PR professionals would like to edit Wikipedia entries on behalf of their brands, but current Wikipedia policies treat them like corporate shills who are not welcome.

Yesterday Wikipedia announced it would be joining the protest against the American SOPA proposal by going dark and effectively disabling all English language content on Wednesday the 18th.

The protest originates from Reddit. Early last week the surfacing site blogged that they would be blacking out from 8am to 8pm on the 18th in a blog post that outlined how dangerous they believe the SOPA proposals to be.

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I heard Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, on Radio 4 this week talking about Wikipedia’s problem in attracting a more diverse set of editors. Typically post-graduates, nine in ten of its 36,000 volunteer contributors are male and the average age is 26. This lack of variety means the content is not as ‘culturally rich’ as it could be, she said. Read More »

Wikipedia has decided its editors need to feel a little bit more valued. So it’s introducing ‘a simple experiment in appreciation’ called WikiLove. Read More »

Wikipedia just celebrated its tenth birthday and have released this video and infographic to mark the occasion. Has it been that long? So many searches.

I love Wikipedia and use it throughout the day.  ‘The State of Wikipedia’ video and infographic celebrates the online encyclopedia’s origins and future of the site launched by Jimmy Wales in 2001. Read More »

Really interesting infographic that highlights the growth of social media within B2B. What’s so surprising here is that the most popular sites fro generating social media traffic are some of the ones that B2B companies don’t always spend enough time on. Read More »

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, described The Times paywall as a “foolish experiment” that “would not last” and predicted that Rupert Murdoch would be forced to give up on the idea. Read More »

We all know that social media’s image has been tainted by issues such as personal data abuse, intrusive display advertising, and plagues of unsolicited demands from ‘friends’ to join mafia or pirate clans; but issues such as these have so irritated US consumers that they have rated Facebook as more annoying than many airlines, cable firms and even the IRS, according to research.

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The 2010 World Cup. Brings to mind the gathered hopes of the nation, the inevitable near-misses, the good performances and the bad, and a whole lot of shoulda, woulda, coulda.

….And Paul the psychic octopus.

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How handy is this? Online marketing firm Eloqua has produced a 42 page “Social Media Playbook”. It was originally created as a how-to guide for its own staff to follow on the social web and now they are handing it out for free.  You don’t even need to give them your email address. Read More »