Slashdot Mirror
Ask Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales About Online Collaboration
Back in 2001 we did a "double" Slashdot Interview with Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the then-brand-new Nupedia, which has since become the amazingly useful Wikipedia. This is a perfect time to catch up with Jimbo (as friends call him), and learn not only how he managed to make Wikipedia work and grow so well, but what we can do to help -- and what future plans he has for this outstanding Web resource. (10 of your highest-moderated questions will be sent to Jimbo by email. We'll post his answers as soon as we get them back.)
Where did you get that nick name? Does it have some meaning? Oh, and any easter eggs in Wikipedia we should look for?
I think you mean the "Freedom" resistance.
One of the more unique aspects of the Wikipedia (aside from the entire concept of a community edited reference) is its license. The current license for content seems to fit rather well with the goals of the project, but seems to cause a few hurdles as well (i.e. publishing a print version of the Wikipedia). So I guess my question is, what other license models did you consider when starting out with the project and what made you go with the current one? Also, looking back would you have done anything different with the licensing?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Has there been any major academic co-operation from major universities or research groups to contribute wikipedia?
I know people contribute individually, but I am just curious to see if there has been any major institutional contributions that the project is aware of.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
What's the current state of donations and what is the future of Wikipedia if fund raising without advertisements does not increase?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
When is wikipedia going to get google ads or some other form of text ads?
How has the word about wikipedia been spread? Has wikipedia actually paid a dime for all it's publicity, I don't think I've seen any advertisement when I think about it.
What really motivates people to write extensive information about a subject? How reliable is the information the some John Doe submits?
Can you ping me now?... Good!
Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?
And do you see the future direction being more or less that way?
Do you foresee having to add more complexity to your user system? Some kind of rating/karma system to discourage people who have a tendency to write libel?
.sig error: carrier signal lost.
Hi,
First of all, the concept of a community-built encyclopedia, open to submissions and revisions from users, is wonderful. It's much like open-source, in fact, and Wikipedia certainly exemplifies how to reapply the OS model to other contexts.
However, the contexts of encyclopedias and software are different. Significantly so. I'm interested specifically in quality control- you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior.
In what ways can a Wiki article be bad, and how can one tell? Do you think QC is a large issue for Wikipedia, and do you have any plans to further integrate the community in the QC process (perhaps akin to the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system)?
Best,
Raindance
Is there an effort to get articles written on specific missing topics? If one looks at a commercial encyclopedia, the full range of human knowledege is covered. On Wikipedia, OTOH, one finds several articles about slashdot trolls, for instance, while other (important) fields are still unwritten.
How is (and how will) the constant bickering between differing sides of the more controversial issues (abortion, religion, etc...) be addressed? Do you expect any changes to the current system, in which it seems the same pages get edited by the same people back and forth every day?
The systems in place to protect the database from "crapflooders" and "trolls" seems to work quite well. However, someone who is hell-bent on making it their business to turn a particular entry into an edit war unless they "win" seems to still be an issue. The lesser-read entries are more of a concern. For example, I went to look up some information on the Nintendo Mario character and found this user called Marcus2 who constantly kept making edits to other people entries based on his own point of view. Since these entries aren't as of a high profile as, say, Saddam Hussein, what kinds of safeguards can you think of to help ensure less popular topics become skewed?
Have you ever considered p2p-based alternatives to deliver Wikipedia articles, to reduce the load on the web servers?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?
As Wikipedia grows, so grows the opportunity for misinformation to creep in. With a relatively small work, there is a lot of public scrutiny on each piece. What happens when the database becomes huge? What group would care for the integrity of the information?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I like the concept of a wiki, but I'm a bit concerned about the current implementation.
Right now, we are seeing several instances where crawlers are disrupting wikis, spammers are embedding wiki links to their sites to boost their Google rankings, and advertisers are placing ads in wikis until someone goes through and nukes them.
