Reveal Yourself: Versionista Exposes Edits for Any Site - ReadWr. You can never be too upfront with your audience. With RSS feeds, Google Alerts, and scraping tools, most of your faithful readers know about changes to your site as they happen. But determining exactly what has changed can be a challenge, even for your most dedicated fans. Now change-tracking service Versionista allows you to be as upfront as possible about the edits you're making to your site, providing wiki-like comparisons of your current content and its previous iterations. The idea of telling readers that your site has been updated is far from new. Back in the mid 90s, practically every Web site carried a date in the footer that proudly proclaimed, "This page was last updated on.... " But that nod to transparency carried with it two inherent problems: first, it was rarely an accurate indication of when the site had last changed, and second, readers had no idea how the site content had been revised.
Why reveal this information? Adding the change log feature to your site is simple. Wikipedia Co-Founder Calls for Major New Moderation Policy - Rea. Hot on the heels of Encyclopedia Britannica's announcement that it is moving to a more open editing system, Wikipedia too seems ready for an about face. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Wikipedia is considering moving away from its free and open editing system to a method that delays changes from appearing on the site until an authorized user has verified them. On Thursday Jimmy Wales proposed turning on the system of "flagged revisions" in an attempt to reduce the amount of vandalism on Wikipedia, stating that recent death announcements of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd on Wikipedia could have been "100% prevented" by this system. What are Flagged Revisions? According to the New York Times, flagged revisions prevent edits of 'new and anonymous' users taking effect until they have been authorized by a 'registered and reliable' user.
While it makes sense that users must be registered to authorize a revision, defining 'reliable' may be a little more difficult. Google’s Knol: The Monetizable Wikipedia. Today Google has launched Knol, its Wikipedia alternative that holds authors accountable for the articles they write. Each article is created by a team of authors who receive attribution, and are allowed to take part in a rev-share for AdSense ads on their page. Other users can submit changes, but they have to be approved by the article’s original authors before they go live on the site (it’s basically a moderated Wikipedia). Google says that it will allow multiple people to create Knols on the same subject.
Knol allows users to rate and review Knols, and will likely include ranking as part of search results so we don’t have to sift through countless articles on the same topics. You can see an example article (a Knol that tells you how to write Knols) here. The big news here is that by assigning ownership and allowing authors to include AdSense ads on their articles, Google is effectively offering a monetary incentive to create good content. WikiAudio - WikiAudio. Shelfari Hopes to Bring Authors and Readers Together Over Wikis. Shelfari, the Amazon-backed community networked around books, has introduced editable author profiles in hopes that it can become a destination for not only biographical information but interactions between authors and their fans as well.
Each author’s page will feature an open wiki in addition to a message board and a list of written books. Shelfari hopes to set itself apart from other big name wikis (namely Wikipedia) by encouraging authors themselves to join the community and modify their own pages. Many sites tend to discourage this practice because of obvious bias concerns, but Shelfari believes the interaction to be seen between authors and their fans will compensate for this drawback.
With the introduction of these new profiles, Shelfari is poised to become a uniquely rich repository of literary information, and has the potential to become an IMDB for books. Besides the new profiles, Shelfari offers book reviews, recommendations, and community groups. Main Page - ArchivesWiki. Blog Archive » A wiki about archives, but not created by archivi. I’ve known about this project for a while, but was waiting for my friends at the AHA blog to announce it themselves before I wrote about it, but Dan Cohen has broken the ice, so I guess it’s fair game. The American Historical Association has created a wiki intended to provide information about archival repositories in the US and around the world. The site has been pre-populated with basic information for 100 organizations from their Directory of Historical Organizations. AHA hopes that historians will supplement basic information about archives with more user-based tips, such as suggestions for how to approach the collection, where to stay inexpensively, etc.
When I just checked, a few European archives had added information about themselves, bringing the total number of entries up to 105. The site has potential, but I have a few reservations. The data seem to have been imported, but not necessarily cleaned up to fit the site’s formatting. Be Sociable, Share!