Music Ally » wikipedia

Chris Anderson accused of plagiarising Wikipedia for Free book

Stuart Dredge — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:21 +0000

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.

Scorpions Virgin Killer album cover leads to Wikipedia ban

musically — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:42:20 +0000

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.

Wiki FM mashes up Wikipedia and Last .fm

musically — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:26:27 +0000

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 stations, while on the right is the Wikipedia page or whatever band is currently playing. It’s neat and simple, although the only problem is that many new artists might not have their own Wikipedia page yet, reducing its value as a discovery mechanism.