Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, the folks behind Wikipedia, announced today that they had secured a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This grant, worth $3,000,000,was donated by Sloan as part of its Digital Information Technology program.

“We are delighted to support Wikimedia in developing and sustaining its educational mission while continuously improving quality, diversity and access to knowledge for people everywhere,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Wikipedia embodies the ideal values of the world wide web and we are proud to be part of this bold endeavor to use the wisdom and the altruism of the crowd to create the biggest, most up-to-date and most open global encyclopedia in human history.”

This is the second major grant that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation given Wikipedia; the first was also $3 million and it was given back in 2008. it continues to demonstrate the value that the Wikimedia Foundation brings to the goal of sharing information freely. The new funds will be used  for the goal of improving Wikipedia’s quality and accuracy as well as increasing the number and demographic diversity of its editors.

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The National Archives has hired a graduate student to be the first “Wikipedian in Residence” at the National Archives.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks, a graduate student in history and archives management at Simmons College in Boston, will be interning at the National Archives this summer. He will be working at the facility in College Park, MD, where he will work to foster collaboration between the Wikipedia community and the National Archives.

McDevitt-Parks is one of several “Wikipedian in Residence” at various  institutions. The first WiR created the post for himself at the British Museum.  There are also WiR at Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis and the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC.

via AP

Today’s comic on xkcd is a pithy statement on modern knowledge. It’s funny, yes, but it’s still true. There really is a growing shift from books to centralized sources like Wikipedia. It’s easier to access, so why look further?

But there’s also a downside. To put it simply, Wikipedia isn’t a trustworthy source. The collective wisdom of the crowd might be a good thing, but the collective bias is not. Just in the past couple weeks we’ve seen an example of this when supporters of Sarah Palin were editing the entry on Paul Revere to match her somewhat inaccurate statements while other users undid the changes.