Throughout January various stories have appeared regarding the Wikipedia phenomenon. Here is a recap of some of the more interesting ones.
Wikiosity
http://www.maxtility.com/scgi-bin/wikiosity.cgi
Alex Wissner-Gross, a physics doctoral student at Harvard, has developed "a program with which professors can scan a Wikipedia article and automatically generate a list of other entries from the encyclopedia that might be worth checking out" according to Wikipedia links used to build smart reading lists
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10849-wikipedia-links-used-to-build-smart-reading-lists.html
According to Alex, "Personalized reading preparation poses an important challenge for education and continuing education. Using a PageRank derivative and graph distance ordering, we show that personalized background reading lists can be generated automatically from the link structure of Wikipedia."
You can learn more at Alex's web site: http://www.alexwg.org/
Scholars from various disciplines have taken Wikipedia to task for some of its less than expert based articles. Recent entries in the online encyclopedia competition are Larry Sanger's Citizendium http://citizendium.org/ and now Scholarpedia http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
Citizendium bills itself as a "citizens' compendium of everything" and was started by a founder of Wikipedia, who hopes "to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding 'gentle expert oversight' and requiring contributors to use their real names."
Scholarpedia, on the other hand, looks very much like Wikipedia and states it is "the free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world."
According to the Chronicle Wired Campus article A Wikipedia for Scholars (Take 2) http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1806
Scholarpedia has a "more rigid hierarchy" with articles on the site written by scholars who are either invited by Scholarpedia directors or publicly selected.
The articles curently are restricted to neuroscience and computational intelligence, and the site's editor-in-chief Eugene M. Izhikevich, a senior fellow in theoretical neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, explains: "Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively."
Ben Vershbow's December post in The Institute for the Future of the Book blog, asserts that scholarpedia "already feels like a more plausible proposition" than citizendium because "it knows who its community is and that it establishes an unambiguous hierarchy of participation."
