Webware

Wikipedia will soon be adding a feature to its English-language site that assigns an experienced editor to sign off on any changes to articles on living people, according to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the user-written online encyclopedia.

Confirming a story reported Monday by The New York Times, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said the "flagged revisions" feature is already active on the German site, but needs some fleshing out before it goes live to the public on the English site.

The plan is to deploy the feature on a test wiki soon so the Wikipedia community can play around with before it goes public. The test wiki is expected to go live soon, but no specific time frame has been established, Walsh said.

The feature was debated earlier this year in the aftermath of a false entry that was posted by a user, saying Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon in January.

It's intended to provide some additional "protection" and to "prevent vandals" from messing with living-person articles, Walsh said. Until approved by the volunteer editor, any changes to such articles will sit invisible to the public on Wikipedia's servers.

This is a big job, Walsh added, and ultimately the community will decide whether to make it a permanent feature. It's bound to be controversial for those who passionately believe in the site's motto as "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit."

Staff writer Daniel Terdiman contributed to this story

We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.

Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.

(Credit: CNET)

Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.

One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.

Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.

Wikipedia users will be getting new tools for uploading, editing, and viewing video very soon. According to a Beet.TV interview with Erik Moller, who is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, we'll see all of these things shortly. However, what's more interesting is the Web encyclopedia's choice of video formats and how it fits into a fracas in the browser world.

Wikipedia has been working on video support for years, and is putting considerable effort into making it easier for users to upload video--specifically, to bridge a video format divide. Moller says that while Wikipedia is still planning to use Ogg Theora (an open-source video codec that can be played back natively inside the latest version of Firefox, and soon Chrome and Opera) there may be tools that will convert video shot in alternate formats so that no special software, or user effort is required.

In the meantime, Wikipedia's solution is for users to do that conversion on their end. Moller says that one solution is FireOgg, a Firefox-only browser plug-in which can transcode user videos to Ogg Theora on the user's hardware.

One issue that still lingers with Wikipedia's slow move to video is its choice of codec. Codecs are the software modules that encode and decode audio and video, shrinking it down into sizes that can be more easily transmitted through the Web. Wikipedia's a large and very popular site, meaning whatever video format it's using will have a big impact on the Web and its standards. Wikipedia's choice to go with Ogg Theora puts further stress on where browsers and site creators alike stand on HTML 5 video, which is emerging as a hotly-contended Web standard.

Unlike the H.264 codec, which has been promoted in both Google and Apple's products and services, Ogg Theora allows for downloading, remixing, and re-uploading without licensing fees. On the other hand, much of today's computing hardware (including newer mobile devices) comes equipped with on-board H.264 decoding, meaning less processing power is spent playing back the videos.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google have been less avid about promoting the Ogg Theora format in their browsers, and have put resources behind H.264 instead. Google's Chrome, in fact, supports it (along with H.264), however Google has gone on the record as saying its quality was not as good as it wanted. Google has also sunk considerable resources into re-encoding YouTube's entire library of videos into H.264, making the company less likely to switch camps.

Regardless, Web video has come a long way since earlier standards and competing formats. Pioneers like Macromedia (now Adobe) with its Flash format, and Apple and its streaming QuickTime standard have helped pave the way for a bevvy of start-ups that rely on the latest codecs to create new and salable parts of their businesses. The big question is whether open-sourced codecs like Ogg Theora will have that same kind of sticking power. Being the go-to format on one of the Web's most popular sites certainly won't hurt.

As news organizations reported Michael Jackson's hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer's death to appear on the online encyclopedia.

Michael Jackson, age 13, poses in his home in Encino, Calif., in 1972. He earned his first No. 1 solo record that year with "Ben."

(Credit: CBS)

The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: "We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back."

Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson's alleged demise, saying in separate comments that "This is not yet verified," "He's not dead," "Premature edits," and "ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP."

But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson's demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word "was" instead of "is," while another edit called "Invincible" his "last studio album."

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"

Plenty of blogs echoed TMZ's report, but news organizations tended to be more cautious. Fox News said Jackson's "condition wasn't immediately clear," while Reuters cited TMZ.

The Los Angeles Times initially reported that Jackson was in a coma, and then updated its story at 3:15 p.m. PDT to say: "Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times." (The Times' Web server was overloaded and could only be reached intermittently.)

Around the same time, the Wikipedia editors had finally intervened in the edit-and-delete-the-edits scrum. One locked two articles about Jackson and his health for about six hours, which prevented them from being modified until the situation became more clear.

Wikipedia: The future home of video.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

The long-rumored addition of video to online encyclopedia Wikipedia is finally near. According to a report in the Technology Review, Wikimedia, the company behind Wikipedia, is just a few months away from adding video to the site.

The Technology Review is reporting that Wikipedia will soon feature an "Add Media" option, which will allow users to search for copyright-free video. They will be able to drag the clip into the respective Wikipedia article.