Do you have any thoughts as to how wikis can be modified to prevent things like this in the future?
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
wikipedia has everything, they even have a self-referential entry, are there plans as this grows to have any kind of trusted moderator system? how do you handle people who troll (input bad data, delete good data)?
steal this sig
How did you get so many contributors to Wikipedia?
Do you think your techniques could be used for other
projects as well?
(Specifically, as an open source author, I would love to have my users collaboratively developing the user manual - what do I need to get this going?)
Han-Wen
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Is there a limit of how successful an open wiki system can be? Sooner or later, not only some simple minded lunatics will try to attack the wiki by breaking its content, but there may be distributed denial-of-service attacks from hacked systems (which makes banning-by-IP impossible) and more intelligent automated vandalism (e.g. inserting semi-random words or sentences in the texts).
Do you think that a volunteer force can defeat this forever manually, or do you expect that wikipedia will be more restricted at one point?
For instance, an Advogato-like trust network could be used to make sure that people are real, and a voting system for entries from unknown contributors.
How do you think Wikipedia helps humans overcome their tendency to hoard knowledge? In capitalist societies, those with specialized knowledge can reap tremendous profits if market demand warrants. Even in non-capitalist societies, those with specialized knowledge may receive elevated status or other powers. Given that Wikipedia follows a not-for-profit model of anonymous submissions, what drivers lead people to contribute? Do you think status-oriented, rent-seeking individuals contribute to Wikipedia?
-- SYS 64738 --
I like everything about Wikipedia but the name. It (like other uses of wiki) supposedly derives from the Hawai'ian word for "quick", and it has always seemed to me like those clever white folks making fun of the baby-talk spelling of those dumb natives. Has anyone else raised this issue, or am I being hyper-sensitive?
Ofcourse, these projects go dead against the brick and mortar corporations (Microsoft, Britannica), which, for years have based their business around selling content that is now available for free due to the effort put in by organizers and volunteers of these open-source projects.
Needless to say, these corporations have been openly attacking these volunteer activities as anti-constitutional, anti-capitalistic, etc. Do you think, that collaborative, volunteer-based societies are the thing of the future? Do you think that someday people/organizations doing things for the good_of_society rather than for profit (hate that term) will become a rule rather than an exception?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I saw "Slashdot Trolling Phenomenon" live at Whiskey a-go-go before they hit it big and sold out.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ever thought of offering alternative data access services other than HTML ?
examples of other successful community driven sites such as IMDB can be queried via email (in a structured way) and a huge number of applications are now built upon these capabilities alone, ever thought of offering up the data in alternative formats (XML/SOAP/TELNET/TXT etc etc) so clever programmers can create applications that could utilise the data in new and interesting ways ?
How do you feel about China's blocking of Wiki, and what effect, if any, do you think it'll have on the service that Wikipedia can and cannot provide to both the Chinese and the world community?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Have there been any attempts by corporations to purchase and/or secure rights to the WikiWiki technology?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
It's because Britannica plans to provide a good product and a warrantee that Wikipedia can't. Microsoft is scared because it knows it doesn't provide as good of a product as it should, and the fact that there is a competive product that does the job almost as well (leave that up to debate) for the perfect price leaves Microsoft just a little scared.
Posting anonymously, well, for obvious reasons.
Currently, the direction and "policies" of wikipedia are set by a very small, very active, and very vocal cabal. This group of users rejects any change to the fundamental power structure of wikipedia unless it suits their needs, and detracts from the project either by driving away users who disagree with the power structure, or outright banning of those users.
There seems to be no effective way to get the cabal members under control, and looking at the history of wikipedia over the past two years shows that this group has steadily grown in influence, control, and outright power through their monopolization of VfD (to squelch dissent) and the Sysop-creation process (to insure only like-minded users are granted any privilege). Additionally, every new ability granted to Sysops, despite being wrapped with "rules" and "policies", has found itself wide-open to abuse with no effective punishment being directed at the abusers.
Jimbo, what can be done to re-level the playing field and rein in the cabal?
Frankly, I'm surprised Wikipedia hasn't performed a massive purge on these articles.
Wikipedia has experienced trememdous growth over the last couple years. It has surpassed all other encyclopedias in terms of article count and up-to-date content. However, it seems that wikipedia could have a stifling effect on other encyclopedia companies that are simply unable to compete. Has wikipedia's presence hurt the market for printed encyclopedias?
How do you ensure the accuracy of the entries?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
the abillity to have colabertation in artwork similar to wikipedia and open source. I see this would be most usefull in 3d applications. If there were a universal format for 3d that could be easily converted to-from other 3d formats. This way someone could create a 3d model of say, the statue of liberty, this could then be improved appon and details added by the general public and anytime someone wanted to have a statue of liberty in their 3d environment it would already be available with eventually nearly exacting details.
Is this something that is possible with the type of frame work? Would it be possible within the artistic communities?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
When are they gonna come out with the "Hitchhiker's Guide" handheld version of the database? ipods are already smaller than the prop used for the Guide in the 80's tv series, and the total text data is only what like 17 gigs or something? And I could put as much "Yankees Sucks" vandalism in it as i wanted.
Any comments on The Open Encyclopedia Project which appears to have a similar objective/goal as Wikipedia - which you have done a very nice job with BTW! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
(10 of your highest-moderated questions will be sent to Jimbo by email.
Yeah, but can I submit an edit to someone else's highly moderated post?
I would like to be able to have a copy of Wikipedia for offline use. When will we see the first Wikipedia "distribution"? (SuSE/Redhat etc. Wikipedia anyone?)
What are you currently involved in as far as legal pressure to modify the current system of copyright and/or patent law that restricts the public domain and the availability and distribution of information? Where have we gone from Eldred v. Ashcroft?
What can we do to help in the current efforts?
Do you have frequent legal issues brought against you by others with regards to your material, or has this been the exception rather than the rule?
How are these issues dealt with, are there any cases that are particulary indicative of the problems with today's copyright laws?
Thanks for your time, keep up the good work.
online for 48 hours,
One great source--if you can trust it, contains the familiar criticism that "it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability."
How do you respond to this comment?
Does you feel that the Wikipedia community has group standards that are comparable to, say, the group standards of people who have graduated from journalism schools?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Just like SCO, how do you know that Britanica or Encarta is not going to sue you if they think that your articles infringe on their copyright. What bothers me is that, they can also collect damages from the past infringment, so removing the content may not be enough.
How do you protect the integrity and uniqueness of Wikipedia?
I hope you are careful about this situation, because slashdot community will not save wikipedia if such a problem occurs in the future.
Now that you're the new posterboy for collaborative media, are you going to pull a "Rusty Foster" and run away with all of the money Wikipedia's users have donated to the cause?
I understand that there were not any good alternatives to the GNU FDL when Wikipedia was started. But would you rather pick a Creative Commons license for the project today?
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I understand the concept of free as in freedom, and not as in free beer. I recognize that they are not always the same thing. And I am an advocate of free software, quite frankly.
But one night when I was driving home with my father, I explained to him the concept behind wikipedia. He thought it was fascinating, and yet it dumbfounded him. How can such a thing afford to exist? What about the massive server costs?
I did the usual explaining of donations and such. However, he raised a valid point: It would be difficult for us to have many successful projects donation-wise.
How do you think free as in freedom content can continue to exist in the future, and where do you see it going... financially?
http://mediagoblin.org/
That is to say, do you know if libraries (especially any major research libraries) have begun linking to Wikipedia on said libraries' online resource pages?
my pet machine
Victory to the Wikipedia Red Faction!
Other encyclopedias cite sources for their work. Wikipedia does not seem to have a facility for this, and I have yet to see sources cited in any of the articles. Am I correct in my assumptions? Why aren't sources cited? It would add credibility to the project.
