Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

Source: NY Times

Nozasearch is a massive database–over 41 million records–offers both free and fee-based access.

The free service (registration required) allows you to search information (by name or by cause) on nearly 1.3 million charitable foundations. The fee-based portion of the service provides records on over 40 million charitable donations by people and companies. A 24 hour free trial to the fee-based side of the database is also available.

Results are available in either list form or as a .XLS spreadsheet.

+ Direct to Nozasearch

+ Direct to Noza Blog

See Also: Nozasearch offers (free) a searchable database (Beta) of Form 990-PF (private foundation) tax returns (about 800,000 records).

Source: Noza Search

Pretty much everyone who’s ever worked as a librarian is familiar with the Marquis Who’s Who series of reference materials. Well, we recently stumbled across a great free resource from the Who’s Who folks, and you know how enthusiastic we are about free quality content here on ResourceShelf.

Take a look at the Who’s Who in America Experts Guide:

The launching of this Web site, WhosWhoInAmerica.com, marks an exciting time for us as we expand beyond the pages of our books to the digital world. Expect to see the same great biographical information coupled with recommendations and advice directly from the experts of Who’s Who. Find out which restaurants our chefs prefer, what vacation spots our travel specialists say are “must visits,” and which doctors are the best for what ails you—and that’s just the beginning. Check back soon for the latest in luxury lifestyle, fashion, beauty, real estate, art, business and more.

You’ll find advice from familiar names here — e.g., Peter Greenberg and Arthur Frommer providing travel tips. You’ll also find interviews with folks who are not necessarily household names, but who are notable in their own fields, such as medicine and real estate. The site is divided into several sections, according to content:

• Health
• Travel
• Food & Wine
• Real Estate
• Interviews
• In the News

You can sign up for e-mail updates about new content in any or all of these sections.

What’s cool…as you travel around the site, when you click on a highlighted name, you are taken to that person’s Who’s Who biography, which includes date and place of birth, career achievements and awards, family info, and more.
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Another venerable — and widely available through public libraries — people resource is Biography Resource Center, from Gale Cengage. We didn’t learn until recently that it has its own blog, with postings about people in the news, celebrities, historical figures, and new content added to the database. It offers an RSS feed, e-mail updates, and notes that, “Twitter is coming soon.”

This is a new type of people search engine that finds information from hundreds of publicly available sources on the web in real-time, including from social network profiles, web links, email address, news pages, images and videos.

Source Pandia

To the likes of Spock, Spokeo and Pipl.com—you can now add yet another social media-focused people search engine: MyLife. The product of last year’s merger between Reunion.com and Wink, MyLife aims to capitalize on all the info people reveal about themselves through various social networks. It has more than one billion profiles in its index already, the company says.

Source: paidContent.org

Previously mentioned people search engine Pipl has updated once again, this time offering three new reverse lookups based on email, username, and phone number.

Direct to Pipl.com

In the past few years, general circulation newspapers have furthered the cause of government transparency by providing searchable databases of government employees and their salaries. Although these are federal, state, county and municipal government public records the corresponding government agencies have not made these available at their Web sites. Government agency Web sites sometimes post a staff list or employee directory — not salaries — with name, telephone number and email. Often, school districts don’t list staff beyond those in the top level administration, but school sites that have their own Web pages may have a staff and faculty directory with names of administrators and teachers. An example of a very flexible school staff and teacher directory is hosted by the Ventura County Office of Education. Search by district, school or employee last name to find the district, school site, job title and phone number (Internet Explorer, only). I’ve endeavored to compile links to all of the government pay databases hosted at newspaper sites on a page called Government Pay.

The disadvantage of the separate databases is you have to know which one to search in order to verify your subject’s employment. The beta site, myDanwei, is a nascent attempt at a cross-agency compilation of government employee names, salaries, job titles and departments. Select the link,
National public employee salary database, to search by partial name, county, state, agency or institution. There’s only one search box, but you can enter a combination of keywords. The words (without quotation marks) “physician santa clara” will return a list of doctors who work for the County of Santa Clara, California. The extent of the coverage becomes apparent with various queries. The keywords “Weir Idaho” doesn’t return any records, but “Weir Washington” results in a handful of names from Washington State agencies. Just enter a state name into the search box to find out if any data is included from that location and from which government departments.

Source: PIbuzz.com

Extracting interest profiles of users based on their personal documents is one of the key topics of IR research. However, when these extracted profiles are used in expert finding applications, only naive text- matching techniques are used to rank experts for a given requirement. In this paper, we address this gap and describe multiple techniques to match user profiles for better ranking of experts. We propose new metrics for computing semantic similarity of user profiles using spreading activation networks derived from ontologies. Our pilot evaluation shows that matching algorithms based on bipartite graphs over semantic user profiles provide the best results. We show that using these techniques, we can find an expert more accurately than other approaches, in particular within the top ranked results. In applications where a group of candidate users need to be short-listed (say, for a job interview), we get very good precision and recall as well.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 246 KB)

Source: HP Labs

Out now from Microsoft Research is U Rank, an experiment that allows people to move results around, as well as share them with friends and add comments to listings.

Source: Search Engine Land

Direct to Email Lookup Database Interface

Displays the city, state, country & a map of an email address.

Review All Melissa Data Lookup Databases

Source: Melissa Data

+ Google Universal Search: 2008 Edition (via SEL)

+ Hackers Rig Google to Deliver Malware (via PC World)

+ It’s Hard to Hide From Your ‘Friends’ (via WSJ)
Note: No mention of the Ask.com Eraser feature that might also be of interest. You can read about it here. Gary is Director of Online Info Resources at Ask.com.

+ Oklahoma Governor Pushes Bill To Create Rx Drug Web Site

+ Middle East and Asia lose internet access after cable fails (via The Guardian, Hat Tip, Barry)

On Monday, at the CES Conference, Bill Gates (video here) demonstrated Mobile Navigator.
From the caption:

At CES in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates shows attendees the company’s new “mobile navigator” technology that can be used to point at a person or place, and get more information. The new software will be incorporated into devices such as cameras, PDAs, and phones.

Source: ZDNet

See Also: Cameraphone Searching in Japan (via SEW Blog)

See Also: Review: Content-Based Image Retrieval: Tools, Writings and Demos

See Also: More DNB Reading

See Also: More Free Dictionaries from Oxford

Source: Oxford University Press

+ New “Pictures” Tool from Digg Labs

+ Baidu CFO, Shawn Wang, Killed in Boating Accident (via Reuters)

Two databases:

+ List of Registered Medical Practitioners

You can use the List of Registered Medical Practitioners to check details of all the doctors on the GMC’s register.

It gives details of:

* the doctor’s reference number, name, any former name, gender
* year and place of primary medical degree
* registration status
* date of registration
* entry in GP/Specialist Register
* any publicly available fitness to practise history since 20 October 2005

+ List of Registered Medical Practitioners

Personalization with MyGMC

Source: General Medical Council