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Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia. Photo: John Davidson

Wikipedia co-founder and influential technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales has slammed the federal government's plan to make telcos store the metadata of every phone and internet user as a "human rights violation" and is considering the launch of his new mobile service in Australia.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Fairfax Media,Mr Walesopened up about his views on high-speed internet and data retention.

Mr Wales is co-chairman atThe People's Operator (TPO), which is a mobile service provider in Britain with a market capitalisation of 98 million ($190 million) that gives 10 per cent of every customer's bill to the charity of their choice. A quarter of overall profits go to a pool of charities picked by the company and it is weighing an entry into the Australian market.

"Australia is very high on our list because while the social media stuff we're building is designed to be multilingual in the long run, in the first cut it's English," he said. "So it's much easier to drop in an Australian partner and we'd be keenly interested in an Australian partner."

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TPO is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it resells services that are based on another carrier's network. The company will launch in the United States in the next three months.

"The jump from one market to two is bigger than the jump from the second to the third because of all the reconfiguring we've done it all becomes easier,"he said. "After we get launched in the US we'll have to take a deep breath.

"Once we're there we will be looking to other markets and within six months or a year we'll be hoping to launch somewhere else."

He said the telco would decide on its next launch targets by November at the latest and had confidentially met with several telecommunications company chief executives during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales slams federal government data retention laws

Have you ever wanted to read more, but never found yourself with enough time? Do you love to browse Wikipedia, but find that you don't get to finish what you've started? What if you could read a whole elaborate Wikipedia page in five minutes? What if you could do it in two minutes? That's the idea behind Quickipedia, a speed-reading app designed by Wasdesign, LLC.

Quickipedia is powered by Spritz, an innovative new program that allows users to read upwards of 1,000 words a minute, or almost five times faster than the average person's reading speed. While this might sound impossible, it's actually backed up by quite a bit of science. The human brain is capable of processing information very quickly, but by placing a reticle in the ideal location within a word, Spritz helps your brain to comprehend a word in a fraction of a second. Worried about not remembering all those words you just read? Interestingly enough, most people who read things using a program that utilizes Spritz find that their comprehension improves with use.

Quickipedia is a Spritz-enabled reader that allows users to browse Wikipedia articles and read them at impressive speeds. It's a wonderfully intuitive and well-designed app that allows users to choose from 40 different speeds, until they figure out what is most comfortable for them. The search feature itself is impressively slick, though a little counter-intuitive -- as it can be a little difficult to tell which article you may want. However, once you find the article you're looking for, Quickipedia is indispensable. There are two modes of reading -- full page "classic" reading, or Spritzing, which feeds you a single word at a time at a speed that you choose. The speeds range from 50 words per minute to 1,200 words per minute, but we recommend that users start at 250 per minute and see what feels comfortable from there. We found ourselves capable of comfortably reading at 900 words per minute after we began to get adjusted to using Quickipedia.

If you are looking for a great, easy way to start Spritzing, or if you're just a Wikipedia junkie like we are, Quickipedia is a great jumping off point. Quickipedia is available for both iPhone and iPad, and costs $1.

Who Quickipedia is for: Feeling guilty about how little reading you do? Want to test your innate superhuman reading powers? This is for you!

Who Quickipedia isn't for: If you're not into reading Wikipedia articles, or are Kanye West, this probably isn't going to convert you into liking them or reading stuff.

-Amber Neely (@SurferAmber)

by MacNN Staff

Read more from the original source:
Hands On: Quickipedia (iOS)

Someone called the Beygency! Beck will think twice before going up against Beyonce again. The veteran singer-songwriter, 44, took home the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy for Morning Phase, surprisingly beating out the Drunk in Love singers blockbuster, critically acclaimed self-titled visual album.

PHOTOS: Memorable Grammy show moments

After his win, Becks Wikipedia page got some interesting updates that appear to have come straight out of Kanye Wests mouth. One new fact read, He is the stealer of The Album of the Year award, before noting that the Blue Moon singer stole the honor from Beyonce Knowles, the Queen of the World. The page has since been changed to read, On February 8, 2015, at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards, Morning Phase won three Grammys.

PHOTOS: Men in tuxes at the Grammys

It wasnt the first attack on the singer. When he took the stage to accept the Album of the Year Award, rapper Kanye West hopped up prepared to interrupt him before deciding against it.

Kanye West appears on stage as Beck accepts his Grammy for Album of the Year Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

The move was reminiscent of Wests infamous 2009 MTV VMA moment when he took the microphone from Taylor Swift, declaring, Imma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the greatest videos of all time.

PHOTOS: Wildest Grammys fashion

At the Grammys, Kim Kardashians husband, 37, restrained himself, waiting to blast Beck until after the show. It turns out the Only One emcee definitely wasnt kidding when he jumped onstage.

"I just know that the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us," he told E! (via Billboard). "We ain't gonna play with them no more. And Beck needs to respect artistry, and he should've given his award to Beyonce."