Proverbs 21:19
Speaking about application of the wiki approach in other fields: What about using the wiki approach for the formulation of laws? Imagine if you would be able to co-author your own laws!
Of course there would have to be the normal off-wiki voting by the usual legal bodies, also probably some law experts would do a finish before that, but a "pre-final" version of the law could be developed the Wiki way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What is the incidence of well-meaning but misinformed people introducing incorrect information? Do you make any attempt to track this?
Related, what is the incidence of what appears to be intentional sabotage by introducing incorrect information? Can you distinguish?
... this isn't the right place to ask, but how about integrating Project Gutenberg with Wikipedia? Wouldn't it be great to have hyperlinked online books? :-))
Set a cookie, ads are disabled for 24 hours...
http://www.azwardriving.com
As an individual who has always had a fascination with epistemology, I find that I learn better when I see the big picture and the connections/relationships between sets of knowledge. This is the main reason why I so embrace the Wikipedia project in that the user is not limited to the "2-dimensional plane" that a single article might offer, but instead can move vertically between areas of knowledge by using the links within articles.
On that note, are there plans to make use of any innovative user interfaces for organizing knowledge? Specifically, I have in mind something akin to The Brain, a sort of visual neural network for knowledge that I first saw used at Ray Kurzweil's site. Could you forsee a tool similar to this as enhancing Wikipedia's functionality?
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
A wikipedian answers for you: No. He even uses User:Jimbo Wales as his (central) Wikipedia user page.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Today, to write into a wikipedia article, you find a page, make a few changes in wiki syntax, and talk about the changes in the talk page. You also send notes in your personal user page.
I'm wondering: Is that process going to remain the same?
What process do you see people using in the year 2015 to collaboratively build articles in the future?
What about organizing groups of related pages- what kind of process do you think will develop there?
QUESTION: Are there any plans to link wikipedia to everything2? For example, each wikipedia entry could have a link to the corresponding e2 node, and vice versa. This could enhance the usefulness of both, don't you think?
Currently I am dealing with the qualification of a few programs I have written for an Evil Corporation. Part of the process is an intensive documentation section. Currently I am using MediaWiki as a way for my frequent in house users to share their examples and notes on the program's API.
With this use in mind, have you thought about actively marketing your software to corporations as a tool to motivate developers (in house) with documentation writing and note-making? This would surely help out larger corporations where developer interaction may be sparse across divisions.
I could see this as a possible source of revenue for Wikipedia, because I'm certain my Evil Corporation would benefit from wiki's taking over the current Word File documentation that floats about.
How do we keep the entries honest?
I was able to alter a current entry with no questions asked. The change was an attempt to add information according to my point of view.
It seems to me that someone could do this with an agenda and repeat daily. Is there anything to stop someone from leaning entries in favor of political or (anti)corporate positions.
Once an entry is considered historically correct, can the entry be locked? Would we want to?
I realize there is a way to point out disputes once found. I'm concerned with bent truth, finalizing a dispute and keeping it from recurring.
KenWood
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
A bit OT.. but please folks, the Wikimedia foundation could really use some big bucks from the government instead of relying on the few PayPal donations.
There's a possible NEH grant the Wikipedia community is working on filling out right now, that is due July 15, that could give a grant up to $500,000. If you have some time, please help fill it out here . The grant is aimed towards digital/online reference works, and Wikipedia fits the bill perfectly. It'd be a shame to pass this opportunity up.
Posted Anon for your non-whoring pleasure
Is Wikipedia basically becoming the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Proverbs 21:19
Considering the fact that wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, are there any real potential fears that the lack of a steady cash flow may cause the whole project to collapse? Has any (and what kind of) unfavorable contingency plans been considered (like ads) and outright rejected, only to be reconsidered again at a later time?
