Andy Carvin has blogged about Jimmy Wales’ (the founder of the Wikipdeia) latest project:
He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It’ll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
This will be an interesting idea to watch develop.
In his notes from a Jimmy Wales presentation, Andy reports that the Wikipedia organisation are really concerned about quality.
“We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn’t even heard of – but I’m just teasing there.”
“We’re not there yet. We’re not as good as Britannica – yet…. So in the coming years we’re going to see a turn towards quality.”
In other surfing, I found a link to another blog called The Best Media in Life. This blog aims to show some of the gazillions of material available under Creative Commons license or in the public domain. It’s a great little site wityh heaps of links to CC texts, music and other audio.
Speaking of the Creative Commons, I have just discovered a new resource on the site They have developed new tabbed Creative Commons Search engine. Find Flickr images, use Google or Yahoo! Good stuff. This willmake it even easier to find “stuff” to use in presentations, movies and podcasts.
Related posts:
You just have to read Jaron Lanier’s thinking on all this meta meta site collectivism online
DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [5.30.06]
By Jaron Lanier
An Edge Original Essay
The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
I read that piece when it first came out and I think it’s been a useful discussion document.
I think that Lanier got just a tad elitist in his critique. He makes the assumption that most people view the Wikipedia as the end point of research; i think people view it as the beginning.
Sick of obtaining low numbers of useless traffic for your website? Well i wish to inform you of a fresh underground tactic that makes myself $900 every day on 100% AUTOPILOT. I possibly could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you simply check their website out? There is a great video that explains everything. So if your serious about making effortless cash this is the site for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche