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Sloan Foundation gives Wikimedia Foundation $3 million

Article or RSS item submitted by Ty Wenzel • Mar 26th, 2008 • Category: Techie News |

Talk about hot foundation-on-foundation action.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving the Wikimedia Foundation--which runs Wikipedia--$3 million.

The money will go toward supporting "Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services."

Among other things, the announcement said the money would go specifically to a new Wikipedia feature called "flagged revisions," which will "allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles--in effect, functioning as a kind of 'nutrition labeling' for Wikipedia content."

I sort of wonder if that is in any way related to a feature that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told me about back in August 2006 that was supposed to make it possible for Wikipedia's home page to be open to the public again.

Perhaps not, but it seems there might be some similarities in the functionality.

Update (4:03pm): I got an email this afternoon from Jimmy Wales who confirms that the flagged revisions feature on Wikipedia is exactly the feature he told me about back in 2006. The only difference, he said, is that back then, it was called "stable versions." But he said, that name was too confusing.

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