I notice that recently the Wikipedia server(s) have been down for repairs and replacements. When is this going to finish or is it an ongoing thing?
Also the text search function has been disabled for a while, but recently it was enabled for a short period, I thought it was great and quite a lot better than the google search, is it going to be brought back permanently?
Finally, how do you ensure that the content of articles are not too politically biased or don't totally reflect one side of story or issue other than other people changing or adding to an article when they read it?
Love the site, keep up the good work.
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
Besides the fact that Wikipedia likes the neutral point of view, Wikimedia (who runs the site) is trying to register as a tax-exempt organization, for fundraising! fundraising! fundraising! purposes. That may potentially restrict what the Foundation may do from that perspective.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What new Wiki projects are in the work? Would it be possible to do a Wiki-style Bible commnetary?
What steps did you take to make the transition from self-funded to funded by donations?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
We've already seen all of the things you describe. A bot attacked last month doing move page vandalism (the hardest kind to revert), and so we temporarily disabled new account creation while we fixed the problem. IN the future, we'll probably impliment capatcha's for new account creation. Admins are given 'shortcut' revert powers (anyone can revert, but admins can do it very easily) - this makes manual cleanup of most things very easy.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I made changes to two pages, the Eden Prairie, Minnesota page and the Great fire of Rome page. In the first page I changed the year of Ellet's visit to Eden Prairie from 1852 to 1857. In the second page I added a sentence to the end of the second paragraph: "Recently discovered evidence has led some modern historians to believe that Nero was in fact guilty of causing the fire." Both changes are (as far as I know) blatantly false. However, after less than half an hour both pages had disappeared from the "recent changes" page (even if I told it to display the last 500 changes) and no one had corrected either error. Unless I am mistaken, once the pages left the recent changes page the only way the errors would have been eliminated is if someone visited one of the pages, recognized the error and reverted the page to an accurate version. Since it seemed very unlikely that this would happen any time soon I reverted the two pages back to the correct version myself.
Is there a safe-guard that I don't know about that protects against sneaky vandalism? If not, what do you plan to do to keep this kind of vandalism from becoming a serious problem?
After all, slashdot and kuroshin show that voting works to weed out incorrect content!
As 'Replies to Common Objections' explains, it's impossible to damage the information stored (short of an unpatched OS/MySQL/CVS vulnerability), easy to clean up the damage done, easy to monitor changes collaboratively (anyone can see the list of recent changes), etc. Defacements tend to be reverted in minutes. There's also a frank admission of wiki*'s flaws. Future possible countermeasures are discussed here, including authentication, peer-review, etc.
The same wikipedia response to common objections talks about bots, automated attacks, marginal quality, etc.
It's even possible to prevent defacing of a link you plan to 'publish': in July 7, 2004's wikipedia story, someone mentioned wikipedia and needing to link to a specific version of a wikipedia entry to prevent slashdot-referenced articles from being doctored. Turned out that this, too, was trivial to implement. In other words, I could create a set of URL's to unalterable articles simply by using the
'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=
Pretty cool, huh?
Are yuo == teh suck!!1?
I've seen occurrences where people are overprotective of their work and revert back to it when any change is made -- even if it's a good change, such as one that clarifies or corrects bad prose. Basically, some people put their ego above the good of the article.
I don't have the patience to get into an edit war with someone over a clarification, and I wonder if Wikipeida could (and should) be expanded to counter the ego effect. In particular, maybe a few concepts could be borrowed from Slashdot: a contributor's behavior is judged by moderators, giving people incentive to stick around on the same account and build up good reputations. Any reversion by a low-credit or no-credit user against the work of a high-credit user could be flagged in a particular way on the "recent changes" page.
A system that rewards good behavior would make me, for one, more inclined to work on Wikipedia (articles on film history and natural language processing are a bit lacking). You could give authorities such as professors good accounts, right off the bat, to get them to contribute their expertise without worrying about bicker-battles with teenagers. Basically, it needs some way to unflatten the user pool.
