The problem with Wikipedia, as most scholars see it, isn’t that the site lacks credible information. There’s plenty of good stuff in the encyclopedia; it’s just that there’s no easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz are trying to make that process simpler. They’ve designed software that color-codes Wikipedia entries, identifying those portions deemed trustworthy and those that might be taken with a grain of salt.

To determine which passages make the grade, the researchers analyzed Wikipedia’s editing history, tracking material that has remained on the site for a long time and edits that have been quickly overruled. A Wikipedian with a distinguished record of unchanged edits is declared trustworthy, and his or her contributions are left untouched on the Santa Cruz team’s color-coded pages. But a contributor whose posts have...

Virtually no one (besides The Chronicle, that is) refers to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by its full name. To students and alums, it’s just “Illinois.” The rest is superfluous.

Yet the institution’s Web site has always been located at uiuc.edu — a domain name honoring an acronym that never really caught on. Big deal, you say? To Illinois officials, it is.

The university has set out on a multiyear project that will replace its little-used domain name with the more elegant illinois.edu, The News-Gazette of Urbana reports. (The university already owned illinois.edu, but that Web address redirected visitors to the uiuc.edu site.) By doing so, campus officials say, the institution will correct a problem it created years and years ago — when colleges were more concerned about keeping domain names short than about reinforcing their brands.

Switching domains seems like an...

A student has filed suit against the University of Delaware, arguing that campus officials had no right to suspend him for creating a Web site they deemed “racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic.”

Maciej Murakowski first built the controversial site in 2005, and he used the page — which resided on Delaware’s servers — to post a series of graphically violent movie reviews and other ruminations. But the site didn’t draw the attention of university administrators until this January, when Mr. Murakowski wrote about an imaginary sexual position he called “The Sociopath.”

The university suspended the student in April — shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings, when many institutions were taking seriously any Facebook posts or student Web sites that seemed threatening. Mr. Murakowski was charged with violating Delaware’s policies on disruptive conduct and computer use, and was told that he...

With their patent dispute dragging into its ninth year, Microsoft and Eolas Technologies may finally be too tired to set foot in a courtroom. The two companies were supposed to spend this week pleading their cases to a federal judge in Chicago, but they have postponed the proceedings for 30 days so they can seek a settlement on their own, according to PC World.

Eolas was founded in 1994 by Michael Doyle, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco who says his team devised a method for launching software plug-ins from Web browsers. The company and the university won a $521-million patent-infringement judgment against Microsoft in 2003, but an appeals court threw out the verdict two years later, ruling that it was not clear whether the patent was valid.

The case appeared to reach its conclusion in 2005, when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office affirmed the patent’s...

The nonprofit Touro College announced this morning that it had signed a deal to sell its 7,500-student online division to a private-equity fund — in a transaction that signals investors’ continuing confidence in distance education as a way to make money in higher education.

The buyer is Summit Partners, a $9-billion private-equity firm based in Boston and Palo Alto, Calif. The price was not disclosed, but Summit’s Web site says the firm’s private-equity investments can range from $25-million to $450-million. Touro plans to use the proceeds from the sale to bolster its endowment, which stood at about $35-million in the fall of 2006.

Yoram Neumann, who now manages the separately accredited institution, will remain to run the venture as president and chief executive officer once it is spun off as a separate for-profit company.

Parties familiar with the terms of the transaction said the...

When Cary Sherman eventually retires as president of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group will have some pretty big shoes to fill. And already, one man seems to be auditioning for that difficult job: Archie, the lovable rapscallion of comic-book fame.

As Boing Boing notes, the September issue of Archie (yes, it’s still coming out every month) opens with a story called “Record Breaker.” It’s a pretty straightforward parable about the evils of music piracy (and, rather strangely, an argument against selling digital music), according to Comic Vine: “Instead of pressing CD’s, the Archies decide to sell downloadable files of their songs on the Internet … which doesn’t translate to much profit once the three purchased files are shared over and over again!”

Of course it’s possible Archie’s just bitter that he hasn’t sniffed the charts since “Sugar, Sugar.” —Brock Read

The best-known “mashups” are astute combinations of artistic product — vocals from a hip-hop album laid over Beatles tracks, for example, or a Sergio Leone film set to a new score. But as Brian Lamb points out in Educause Review, the world of mashups now incorporates not just art, but also online applications and other forms of digital media.

Mr. Lamb, the manager of emerging technology and digital content at the University of British Columbia, makes a strong case that professors ought to take mashups seriously. That doesn’t mean every educator should painstakingly edit Disney films into a treatise on copyright, but it does mean that professors should learn about “data mashups” and strive to make course content open and remixable.

“We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse,” Mr. Lamb writes. “When choosing a...

Some students at the University of Oxford are hopping mad about the institution’s policy of policing Facebook for evidence of “trashings” — annual post-exam rituals in which classmates cover each other in foam, eggs, and flour.

Evidently, trashings violate campus rules. So when students post photos of their revelry on Facebook — as they inevitably do — Oxford officials surf the site and dole out fines, by e-mail, to people they can identify.

It’s hardly surprising that this type of law enforcement would tick off students. But Martin McCluskey, president of the university’s Students Union, makes an interesting point in an interview with the Associated Press: “Disciplinary procedures are supposed to be transparent,” he argues.

That complaint seems a bit different from the typical I-was-caught-on-Facebook sour grapes, and it raises a question: Do colleges owe it to their students to spell out ...

The University of Kansas recently stiffened its policy for dealing with students caught downloading movies or music. But that doesn’t mean the institution is getting especially chummy with the Recording Industry Association of America, as an article in The University Daily Kansan points out.

Kansas officials told the student newspaper that they will not heed the recording industry’s request to pass pre-litigation notices on to 14 students accused of music piracy. Many institutions have forwarded the letters — which offer students a chance to settle file-sharing claims out of court at discounted rates — but some have declined to do so, citing concerns over students’ privacy.

“My understanding is that the university’s best-practices viewpoint is to protect its students and show compliance to the rules,” said Todd Cohen, a university spokesman, “but not to act as a legal agent.” —Brock Read

Today marks the debut of Tech Therapy, a new podcast in which Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, answer your questions and concerns about campus technology.

In this episode, the duo talks about secure information technology and how college leaders can better protect their computer networks by working to change campus culture. The podcast will run regularly on The Chronicle‘s Information Technology page. You can subscribe using the RSS feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtherapy