Music Ally

Brickbats are being fired at digital thinker Chris Anderson, after it was claimed that a number of passages in his new Free: The Future of a Radical Price book were lifted verbatim from Wikipedia.

The Virginia Quarterly Review uncovered this, and highlights several examples in this article. None were credited as the work of Wikipedia contributors in the book. Anderson says it’s a cock-up, rather than plagiarism.

“All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources,” he says in his response, while promising to publish the correct attributions online.

The irony of Anderson cutting and pasting material from a free website into a book being sold for $26.99 won”t be lost on his online detractors, though.

Six of the UK’s largest ISPs have been blocking access to a Wikipedia entry on The Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer. Why? Because the cover – which features a naked prepubescent girl – is on a child-pornography blacklist compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation.

But the story doesn’t end there – because of the way ISPs are blocking access to the site, millions of British internet users have been blocked from editing ANY Wikipedia pages. It’s to do with proxy servers, or something.

But we still blame The Scorpions.

We were just writing the other week about how Wikipedia is an underutilised music resource, and now a mash-up service has sprung up blending it with Last .fm. It’s called Wiki FM, and it involves splitting your browser window in two: on the left is a Last .fm widget letting you search by artist or play your personal (more…)