Danny Hillis' latest venture, Metaweb, is about to unveil its first product, the aptly named freebase, tomorrow. While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.
Something Awful has a flat out hilarious (if somewhat long in the introduction) article on the nerd bias of wikipedia. The point isn’t to say that one article or another on Wikipedia has factual inaccuracies, but rather to show how much more attention certain topics get than others.
A columnist for the Syracuse Post-Standard apparently recommended Wikipedia as a good independent source for information. However, a librarian wrote him to complain about Wikipedia, and now another columnist has decided to spend an entire column bashing Wikipedia as a source because (gasp!) "anyone can change the content."
Nowhere on the Internet does this free lunch logic hold more true than at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone can edit. Sure, it's monetarily free, but it costs you heaps in credibility and accuracy, as well as the time spent combing over information for instances of "jason is a faggit" and other assorted such delights hidden mid-paragraph here and there.
For those of you who are (as uncharitableWikipedians sometimes say) “clueless newbies,” Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. But it is like no encyclopedia Diderot could have imagined. Instead of relying on experts to write articles according to their expertise, Wikipedia lets anyone write about anything.
Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865.