Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-18/In the news

Wikipedia on the road, and more

Audi A8 will have Google Earth and Wikipedia

Audi's new A8 D4 luxury car will have built-in access to Wikipedia, CNET reported this week. The car will be able to download and display live content from Wikipedia as the driver encounters points of interest.

The A8's Multi Media Interface can also display maps directly from 3D mapping service Google Earth. The car connects to the internet by either tethering the drivers' mobile phone connection, or inserting a SIM card into the internal GPRS/EDGE modem.

A professional editor writes a Good Article

On his personal blog, Brendan Wolfe (English Wikipedia user Margo&Gladys), who has previously contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle and now edits Encyclopedia Virginia, an online encyclopedia with entries about the American state of Virginia, explains how he improved the article on Bix Beiderbecke to Good Article status.

Can Wikipedia fuel growth of vernacular content?

India's The Hindu reports on the Tamil Wikipedia, and how editors hope that increasing the amount of freely available content will increase the growth of vernacular content online. In the article, Balasundararaman, an editor on the Tamil Wikipedia, says that the greatest barriers to the growth of the Tamil Wikipedia are a lack of online references, which he hopes developments in search engines will cause to improve.

Briefly

• The Idaho Mountain Express reports that Wikipedia has given rise to a new generation of historians.
• The New York Times has launched a topic page, a broad overview of the Wikipedia project which will be curated and kept up to date by Noam Cohen.
• Chris Dixon in The Business Insider asks "Should The Government Be More Like Google And Wikipedia?"

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• Thank you for linking to my blog post about my experience editing a Wikipedia article. However, I think it's worth mentioning that I am not a professional newspaper editor but, as the post makes clear, a professional encyclopedia editor. And while I have written two freelance book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle, that hardly qualifies me to be "a former newspaper writer for the San Francisco Chronicle." It would make more sense to identify me as the current editor of the online project Encyclopedia Virginia. Finally, I am quoted here as describing the experience of Wikipedia editing as being "almost more like an online game." Again, as my blog post makes clear, this is not me speaking, but a Wikipedia employee, as quoted by Nicholson Baker in his article "The Charms of Wikipedia" in the New York Review of Books. I do appreciate the link, but the irony of these mistakes doesn't serve Wikipedia's mission—a mission I fully endorse, by the way—very well. Thanks. Margo&Gladys (talk) 15:34, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I had already spotted the errors (I had it correct in an earlier version). It's pre-publication, (edition is for tuesday), so it's not that bad, and I'll make sure it's sorted out before tuesday. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:13, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Great. Thanks. Margo&Gladys (talk) 16:24, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • At the risk of sounding positively persnickety, the change still has me identified as "a former newspaper writer for the San Francisco Chronicle." This implies either that a) I was employed by the Chronicle, which is not true, or b) I had some kind of ongoing relationship that has since changed, hence the "former," which also is untrue. Rather, I am the current editor of Encyclopedia Virginia, an online project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia. Thanks. Margo&Gladys (talk) 21:05, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm so sorry. I went off the "about this blog" page, and assumed you edited the San Fran paper. I'll get to work right away fixing them. I was writing this article after 2000 local time last night. Again, this is a mistake, and I will make sure this does not occur again. Regards -- Sk8er5000 (talk) 23:05, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]