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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds
Wikipedia is an excellent project, and Slashdot readers' questions for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were just as excellent -- as are Jimmy Wales' answers to 12 of the highest-moderated questions you submitted.
1) Donations - by southpolesammy
What's the current state of donations and what is the future of Wikipedia if fund raising without advertisements does not increase?
Jimmy Wales:
We are always in need of funds for hardware. I still cover the bandwidth and hosting charges, and will do so for the foreseeable future, but we rely on community donations for the hardware that we need to run the site.
Our growth rate continues to be staggering.
One of the reasons I was excited to be asked by Roblimo to do this interview is that the slashdot community in particular has been so generous to us in the past. This is an audience that understands the importance of what we're doing, the importance of spreading the idea of GNU-style freedom far beyond the free software community.
Anyone who would is interested in donating money to help, please visit the site to see how we use the money.
2) Advertising? - by obli
How has the word about wikipedia been spread? Has wikipedia actually paid a dime for all its publicity? I don't think I've seen any advertisement when I think about it.
Jimmy Wales:
No, we don't pay for publicity, never have and most likely never will; it hasn't been necessary, and I don't see that it will be necessary.
The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well.
3) Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs by ewanrg
Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?
Jimmy Wales:
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.
Software is unique in that there are network externalities and various other mechanisms of "lock in" that make it hard for us to get people to switch to free alternatives. People are very comfortable with Microsoft products, and they fear that if they switch, they'll give up all the skills that they've learned (ctrl-alt-del!) and won't be able to share files with others.
But the things our community is producing are different. There's no cost to switching from an outdated old encyclopedia to Wikipedia -- just click and learn, and there you go. You can switch before your friends switch, but the knowledge you learn will be perfectly compatible.
4) Quality Control - by Raindance
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)?
Jimmy Wales:
Well, encyclopedia articles can be bad in a lot of obvious ways, and some subtle ways. Obvious ways include simply incorrect information, or grammatical errors, or strong bias. Subtle ways can include milder forms of bias, dull writing, etc.
Quality control is what a lot of our internal processes are all about. Every page on the site shows up on Special:Recentchanges, and individuals have 'watchlists' that they can (and do) use to keep an eye on particular articles.
I am currently working on a first draft proposal to the community for our "next phase" of review, which will involve getting serious about producing a "1.0 stable" release. The concept here is very analagous to that in the software world -- the existing site is always the cutting edge nightly build, which rocks of course, but we also need a stable release that's been reviewed and tested and found good.
I'll put out that draft in a couple of weeks, and get feedback and revisions from the community, and then we will hold a project-wide vote.
That process might involve some bits that are like the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system, but it's likely to be much more of an editing-oriented process than voting-oriented process.
5) How to balance coverage? - by mangu
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.
Jimmy Wales:
This is increasingly a solved problem. It is true that we have quite a bit of pertinent information about slashdot trolls, but we also have just about every important topic as well. Of course some areas are in greater need than others, and finding them and resolving them is an ongoing effort in the community.
I think you'd be pretty hard pressed anymore to find topics that are in Britannica that we don't cover at all. It's still not that hard, if you look around a bit, to find rare articles in Britannica that are better than our article on the same topic. But it's getting harder all the time.
So to answer your question directly, yes, there are constant efforts to get articles written on specific topics, and to flesh out areas that we haven't yet covered as well as we should.
6) The constant bickering... - by Rageon
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?
Jimmy Wales:
In our community, we very strongly discourage that kind of bickering. One of the biggest social faux pas that one can commit is the dreaded "revert war". But humans are humans, and they will argue, and we have to understand that there will never be a process whereby we eliminate all of that.
7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?
Jimmy Wales:
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We're doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.
It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.
Those kinds of big picture ideals make people very passionate about what we're doing. And it makes it possible for people to set aside a lot of personal differences and disputes of the kind that I talked about above, and just compromise to keep getting the work done.
I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
8) Advertisers, Spammers, Search Engines, oh my! - by RomSteady
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?
Jimmy Wales:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple to solve problems like that. One of the first tricks I would try is to parse the wiki text that someone inputs to see if it contains an external link. If so, then only in those cases, require an answer to a captcha.
Second step, keep editing wide open for everyone, but restrict the ability to post external links to people who are trusted by that community. Make it really easy for trusted users to extend the zone of trust, because you want to encourage participation.
Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works.
People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community.
9) Webservices ? Data Formats ? - by sh0rtie
Ever thought of offering alternative data access services other than HTML ? examples of other successful community driven sites such as IMDB [imdb.com] 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 ?
Jimmy Wales:
Yes, yes, yes. I am 100% all for it. Join wikitech-l, the technical mailing list, and ask about specifics, and we'd be thrilled to have more developers volunteering to help us get those kinds of things implemented quickly and correctly.
10) China and Wiki - by Stargoat
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?
Jimmy Wales:
The block in China only lasted for a couple of days, until some administrators in the Chinese-language wikipedia appealed the ban.
My thinking on that is two-fold. First, it's a huge embarassment for the censors if they block Wikipedia, because we are none of the things that they claim to want to censor. Censoring Wikipedia is an admission that it is unbiased factual information itself that frightens you. We are not political propaganda, we are not online gambling, we are not pr0n. We are an encyclopedia.
