CyberJournalist.net is an excellent resource for keeping up with the quickly evolving world of online journalism. Sponsored by the Online News Association, the service offers pointers to stories of interest, tips, tools, and serves as a showcase for citizen media initiatives. The site just posted the ten stories most popular with their readers during the past year. Articles about tsunamis and hurricanes followed behind the top story, novel uses of Google Maps. Also on the list are stories about the growing popularity of podcasting and RSS subscriptions.

Nature pits Wikipedia against Encyclopedia Britannica and the free, user-edited encyclopedia holds its own.

The good news for Wikipedia began yesterday with a special report by the venerable science magazine, Nature. The periodical oversaw the peer review of 42 entries common to the two encyclopedias and found errors in both. In fact, they discovered 162 errors in Wikipedia and 123 in the Britannica. Among the errors, four in each compedium were dubbed “serious.”

Determined to test the mettle of the online encyclopedia, two of the Wikipedia’s 45,000 registered “editors” carried the math a little farther and discovered that the Wiki articles used in the review were, on average, 2.6 times longer than the Britannica’s. The authors are “cautious about drawing conclusions, but from a purely statistical standpoint, this means that the Britannica yielded 3.6 errors for every 2KB data while the Wikipedia ended up with a mere 1.3 errors per 2KB.

The good news followed hard on the heels of bad. John Seigenthaler, founding editorial director of USA Today recently accused the encyclopedia of erroneously implicating him in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Mr. Seigenthaler declined to edit the document.

Plus, there is the class action suit against Wikipedia brought by Baou Inc. Baou is run by Greg Lloyd Smith, who launched and defended the questionable QuakeAID project and was once sued by Amazon for engaging in fraud while using their name. Win or lose, defending cases like this one are costly and distracting.

Wikipedia will never be free of problems. There will be misinformed editors, ham-handed writers, vandals, and prolix types with axes to grind. Even with new mechanisms being put into place to screen entries, the sheer volume of data on the service prohibits any kind of full vetting. As of this writing, there are 3.7 million articles in 200 languages in the Wikipedia.

But the Nature article is thought provoking. First, it’s good to remember that even our most trusted reference tomes can make mistakes and, second, the Wikipedia, with its self-correcting nature and protean body of content, isn’t all that terrible a resource, after all.

In 2004, the Merriam-Webster dictionary named “blog” Word of the Year. This year, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “podcast” Word of the Year. This is remarkable when you consider that most people have no idea what a blog or podcast actually is. This is changing as mainstream media and old-school reference tomes tout the new technologies. How long until wiki makes it to word of the year?

Should anyone be interested in reading a bit about the history of open discourse through the ages, I’ve just posted a draft of chapter two, The Urge to Publish is Universal and Irrepressible. I’m inviting comments, so do feel free to call it as you see it.

Completely Automated Public Turing (test for telling) Computers and Humans Apart. n. A test designed to determine whether a user is human or a spam bot, often consisting of a sequence of obscured graphic letters or numbers that must be typed into a field to continue. Some visually impaired individuals have difficulty reading captchas and spammers are continually developing successful methods of subverting the scheme. [Coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University and John Langford of IBM.]

Bloggers are regularly called to task by traditional journalists who complain that blogged content can be inaccurate, biased, or out-and-out fabrication. In a turn of the tables, Guido Fawkes’ blog of plots, rumours, and conspiracy has announced the winners in its inaugural Press Plagiarist of the Year Award. The criteria for consideration were straightforward: “a story has to be pinched from an original blog source, either verbatim or in essence, and no credit / payment given to the original source.”

The top award went to Peter Wright, editor of Mail on Sunday for lifting an article in whole from The Policeman’s Blog. Second place went to Marina Hyde, former diarist for the Guardian, who apparently liked enough of what she read on Wonkette and Guido Fawkes’ own site that she copied whole sections verbatim and without attribution.

The winners are both British, which makes sense since the anonymous Mr. Fawkes writes from those shores, but journalists around the world are paying attention. We know this because the Guido Fawke’s site lists the server origins of the most prominent on his front page. Just the first three in the alphabetical list provide a glimpse: Associated Newspapers Ltd, 42 returning visits; Bloomberg Financial Markets, 48 returning visits; British Broadcasting Corporation, 103 returning visits.