wikipedia - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Wikia founder Jimmy Wales, best known for co-founding Wikipedia, didn't impress when he first launched his search venture, Wikia Search.

Having kept its technology under wraps for more than a year, 'natural language search engine' Powerset has finally opened up to the public.

Wikipedia probably receives more traffic from Google than any other website. With over 2 million in depth articles the English version is most people's idea of a perfectly optimised site so what can we learn from it?

Wikipedia has passed another milestone after the two millionth article was added to the site on September 9.

The article - on the subject of 'El Hormiguero', a Spanish TV show - was the two millionth English language entry in the online enclyclopedia. Wikipedia has 8m articles altogether in 250 different languages.

The Australian government has become the latest organisation to face embarrassment over editing of Wikipedia entries.

Thousands of changes by employees at the Defence Department and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have been discovered by tracking site WikiScanner, including some rather obscure contributions. One simply stated: “Poo bum dicky wee wee”.

A number of well known companies and political partites have been accused of altering their entries on Wikipedia, in order to cover up previous misdeeds, or to make their rivals' entries less appealing.

A new tool developed by the California Institute of Technology can find out about the editors of Wikipedia entries by comparing the net addresses of editors on Wikipedia to a known database of IP addresses.

Wikipedia's audience continues to grow rapidly, with the collaborative encyclopedia having added around 20m monthly visitors over the past 12 months.

Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show that Wikipedia had 46.8m unique visitors in May 2007, a 72% increase on June 2006. In addition, the site topped the news and information category every month this year.

A study from the Pew Center for the American Life Project has revealed that, despite questions over the accuracy of some of its entries, the online encyclopedia remains a popular source of information.

36% of US internet users consult Wikipedia regularly, which equates to 8% of the total US population. The survey also found that the site is most popular among the well educated, and college students.

One of Wikipedia's founder members, Larry Sanger has launched a rival online encyclopedia, with the hope of improving on the original by avoiding the vandalism and inconsistency which affects some of its entries.

Sanger believes that allowing anyone to edit entries anonymously has caused problems for the original site, and plans to solve this by asking contributors to provide their real names.