The Longest Now

The week in wiki, retold via the Wiki Muse… I mean, Wikinews.

While Wikipedia was still recovering from an attempted April 1 buyout by Britannica:

• the German Wikipedia DVD was released, announced, and hit #1(now back to #2) on Amazon’s software bestseller list,
• Yahoo! declared its plans to mirror WP content on a massive Korean server farm and started linking French searches to WP articles, and
• Encarta just today touted the rollout of a pseudo-wiki encyclopedia editing system, reminiscent of the successful Nupedia process. Ahh yes, and they would love to pay you for your editing time. They also have a contractual obligation never to mention the word “Wiki-” in public 🙂

Unfortunately, while Encarta is opening itself to wiki-style editing from the masses, and wants to make its mark as a reliable source of content, it doesn’t even list the names of its editors, not to mention email addresses or ways to get in touch with them. Having a blog hidden away on an MSN Space where a few users can contact one or two of the online editors just isn’t the same. Now if they were to really grasp what openness means, I could get excited about it…