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Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years of Crowd-Sourced Smarts
By Theunis Bates - AOL NewsLet's take a journey to a distant time where knowledge was hard to come by: the year 2000. Back then, if you wanted to find out the gross domestic product of Belarus or the wingspan of a B-10 bomber, your best bet was to head to a library and dig out a specialist book. Should you need quick access to a more arcane piece of trivia -- a treatise on the art of chicken hypnosis, for example -- well, you'd probably just have to stay ignorant. Today you can grab all of that information by simply tapping in a few keywords at Wikipedia.org. The user-generated encyclopedia, which celebrates its 10th ...
Indie Rocker Sets Morgan Freeman's Wikipedia Page to Music
By David Moye - AOL News(Aug. 25) -- Earlier this summer, indie rock musician Alex Schaaf had lots of musical ideas but was having trouble coming up with lyrics that were fitting for his funk-influenced tunes. So he turned to an unlikely source for inspiration: Morgan Freeman. Well, Morgan Freeman's Wikipedia page to be exact (and a detour with Google). Collating the information to be gleaned from this impeccable source, Schaaf wrote six songs and turned them into a new album, appropriately titled "The Morgan Freeman EP," which was recorded under the name of Yellow Ostrich. Courtesy of Alex Schaaf When indie ...
Wikipedia Tells FBI to Check Its Source
By Joe Peacock - AOL News(Aug. 3) -- So, you get a letter from the FBI asking you to comply with a demand, or face "further legal action." Most people would be reaching for the Depends adult diapers right then, if they hadn't soiled themselves already. But not Wikipedia. When the FBI sent the user-generated encyclopedia a letter demanding that the site take down an image of the agency's seal, the Wikipedia folks stood their ground. Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images The FBI has a unique ability to strike fear into most people, and even the biggest corporations. But Wikipedia is sticking to its guns. According to the ...
Pentagon Goes Wiki With Crowdsourced Tech Project
By Sharon Weinberger - AOL News(July 30) -- Can a thousand people working together design a product better than one person, or a small group of people, could? That's the provocative question behind crowdsourced design, an increasingly popular practice in the commercial sector -- and one that seems to have caught the Pentagon's attention, too. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development arm of the Pentagon, announced this week that it is planning an "industry day" to meet with various companies interested in developing a crowdsourcing project. Called vehicleforge.mil, the project will ...
U.S. World Cup Fans Take Revenge on Koman Coulibaly's Wikipedia Page
By Carl Franzen - Politics DailyAfter blowing a call and robbing Team USA of a 3-2 victory over Slovenia today, Malian Referee Koman Coulibaly -- aka "Sleepy Eyes" -- has already cemented a firm place for himself as one of the great villains in American sports history. In response, fans immediately defaced Coulibaly's Wikipedia page, AOL Fanhouse reports. The vandalism that was posted was actually somewhat tame by previous Wikiepdia standards, limiting itself to the slew of criticism that followed from American commentators. There were, however, several creative flourishes, such as: "Coulibaly is rumored to hate the ...
Odds Are Good You'll Think This Story Is Odd
By David Moye - AOL News(May 31) -- The odds are good that you'll like this story. In fact, there is a 1 in 3 chance you'll link this story to Facebook. For the record, those are the same odds that you will stiff a masseuse on a tip or that the next person you meet will believe in UFOs or ghosts. Oh, and 1 in 3 people are convinced it's possible to get the H1N1 virus -- aka the "swine flu" -- by actually coming in contact with pigs. Laura Shapiro Amram Shapiro is the man behind www.bookofodds.com, a website that allows people to compare (among many other things) the probability that Barack Obama will kill someone ...
Pakistan's Web Ban Is Part of Broader Crackdown
By Adnan R. Khan - AOL NewsISLAMABAD, Pakistan (May 22) -- This nation's ban on Facebook and YouTube this week has reopened a fierce debate on freedom of information in a country that seemed on its way to being a developing-world leader in promoting citizen access to the Web. The ban, which also covers Wikipedia and Flickr, comes after a Facebook group declared May 20 to be "Draw Muhammad Day." But critics say that was a convenient excuse for broader moves to curtail access to what has been a largely uncensored Web in Pakistan. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that 18.5 million of the nation's 175 ...
Pakistan Blocks YouTube Over 'Sacrilegious' Content
By Lauren Frayer - AOL News(May 20) -- Pakistan has blocked access to some of the Internet's most popular websites -- including YouTube and Wikipedia -- over what it calls "sacrilegious" content. The move comes a day after the government blocked Facebook because a page on the social networking site encouraged users to post drawings of Islam's Prophet Muhammad -- which Muslims consider blasphemous. Islamic law prohibits any images of the prophet, and Muslims across the world staged angry protests when satirical cartoons of Muhammad appeared in European newspapers in 2005. Scores died in riots in dozens of ...
Enough With Lament: Why This Decade Should Be Celebrated
By Andrew Clark - Politics DailyNow that the eve of a new decade is upon us, the pundits are looking back at the 2000s, and they're judging it a train wreck. Time Magazine heralded the goodbye to the Decade From Hell, calling it the "most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era," going so far as to create a slide show titled "The 10 Worst Things About the Worst Decade Ever." In a clever wordplay, the Washington Post lamented that the decade should not be called the Aughts, but the "Oughts," in memoriam of all the achievements that "ought" to have happened in the 2000s, ...
Obama's Wikipedia Page Lacks References to Ayers, Birth Certificate
By Michael Kraskin - Politics DailyFox News delivers a much more researched report of a story originally broken by by World Net Daily regarding some recent developments to Barack Obama's Wikipedia page: Critics noted over the weekend that President Obama's page on the free online encyclopedia had been edited to remove any mention of his links to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, and to allow only a brief citation of his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - though pages for Ayers and Wright are heavily peppered with references to the president, including subsections on both pages that detail their past ...
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