Who are (or have been) your favorite Slashdot trolls, and why?
For legal issues brought before us - I believe these are quite rare. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of policing for coypright violations.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Do you see any way in which readers of a future version of the Wikipedia could choose for themselves on an individual basis who they trust, and be presented with an edited view of the data based on that preference?
This might require third order mediated trust
Where do you see Wikipedia in ten years?
---
WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
In a nutshell, what you're saying boils down to the following:
The people who run the place are reasonably competent, reasonably honest, and treat the contributors with reasonable justice and consideration (if all those weren't true, the quality wouldn't be so damn high).
The people who run the place tend to sidline the paranoid dingbats (like you) who'd rather engage in endless intramural power struggles than do real work.
That's a pretty good thumbnail sketch of a competent project management team.
Sounds like somebody's doing something right over there.
I've never yet met anybody who'll admit to posting on Slashdot. So who are all these people?!
Here's an idea to address the comments of some posters and press articles about accountability and quality control.
Although I don't consider Wikipedia's model inherently worse for accountability or QC than a traditional encyclopedia model, some will find value in addressing these points, just as some people find value in GNU/Linux indemnification.
My question is, "What do you think of the following idea?"
Create a community of users with credentials for whatever topics they are knowledgeable in, each with a web page showing their credentials.
Create a mechanism that lets these people validate Wikipedia entries at whatever points in the article's revision history they feel is appropriate.
Provide a link from validated article to validator's web page so users who can see who validated the article at what point.
This plan maintains free access and allows anyone to edit and provides some accountability. Users can trust the validator as much as they trust his or her reported credentials. If trolls edit a page away from validity, users can revert to the last validated version. More than one validator can validate a page at different versions, so users can choose which version to trust.
If you wanted yet more accountability, you could have meta-validators validate the validators. Around this level, you probably have the same level of accountability as a traditional encyclopedia.
Side question:
What establishes the accountability of traditional encyclopedias? Their long history? Their brand names? Those properties are not inherent to paper encyclopedias. Is it their profit motive? Many counterexamples exist to a profit motive achieving accountability.
For better or for worse, accountability these days often means you can be accountable for damages if you are wrong. I doubt any traditional encyclopedias have that property any more than Wikipedia.
For example, Slashdot is owned by OSDN, has advertising, does not have a democratic article submission process but does have a very democratic moderation policy.
Kuro5hin has a more democratic article submission policy than Slashdot, since unlike Slashdot, the users decide what is news. Well, different strokes for different folks, but that is how things are set up
Wikipedia does not currently have advertising, is controlled by Jimmy Wales (who finances Wikipedia with his porn sites), who is an Ayn Rand fanatic. He chose who the first admins would be which include a rabid right-wing Moonie whose handle is Ed Poor. This group is self-selecting and all articles on politics, history, biographies of certain figures and so forth is suffuse with their American, white, white collar perspective of things. I am a white white-collar American, but they seem alien even to me - the US government and big business is always right, anyone Reagan or Bush wouldn't like is wrong (from the Russians to the Sandinistas to the Cubans to the Iraqis to the Palestinians and so on and so forth). It is not an "open" collaboration because these hand-picked admins by Jimmy Wales, the porn magnate randroid, have control of the site and act in this manner.
It does not look that unusual to an American perhaps because it is similar to the corporate media. But of course, people who work for the corporate media are paid for their effort, Wikipedia volunteers aren't. Yet the same ideological hegemony remains. Wales gets the same edifice other media millionaires like himself gets build, with the same ideological hegenomy, but he gets people to build it for him for free.
