A sampler of Wikipedia's
current edit format

Those scared off by the "jumble of coding mixed with plain English paragraphs" in Wikipedia's entry edit forms should feel reassured by updates to the interface — thanks to a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation.

A five-person team will use the money to identify what aspects of the editing process intimidate users that could otherwise make valuable article contributions. It shall also "hide" technical elements irrelevant to contributors, writes the Associated Press.

The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia, which operates as a non-profit and contains over two million articles produced, edited and for the most part moderated by users. It ranks seventh of the top 10 most popular websites in the US, and ranks second among the most popular social media sites in the UK.

Founder Jimmy Wales has tried spinning the Wikipedia model off into other, more potentially profitable, platforms, launching Wikia Search in beta last December. Though traffic to the site has grown, Wikia Search has generated little mainstream enthusiasm.

In July, Google introduced a publicly-authored knowledge site called Knol. Like Wikipedia, the pages are news-heavy and well-tended by editors, but some expressed discomfort about Google serving as both provider of content and decider of content relevance (through its search engine algorithm).