Tamil Wikipedia, Internet Watch Foundation, and more
Indian newspaper profiles Tamil Wikipedia
The Hindu, a widely read English-language Indian newspaper, profiled Tamil Wikipedia in "The Tamil Wiki...six years on" on 21 May 2009. Although the Tamil language has almost 70 million native speakers, Tamil Wikipedia has grown slowly, with fewer than 20,000 articles. (Tamil is ranked 15th among all languages in number of native speakers, but is only the 68th largest Wikipedia.)
Wikizine reports that "New account creations on that wiki doubled on the day the article was published."
Wired investigates UK's Internet Watch Foundation
In "The hidden censors of the internet", 20 May 2009, Wired UK takes a close look at the Internet Watch Foundation, the non-governmental charitable body that monitors online child pornography, racist content, and criminally obscene content and distributes blacklists of such material to ISPs in the United Kingdom. The previously low-profile organization came under scrutiny last year after a botched effort to censor the controversial cover of the album Virgin Killer (see earlier Signpost coverage and the article Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia).
Briefly
- BBC Radio 4 is producing a four-part comedy series called Bigipedia, created by comedians Nick Doody and Matt Kirshen. Doody describes the premise as "a piss-take of Wikipedia, with all the same inaccuracies, written by nutters."
- 81% of search engine optimizers say they can displace a Wikipedia #1 Google search result, according to a poll by the blog Search Engine Roundtable.
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