I’m truly anxious at the recent rhetoric about ‘regulating’ of the internet, and fear the worst. I grew up with the internet and like to think we made a journey together, from my high school days where dial-up internet was the norm, to the blazing fast broadband I have now–things have change a lot for the both of us. I am a digital native, I know no other land other than a digitally infused one we live in today. Couple that with my unique libertarian views and my savvy for all things tech, and you can quickly see why I strongly oppose internet censorship of any kind….and I really mean any kind.

Continuing my series on bigdata and Google bigquery, I’ve decided to share a rather interesting snippet of information regarding our very own Malaysian Airlines and their wikipedia page.

First, just to illustrate how important Wikipedia is in general, the Malaysian Airlines Wikipedia page gets roughly 30,000 hits per month. That’s just one page of Wikipedia getting more hits than my entire website, I can’t tell you how frustrated that makes me.

Having a negative sounding Wikipedia page is pretty bad for business, particularly if 30,000 potential customers view it every month. That’s a web page that needs some serious attention if you’re the marketing manager of Malaysian Airlines.

Unfortunately for MAS (and every business organization there is), Wikipedia has a policy about updating your own Wikipedia page–you’re not allowed to do it. Wikipedia has to keep to it’s original intention of being an online repository of information that is fair, balanced and neutral. Having marketing gurus or corporate big wigs updating their own Wikipedia entry isn’t exactly in the best intentions of anyone, however Wikipedia doesn’t strictly enforce the policy and leave it up to the crowd.

Fortunately, the crowd have responded, sites like WikiScanner allow users to see which IP addresses updated which Wikipedia articles. Some have gone to the extent of correlating those IP addresses to the owners and determining if companies are updating their own Wikipedia pages against the general guidelines. Let’s see if Malaysian Airlines can join that group of companies who’ve been slapped on the wrist for changing the Wikipedia pages of their organizations.

I’ve posted a couple of post around SOPA and PIPA, and today there was a protest from one of the most web-traffic websites of all – WIKIPEDIA.

Wikipedia, today was blacked out to protest SOPA and now you know. Every college student looking to do a term paper, every high school student looking for information on a term paper and if you’re looking for just about anything online, you’re going to see a blacked out wikipedia– and so now you know about SOPA.

QR codes may be making that all important comeback. Apparently QR codes were all the craze a couple of months ago, but now (just like the Royal Wedding) seem to be out of fashion. Fortunately, though there seems to be life left in this brilliant invention. The Wikimedia blog recently made a strange (yet interesting) announcement that they’re launching QRPedia.

Wikimedia are the guys behind wikipedia and they’re using the great power of QR codes by offering a fantastic service via the wikipedia API.

Don’t worry if you didn’t understand that last sentence,here’s what it really means…The scenario is something like this, imagine you’re out in a Museum and you’re admiring a wonderful piece by a Van Gogh (as an example I’ll use Starry Night) , at the display there is also a QR Code which you can scan on your device (much like the guy in the picture is scanning QR Code). The QRCode takes you to the specific wikipedia article regarding Starry Night (or Van Gogh, it’s entirely the Museums choice). So far so good.

What’s different now, is the wikipedia API can detect your language setting. So if you’re phone is set for French or German, it will take you to the French Wikipedia article on starry night and you can enjoy more facts about starry night in your native language.