These are things to be aware of - on Slashdot as well as Wikipedia. I mean, Slashdot is NOT a totally open forum for hackers of all stripes. On the other hand, Usenet is often too all over the place, and too unconstrained (spam more than flames nowadays). True people's encyclopedia's, true forums for IT people are yet to be built. The chaos of Usenet would make many an anarchist cringe - structures are being built, and must be built that allow the freedom of Usenet publishing, plus the personal freedom of choosing whether to go in for collective moderation or not (like Slashdot - we can ignore -1 flames if we like. There seems to be a lot of Wales fans here so I suppose I risk being sent to -1). It must be remembered that Slashdot and Wikipedia are not it, and these forms are being built, and need help being built.
I've reciently come across a fork of wikipedia wikiinfo. How do you feel about this, good thing, bad thing? Does it indicate signs of problems in wikipedia?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
* torrent-based (+rendezvous for lans) so it can be serverless.
* use it with any kind of document, not just the "wikicode" bastardized HTML. Stick it in OpenOffice. That kind of collaboration/sharing/tracking feature would blow MS Office away.
I use a wiki for my own personal use all the time. I wish that I could use it for any kind of writing, but I really need a real word processor for some things.
Is there any attempt to keep entries in multiple languages synchronized? Is that something that people strive for, or do you just have multiple wikipedias with some translated instructions?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Will scholars snicker at me for citing thusly?
"...are gay lovers. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_and_Stimpy, 23:30, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC))"
All seriousness aside...
Do people cite Wikipedia seriously and get taken seriously? My hope is that the answer is yes, but my fear is that the answer is no.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
After I discovered wikipedia I carefully started making a few corrections. I was horrified to discover that WP logs IP addresses of anonymous editors and displays them on the web for all to see for years after the edit.
I looked for an email address to contact someone to complain about this, but I couldn't find anything for unregistered users.
This made me very, very angry. I understand you need a method to keep out the trolls but I'm a legit user and I now consider contributing to wikipedia something end users should be warned to avoid.
Which is a shame, because WP is such a beautiful idea.
Do you mean like this?
/. knows the history of what happened over the past couple of years post dot bomb collapse, I would be interested. H2G2 also had quite a bit more content than Wikipedia originally, primarily because they had a jump start over Wikipedia.
It is almost sad to think of how that name has been abused. I have specifically not contributed to H2G2 in part because of the copyright of what gets contributed. The Wiki* heirarchy (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikitionary, etc.) is released under the GFDL and the content is owned by the original author. In theory you can take one of your books, and as long as it is your own content you can re-release it under other licenses, just like you can do with GPL'd software. This is not the case with H2G2.
Originally it had quite a bit more brashness, and had content that went all over the place. It looks like it has degerated into a cute plaything for the BBC, which BTW owns the copyright for everything in H2G2 right now. The Old URL still resolves into this current site, and if anybody on
Thanks for asking this question. I was recently at a conference where I presented an idea for a collaborative system for something where there doesn't seem to be one at the momemnt. I used a couple of examples to try and demonstrate my point of what genuine collaboration was on the web, moreso than just sending emails. One example was Wikipedia and the other was Distributed Proofreaders.
If you look at either of these websites in any detail, there are scores of devices and virtual rewards used to keep people interested, and to keep the regulars coming back to keep taking part in the community and continue building it.
I'd be very interested to know what the Wikipedia engineers believe are the most important and successful devices that they use to encourage people to continue contributing to the community.
Can you say something bad about Everything2?
Please be very careful when you use the Wikipedia random page as your home page... and you also sometimes use your computer to give presentations to large groups of clients. The following is a true story that happened Wednesday last week.
I was connected to the projector demoing some software, and had to bring up my browser to search for something. Firefox started up, along with the wonderful random Wikipedia article ready to teach me a new interesting fact for the day. The interesting fact for today was...'Penile inversion'.
Try 'splainin that to your colleagues... :]
http://open-site.org/help/Using_Our_Data/ should be useful. Seems a bit like using ODP.
The biggest bummer with Wikipedia is that no sooner do you put time and effort into writing an article than some bozo goes and trashes it. Why not let people write their own articles that would be read-only, and scored by other users a la Slashdot. For any given topic, a list of articles would appear with scores/capsule reviews.