Read more:
Beck's Wikipedia Page Hacked to Say He Stole the 2015 Grammy From Beyonce: Details

This Saturday, one tech-savvy group is hoping to correct a major gender imbalance on the internet. After the recent, much publicizedGamerGatecontroversy, in which several female developers and cultural critics were victims of a sustained campaign ofmisogynisticattacks and advanced trolling, this help is certainly needed. TheArt+FeminismWikipedia Edit-a-thon, currently in its second year, is an all-day mass update ofWikipedia entries pertaining to art and women, meant to increase female involvement with, and coverage on, the predominantly male website. Wikipedias problems with gender distribution are legendary, and a 2011 survey by theWikimedia Foundationfound that lessthan 8.5% of contributors were female. This has led(by default)to a paucity of entries on seminal womenespecially in the arts.To help rectify this, onMarch 7th, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) willturn the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Building into mission control for a vast international effort to help promote, create, and edit articlesonfemale artists and movements. At last years event, participants at 31 locations created more than 100 new articlesand added content to another 90.This yearsEdit-a-thon, falling conveniently onInternational Womens Dayweekend (March 7-8, 2015), will incorporate 55+ satellite events internationally, taking place simultaneously at the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, the Dowse Art Museum in New Zealand, the National Museum ofWomen in the Arts, Washington, DC. and many others.

The project was first conceived of inOctober 2013, whenSin Evans, coordinator of theWomen and Art Special Interest group for Art Libraries Society of North America, and writer and curatorJacqueline Mabeyfirst discussed potential art and feminism projects in homage to theAda Lovelace Dayedit-a-thons.Mabeybrought the idea to NYU professorMichael Mandiberg, known for his use of Wikipedia in his teaching, who quickly joined up, offering his new media expertise. Mandiberg then recruited curatorLaurel Ptak, a cyberfeminism fellow atEyebeam, thecenter for art and technology in New York City. Later,Dorothy Howard, METROs Wikipedian-in-Residence and Open Data Fellow joined as well, andRichard Knipelof Wikimedia NYC rounded out the team.

Two editors hard at work at the Wikipedia Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, at Eyebeam in New York City.

As Mabey mentioned recently, This project also came on the heels of a very public debate about structural sexism in Wikipedia. [This] began when writer Amanda Filipacchi wrotea New York Times op-edon a problematic editorial practice being implemented by a number of Wikipedia editors: women were being removed from the American Novelists category and moved into a subcategory for American Women Novelists. Filipacchis piece set the internet on fire, sparking a mass call for reform. At the same time, continues Mabey. Wikipedians were having an entirely separate conversation on Wikipedia about whether to change this practice of sub categorization. These conversations were worlds apart. We wanted to help give people the training to shape the conversation directly on Wikipedia.

The Edit-a-thonsso far have proven extremely successful, capturing the attention of women in tech as well as the Wikipedia Foundation itself, which recently awarded a grant to the group to create+Feminism, an infrastructure permitting the event tobe replicated by others.The response has been overwhelmingly positive, says Mabey. A few trollish sub-reddits here anda confused Guardian articlethere, sure, but ultimately, what were doing isnt that radical: were editing articles on Baroque painters and adding citations to entries on important dada artists. Simple enough, yet the project isnot just radical, but urgently needed.

In the 21stcentury, when women have unprecedented freedoms, they are still marginalized, not just in the art world, but also on the digital plane, often relegated to a footnote or brief citation. While were still a distance from common-sense realities like equal pay for women, comprehensive childcare, and a reproductive rights bill, at least the digital world will be a slightlymore female-friendly place after this weekend.

A discussion of strategy at the Wikipedia Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, at Eyebeam in New York City

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Mass Wikipedia Edit To Make The Internet Less Sexist

Cited for Contribution to Info Revolution

gettyimages

Published February 11, 2015.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will receive the Dan David Prize and $1 million for his contribution to the information revolution.

Tel Aviv University on Tuesday announced the recipients of the international prize, which annually makes three awards for outstanding achievement in the categories of past, present and future time dimensions. Each award in a category is $1 million.

Wales was recognized in the Present Time Dimension: The Information Revolution. His stated motivation for creating Wikipedia was to create a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, according to a statement from the prize committee.

In the past category, Retrieving the Past: Historians and their Sources, Peter Brown and and Alessandro Portelli share the prize. Brown is a historian from the late antiquity period whose groundbreaking studies have reshaped the way we understand social and cultural change, according to the prize committee. Of Brown, the committee said his studies of the interaction between private and collective memory have challenged the way we understand recording the past.

Three scientists Cyrus Chothia, David Haussler and Michael Waterman were awarded the prize in the future category of Bioinformatics.

Chothia pioneered the understanding of the relationships between protein sequence, structure, function and interaction. Haussler was a leader in assembling the first draft of the human genome sequence and leads the development of the UCSC Genome Browser used worldwide for interpreting genome sequences. Waterman has contributed significantly to biological sequence analysis.

The Dan David Prize is named for the late international businessman and philanthropist. The laureates, who donate 10 percent of their prize money toward 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships, will be honored at a May 17 ceremony at Tel Aviv University.

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Wikipedia Chief Jimmy Wales Wins $1M Dan David Prize