Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales delivered an inspirational speech to 600 attendees at Hult International Business School’s San Francisco campus, revealing how companies around the world are adopting the open-source technology that made his free encyclopedia a global success.

Mr. Wales told Hult students that his success stemmed from initial failures. “The way I got here is through failure,” said Jimmy Wales. “For a lot of my projects I should have quit a lot sooner,” reflected Wales to the crowd.  Mr. Wales also shared his strategy for the future of the Wikimedia Foundation and commented on ways his organization could achieve this by saying, “We do think we need more diversity in our community.”

Wales, a champion of Internet freedom, becomes the latest in an impressive line of high-profile speakers to share their knowledge with Hult students. “For any organization it is important to maintain that willingness to fail and try new things,” said Wales. Students also heard Mr. Wales speak about the most recent SOPA blackout. “The act would have set certain precedents that are really bad,” said Wales, answering a student question from the audience.

Students, journalists and local Bay Area companies took note of Wales’ views on how advances in open-source content are going to shape the future of global business. He also argued that the business managers of tomorrow – like Hult’s students – would have to be active and innovative to keep up with the changes brought about by advances in technology.

“Jimmy Wales is a true visionary and his success with Wikipedia has given him a well-deserved reputation as one of the Internet’s most influential people,” said Dr. Stephen Hodges, President of Hult International Business School. “Exposing Hult students to current business issues and trends that are impacting our international community, allows them to experience live what it takes to be a successful business leader.”

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/williambrawley/

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A new bill set to pass through the United States Senate has many internet users worried about the future of online censorship. SOPA, an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, was proposed as one the latest attempts to protect copyright and control online media pirates.

However, the bill’s vague parameters are already raising concerns and objections that the loose wording may be ripe for corporate manipulation. The aim of the legislation is to crack down on pirating by targeting rogue sites outside of U.S. borders. SOPA would allow the government to disband any website that hosts copyrighted material, and an individual who streams such material could also be tried for committing a federal offense.

Search engines, blogs, and directories with links to infringing content would be required to remove the offensive link under threat of lawsuit. It would force host websites to take responsibility for all of the material uploaded rather than merely serving as an impartial medium, hence the fear that major video sharing websites like Youtube could become targets.

Web giant Google went so far as to call the bill ‘draconian’, and Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Redditt, among others, are taking a similar stance. Vice-President Biden also has announced his anti-SOPA position, claiming that the bill would create a fragmented and divided internet.

Others point to the fact that no new statues are actually being introduced by the bill, and that the government already has the means to combat internet theft through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although SOPA has garnered a lot of support from the entertainment industry, many technology experts fear that it would irrevocably change the internet for the worse, stifling innovation and many promising young online businesses.

Art Bordsky, a Washington-based public policy expert, recently explained some of the potential implications of the bill to The Guardian:

“The international aspects alone are very worrying,” he said. “It appears that the US is taking control of the entire world. The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any US consumer who uses a website overseas immediately gives the US jurisdiction the power to potentially take action against it.”

Despite rising opposition, SOPA’s supporters are insistent that the legislation is in fact needed to combat the issue of piracy, and that complaints of government censorship are overblown. Careful analysis of the bill reveals that sites host infringing information must demonstrate “willful intent” to be prosecuted, which would offer protection to sites like Youtube.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the issue on November 16th, and SOPA is expected to go to markup sometime around December 15th.

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Sarah Palin can never be wrong.  After she made a mistake and stated that Paul Revere was actually warning the British and not warning Americans about the British, her supporters have helped to rewrite history to make her account correct.  Meanwhile, Palin is not backing down and insists that Revere was warning the British that the colonists would not back down.

The Paul Revere Wikipedia page has become a focal point in the Palin story and has seen a large increase in traffic.  Where it used to have 2,000 or so page views a day, nearly 54,000 people viewed the page just on Saturday.  An edit war has also transpired on the page after Palin’s supporters attempted to change the historical account. Over the weekend, Wikipedia users added sentences to the Revere article that repeated Ms. Palin’s claims. One editor, Tomwsulcer, added the following sentence:  “Accounts differ regarding the method of alerting the colonists; the generally accepted position is that the warnings were verbal in nature, although one disputed account suggested that Revere rang bells during his ride.”

When the discussion board for the Revere article was ringing with complaints that this was a lie, Tomwsulcer replied that it should be included as a theory because a prominent American politician, that is, Sarah Palin, had said it. “If you follow Wikipedia’s rules,” he wrote, “we must maintain a neutral position, representing the mainstream position as well as disputed versions.”  He lost the argument, but others have been searching history books to find evidence to support Palin’s claims.

One Wikipedia editor included the fact that the colonists on the eve of revolution were themselves British trying to justify that Paul Revere did warn the British. That argument was included at the end of a passage stating that “Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him (‘The British are coming!’), largely because the mission depended on secrecy and the countryside was filled with British army patrols.”

Palin’s supporters have also edited a Paul Revere article found on Conservapedia, a right-leaning version of Wikipedia.  The piece has been edited to read as follows: “He is famous for riding from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts with William Dawes on the night of April 18, 1775 ringing bells to warn the British that colonists would exercise their natural rights to both bear arms and use them in an effort secede from the United Kingdom in response to Big Government bullying and interfering with Colony’s Rights.”

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