Wikipedia won a pair of online awards in Germany this week in the annual Grimme Prize competition: one of three jury-awarded Knowledge and Education prizes, as "an excellent example of collaboration on the Internet," and the overall Audience Award, barely beating out the tele-novela "Verliebt in Berlin" (http://www.sat1.de/vib/serie/) http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/61312
Meanwhile, Peter "Shaggy" Shanks whips out a 'slimmed down XHTML version' of Wikipedia -- "the Wikipedia writ small" -- for people whose phones' egos outstrip their screen-size: http://wapipedia.org/wikipedia/mobilerandom.aspx
..."The London Line" notes the English Wikicoobook as a place to look for world recipes: http://www.thelondonline.co.uk/theline/article.php?articleID=484
...and eHow, the victorious dot-com "how-to" site, has started up a wiki section, "The How-To Site that anyone can Write or Edit", "powered and Inspired by MediaWiki" : http://wiki.ehow.com/Main-Page
The eHow interface has a few interesting aspects:
* It is very clean, with no left-hand sidebar, no logo at the top, and almost no user nav-links at all. It compresses most of those links into a drop-down menu in the middle of the top of each screen, labelled "Toolbox". * It has a separate "create a page" interface, which makes creating a page a pleasure http://wiki.ehow.com/index.php?action=easy * Empty pages, rather than simply saying "There is currently no text in this page", say "This discussion page has not yet been started, click '''here''' to leave the first comment."
Happily, they are CC-licensed. However, they are CC-NC, and so incompatible with current Wikimedia projects.
(finally, for kicks, don't miss http://wickerpedia.org and its fine search interface)