Amidst the celebration of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, Jimmy Wales has narrated an animated history of the web-based encyclopedia, and where he sees it heading in the future. One place you can expect to find Wikipedia going (something slightly hinted at here) is the classroom. In the months ahead, look for Wikipedia to develop an “open educational resource platform” that will help students make better use of Wikipedia in the classroom, if not contribute to writing stronger articles/entries. The Wired Campus has more on this new initiative coming down the pike.

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Big Thinkers on Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary

The State of Wikipedia Animated is a post from: Open Culture

Yochai Benkler, professor, Harvard Law School: That’s the biggest gift that Wikipedia has given to us — a vision of practical utopia. What gift can we best give back? Perhaps it is just this, to recognize the transformative role that thousands of individuals have played for all of us in how we can imagine our lives together as productive, engaged, social beings.

Jonathan Lethem, novelist, Pomona professor: With all respect to the noble volunteer army, I call it death by pedantry. Question: hadn’t we more or less come to understand that no piece of extended description of reality is free of agendas or ideologies? This lie, which any Encyclopedia implicitly tells, is cubed by the infinite regress of Wikipedia tinkering-unto-mediocrity.

Other contributors include Clay Shirky, NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen, and Mariette DiChristina (editor-in-chief, Scientific American). Get the full list here.

Big Thinkers on Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary is a post from: Open Culture

Among the confluence of factors coming together in 2010 are: 1) the growing awareness that video is the dominant medium of the web and that video can help make Wikipedia articles even richer; 2) the development of open source players and codecs (alternatives to Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media, and H.264, 3); the introduction of public browser tools—Firefox’s Firefogg extension, for example—for uploading and playing nonproprietary video formats; 4) the willingness of nonprofits like the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Open Video Alliance and for-profits like Kaltura and Intelligent Television to dedicate themselves to open video; and the provision of strategic funding from the Mozilla Foundation and Ford Foundation, among others, to support developers, programmers, and activists.  As Wikipedia board member S. J. Klein explains in a recent Open Video Alliance video short, the day is fast coming where video will be as easy for users to write, edit, annotate, and remix as text is today. (You can find more details on the campaign here and here.)

What are the recommendations for video contributed to Wikipedia? They should be related to current articles, short and under 100 MB, free, and available to share and reuse (offered under a Creative Commons BY-SA or equivalent license). In coming weeks new videos are expected to proliferate and new strategies will be unfurled for working with educational repositories of legacy video.

This post was contributed by Peter Kaufman, the CEO and president of Intelligent Television, who shares our passion for thoughtful media.

Open Video Coming to Wikipedia is a post from: Open Culture

PS In case you didn’t hear, Wikipedia is starting to put editorial restrictions on certain entries. The laissez-faire days are coming to an end.

Google Knol Prediction Revisited is a post from: Open Culture

I’m not sure how this mobile page looks on various mobile devices. But I can report that it looks a-ok on the iPhone. iPhone users can also use the new Wikipedia Mobile app that’s now available in the iTunes store.

Get Wikipedia on Your Mobile Phone is a post from: Open Culture

When the content initiative was first announced, many assumed that this was Google’s way of trying to displace Wikipedia, whose links appear first in Google search results 25% of the time. But the company has since made it clear that they’re not trying to offer another encyclopedia. Rather, they’re simply offering a platform for experts to write about whatever they know. That could include entries on Rationalism, the stuff you’d expect to find in a traditional encyclopedia. But it also includes entries on how to organize your home in 15 minutes or less, or thoughts on whether people really go to heaven when they die. You can browse the range of entries here.

This approach makes Knol at once more expansive than Wikipedia and more difficult to get your arms around. By lacking a focus, Knol is a little slippery. As a reader, you’re not sure what you’ll get at Knol (academic content? recipes? how-to articles? medical information?). And, as a potential writer, you’re not sure what kind of larger body of information you’re contributing to — something that seems important for inspiring mass collaboration. This is not to say that Knol won’t yield a good amount of useful content. It probably will. But will it all hang together, and will it all contribute to another juggernaut Google product? Well, I’m less sure about that. If you disagree, feel free to make your case in the comments below.

Knol: Ok, It’s Not Wikipedia. But What Is It? is a post from: Open Culture

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What Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales, Thinks about Knol, the New Google Competitor is a post from: Open Culture

As we mentioned in our initial piece, Knol caters to the individual author/expert, not to the wisdom of crowds (à la Wikipedia). Each encyclopedia entry is generally written, edited, and revised by one individual. The author reigns supreme here. But that doesn’t mean that Wikipedia’s collaborative approach is being entirely abandoned.

Google’s model leaves ample room for collaborative writing. It keeps open the possibility that multiple authors will write an encyclopedia entry. And, they allow for “moderated collaboration” — meaning that “any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public.” Collaboration is built into Google’s model. It’s just not taken to an extreme conclusion. (Get more info on the positioning of Knol here.)

Knol is not the only content platform trying to strike a balance between the author and mass collaboration. In June, Encyclopedia Britannica launched a beta of a new online encyclopedia that takes “a collaborative-but-not-democratic approach” to producing knowledge. Users can make contributions to a growing storehouse of knowledge. But whether these contributions get accepted remains up to the experts and editors. (“At the new Britannica site, we will welcome and facilitate the increased participation of our contributors, scholars, and regular users, but we will continue to accept all responsibility of what we write under our name. We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable “wisdom of the crowds.”)

I have little doubt that the Google and Britannica models will generate some solid encyclopedia entries. That’s a safe bet. But whether these encyclopedias will ever become as comprehensive as Wikipedia, or as widely used, is another question. And the same holds true for whether the content will generally be qualitatively better than what Wikipedia has to offer. When Google first announced Knol last December, I voiced my doubts. Now that the rubber is finally hitting the road, we can see whether my skepticism is warranted (or not).

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Google’s Answer to Wikipedia Now Live is a post from: Open Culture

This experiment with collaborative authoring may — or may not — yield a better encyclopedia (although some experts have questioned whether the general Britannica model has any inherent advantages). It’s hard to know how things will turn out. But what’s more readily clear is the speed with which the 240 year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica got outflanked by Wikipedia, born just seven years ago. We have seen this scenario played out over and over again. But it never ceases to amaze. The traditional institutions, just when they seem as permanent as things can get, suddenly get upended. And, they don’t see it coming. Caught flatfooted, they try to adapt, usually by adopting the methods used by their competitor. But it’s mostly too late, and the real game is over.

Britannica may stick around. But will this generation of children — or the next — grow up thinking of Britannica as the default research resource? A question that I’ll leave to you to answer.

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Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adopting Collaborative Approach, Whispers Uncle is a post from: Open Culture