Second, I consider it a moral imperative for our overall mission that we will not bend our principles of freedom, of the freedom of speech, of a commitment to inclusiveness and neutrality, to meet any possible demands of any government anywhere. We are a _free_ encyclopedia, with all that entails.
11) One area Wikipedia seems to lack - by wcrowe
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.
Jimmy Wales:
I think you're mistaken. We do cite sources, about as much as most encyclopedias, I think. But I do agree with you that more sources is good, and there's no question that as we move forward towards a 1.0 stable release, one of our goals will be to provide more articles with more extensive information about "where to learn more", i.e. cite original research, etc., as much as we can.
12) Money issues - by Achoi77
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?
Jimmy Wales:
Wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, and keeping us in enough servers to keep performance where we want it is a topic constantly on our minds.
But at the same time, I have every confidence that we'll be just fine. The thing is: everyone loves Wikipedia. When I asked the world for $20,000 last January, we raised nearly $50,000 in less than a week.
We are currently investigating the possibility of grants, and we are also asking you, here, today, to consider visiting the project to find out how you can help, if that's something you're comfortable with doing.
The question of advertising is discussed sometimes, but not really in the context of "will we need to accept ads to survive". The answer to that is clearly "no".
The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website.
That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission.
But it's more complex than that, even, because in large part, our success so far is due to the purity of what we're doing. We might find that accepting ad money would cut us off from possible grant money. It's a complex question.
But it is not a question that has to be answered for our continuing survival. We can keep going as we are now, with your help of course. :-)
Know someone *other than your favorite political candidate* who'd make a great Slashdot interview guest? Please email Roblimo with the person's name and contact information.
What's the current state of donations and what is the future of Wikipedia if fund raising without advertisements does not increase?
Jimmy Wales:
We are always in need of funds for hardware. I still cover the bandwidth and hosting charges, and will do so for the foreseeable future, but we rely on community donations for the hardware that we need to run the site.
Our growth rate continues to be staggering.
One of the reasons I was excited to be asked by Roblimo to do this interview is that the slashdot community in particular has been so generous to us in the past. This is an audience that understands the importance of what we're doing, the importance of spreading the idea of GNU-style freedom far beyond the free software community.
Anyone who would is interested in donating money to help, please visit the site to see how we use the money.
2) Advertising? - by obli
How has the word about wikipedia been spread? Has wikipedia actually paid a dime for all its publicity? I don't think I've seen any advertisement when I think about it.
Jimmy Wales:
No, we don't pay for publicity, never have and most likely never will; it hasn't been necessary, and I don't see that it will be necessary.
The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well.
3) Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs by ewanrg
Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?
Jimmy Wales:
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.
Software is unique in that there are network externalities and various other mechanisms of "lock in" that make it hard for us to get people to switch to free alternatives. People are very comfortable with Microsoft products, and they fear that if they switch, they'll give up all the skills that they've learned (ctrl-alt-del!) and won't be able to share files with others.
But the things our community is producing are different. There's no cost to switching from an outdated old encyclopedia to Wikipedia -- just click and learn, and there you go. You can switch before your friends switch, but the knowledge you learn will be perfectly compatible.
4) Quality Control - by Raindance
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)?
Jimmy Wales:
Well, encyclopedia articles can be bad in a lot of obvious ways, and some subtle ways. Obvious ways include simply incorrect information, or grammatical errors, or strong bias. Subtle ways can include milder forms of bias, dull writing, etc.
Quality control is what a lot of our internal processes are all about. Every page on the site shows up on Special:Recentchanges, and individuals have 'watchlists' that they can (and do) use to keep an eye on particular articles.
I am currently working on a first draft proposal to the community for our "next phase" of review, which will involve getting serious about producing a "1.0 stable" release. The concept here is very analagous to that in the software world -- the existing site is always the cutting edge nightly build, which rocks of course, but we also need a stable release that's been reviewed and tested and found good.
I'll put out that draft in a couple of weeks, and get feedback and revisions from the community, and then we will hold a project-wide vote.
That process might involve some bits that are like the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system, but it's likely to be much more of an editing-oriented process than voting-oriented process.
5) How to balance coverage? - by mangu
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.
Jimmy Wales:
This is increasingly a solved problem. It is true that we have quite a bit of pertinent information about slashdot trolls, but we also have just about every important topic as well. Of course some areas are in greater need than others, and finding them and resolving them is an ongoing effort in the community.
I think you'd be pretty hard pressed anymore to find topics that are in Britannica that we don't cover at all. It's still not that hard, if you look around a bit, to find rare articles in Britannica that are better than our article on the same topic. But it's getting harder all the time.
So to answer your question directly, yes, there are constant efforts to get articles written on specific topics, and to flesh out areas that we haven't yet covered as well as we should.
6) The constant bickering... - by Rageon
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?
Jimmy Wales:
In our community, we very strongly discourage that kind of bickering. One of the biggest social faux pas that one can commit is the dreaded "revert war". But humans are humans, and they will argue, and we have to understand that there will never be a process whereby we eliminate all of that.
7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?
Jimmy Wales:
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We're doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.
It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.
Those kinds of big picture ideals make people very passionate about what we're doing. And it makes it possible for people to set aside a lot of personal differences and disputes of the kind that I talked about above, and just compromise to keep getting the work done.
I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
8) Advertisers, Spammers, Search Engines, oh my! - by RomSteady
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?
