By now, if you’re even moderately interested in Wikipedia, you’ve probably had the chance to read any number of lengthy articles on the Web site’s meteoric rise. So why bother with a whole book on the topic? In the case of Andrew Lih’s new tome, The Wikipedia Revolution, the answer is simple: The author is a longtime site administrator, and he has enough pull in the community to get Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to write a foreword. So, for all intents and purposes, this is Wikipedia: The Authorized...

Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging...

Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia relying on user-generated content from anyone with an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field, officially became available today. The venture, which has the backing of numerous leading medical schools, was explored in an earlier Chronicle article that takes a detailed look at issues for contributors and users of the site. —David Shieh

Educause, the higher-education technology group, has released its list of top teaching and learning challenges of 2009.

The top five challenges were selected by a combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals, face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. 2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual — among students and faculty members. 3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners. 4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology for teaching and learning. 5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.

Educause...

A mobile computer that reads wireless transmitters, allowing blind people to navigate a city, could serve seeing pedestrians as well, students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor say.

The students have developed Talking Points, an urban-orientation system, to give users context about their surroundings.

“If it caught on, this would be an effective way to tag the whole world,” Jason Stewart, a master’s student at Ann Arbor, said in a written statement. “Anyone with a reader could use it to find out more information about where they are.”

The system’s mobile computers, about the size of paperback books, read Bluetooth tags — on city landmarks and other points of interest — and convey...

With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.

The effort is supported by Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and several health organizations.

The goal is to have, by the end of 2008, a site that covers more than 30,000 medical diseases and conditions and 10,000 drugs, as well as medical procedures and facilities throughout the world. Articles will be contributed and edited by online collaborators, like the online encyclopedia...

A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.

For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at “Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”

Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the “center” of...

Cambridge, Mass. — Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been outspoken about his view that his creation, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, should not be used in academic settings, especially by students writing papers. One reason is that any given entry “could change instantly and not have a final vetting process,” said Mr. Wales in an interview Thursday at a conference on the future of the Internet, held at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

But the popular encyclopedia may soon add a new feature that would allow Wikipedia entries to be “cited more comfortably” by students and professors, he said. The feature would allow a version of a Wikipedia article to be frozen...

A new study found that in Wikipedia, word count can be used to predict article quality.

Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.

He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count...

A major German publisher has decided to sell print copies of a portion of the the German-language version of Wikipedia, the New York Times reports.

The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia published by Bertelsmann will contain summaries of the 25,000 most popular articles. It willl go on sale in September for 19.95 euros, or about $32.

Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, told the Times that the book is intended to appeal to “new target groups, including young people.”—Catherine Rampell