And make Wikipedia useless to editors with visual impairments?
There are many "some rights reserved" Creative Commons licenses. Some of them do not distinguish between commercial and other reuse. The one closest in spirit to the GNU FDL appears to be Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
Finally, this criticism implies that general-purpose encyclopedias are widely cited in scholarly works. That's not done; even if they are expertly written and fact-checked, they are usually many years behind the latest research in an area.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Jimbo, Considering the high calibur of your encyclopedia generally speaking, I am disapointed that you shun alternative energy technologies. You will not allow such topics as magnetic motors, gravity motors, etc, even though there is a growing body of claims and even evidence. It seems quite cowardly to not tackle these topics just because they are sometimes laughed at by the mainstream. Why will you not allow such bleeding edge topics to be addressed, identified as such? See PureEnergySystems.com and FreeEnergy.GreaterThings.com
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
I've been thinking about this for some time. Suppose you can go to an on-line encyclopedia like Wikipedia, and enter snippets of your favorite code in a well-defined formalism. E.g. on the page about backtracking, you can place the implementation of a very high-level backtracking algorithm. On the page "8 queens", you provide the code for the 8 queens problem (a typical example of backtracking, from chess). These articles refer to each other in their "see also" sections. If done correctly, tools can be written that automatically produce entire, working algorithms by combining the code snippets on various articles, e.g. producing a working 8 queens solver in C++, Java or Python.
This would be like turning "design patterns" into "implementation patterns" and have them combined automatically into working code.
I know this is a rather radical deviation from Wikipedia's current focus. Is there any interest in this kind of development? Has Jimmy thought about similar extensions to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has done a fantastic job so far in building up a valuable resource from scratch.
However, as articles develop over time, one would assume that it gets harder to improve them. Would it be reasonable to have articles initially open for everyone to edit, but then make them harder to modify as their quality is judged to have improved?
And once there is enough material written about a topic, the editorial and fact-checking functions get more important. Could a shortage of good editors and specialists limit the future growth of Wikipedia, especially for more in-depth articles where only a few can judge nuances of quality?
I know this is a late question and probably won't get modded up, but I'll ask it anyway:
What lead to the demise of Nupedia? What is wrong with a set of peer-reviewed articles instead of the free-for-all that Wikipedia as turned into? Can a more scholarly version of Wikipedia ever succeed? (I.E. something more like Nupedia where you have to somehow demonstrate knowledge of a particular topic first.)
While I can find info about this elsewhere, I would like to get Jimmy Wales' perspective of this, particularly with his ties to Nupedia in the past.
Suppose I want to reference a Wikipedia article in a scholarly paper. I would like to be able to reference an article that is: (a) archival, so that I know future readers of my work will be able to find it, and (b) authoritative, so that readers will trust the reference. Is Wikipedia either of these?
Wikipedia seems very active and thorough today, but what's to ensure that people will continue to update and improve it in the future? Is the current level of activity on it just a passing fancy that people will lose enthusiasm for in time?
Wikipedia already displays paid text advertisements on Google. I thought it was a free project, not a commercialized encyclopedia...
When Wikipedia will start paying money to the editors who worked so hard to create its articles and releasing them all for free under GFDL?
Isn't it immoral that thousands of editors sacrificed their time and energy to create a site that in the future may generate lots of revenue by advertisements?
I will never contribute to a site that just takes my article without giving me anything in return, even a symbolical $1 payment.
Most of the visitors and editors of Wikipedia content are from the United States.
Articles about the World Cup, for instance, which is the world's most-watched sporting event, is decidedly more tepid and thin than, say, the Super Bowl.
How can Wikipedia expand interest in writing on more international issues (Italy's constitution, maybe?), and for more international contexts? Or, more importantly, how is Wikipedia going to market itself to topic experts to contribute?