Jimmy Wales:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple to solve problems like that. One of the first tricks I would try is to parse the wiki text that someone inputs to see if it contains an external link. If so, then only in those cases, require an answer to a captcha.
Second step, keep editing wide open for everyone, but restrict the ability to post external links to people who are trusted by that community. Make it really easy for trusted users to extend the zone of trust, because you want to encourage participation.
Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works.
People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community.
9) Webservices ? Data Formats ? - by sh0rtie
Ever thought of offering alternative data access services other than HTML ? examples of other successful community driven sites such as IMDB [imdb.com] 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 ?
Jimmy Wales:
Yes, yes, yes. I am 100% all for it. Join wikitech-l, the technical mailing list, and ask about specifics, and we'd be thrilled to have more developers volunteering to help us get those kinds of things implemented quickly and correctly.
10) China and Wiki - by Stargoat
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?
Jimmy Wales:
The block in China only lasted for a couple of days, until some administrators in the Chinese-language wikipedia appealed the ban.
My thinking on that is two-fold. First, it's a huge embarassment for the censors if they block Wikipedia, because we are none of the things that they claim to want to censor. Censoring Wikipedia is an admission that it is unbiased factual information itself that frightens you. We are not political propaganda, we are not online gambling, we are not pr0n. We are an encyclopedia.
Second, I consider it a moral imperative for our overall mission that we will not bend our principles of freedom, of the freedom of speech, of a commitment to inclusiveness and neutrality, to meet any possible demands of any government anywhere. We are a _free_ encyclopedia, with all that entails.
11) One area Wikipedia seems to lack - by wcrowe
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.
Jimmy Wales:
I think you're mistaken. We do cite sources, about as much as most encyclopedias, I think. But I do agree with you that more sources is good, and there's no question that as we move forward towards a 1.0 stable release, one of our goals will be to provide more articles with more extensive information about "where to learn more", i.e. cite original research, etc., as much as we can.
12) Money issues - by Achoi77
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?
Jimmy Wales:
Wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, and keeping us in enough servers to keep performance where we want it is a topic constantly on our minds.
But at the same time, I have every confidence that we'll be just fine. The thing is: everyone loves Wikipedia. When I asked the world for $20,000 last January, we raised nearly $50,000 in less than a week.
We are currently investigating the possibility of grants, and we are also asking you, here, today, to consider visiting the project to find out how you can help, if that's something you're comfortable with doing.
The question of advertising is discussed sometimes, but not really in the context of "will we need to accept ads to survive". The answer to that is clearly "no".
The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website.
That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission.
But it's more complex than that, even, because in large part, our success so far is due to the purity of what we're doing. We might find that accepting ad money would cut us off from possible grant money. It's a complex question.
But it is not a question that has to be answered for our continuing survival. We can keep going as we are now, with your help of course. :-)
Know someone *other than your favorite political candidate* who'd make a great Slashdot interview guest? Please email Roblimo with the person's name and contact information.
Wikipedia seems like a truly priceless knowledgebase. It would be a good idea if a non-electronic backup could be made and stored away in the event of a catastrophic world crisis. I realize it is over 700,000 articles, but it would be such a shame for something like a nuclear war to wipe out all of this knowledge. Perhaps a paper edition is printed every X years (to keep up with changing articles) and properly stored?
503 Service Unavailable?!?! Slashdot? Say it ain't so!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_post
Will you burn DVDs for offline users to purchase? I like buying GNU manuals in dead tree format, to fetish, and support the community. Worth considering.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Its obviously the slashdot TROLLs who are the generous donors to Wikipedia, and Wayne knows that he can't upset the troll or his funding might dissapear.
Then again, it might just be that more people know about slashdot trolls that they do about ancient slovian history.
In general, science (especially physics) is covered quite well and the humanities less so. But that's what you'd expect given the profile of people who form the pool of contributers. This will change over the next x years are more and more of todays infant computer users grow up to be humanitarians.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.
Is this guy a betting man? Might be an easy way to make some cash (well, 5 years from now), if you could convince him to put money on it.
The cited sources might be a major issue for people doing research projects on it. I asked my librarian at the school I go to, and she had thought that it would be a bad idea to use it, because it's written by random people, instead of scholars like in "traditional" encyclopedias. Maybe this can be changed somehow to get Wikipedia look more credible.
In five years, I think this statement will stand with "This Is the Year of Linux", "Closed Source Software will Die", and "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame" as one of the dumbest of the geek community.
how is Jimmy Wales covering his own living costs?
I'm in no way bashing, just wondering how it could be possible for me myself to work on such a project? or even start some GPL style work in another context.
Um, that wasn't an answer. The question was "what do you do" and the response was "all you need is love" and a quasi-concept of how nice it will be when wikipedia is everywhere.
As it stands, you can quote Encyclopedia Britannica in any school essay. If I was marking some homework that relied on referencing Wikipedia, I'd have to fail them. Because (with some limitations) anybody with enough craftyness can write just about anything into Wikipedia. They could even write in what they're quoting. Nor is anything in there it verified 99.9% of the time.
I know many people *want* to love Wikipedia, and it has its uses, but it does have its faults. People trying to pretend those faults don't exist are starting to look like Linux zealots who have been saying Linux is about to take the desktop for the last 8 years. Don't blind yourself, realize this is not a researched encyclopedia but an interenet scrapbook. Britannica may have made errors in the past, but there're more things wrong with a handful of individual articles on Wikipedia than Britannica has made mistakes in their entire history.
n.