Users will also be able to edit clips, as well as rearrange segments.

I'm excited. Wikipedia is one of my favorite destinations on the Web. From updates on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" (I have no shame) to information on brain surgery, the site provides us with a lot of great information.

That said, one of the issues facing Wikipedia is that the information can't always be corroborated. And some feel that it can't be trusted, due to editor bias or shallow research.

I think that video can help change that.

When Opera released its widget software development kit last year, there was little doubt that some cool applications would make their way to the company's browser. More than a year later, they indeed have.

I've been sifting through hundreds of Opera widgets that all work with the Opera browser for your Mac, Linux box, or PC. I've found 10 that stand out from the others. Opera users should definitely try these out.

10 Opera widgets

Brainkrieg Brainkrieg is a fun game that does its best to "exercise your brain." The tool gives you a variety of games to play that test your memory and help you think. The point of the game is to decrease your brain age. It's somewhat similar to Brain Age on the Nintendo DS, but the latter is a bit more sophisticated.

Brainkrieg helps you improve your memory.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Dotoo Dotoo is a to-do list widget in your Opera browser. You can create a host of to-do lists and access them all from within the widget. Adding tasks is as simple as pressing the "+" button under your list and inputting your task. It's not a sophisticated widget, so you won't be able to track your progress. But if you want to quickly add a few tasks, you should be happy with what you find.

Dotoo lets you create a quick to-do list.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Facebook Notifier Facebook Notifier gives you a listing of all your friends' recent status updates. You can't update your profile in the application, but you can easily access your profile with the links in the widget. It might not be the most useful app, but if you want to see what your friends are up to while you're browsing outside Facebook, it's a fine choice.

Facebook Notifier keeps you up-to-date.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it is getting out of the encyclopedia business, ending its long-standing Encarta product.

As noted by Ars Technica, the software maker says it will discontinue all its online Encarta products by October, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will run through the end of the year. It will also stop selling Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium, paid software products that included the online encyclopedia.

In a posting on its Web site, Microsoft said that the move reflected the change in the way people use reference material. It didn't mention Wikipedia by name, but I think we all know the biggest change to encyclopedias to come around in recent memory.

"Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years," Microsoft said. "However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft's goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today's consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business."

The move is one of a relative handful of products that Microsoft has discontinued in the wake of expense cuts implemented in January, cuts that included the company's first across-the-board layoffs.

Last week, Microsoft said it was scrapping a Web analytics product that was in beta. In November, the company announced plans to stop selling its Windows Live OneCare antivirus product.

Microsoft has been publishing Encarta, in various forms, for more than a decade. It has also scooped up various print encyclopedias along the way, according to Wikipedia (I love irony). While the original Encarta was based on Funk and Wagnalls, Microsoft later bought Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia and incorporated those two products into Encarta, again according to Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" by John Broughton has been made available for free on Wikipedia, O'Reilly Books, its publisher, announced Tuesday. The book is being delivered in Wiki format, which means users can edit the text as they see fit. Peter Meyers, the "Missing Manuals" managing editor, said O'Reilly may use those edits in a second edition, if it's made available. If you want to read the book (or improve it), it's available now on Wikipedia's help page.

AllFacebook, a blog that covers the world of Facebook, launched a tool Tuesday that will allow users to search and sort Facebook pages by category or statistics, like fans or daily growth rate. According to data compiled by the tool, Facebook's top page, ranked by the number of fans, is Barack Obama's. Second is Coca-Cola's page and third is Homer Simpson's Facebook page. The tool will be updated daily.

Comment management service, Disqus, now allows its users to pull Friendfeed comments about their blog posts and post them on their blog. Disqus' new tool will take comments from the respective blog's RSS feed in FriendFeed and post them automatically in the corresponding blog post. The new feature is available now for all Disqus users.

Fring, a company that provides mobile VoIP IM services, announced Tuesday that it's bringing a Last.fm mobile app to its client. The app will feature Last.fm's music recommendation engine, as well as its social features. According to the company, Fring users will be able to access their Last.fm library, tag songs, and check on a friend's music tastes. The Last.fm app is free and available now to Fring users.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Encyclopedia Britannica President Jorge Cauz said that the encyclopedia's free, online version, Britannica.com, will soon be allowing user edits and additions to its pages. This system is not yet live, but according to the Herald should be within the next day or so.

Registered users will be able to make corrections, or add entirely new sections to encyclopedia pages--much like Wikipedia. The big difference, however, is that Britannica.com's editing and approval system will be managed by its own editors and contracted staff instead of power users. According to the Herald, Cauz is promising a 20-minute turnover on these edits, but that number could go up dramatically if the company cannot anticipate a large influx of edits at once.

Cauz also told the Herald that the big reason for the change is to improve Britannica's search engine optimization and dethrone Wikipedia from its current dominance on Google.com and other search engines. These edits will also trickle down into the print edition, benefiting those who purchase its 30-plus volume set.