Wikipedia to limit changes to articles on people

By Noam Cohen, The New York Times

Wikipedia, one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, was founded about eight years ago as a long-shot experiment to create a free encyclopedia from the contributions of volunteers, all with the power to edit, and presumably improve, the content.

Now, as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

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Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! oppose Google book deal

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! joined an alliance opposing the legal settlement which would allow Google to digitize and sell millions of books, a move that the Internet giant dismissed as "sour grapes."

The three technology heavyweights are among the members of a coalition called the Open Book Alliance which expressed concern about "serious legal, competitive, and policy issues" surrounding Google's book scanning project.

In a statement, the alliance said its members, which include the San Francisco-based non-profit the Internet Archive, publishers and library associations, will counter the Google book settlement "in its current form."

Google reached a class action settlement in October of last year with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to a copyright infringement suit they filed against the Internet powerhouse in 2005.

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Oxford University admissions favour men, study finds

By Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian

Women are less likely than men to be offered a place at Oxford University even when they have better grades and are from similar backgrounds, a study has found.

Academics at Oxford, Manchester and London University's Institute of Education analysed details of 1,700 UK students who had applied to 11 Oxford colleges in 2002.

They asked students what kind of school they attended, their GCSE and predicted A-level results, the number of books they read in a year, and the jobs and qualifications of their parents.

The students were asked how often, in the past year, they had visited a museum, art gallery, classical music concert, theatre, opera or ballet, and whether they played a musical instrument. They were then asked to tick in which field figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Lloyd George and Graham Greene were best known.

The academics found men were twice as likely as women to be offered a place in a science subject, and 1.4 times more likely than women to gain a place in an arts subject.

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