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While Wikipedia may be the best known example, wikis are not only becoming the first place people turn when conducting online research, but also when they're looking to build specialist online communities. It's not surprising, then, that wikis dedicated to real estate are emerging. InmanWiki -- part...

Larry Sanger was an early participant in Wikipedia, and in 2006 he founded the Citizendium, which bills itself as "the citizens' compendium." Like Wikipedia, Citizendium is an encyclopedia that invites the public to contribute content. The two share other similarities as well, but the two are distin...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines. Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search i...

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce several key enhancements to its StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office productivity software suites. StarOffice 8 and the corresponding open version, OpenOffice.org 2.3, have both been updated with a variety of new features, including the ability to edit fo...

Yahoo, Google and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search. Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open source alternative to mainstr...

Anonymous Wikipedia editors who seek to alter articles there for less-than-honorable purposes can no longer hide behind their cloak of anonymity: A new scanner tool now makes it relatively easy to figure out where they came from. WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate ...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...

There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process. "We've already seen a shift in both software and the media where individual content is key and any one very talented coder or blogger can impact an industry," Am...

It's probably safe to say that most Americans, at one time or another, have felt they could do a better job of governing the nation than their elected officials. It may even be safe, in fact, to say that that has never been more true than it is today. "Bush's approval ratings are as low as it's poss...

Wikia, the open source search engine initiative and potential Google-killer, has snagged Jeremie Miller, who founded Jabber, an open instant messaging platform. Miller was handpicked by the Wikia project's founder, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. "Jimmy sat down in January after he announced his intention ...

Using the Hawaiian word "wiki" meaning "quick," Ward Cunningham coined the concept of WikiWikiWeb as a Web site for speedy interaction among targeted users. In its most basic form, a wiki Web site allows any user to create, add, remove or edit content and pages. Forrester Research recently surveyed ...

Users of Wikipedia trust that anonymous contributors will only add true and accurate knowledge to the free online encyclopedia. However, not everyone is trustworthy. Contributors have made mistakes, of course, and then there's the widely-reported inconsistencies and outright vandalism of entries. So...

One of the editors in charge of monitoring Wikipedia's content has been discovered to be a fraud. EssJay, whom the site had assumed was working under a false name for privacy, had presented himself as a tenured professor of religion with expertise in canon law. However, it has been revealed that Ess...

In its relatively short life online, reference Web site Wikipedia has endured numerous shots from corners ranging from the generally staid Encyclopedia Britannica to a former aide of the late Robert F. Kennedy. Now it's lined up in the sites of a new foe -- a group of high school students with a con...