The Internets are back!

If you used a web browser yesterday you probably noticed that things were a little wonky. Wikipedia blacked out its entire English site in protest of two bills (known as SOPA and PIPA) under consideration in Congress. Reddit and BoingBoing followed suit, and Google blacked out its logo and posted a link to an infographic explaining the harm SOPA and PIPA could do. Facebook remained online with no apparent sign of protest, yet its users certainly took notice: reactions ranged from annoyance to vocal support.

The SOPA and PIPA acronyms stand for "Stop Online Piracy Act" and "PROTECT Intellectual Property Act" (with PROTECT a nifty little acronym for "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft"). These sound fairly innocuous, I suppose, but Wikipedia and other opponents of the bills fear that their passage would fundamentally damage the structure of the Internet. So we had what we had yesterday: an unprecedented blackout/protest coordination among major Internet sites.

The sites' strategy seems to have worked, at least in the short term. By the end of the day yesterday, support for the bill in Congress had weakened. And today, though all is back to normal, people are still talking about these bills: by my informal tally, approximately 150 articles about SOPA/PIPA have been published in the past 3 hours. If Wikipedia and friends wanted to make waves, they appear to have succeeded, but are well aware of the well-connected opponents they face.

More about this:

"PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet" (a video on Vimeo, by Fight for the Future)

"What are SOPA and PIPA? Education about the bills continues after online protests" (Washington Post blog)

"Put down the pitch forks on SOPA" by David Pogue (New York Times)

"SOPA will take us back to the dark ages" on Mashable

(This post was aided by research by Dominika Gergely '13.)

Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say

Sven Manguard, a Wikipedia volunteer, recently published an essay in which he noted that over 5% of the articles in English in the community-authored encyclopedia contained no source citations for the "facts" they assert. Manguard concludes with a plea for help in tackling the backlog - the "monster under the rug," as he calls it.

A staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns and operates Wikipedia) responded, acknowledging workflow and management problems in how articles are created and maintained in Wikipedia:

It seems that this pattern comes up over and over again; where things are seriously broken, it's because there's no system to channel resources appropriately. So you need to make appeals for heroic behavior. This is unsustainable.

Manguard and the author of the article below point to Germany, whose Wikipedia volunteers have a quarterly competition (Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb or "maintenance component competition") to combat their backlog.

If you want to help, you can go to the Wikipedia community portal page.

If you are looking for reliable sources to cite, visit the library and ask a librarian!

Full article: Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say: 1 in 20 Articles Bare of References

Wikipedia Now Lets You Order Printed Books

Wikipedia has launched a new feature: the ability to create custom books from Wikipedia content and either download as a pdf or order as a printed copy. Wikipedia content is licensed in such a way that images and copy are free to anyone to access, use and share in this way. This for a fee service is available now.

Pricing is dependent upon size of book (number of pages). Value of content is left to the user to evaluate.

Read more here: Wikipedia Books


from Mashable

How today’s college students use Wikipedia

Here's a recent study on the use of Wikipedia by students:

How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course–related research
by Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg
First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 - 1 March 2010

Abstract:
Findings are reported from student focus groups and a large–scale survey about how and why students (enrolled at six different U.S. colleges) use Wikipedia during the course–related research process. A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were more likely to use Wikipedia for course–related research than respondents in other majors. The findings suggest Wikipedia is used in combination with other information resources. Wikipedia meets the needs of college students because it offers a mixture of coverage, currency, convenience, and comprehensibility in a world where credibility is less of a given or an expectation from today’s students.

Read the article