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The Wiki That Was

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WIKI MAN Wales
Busy weekend for the folks behind Wikipedia, the online repository of, well, everything ever. Today, Reuters is reporting that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (hey, check out his Wikipedia entry!) will be offering free "software, computing, storage and network access" for people to create their own community collaboration sites like Wikipedia through his business, Wikia, Incorporated. (Hey, they've got an entry, too!) "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue," Wales told Reuters's Eric Auchard. (Sadly, no entry for him—yet.)

Wales will certainly have no trouble getting the word out about this new enterprise, considering the positive press Wikipedia continues to generate. Just this weekend, CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment called "The Good And The Bad Of Wikipedia," which, despite its subtitle ("The Online Encyclopedia Has Revolutionized Information Sharing, But There Are Downsides"), was largely favorable.

In a demonstration of Wikipedia's potential for mistakes, CBS correspondent Serena Altschul checked out her own entry and determined that, while her name was spelled right, her birthday was wrong.

As Wales told her, "It's being edited constantly ... You need to have some consideration if you ... read something that seems a little crazy you should stop and think about it." Amazingly, Altschul's entry was updated—nearly in real time during the show's broadcast Sunday morning—to include the fact that:

On December 10, 2006, on the weekly show CBS News Sunday Morning, she reported a story on Wikipedia and compared it to other encyclopedic sources. To point to the issue of inaccuracies on this website, she looked up the entry about herself. "My birthdate is wrong," she commented. Multiple sources on the internet, including the Internet Movie Database list varied dates for her birthday.

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