A rare breed of nocturnal technologically savvy coffee drinker. The anti-social A.C. is related to the neo-ludite family. The North American variety is known to infest networks of varied bandwidths and breeds quickly when the practically extinct female of the species is introduced to its natural habitat. The cubicle habitat has been providing more space and hope for the survival of these species. This important creature is part of an ecosystem that even supports the all important parasitic management weasels that live alongside them in relative harmony.
Good luck and godspeed. That last sentence brings a tear to my eye. This what I thought the Internet would be about before the bubble. I may just start to believe again.
I'm all for backups (not to mention a searchable press-quality copy), but but why not distribute it via Bittorrent and Freenet?
It seems to be cgi/perl issue as both http://slashdot.org/submit.pl & http://slashdot.org/login.pl .pl 503
give the 503 errors
see both prior post on this
re:503
login
--Fmileto
First, let me say that I love wikipedia and think its a great resource. I use it regularly. I also work at a traditional encyclopedia company (based in chicago, owned by someone real rich - you guess).
The problem I have with Jimmy's assertion that companies like mine will be out of buisness in 5 years is this: wikipedia and most thriving encyclopedias have different markets.
Our products (both print and online) are geared to the K-12 student and very little else. We take special pains to ensure that the content is at a level that our audience can digest. We talk with teachers and librarians across the world to ensure readership. We also take great pains to make sure the writing and style is consistent across the product - something that seems very important to educators.
Now, Wikipedia has many many more articles than our online product, but quantity doesn't always win out, especially in the education world. Secondly, I doubt very much that wikipedia can attain the same amount of attention to the K-12 market as we do. Its hard to offer something for free and then do all the editing and research into the market. The educators that purchase our products want to have a good qaulity resource they can point pupils to, not something they have to contribute to make it that way. This is why I don't see Wikipedia and our product as a direct competitor, Wikipedia reaches a different market altogether. For instance, I really enjoy reading Wikipedia now, just as I really enjoyed reading encyclopedia's when I was younger. The difference is I am an educated adult now and can digest the Wikipedia content. When I was in elementary school, I think most of the Wikipedia articles would have been out of my reach.
It goes without saying that traditional encyclopedia's have to change their buisness in a new information age (something we are working on very hard). However, as a product, we don't see our core audience (K-12 School and Libraries) running away from us for Wikipedia in the near future.
Keep up the work on the amazing product.
Usually when I post to Wikipedia, I always get the thought in the back of my head that basically says, "Wow.. this is such an amazing collection of human knowledge.. it'd be a great time capsule contribution, and it'd also be a great way for..well..extraterrestrials.. to learn about us.
I liked most of his responses (although his "they'll be crushed in 5 years" was a little too brunt for my tastes. Still, I think Jimmy underestimates one of the basic tenants of human nature: it's fun to be bad.
The first time I saw a Wiki, and learned enough to understand how to add to it, I was a bit surprised on how easily you could destroy the whole thing. A few types and, bam, the article was gone. Sure, there was versioning and all, so they could go back to an earlier version if they wanted, but the preventative measures they had in place for preventing random deletions (just showing the guy's IP) were crude.
So you might say "no one in the community would do that". But guess what... it's human nature to test the system, to break things. That's where an Encyclopedia Britanica or whatever, with an established history, has a leg up over Wiki.
When I open a commercial encyclopedia, I know the article I'm reading was usually typed by someone educated in the subject, edited by multiple people, and will never disappear while I'm reading it. True, there's bias and errors, and everything, but they're in all media. Quality control, which he barely addresses, is much more difficult in an environment where Joe Public can randomly delete articles.
I think Wikis are eventually going to die off, and blogs with rating systems will ultimately reign supreme. Everyone talks, everyone determines what articles are top notch, and someone truly in control can axe things if necessary. There's no true control with Wiki, and that's its biggest hurdle.
Wikipedia just seems to be the good things about open source, freedom etc. personified. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
A ruler wears a crown while the rest of us wear hats. But which would you rather have when it's raining?
has anybody thought about applying this community development towards the creation of some sort of mechanical device. Inventions could be perfected and perhaps someday there could even be open-source automobile designs. does this sound plausible to anyone? what are your thoughts?
When the wikipedia project was first announced on /. a number of years ago I remember I was writing a paper on Tiberius Gracchus. Currently there was nothing on wikipedia about him so I decided to edit my paper into an encyclopedia-ish form and upload it. This is when I was a sophomore in HS by the way. Anyway the article actually stayed as is for about two years before someone else rewrote it to make it not suck. However there are one or two sentences that bear just a hint of my original writing. Kind of neat I think.
This kind of unabashed optimism has got to stop. Now I'm at work and I'm getting all bleary eyed.
Success via trusting people & purity of ideals. G'damnit, this is going to have me verklempt for like a week.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
BitTorrent and Freenet aren't as good at distributing non-electronic media as you might think. The paper tends to clog the network cables.
