Wikia Search abandoned, university plagiarism, and more

Jimbo Wales has pulled the plug on Wikia Search, a community based search engine, as reported by eWeek. Wales stated on his personal blog, "While I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space, our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped." According to Nielsen Online, Wikia—which hosts a wide range of wiki projects such as Memory Alpha, Wookieepedia, and Uncyclopedia—was one of the fastest growing community websites, after Twitter, Zimbio, Facebook and Multiply. However, Wikia Search was a departure from Wikia's main focus, which has been community-specific encyclopedia projects that, to varying degrees, follow the model of Wikipedia. Wales said he cares about the search industry deeply and will return to it in the future.

In "University confronts cheats in the age of Wikipedia", the Edmonton Journal reports that the problem of students plagiarizing from Wikipedia has prompted the University of Alberta to take steps to stop such academic dishonesty. Students who need help with their writing can go to the campus Centre for Writing. Other teachers are giving proper instruction on how to properly cite sources, to prevent confusion about quoting vs. stealing.

On April 2, the Minister of Internal Affairs of New Zealand, Richard Worth, was questioned about whether he had edited his own Wikipedia article and asked whether he intended "to take the advice Wikipedia gave him yesterday afternoon that he should consult Wikipedia’s conflict of interest guidelines?" This was apparently related to edits made in December 2008 and March 2009, which are discussed in a post dated April 1 on talk:Richard Worth. The story was picked up by TVNZ, with no mention of the age of the edits.

• An edit by a New Zealand user made an unreferenced claim, as MI6.co.uk reported: "Wikipedia entry lists Iain Softley as Bond 23 director".
• Oliver Kamm opines in The First Post that the consensus system that Wikipedia uses is anti-intellectual and that while "some of its articles effectively mimic the language of scholarly reference [,t]he venture is junk [and] much of its content is a pile of dross."Knowledge by consensus is Wikipedia's downfall.
• In "Wikipedia's Old-Fashioned Revolution", an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz argues that "Wikipedia is quietly transforming itself into a hybrid of amateurs and professionals" and that its "research principles are as traditional as its operating model is revolutionary".

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