Lexico Publishing Group, the owners of Reference.com[1], Dictionary.com, and Thesaurus.com, announced in a press release on September 15 that it has added search access to Wikipedia content to its other offerings. According to Hitwise, Wikipedia surpassed Dictionary.com as the most popular reference site for US internet surfers in late May (see earlier story). Several sources reported on the contents of the press release. [2]

However, Reference.com's version of Wikipedia is at least five months old, despite the service itself being new.

On September 17, MSNBC/Newsweek online published "Your Own World", an article from the forthcoming September 26 edition of Newsweek International Edition. In it, they discuss many aspects of the personalization of the web, and the crossover between the web and traditional media. It includes this paragraph: "Take Wikipedia.org, the online, user-generated encyclopedia. Anyone can edit a page, which could theoretically lead to total anarchy. Instead, the community of users are themselves so involved and diligent that spam or misinformation tends to come down as quickly as it goes up. Wikipedia is a nonprofit, but some venture capitalists say that the advertising potential of the site could make it a billion-dollar business (community members have thus far bucked any movement in that direction)."

As a followup to the Wikimania conference, German magazine SAP Info interviewed Jimbo Wales and Elian about how Wikipedia works, in the September 12 article "The Community is Our Editorial Board".

This week, BusinessWeek Online's Online Extra section includes an interview with web usability expert Jakob Nielsen. When asked what new technology or techniques are needed to move the Web to the next level, Nielsen referred, in part, to wikis: "We also need much better collaboration features. The Web is still very much a single-user environment. Wikis -- multi-user Web sites that can be built with many people -- are a great example of what is working. At Wikipedia [the collaborative online encyclopedia], the individual components may not be so great, but they can add up to something valuable. I think there will be many more specialized projects of a similar nature."

Wikipedia was cited in the last week in the following publications:

• The Age, on Podcasting
• BBC home page, on Prince Harry
• Kansas City Star, on Lavosh [3]
• Rocky Mountain News on The Simpsons [4]
• Searcy Daily Citizen on Monday Night Football [5]
• Internet News on Catalan language [6]