May I have mine in a small PDA format with the messages "DON'T PANIC" printed in large friendly letters on the glossy plastic slipcover?
meh
If it's the same Gentoo as on Stargate Atlantis last night, apparently you get lost by walking into closets that are really elevators or transporters or something.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
For instance, I really enjoy reading Wikipedia now, just as I really enjoyed reading encyclopedia's when I was younger. You have GOT to be kidding!
that was one of the most boring responses I have ever read.
I don't think you realize how printed encyclopedias are written. Basically, they contact someone in a field and they can write basically anything they want and it goes in. Gary Olsen, who was my doctoral advisor, was contacted to write the World Book entry on Archaeabacteria. Now, he knows his stuff, and is honest, so it's a good article. But what if he didn't and wasn't? Certainly I've read just plain wrong things in printed encyclopedias
has anybody thought about applying this community development towards the creation of some sort of mechanical device.
Yep, people have been jabbering about that idea on Slashdot for quite a few years now: "Huh huh, open source space ships, huh huh!" I thought that stuff went out of style around the time the Beowulf cluster joke got stale, but perhaps I was wrong.
My thoughts? Something like this: "Beavis, you're a dumbass..."
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
E.g.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Thirty seconds ago, I followed the link to donate to Wikipedia. Fifteen seconds ago, I had decided against giving anything. Why?
1) You only accept paypal and snail-mail. Not gonna happen.
2) You only have one-time donations.
There should be a secure form for credit cards. You should allow for small, monthly donations from the provided card. This will make donating convenient, less difficult to give (over time) large amounts, and will provide a steady stream of income for wikipedia (which is more important than getting random jabs of cash, although those are nice too.)
Make donating easy, and getting donations will be easy.
When an encyclopedia article is written by an academic 'expert', the reader might be willing to forego detailed references because there's a certain trust and appeal to authority. If I read an article about physics by Stephen Hawking, in a sense he serves as his own reference.
This situation does not apply when the encyclopedia article is written by essentially anonymous contributors. There's some reliability to be derived from open community editing, but ultimately as a reader, I need to see where the info came from. In fact, unless the article is making an original contribution to knowledge, a reader should be able to reproduce all the information in the article by looking up the references.
This 'replicability' standard is nothing new; any refereed academic journal will insist on it for the portions of an article that do not represent original knowledge. IMO, It is the only way to make Wikipedia authoritative.
Finally, I hope 'references' are not lumped or confused with 'to learn more' links. They serve completely different functions.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I just started browsing Wiki not too long ago. I'm looking at it right now and it's slow as molasses. Is this normal or is it a Slashdot effect?
I have to think that Wikipedia would be _exactly_ something that Google could sponsor with its pending million$ or massive infrastructure..
Also, I notice that a bunch of entries are taken from public domain encyclopedia editions. An interesting feature would be to, say, allow 'shading' of citation sources, so that sections of text would have background colors based on a citation key... With the user's ability to filter out sources if they wish, or set a 'trust' level..
They'd be mighty useful, and might even support open-source machine translation efforts. Besides, the idea of a trolled hungarian-english dictionary would make for a hilarious skit.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
"Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works."
What the man said. It's become more and more difficult to trust anything on the net, with all the people trying to make a fast buck and all the endless scams, all the media stories about people taking advantage.
But somewhere between the Pollyanna attitudes of the pre-boom (and during-boom) years, and the more recent/current attitudes of cynical distrust and ironic distance -- somewhere remains the truth, that the net still remains a new place where good people can sometimes invest their hopes, and give some good honest work to genuinely help other people. Where good new resources can still arise.
Bravo to Jimmy Wales and all volunteers of the various Wiki projects. They're earning back the trust they give, and all of us are better for it.
-madmagic
You are a liar! That article is less than 2 years old!
Now, he knows his stuff, and is honest, so it's a good article. But what if he didn't and wasn't?
Then it is doubtful he would have been contacted. What you pay for w/ World Book or any other publisher is that initial screening.
To be really useful, such a printout should incorporate enough information to allow bootstrapping from a much lower level. If you had a 10-year-old scanner (as if such would still work) and each page had a dot-code representation of its complete data on the back (including some redundancy from other pages, perhaps) and redundant sets of scripts to use to decode the contents and code from the raw scans, it would be worth making such printouts.
If you don't have such things or if you do not consider it important to be able to recover from a disaster which destroys the Internet, you might as well distribute electronic copies worldwide and leave it at that. The cost of keeping mirrors up to date will be far lower than the price of 600 reams of paper plus ink/toner, and recovery would be immensely quicker.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
ahh how i long for the days when everything is free and open, we can share information over p2p on our linux desktops, we do all our research on wikipedia, and we all live in arcologies.
what do you think is the best niche to start converting the general public to trusting open source? they seem awfully wary of open source software and open source information sharing (perhaps rightly so), so how can we prove that it works?
oh and have people seen sketchzilla? it rules.
--
the corporate mind is pointing toward the capitalizing of ignorance
Wasn't it amazon.com whose ratings and reviews temporarily lost anonymity... to the great amusement of everyone except those gaming the system.
I would not mind unobtrusive advertising on Wikipedia if it was like the old days of PBS, where a program would begin with "The following was brought to you from a grant by Pan Am"
So, the following are things I could deal with:
1) A link on every page to "Sponsorship" which would list the biggest and/or most recent donations, and how You Too can contribute.
2) A logo-of-the-day on the start page, rotating amongst the major donors
3) This would push my limits, but the arrival page (where the referred is not on Wikipedia) could display a rotating sponsor ad, then take you on to the article. But that had better be the only time that happens, not like the every-five-or-so you see with, say Yahoo Groups.
