Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Eric Shackle's Column

Wikipedia Calls for Cash

When we want to check out a story, a reference. a phrase, or anything else, it’s guineas to gooseberries that we’ll consult Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia that seems to know everything.

“Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web, and serves 450 million people every month – with billions of page views,” says its co-founder, Jimmy Wales. “Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind.
“It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.....
“If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine.
“Each year just enough people decide to give.
“This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia has been described as ”a free, collaboratively edited and multilingual internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.”
Its 23 million articles have been written or edited by about 100,000 contributors around the world. In 2011 Wikipedia received an estimated 2.7 billion page views just from the US.
You can read more about Wikipedia by visiting co-founder Jimmy Wales's website: www.jimmywales.com
From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia. Posted Saturday, 1 December 2012, at 21:53

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Frog Struck Down by Lightning!

Darwin’s Northern Territory News often displays screaming headlines about crocodiles, which are an ever-present danger in its vast circulation area.
front page in Aussie newspaper NT News
One day recently (November 30, 2012) it published a front-page story captioned
FROG STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
... and a few humans were hit too. It also published a poster showing a picture of a dead frog. Many readers thought this hilarious. Dan Thorne, in the UK online news magazine TNT, wrote “Stop the press! Frog hit by lightning makes the front page in Aussie newspaper NT News.
Incidentally, the NT News is a small dinghy in Rupert Murdoch’s global fleet of newspapers.
Let's take a moment to thank the hapless frog for his service to the media industry and giving us a darned good laugh. NT News, we salute you.
FROG CROAKS IT AFTER BEING HIT BY LIGHTNING pic.twitter.com/ktrJdzfg
From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia. Posted Monday, 3 December 2012, at 14:58

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