The project displays a global map, and updates in real-time when a change is made on Wikipedia, displaying it as a small circle that flashes on the editor’s location, as well as the name of the article that was revised and the editor’s IP address. Below the map is a scrolling text box containing more information, including a link to the article, the language of the article, and the city, state, and country where the edit was made.

So far, edits made on the English, Japanese, Russian, German, Spanish, Indonesian, and French Wikipedias are available, with users being able to select one or more to view. When watching the map under the English version of the website, it averaged about 500 edits per 33 seconds. While the edits shown are substantial, the project only tracks those made by unregistered users, which represent about 15-percent of the edits made to the online encyclopedia. The information is pulled via live feeds broadcast with Wikimon.

The programmers behind the project advise that, according to a survey done in 2007, edits made by unregistered users on Wikipedia are often of less value than ones made by registered users, advising that you can correct an issue if you happen to spot one while using their real-time visualization. The project was built using DataMaps, d3, and other services and libraries, and is open source for anyone to grab on github.

Watching the map provides an interesting passive sort of observation, giving us a peek into what articles are of interest to users and where those users are located. When observed long enough, shifts can be noticed, such as edits increasing and decreasing with the fluctuations of waking and working hours, topic trends, and more.

SOURCE: Hatnote

With this new feature, users will be able to view a watchlist of their favorite articles via the Wikipedia app, something Wikimedia Foundation has stated it hopes will encourage more people to get involved. Users will need a Wikipedia account, which is free to create. From there, users can then log in to the account via the mobile app.

Users can star their preferred pages, and once starred, those pages will be shown in a list with the option for a “modified” view that shows changes and modifications that have been made. The foundation’s web team plans to roll out more features for this in the future, with this being just the beginning of what it has planned.

The next step, says Wikimedia, is implementing features that allow anyone to add images and make “small edits” to articles, as well as other unspecified features. Those who want to provide feedback on the change, or who want to stay updated on the other changes the foundation will be rolling out are encouraged to join the organization’s mailing list.

[via Wikimedia]

Wikipedia’s Facebook page received 32,647,942 views throughout the year, three million more than its closest competitor – the page for “Wiki” only had 29,613,759 views to boast about. Some of the years biggest franchises got some major attention on Wikipedia, with The Hunger Games, The Dark Knight Rises, and yes, 50 Shades of Grey all ranking in the top ten. Here’s the full top ten list, racy adult novels and all:

1. Facebook – 32,647,942 views
2. Wiki – 29,613,759 views
3. Deaths in 2012 – 25,418,587 views
4. One Direction – 22,351,637 views
5. The Avengers (2012 film) – 22,268,644 views
6. Fifty Shades of Grey – 21,779,423 views
7. 2012 phenomenon – 20,619,920 views
8. The Dark Knight Rises – 18,882,885 views
9. Google – 18,508,719 views
10. The Hunger Games – 18,431,626 views

Gunnarsson and Wikimedia spokesperson Jay Walsh both told All Things D that Facebook landing at the top of the list could be a case of users searching for Facebook with browser-integrated search engines and ending up on the Wikipedia page instead (which would also explain why “Wiki” took home second place). Either that, or there’s simply a lot of interest in how the world’s biggest websites made it to the top.

Gunnarsson’s list isn’t just a top ten list though, as it actually ranks the 100 most-viewed Wikipedia pages for 2012. Notable entries include YouTube at number 12, Sex at number 18, and the Illuminati at number 33. Both World Wars ranked on the list, as did the Android operating system and, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Human penis size.”

It gets even better though, as Gunnarsson has also produced top 100 lists for a ton of other languages. If you have some free time, be sure to head over to his site and take a look at everything. Just be warned: it’s very easy to waste a lot of time browsing through those lists, so it may not be the best idea to head there if you have any pressing appointments that need your attention.

Apparently, someone unintentionally cut through fiber cables that connected Wikipedia’s servers located in Florida to the Internet. Wikipedia denies any foul play in the outage, and a spokesman noted that two overland cables had been severed between Tampa and Virginia. The slashed cables took Wikipedia off-line for over an hour and once the lines were fixed it took another hour to get servers back up and running.

Wikipedia has been having an interesting year. The company took itself off-line as part of a protest against SOPA laws intended to help prevent piracy. Wikipedia’s parent company Wikimedia has suffered from controversy surrounding a key executive in its UK division recently after Ashley Van Haeften resigned as the chairman of Wikimedia UK.

Van Haeften stepped down in the middle of a controversy over personally posting links to pornography in the biography of a living person. As a response, he was banned indefinitely from contributing to the English version of Wikipedia by ArbCom, which is elected committee of senior Wikipedia editors. ArbCom also found that he had violated editing rules by using multiple accounts to change pages.

[via Telegraph]

The list published by the analysis group also showed Google+ to be tied for first place in this list for customer satisfaction with Wikipedia, both groups grabbing an impressive 78% rating. Of course one must consider that Facebook has million more users than Google+ while Wikipedia has been at the top of this list since the company started recording such tests. Twitter was also low at 64%, with YouTube grabbing 73% and Pinterest ringing in at 69%.