Design for Use, not Construction!
A possible patch(note:not solution) for the bias issue is to have certain topics like abortion, religion and politics to have a central topic that is modified by admins.
Then to have people post under that with their various biases. Thus, you can read about Abortion and then read responses to key topics side by side from both perspectives. Those who are pro-life can modify the pro-life sub pages but not the pro-choice pages and vice versa.
Something like this
Abortion: Should I get one?
View point 1 | View point 2
It is your choice to do so | It is murder and is
nobody has the right to tell you | morally wrong to get an abortion
that you cannot get one. It is | many people who have gotten
your body and you can do what | an abortion regret having
you want with it | done so many years later.
And, a person looking at the wiki can modify it to show only one or more viewpoints that they agree with or that they want to see.
Don't know.. just an idea.
From the dead-tree encyclopedia guy... We take special pains to ensure that the content is at a level that our audience can digest. ... I doubt very much that wikipedia can attain the same amount of attention to the K-12 market as we do.
The English language translation of Wikipedia is the largest, but there are a dozen or more equally active translations in other languages. Consider K-12 another "language" essentially. Each language exposes the same underlying facts in their own way.
So if the English entry on Widgets is not available in Swedish, then someone who cares about knowledge in Swedish will create it. The basic research has already been done. One person doesn't have to take this all on; it will start as a stub, like all articles do, and the translation will grow alongside the English one, roughly synchronized, to appeal to the Swedish market. In fact, if the Swedish contributors do better research, the Swedish version may become the "master" article and effectively feed back into the English one.
Ditto for K-12. Only it's easier. Because in theory, anyone who speaks "adult" English can edit down into the K-12 version.
So 99% of the required K-12 base articles are already there in "adult" form. The only assumption here is that there are enough people who care about the K-12 market to do the editing for free. The amount of educators, parents, target students, and older students who are online is staggering, and I think they'd make a fantastic base of contributors/editors.
And these turn out to be the people with the most time to spend ensuring their propaganda stays in place. Unemployed liberals, for the most part, as the conservatives are too busy raking in money to be bothered with a feckin' wiki!
For improving power/CPU and size ratios, how about going to mini-ITX systems arranged on a decent 1U tray, with a central powersupply or some lucite fabricated 'rack' where they could be stacked vertically?
Kind of what blade servers do, but ghetto.
Please do not mod this as a troll on reflex. I'm continually scared by the opensource movement. This is probably the best example: true, encyclopedias aren't a huge bussiness, but the entire industry might have been eliminated. And who (potentially) can profit from it? The people who use Wikipedia, and in thsi case, a select group who (if they want to take the oppurtunity) can publish it and reap the profits. The people who contribute never get compensated. It's probably impossible, since the labor is so diffused. In my opinion, writing an encylopedia article or editing are skilled jobs and should be paid. It's sad and scary to see them eliminated.
Please stop contributing to Wikipedia right now.
There is long precedent for "easy, cheap and adequate" squeezing out "rare, expensive and tailored".
I think 5 years is about right, timewise. That's long enough for knowledge of wikipedia to percolate through to the limits of non-technical society.
You will know you need to change careers when "to wiki" becomes a verb like "to google".
SEE ALSO:
Flamebait
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
You know what feature I'd love to see? I'd love to have a random Wikipedia article show up in my mailbox each morning, just like a Word of the Day.
Just clicking on the Random Page link gave me articles on Butha-Buthe, the Chestnut-headed Bee-eater, and Farragut North. I love learning how much I don't know.
Have a look at the servers Wikipedia is using! That's some hardware Slashdot will surely like - master db is a dual Opteron with Fedora Core 2 64-bit and 1+0 RAID. The cash seems well spent.
I want to contribute to Wikipedia, but what language should I choose English as the global language or one of my native tongues (Dutch, German)?
It would be no hard decision if there were some synchronization efforts that try to move good information between different language versions.
Are there such efforts?
Alas the partitioning of information into different articles alone is not obvious and probably matter to taste and whatever, one article might cover 5 interesting paragraphs, while in a different language one spreads that information differently.
I need to have a look if I am right with that conjecture.
Regards,
Marc
Ghandi).
So I wonder, at what point is it appropriate to add a person to Wikipedia? At one extreme, every person who wants a page for him or herself could create one; in fact, one's Wikipedia page could replace one's home page. But this doesn't seem right somehow. Certainly a personal wikipedia page could contain an (auto)biography and links to related topics and people. But other stuff---like vacation photos and fan sites---do not really belong there (and we wouldn't want to clutter "the sum of all knowledge" with this).
Is this just a matter of good sense and public consensus? Would it make sense to have some kind of Wiki-social-network thing?
If J. Random Hacker endorsed the "Cryptography" and "PKI" articles, and I agree with him that those articles are accurate, then I would be likely to trust his endorsement of "Elliptical Curves" (which I know little about). Similarly, if Pete Cruft endorsed "Linux Are Teh R0ck0rz", then his opinion on "Critiquing SHA-1" may not hold much weight with me.
The same could be done on a lesser trust level without PKI by allowing visitors to "vote" on the accuracy of articles and using that to generate trust scores on other articles based on the editors.
