekly publication has an excellent signal-to-noise ratio.
If you have longer, read the Wikipedia Signpost as well. Also published weekly, this has eight sections with summaries of bug fixes, arbitration cases, Wikipedia in the news, new admins, featured articles, and other important information for the Wikipedia community.
If you prefer your news in audio, listen to Wikipedia Weekly – a great podcast led by Tawker and Fuzheado for everyone involved with Wikipedia. In the first few episodes, they’ve covered advertising on Wikipedia (which I’m predicting will happen before the end of 2007), Citizendium (which I’m predicting will fade into obscurity before the end of 2007), Wikimedia Local Chapters, and all of the latest project news, including a look at Wikipedia’s most read articles.
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As the Chinese Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles, the Wikimedia Commons is getting ready to celebrate a milestone of its own — 1 million files. Brianna came up with a great idea for the community to mark the occasion by creating a mosaic that represents the Wikimedia Foundation logo. The aim is to visually represent the breadth of images that are available on the project. If you want to help improve the mosaic, you can get involved in selecting better images.
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Good news for Wikipedia and China – Andrew Lih reports that the partial unblock of Wikipedia in China is now a full unblock and Wikipedia is accessible from everywhere in China. He also has graphs showing a surge of new users. Over 1000 new users are signing up for the Chinese Wikipedia per day since the block was lifted! This makes it the second fastest growing Wikipedia in terms of user registrations. Article growth is also up, and they celebrated reaching 100,000 articles this week. It’s almost four years since the English Wikipedia hit the same milestone.
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The Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco over the last couple of days led to a lot of exciting announcements and launches, but very little in the wiki space. (At least according to blog reports of the event – I wasn’t actually there).
Intel announced the launch of SuiteTwo, “a rich set of interconnected services that combine to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing”, or, more simply, a useful combination of wikis and blogs from Socialtext and Six Apart. See the related posts from Anil Dash and Ross Mayfield.
Answers.com announced that they had acquired FAQFarm for $2m. FAQFarm is a heavily adapted MediaWiki site where a wiki community can ask and answer questions.
Some of the non-wiki stuff:
- Beta launch of Skype 3.
- Riva launched Like.com, a visual search engine for products that you can buy at Amazon and elsewhere. It makes so much sense. It’s a far more realistic way to shop online.
- CNET launched a new Blog at Webware.com which aims to document “cool web apps for everyone”.
- CNET claims that Ning launched at the conference, though in reality, they’ve been around for at least a year. Ning, founded by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen (a Wikia investor), is a Java platform where users create their own social applications.
- Mercora, the user-contributed and user-programmed digital radio network, launched the second generation of its “Radio 2.0″ platform.
- Stikkit launched their post-it note/to do list/calendar/tagging/bookmarking tool. I’ve given up trying to use things like that though and am now trying a physical whiteboard instead, with the idea that if I can’t close the tab, I might pay more attention to what’s on my to do list. :)
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Jure ÄŒuhalev has published some interesting results from a small study of how three search engines rank Wikipedia in a search for Wikipedia article titles.
It was inspired by comments in the blogosphere about Wikipedia appearing highly in SERPs, but doesn’t tell you much about that since the sample of searches used all came from Wikipedia article titles, and therefore biased the results towards Wikipedia. The terms searched for include words that are biased towards Wikipedia-style wikis, like “stubs” and “disambiguation”. They’re also not the sort of things people often search for, like Adenochlaena or Zakroczym.
However, what it does show is the relative status of Wikipedia in the three search engines. Google and Yahoo are far more likely to show Wikipedia in the first ten results than MSN is. Wikipedia appears in the top-10 results for 81% of Google searches, 77% of Yahoo searches and only 38% of MSN searches.
Jure ÄŒuhalev was kind enough to run the same analysis for Wikia, using the original 1000 search terms. It shows that if you take a random 1000 Wikipedia article titles, a search for those titles will show a top-10 link to Wikia seven times on Yahoo, twice on Google and once on MSN.
A really odd result that Jure sent me by email is that MSN does not link to Encarta at all within the first 10 results for any of these 1000 queries. I’d wondered if they showed Wikipedia so infrequently compared with Google or Yahoo because they were biasing their results towards their own Encarta… but, no. They prefer Wikipedia to Encarta, but generally choose to show irrelevant junk instead of either. For example, search for Inaugural Winter Games. Google and Yahoo give hits for both Wikipedia and Encarta. MSN links to neither.
The full report of Jure’s study is at wikistatus.pdf.
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I don’t know what to think of this right now… Google bought JotSpot.
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As an update to my earlier post about videos introducing wiki, I found some more wiki-related videos/screencasts online. John Hubbard from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has a four-part online video course which will introduce you to the benefits and disadvantages of wiki. I watced the fourth part which is about “other wikis”. It covers Wikipedia’s sister projects, Citizendium, Memory-Alpha, and various library wikis. John briefly discusses options for getting your own wiki at the end of the video. He concludes by saying he would “eventually like it to be true that the Muppet wiki … is not more developed than the library wikis out there”. :)
Andrew (aka Tawker) has published the first of a series of flash-based tutorials which covers very basic MediaWiki editing techniques.
If you know of other useful wiki-related videos, screencasts, etc, please add them to my wiki.
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