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The search colossus is helping to fund the group that operates Wikipedia, founder Jimmy Wales says. Also: 958 million Wiki edits and counting. Danese Cooper, a former open-source community specialist at Sun and Intel, now will work on technology for Wikipedia and other projects. The companys researchers have launched EntityCube, an automated search tool that aims to pull together biographical information on even the not so famous. The online encyclopedias volunteers, who write, edit, and fact-check, are dropping out at a suddenly quickened pace, says The Wall Street Journal.

Modeled on the user-contributed open-source wiki software popularized by Wikipedia, the nearly year-old Medpedia grows up with the addition of three key features. A German man convicted of murdering an actor sues online encyclopedia under privacy law he claims prevents his name being mentioned in connection with the murder. Founder of the online community-written encyclopedia talks to Silicon.com about whats next for the site and why it needs geeks of all kinds. In addition to updating the Custom Search tool with new features, Google announces creation of a custom Wikipedia skin to make searching the encyclopedia easier.

For the first time, the free encyclopedias English version will soon require editors approval before edits to articles on living persons go live. Its probably not the end of life as we know it. New feature to be deployed soon on a test wiki assigns an experienced editor to sign off on changes to articles on those who are alive and well. Do you ever wonder how you got from point A to point B on Wikipedia? A new Firefox add-on will break it down for you by session. Nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia plans to use the grant to improve the user-friendliness of Wikimedias software, among other things.

Research at the Palo Alto Research Center suggests that those who edit frequently on Wikipedia dont have their entries challenged, whereas less frequent editors do. Top 20 terms including "YouTube," "Wikipedia," and "sex," says Symantec, show that children want to be entertained, educated, and titillated. According to a recent interview with Wikipedias video guru, the Internet encyclopedias revamped video player is coming very soon. However its using a format thats causing quite a stir in the open source community. A new site collates the social-networking activity of sports people, tabulated by name, league, and country.