Friday, December 02, 2005
Wikipedia Plans API, WYSIWYG Socialtext Interface
Jimmy Wales, President of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation and creator of Wikipedia, spoke at a Brookings Institute event yesterday and revealed some interesting news about the open source encyclopedia, according to one observer. According to Mike Lee, you can listen to a related podcast recorded in September here (MP3). Here's a summary...
* Wikipedia gets 2.4 billion page views monthly. It has over 120 servers, which are mostly in Florida
* Over half of all edits to the English version are done by 0.7% of its users, or 615 users
* They are working on a WYSIWYG interface so more newbies will feel comfortable. It is being built using SocialText and should be ready for wide release in January. It will become the default UI for MediaWiki.
* Last but not least, Wikipedia has early plans to open up their API