The group ForeSee, partnering with ACSI for this survey, note that Facebook users mentioned the Timeline layout as one of their main reasons for being dissatisfied in this modern iteration of the social network. Furthermore Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee, had the following to say:

“Facebook and Google+ are competing on two critical fronts: customer experience and market penetration. Google+ handily wins the former, and Facebook handily wins the latter, for now. It’s worth asking how much customer satisfaction matters for Facebook, given its unrivaled 800 million user base … if Facebook doesn’t feel the pressure to improve customer satisfaction now, that may soon change.” – Freed

Of the three years this study has been run, this is Facebook’s lowest approval rating with 64% being their first year in 2010 and 66% showing up in 2011. This is accompanied by Facebook’s stock prices this week which have once again fallen as low as 27.04 a share – the lowest this stock has gotten is a bit below 25 a share.

Check out the timeline below to see how Facebook has done over the past few weeks, and keep in mind that the stock price is once again rising here in the middle of the week, currently reading out at 29.04 at the time of this posting – keep running!

“The internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online” Wales insisted. “When operating his site, Richard O’Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.”

O’Dwyer’s site, TVShack.net, was in some ways a more focused Google or Bing, offering users a way to hunt down streaming versions of their favorite shows. Although he did not host the files, his linking to them caught the attention of content rights holders.

“Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited. It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood” Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia

Wales has become an increasingly outspoken critic of what he sees as over-reaching content rights pandering, blasting app stores as a “dangerous chokepoint” and using Wikipedia to support anti-SOPA/PIPA protests earlier this year. The online crowd-sourced enciclopedia went offline for a day to highlight how important access to information is.

“Richard O’Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public” Wales concludes. “Earlier this year, in the fight against the anti-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.”

[via Phys.org]

Wales also touched on the furore of global privacy regulations in recent months, including the talk of employers demanding Facebook account access so as to perform background checks into employees and applicants. While many have called for new laws to protect privacy, Wales isn’t so sure that’s the best reaction, instead suggesting that we will “rethink” the “perception of its danger.” “Maybe we shouldn’t consider it a threat to privacy, but a change to privacy” he suggests “One of the classic things people have say to college students about Facebook is “be careful, don’t put any pictures of yourself up drunk at a party because your employer might see them.”

“Actually, what I think is more likely to happen is that sort of hypocrisy, where an employer is going to go “oh, you drink in college, how can I possible hire someone…” which is ridiculous” Wales scoffs. “Of course, everybody got drunk in college – well, not everybody, but most people – why is that so scandalous?”

As for online journalism, Wales predicts efficient micro-payment systems will make a huge difference to paywalls, with readers able to reward those journalists they particularly appreciate by paying for individual articles and content. The Wikipedia founder doesn’t expect all sites to become paid, but expects to to increasingly feature online.

Wales is known for not being shy about making contentious statements about the internet and what dangers face it; he memorably described app stores as presenting a “chokepoint” to the web and being “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem.” Whether his optimistic view on evolving opinions toward privacy and accountability pan out remain to be seen.

This pro service is allowing you the users to manipulate the data that Wolfram Alpha outputs. In addition, this version of WA is ablto to take inputs from up to 60 different data formats including binary structures of data files, images copied and pasted, and queries so simple as “what’s the capitol of Assyria?” What you’re able to do here with the Pro version is not just query what Wolfram Alpha has in its own data banks, but the data you input as well. Give Pro a set of data and ask it what it has to say about it.

“We’re not just dealing with knowledge from the world at large, we’re also dealing with a kind of individual knowledge that people have, and take data that people have, and upload it, and allow them to dip into it. … You take the data, throw it at Wolfram Alpha Pro, and see what it has to say about it.” – Wolfram

This entire process is done with Computational Document Format, the format which you’ll have the option to save with in Pro. This data format allows you to interact with your data rather than just have WA read you a static report. WA Pro goes so far as to launch a viewer for some data sets that allows you to change the scales of graphs, manipulate the data based on the output, and more.

Again Wolfram Alpha is currently integrated with iPhone 4S’s Siri, but there’s an iOS app as well as an Android app out there as well, and the Pro versions for mobile will be upon us soon too. Stick around and check em all out – or go ahead and get in on the Wolfram Alpha Pro beta-testing program right now!

[via PCMag]

Africa and the Middle East, otherwise known as AMEA, will have access to Wikipedia at no charge through their internet-enabled phone so long as it has an Orange SIM inside it. This project is part of a larger campaign initiated by the Wikimedia Foundation to connect with people across the earth whose only access to the internet is through their phone. This project and offering will be rolling out throughout 2012, reaching eventually a total of 20 African and Middle Eastern countries that Orange has a presence in. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation had the following to say:

“Wikipedia is an important service, a public good — and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using. This partnership with Orange will enable millions of people to read Wikipedia, who previously couldn’t.” – Gardner

Seem like a pretty awesome program to you? Then on another note: do you think this is the start of subsidized “free” data for users around the world, or will it be limited to programs exactly like this one? Wikipedia are you doing a bunch of good here?

