Wikipedia

I'm very happy to report that an update of my paper from last year's AolR conference, "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News?", has now been published as the lead article in Scan Journal. I was able to find some more recent statistics, which unfortunately confirm the trends I'd already seen at the end of 2005: Wikinews is stagnating, both in terms of new contributors and as far as content creation is concerned. In my opinion, this is due to a misinterpretation of the Neutral Point of View doctrine, which here leads to a counterproductive aversion to any kind of discussion of news and current events. (And let me be absolutely clear: I'm not arguing against NPOV as such here - Wikipedia's current events section does very good work covering the news, for example, so it can work very well in a news context.) Anyway - read the article in Scan Journal! Here's the issue announcement by editors Chris Atton and Graham Meikle:

Dresden
The next session is on creative commons-related issues; Mark Latonero is the first speaker. He notes that Tim Berners-Lee suggests that the whole added value of the Internet is serendipitous re-use. The creative commons represents an emerging technological and legal mechanism for this re-use, and a significant challenge to the traditional copyright industries. It is a legitimising tool for cultural technologies on the Internet. Mark adminstered a questionnaire to the winners of the recent Wired creative commons remix contest.

As I've mentioned previously, today I took part in an online event to mark World Intellectual Property Day, held within the Second Life space. Very interesting event, with only a small number of technical issues. I did make a recording of it, but I think there was also an official recording which I imagine will be available in due course... Anyway, here's (roughly) what I said:

Yes, I'm still alive - just got back from a two-week holiday on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, and currently downloading the last fortnight's worth of emails (this has been going for the best part of an hour so far). Also deleted a bevy of spam trackbacks; no, I'm still not interested in playing Texas Hold'em poker while consolidating my debt with a dose of Viagra, thankyouverymuch.

And just by way of a note to self (making sure this doesn't get lost under a mountain of other mail) - Nature did an interesting comparison of scientific entries in the Wikipedia and the Britannica, which appears to have found little difference in quality... Good work.