How 'bout it, Jimmy? Is a reputation server viable for Wikipedia? It seems like that would alleviate a lot of the concerns people are expressing about the reliability of your information.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What if he just made a mistake? Would it necessarily be checked by someone, and even if it was, would they necessarily find the error?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think what your looking for is this? {haha!
i feel like its more less-useful, less-factual information, more culture and stuff. {see the haha!}
Maybe they can merge or smthg. that would be awesome.
done
What's a "captcha"? There's no Wikipedia entry :-)
Aaron Maxwell - redsymbol.net
(cur) (last) 19:25, 28 Jul 2004 Daelin m grammar cleanup
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
The Internet troll is a slang term used to describe:
1.) A post (on a newsgroup, or other forum) thought to be intended to incite controversy or conflict or cause annoyance or offense.
2.) A person who posts these.
Trolls are sometimes caricatured as socially-inept. This is often due to fundamental attribution error, as it is difficult to know the real traits of an individual solely from their online discourse. Indeed, since intentional trolls are alleged to knowingly flout social boundaries, it is difficult to typecast them as socially inept since they have arguably proven adept at their goal of inciting conflict.
Could any ad service be better suited for this than Google AdSense? Or any other well targeted ad service for that matter.
:p
Wikipedia has tons of pages of unique and coherant content. Each page could have a simple google ad (There are a variety of different formats... A skyscraper is best). The ads within that google ad would relate directly to the content of the wiki.
Google gives "Premium" service to clients with over 20 million pageviews a month. According to Wikipedia's graphs, they get about 25 million requests per day, or 750 million per month. Now, a lot of those requests are probably for images and such, but I'm pretty sure they're over the 20 million per month needed for premium service
Wikipedia could do pretty well on AdSense alone; I'd say they'd be able to stop relying on donations entirely, and still have money left over for charity.
God forbid that technological or social progress ever eliminate anyone's job.
As many people have already commented, as of yet, a general audience can't invest as much trust in Wikipedia, as in a regular encyclopedia, irrespective of the actual relative merits.
As an internal benchmarking tool, the regular Wikipedia community should employ a 'Quality' metric to judge the state of the project. Roughly, this involves randomly selecting articles from all ends of the spectrum (featured articles, some estoric subjects, some mundane topics, most visited topics, in-between traffic...etc) and have a trusted & skilful panel compare these specimens against socially and academically accepted sources like regular encyclopedias, journals and books. These reviews ought to be conducted at a suitable frequency, like every 6-8 weeks.
Other areas, directly connected to improvement, involve the wiki engine. Currently, there are many articles that could be subsumed within larger articles. Instead of maintaining the data in a separate node, they should be accessible as extracts from within the larger article. HTML anchor targets only do half the work, as they load the entire article. The mediawiki engine should be specialized to handle a modern encyclopedia. Some articles have external citations, some don't. Some articles have category boxes underneath, some don't. Some articles have structured content, some don't. Like the country entries, there ought to be article templates and tools that one can inject into, and transform a page, e.g. there can be a tool: Citations, a section of the page where all citations are collected and linked to the content they're responsible for. The difference between this feature and manually creating a HTML "citations" section is that the HTML solution is context agnostic. I should be able to search only citations from a specific group of articles or check if a citation is used elsewhere on Wikipedia, e.g. let there be a single comprehensive external link "resource repository". So, if I write an article on the sport of cricket and I inject a link to a cricket history website, that link alongwith suitable keywords I provide (metadata) gets indexed. Then anyone who searches this repository and bring up all cricket links, will have my link also come up. One can cite the same source by citing the index ID of the link. Subsequently, one can call up all articles that reference that specific link.
Basically, this is about imposing some order on this wonderful initiative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
IIRC, Encyclopedias were generally not allowed as references in my high school, and I certainly would have been laughed out of class if I attempted such a thing in college. (No, I didn't walk to school uphill, both ways!)
Encyclopedias are meant to be a source of *general* knowledge. If you're writing a research paper (even a short one), you should already be beyond an encyclopedia's scope (or at least pretending to, like in high school).
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Proprietary stuff better than an open content like a Wiki? Heresy! Mods, we have a /. heretic here!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I don't want to use Wikipedia as a source for one of my essays. I wouldn't want to use Britannica either.
Wikipedia is best used just for information. Like when I have a history class that I avoided for a few weeks, but I need to still need to ace come test time. Sure, not all of the articles I read to study will be accurate, but if enough are I get an A anyway.
It's not about the professionals. Its about the little guy having easy access to the information. Its about those that don't need to write essays learning about there world. Its about creating a learning structure based on knowledge instead of discipline.
Open Source Sushi
I've long wanted a genealogy wiki. For example, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Benjamin Stinnett has several thousand descendents, about a dozen of which are building family trees, but each researcher maintains their own sets of notes on Benjamin. The wikipedia explicitly does not allow genealogical wikis, except for famous people.
Wikipedia has replaced Google as my favorite site. It's arguably the one site I would actually pay to access, and I'm so grateful I don't have to.
That being said, I don't like being a leech, but I don't have any spare money right now, so I'm working on a couple of articles, but mostly, I'm correcting grammatical and spelling errors whenever I see them. This is an excellent thing for everyone with good language skills to do, and it's almost effortless. Simply editing the text of an article to correct errors or to replace an awkward phrase doesn't require one to learn Wikipedia's peculiar markup system.