By many counts, the blackout was a huge success. Google gathered 4.5m signatures on its anti-SOPA/PIPA petition, the LA Times reports, after the search engine added a “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” message to its normally minimalist homepage. Meanwhile, More than 162m people saw Wikipedia’s English-language blackout page, the site says, and 8m went on to search for their elected representatives’ contact info in its address tool.

As for lawmakers, representatives in both the House and the Senate made changes to their stance on the two acts. OpenCongress (itself up and down this morning, but Google’s cache works) reports eighteen in the Senate now oppose the act, of which seven were previously co-sponsors.

Reasons varied somewhat, but many spoke of changing their determination for SOPA and PIPA after hearing the scale of the antipathy toward them. “I’m pulling my support because your concerns deserve consideration before Congress moves forward” New Hampshire Republican Kelly Hyotte tweeted, while Missouri Republican Roy Blunt took to Facebook to describe PIPA as “legislation that is deeply flawed and still needs much work” which “is why I’m withdrawing my co-sponsorship for the Protect IP Act.”

Nonetheless, a vote on PIPA is expected to be held on January 24, while SOPA will be pushed forward in February, according to sponsor Lamar Smith. The risk is high that minor tweaks will be made that appear to remove particularly contentious points, but in fact merely whitewash the issues. “We expect changes that appear to tone down the damaging effects of the laws,” Wikipedia warns, “without addressing their fundamental flaws.”

As we wrote yesterday, there’s more information on on SOPA/PIPA in our plain English guide to the proposed acts, while details as to how you can contact your US Representative – or simply make your voice heard if you’re outside the US – at sopastrike.com/strike. More information can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Google’s “End Piracy, Not Liberty” campaign takes a similar approach to Wikipedia, explaining how SOPA/PIPA could be used to censor the internet in a way that doesn’t actually challenge piracy. It’s a stance that has already earned the search company vocal criticism, with News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch blasting Google as the “piracy leader” of the internet.

Meanwhile, reddit’s twelve hour blackout begins in around four hours time, at time of publishing,  while Firefox developer Mozilla has also announced that it will be joining in with a blackout of its own. Other participating sites can be found here.

In desperate need of a quick Wikipedia look-up? The online encyclopedia’s English-language mobile site is still functional, will likely load automatically on your phone (and some tablets), and is accessible in regular browsers by visiting m.wikipedia.com.

If you’re more interested in finding out what, exactly, SOPA and PIPA are, and why you should be concerned by them, head over to our SlashGear 101 explanation.

The temporary hold up on SOPA is partially due to the upcoming Republican and Democratic retreats, which will take place over the next two weeks. Markup on the bill will resume in February to move it out of committee and into the House and Senate. The most controversial part of the bill, DNS blocking of rogue sites, will be removed.

The announcement comes just hours ahead of a major blackout digital protest that will include Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, BoingBoing, and Google, among others. Wikipedia announced yesterday that its English site will shut down for 24 hours, displaying only a message urging against SOPA, while Reddit will shut down for 12 hours and Google will add a link to its homepage that expresses its opposition to SOPA.

For more background on SOPA and its sister bill PIPA, make sure to check out our SlashGear 101 post on the matter.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

“As for me, what I am hoping is that people outside the US who have friends or family who are voters in the US, will ask them to make a call to their senator or representative,” Wales explained, “and I hope we send a broad global message that the internet as a whole will not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement.”

The alternative, the Wikipedia founder says, was the possibility of only taking down the site for US visitors. That resulted in a close vote on how broad the protest should be: in the end, 591 of the Wikipedia community polled said they were in favor of the global blackout, against 479 calling for it to be US-only. “While there was a solid majority, it wasn’t the overwhelming majority that we had for the whole concept” Wales admits. “It seems to have been somewhat of a tough choice for many people.”

SOPA has, most recently, been apparently shelved after the Obama Administration voiced concerns that the proposed act might be too dangerous in terms of challenging the underlying openness of the internet. It’s a stance that earned the US President a tongue-lashing from News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, who described Obama as having “thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters” while Google is apparently the “piracy leader.”

If you’re panic-stricken at the thought of being without Wikipedia for 24hrs, there’s still hope. You can download an offline version of the database from here, assuming you have sufficient drive space and bandwidth.

“I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea. But that means we need to move forward quickly on a concrete proposal and vote – we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do. As I understand it, the Foundation is talking to people about how we can geolocate and guide people to their Congressperson, etc. Geoff will know about that. Our task is to decide to do it with a thumbs up / thumbs down vote” Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia

Wikipedia had mulled a blackout earlier this month, as part of NetCoalition discussions with Amazon, PayPal, Google and others about whether a period of synchronized downtime could rally opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act. A similar stunt by tumblr last year prompted near 90,000 calls to US Representatives.

Blogging platform WordPress has also joined the anti-SOPA drive, though it’s unclear if it’s also advocating a blackout. “Blogging is a form of activism” community manager Jane Wells said in a post on the company’s own blog. “You can be an agent of change.”

“The people writing these laws are not the people writing the independent web, and they are not out to protect it. We have to stand up for it ourselves” Jane Wells, WordPress

More information on how you can help raise awareness – both public and among senators – around SOPA opposition here.

[via The Inquirer]