Wikipedia it hot. Hot, hot hot!

The New Yorker published a good article on Wikipedia, Know it all, Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? by Stacy Schiff two weeks ago. It contains a lot of good information, much of it new to me, and puts Wikipedia in a larger context.

I heard two interesting papers at AAAI 2006 on using Wikipedia as a knowledge source. It’s been very popular recently to use search engine access to the Web as a giant brain. The two Wikipedia papers showed that using the Wikipedia subset of the Web showed better results.

• E. Gabrilovich and S. Markovitch, Overcoming the Brittleness Bottleneck using Wikipedia: Enhancing Text Categorization with Encyclopedic Knowledge, Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06), pp. 1301-1306, 2006..
• M. Strube and S. Paolo Ponzetto, WikiRelate! Computing Semantic Relatedness Using Wikipedia, Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) 2006..

Denny Vrandecic called Wikimania 2006 “Maybe the hottest conference ever” and really made me wish I had attended.

Last week I happened across Wikimapia, a “resource that combines Google Maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information (in the form of a note) to any location on the globe”. It looks like the map is also populated with geo tagged objects extracted from Wikipedia. See the area around UMBC as an example.

Categories: Uncategorized, , Related posts: • WIkipedia research papers;  • Wikipedia editing policy in the news;  • On evaluating the credibility of Wikipedia articles;   Trackback: link, Comments: