Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer - Rick Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of Sydney computing company Topologi, based in Pyrmont - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an "open document format" and a rival put forward by Microsoft.

Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.

In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing "what I asked Rick to do".

"Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections," reads the email Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.

"Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."

The email also encouraged Jelliffe to disclose his deal with Microsoft in his blog at oreillynet.com, and reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any of his Wikipedia edits before they were made.

At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow" -- this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.

The sources cited in Wikipedia, many of which are original sources, will no longer get credit for their appearance there, which should cause at least a little downward pressure in their own search rankings (hence providing a little more upward pressure, relatively speaking, for Wikipedia's articles). Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.

THE internet could become even more difficult for governments to regulate with a new website, Wikileaks, promising to provide a safe haven for whistleblowers to upload confidential documents.

Australians are among the volunteers behind the site. "Your country's support for the underdog and for a fair go is showing through," a spokeswoman said.

Comparing themselves with the leaker of the Pentagon papers that damaged the Nixon administration and eroded US public confidence in the Vietnam War, Wikileaks' creators say they will uncover unethical behaviour by developing "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis".

Wikileaks was founded by Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Our advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers.

There are currently 22 people directly involved in the project and counting.

WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.

The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.

1. Web 2.0 -- 206
2. Steve Irvin -- 161
3. Mark Foley Scandal -- 142
4. Blog -- 147
5. Ajax -- 133
6. World War II -- 143
7. Snakes on a Plane -- 126
8. Meme -- 132
9. Wiki -- 129
10. RSS -- 122
11. Podcasting -- 127
12. George Bush -- 129
13. Podcast -- 111
14. Net Neutrality -- 100

A source tells us that the working name for the project was "WikiSearch" until recently. It's clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be "reputable" because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages.

Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others are free to take it under the terms of the GFDL.

So, there are hundreds of utterly worthless blog-related pages on Wikipedia. Some are genuinely notable, but others are just self-promoting vanity / spam.

Here's some quick guidelines for a non-notable blog:

1. Is it an article about a blog?
2. Is the article title the blog title?
3. Is the blog's first hit on google when searching for the said blog title?
4. Can most of the "about" info be gathered from clicking "about" link on the blog?
5. Is the rest of the shit inane garbage blatantly promoting the said blog?

If so, the blog is a perfect candidate for getting deleted from Wikipedia. Make sure to check alexa and google, and search for "exact" blog name. Skip through a few 'next' pages on google, to get total number of 'unique' hits, the rest being uselessly duplicated content. Then nominate it for deletion

Pierce defends himself by listing his accomplishments, including appearances on G4TV, mentions in the New York Times and Washington Post, having a word he coined ("blook") a nominee for Oxford's word of the year, and is the number three result when you Google the name "Tony". This doesn't mention the hundreds of additional bloggers who credit Pierce with inspiring them to write, or influencing their style. Rank wise, of the millions of blogs online, Technorati has listed his Busblog in the top 500, and Blogebrity ranked Pierce an "A List" blogger when it launched almost two years ago.

It would seem that within the field of blogging, Tony Pierce is doubtlessly notable - so is the notability of the field of blogs a legitimate issue, or coud this be a coordinated attack on blogs by Wikipedia users who don't like the medium and some of its players?

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

"I'm no fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias," Colbert opined. "I've said it before: Who is [Encyclopaedia] Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves? If I want to say George Washington didn't have slaves, that's my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact."

While he was speaking, Colbert was also typing away on a laptop computer, apparently editing the Wikipedia entry on George Washington to read, "In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves."

He also apparently edited the Wiki entry on his own program, replacing a lengthy section on his reference to Oregon as both "the Canada of California" and "Washington's Mexico" with "Oregon is Idaho's Portugal" — an example, he said, of Wikiality.

"[On Wikipedia], any user can change any entry," he said. "Now 'Oregon is Idaho's Portugal' is the opinion I have always held. You can look it up."

At 10:09 a.m., it said "no further details have been officially released" about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: "The guilt of ruining so many lives finally led him to his suicide."

At 10:12 a.m., this was replaced by: "According to Lay's pastor the cause was a 'massive coronary' heart attack."

By 10:39 a.m., Lay's entry said: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." This statement was later dropped.

Influential, top blog authors are embedding Wikipedia links in their blog postings, exposing the site to wider audiences. A half-percent of all blog posts at BlogPulse.com, in fact, now typically cite Wikipedia.

Major news events, especially July's London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina in August-September, boosted Wikipedia's use as a source of immediate and thorough background. As a result, Wikipedia has emerged as more reliable and timely than other encyclopedias or knowledge databases.

The rise of Consumer-Generated Media. Because Wikipedia involves thousands of collaborative authors and contributors, many of them are passionate about accuracy and focused, thoughtful usage, increasing the level of trust among users.

International appeal. Of the growing number of foreign-language Wikipedias (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch & Swedish), blog citations to the German-language Wikipedia increased the most, nearly doubling in the past six months.

Blog references to Wikipedia have tripled, in fact, since Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August. More than twice as many bloggers now refer to the term "Wikipedia" as they do to the traditional "encyclopedia," and bloggers mention Wikipedia six times more frequently than they mention Encyclopedia Britannica's web site.