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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-31/News and notes

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News and notes

News and notes

Wikipedia appears in Encarta

A mention of Wikipedia has recently been added to the Encarta article on encyclopedias. The relevant passage, which comes at the end of the article, reads as follows:

In the early 21st century a new type of online encyclopedia, known as Wikipedia, enabled readers to create and edit encyclopedia articles. A wiki is a type of server software that enables users to create or alter content on a Web page. Wikipedia was closely associated with the open source software movement and rapidly expanded to include hundreds of thousands of articles, many on popular culture topics, in a number of languages. The philosophy behind Wikipedia was that a community of volunteers could pool their knowledge and crosscheck their work to create a free encyclopedia. Due to Wikipedia’s openness, it is often the target of vandalism.

Encarta is one of the first traditional encyclopedias to acknowledge Wikipedia in an article. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Brockhaus encyclopedia in German will give Wikipedia its own article in its new edition (see archived story).

Wikiversity vote ends

The vote on whether to create a new Wikiversity project ended today. Wikiversity, which currently resides on Wikibooks, started a vote on 15 September to move to wikiversity.org, currently hosting a near-dormant German Wikiversity project. Discounting votes made after the deadline, the vote, unofficially, ended approximately 71% in favor of the project. A two-thirds majority and board approval is required to start a project beta period.

Briefly