Of course, this only applies to you if you're part of the minority of Slashdot readers who know how to spell "ludicrous" and "ridiculous," can tell "e.g." from "i.e.," know that the expression is "just as soon," not "just assume," and understand that, unlike in C, the closing punctuation mark in English comes before the final quote, not after.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I would have to agree with you. Knowledge is Power. Congrats to Wiki and it's creator for a great public service.
"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free."
I dunno what the hell is wrong with wikipedia, but try actually searching google for a phrase from my article. for example when i google for ""signal the long decline of the republic of Rome." it comes up with 2 results from derivative works of wikipedia. Why is wikipedia fucked up? I dunno. But I shit you not, I really wrote this.
I'm not sure that the Wikipedia keeps really old versions of articles; it may archive and remove them, to keep storage costs down.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
How long must Wikipedia's editors "[demonstrate] themselves to be trustworthy" to get this kind of review?
I read that differently--I read that as meaning EB (for instance) will go away because they are not able to meet self-imposed expectations of commercial success. This struck me as neither arrogant nor short-sighted. I saw it as another point adding to a theme where free software and free documentation become competitive to the point where businesses can't all stay around. And that's okay because competition is healthy and welcome, and because the viability of a business should depend on their ability to innovate and deliver what the public actually wants. I read his statement a prediction we can look at in the future to measure how true it is.
Digital Citizen
Wikipedia does it with watchlists. You decide which articles mean something to you and you add them to your watchlist. Whenever anyone makes a change, your watchlist updates. You just watch the pages you care about.
Recently I saw some confusion about Nat King Cole's Birthday. I did some research (I have a biography of Cole) and came up with a satisfactory answer and improved the article.
With Watchlists, you don't limit yourself to one editor. I often find that when I make an addition, someone else (who obviously saw it on his/her watchlist) makes it better -- either fixing some bad spelling/grammar (take that Grammar Nazi) or fixing my inadequate and cumbersome writing skills. If I were the only editor, the process would (a) slow down until I got around to vetting every change and (b) be limited to _my_ best ability.
My father is a blogger.
For what it is worth, I have used a Wikipedia article as references in my (not yet finished) Ph.D. thesis. More specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise , which I needed for a discussion about radio signal propagation modelling (which I am not familiar with, otherwise I reckon I could have found a traditional reference).
And, yes, I believe you are quite right in your arguments.
Of course it makes a lot of sense. There's a ripe market for a public wiki a la friendster, tribe.net, or linkedin.
There's a ton of wiki engines out there, not least MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Almost any one would be sufficient to make a good social networking site.
All that's needed is some effort to make it happen.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Just a quick followup:9 923207a56165
:)
Perhaps it would make sense to add and MD5 namespace to Wikipedia. The idea is that the URL http://wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5:3f804f5d6d89e5e7442
would refer to the Wikipedia page whose content has that MD5 hash. This makes it particularly easy to refer to specific versions of an article, not just for endorsements, but also when discussing the content of an article, etc. Of course, Wikipedia would not need to actually keep the entire content of each version; it could keep diffs a la CVS to save storage (and I'm sure it already does this).
P.S. A quick glance at the MD5 Wikipedia entry reminds me that MD5 is was shown to be insecure in 1994, so we should probably use SHA-1 instead
I was really looking forward to the answer for this question. There are so many cool social and technical devices in wikipedia that could potentially be talked about, and I was very interested to get a better idea of how the wikipedia operators saw it from their point of view.
Jimy doesn't seem to've answered the question by simply saying that "love for what they're doing" is what keeps people involved. Believing in wikipedia would be important, but I don't personally think that it's something that would keep people coming back.
For instance, what about the following?
There are only starters. There are heaps of devices in wikipedia that seek to hook and involve people and give them every possible excuse to keep contributing once they've started. Jimmy's answer about "make them love what they're doing" just struck me as quite shallow.
Oh well; the rest of the interview was interesting. Thanks to Jimmy and the slashdot editors for producing it.
You made coffee squirt out my nose. I would mod you up, sir, but I have spent the points already.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The huge thing is that the reader has access to the versioning. This means that as a reader, you can look at the previous versions, or the diff with previous versions and read the comments of the editors as to why they changed things. This makes fraud pretty obvious (especially since I wouldn't use information from there unless I checked back a few months to make sure it's stable).
This means that articles can *never* disappear while you're reading it, because it's always available. Just click on history and choose the version you were looking at. Exact same version.
This is far better than a rating system. This lets the reader interpret and decide the truth, or level certainty they require. Rating systems don't determine truth. They determine popularity. Popularity among who? All the users or unique IPs? There's nothing stopping me from obtaining 1000 blog accounts and rating what I want rated positively. But even if I had the entire ipv6 range I couldn't kill wiki.
This is because wiki doesn't need anti-user quality control. It's implicit in the system -- completely taken care of by the versioning system, administrators, and editors.
Also, in my experience, most of the articles in wiki are by people that know their stuff. I've read quite a few pages in subjects I am studying, and the articles are very consistent with the textbooks and information from other websites.
There are rarely only two sides to any argument.
Excellent point. If there's a mistake in World Book, then World Book will lose money. So it's in their best interest to keep mistakes out. But if there's a mistake in Wikipedia, ten thousand fanatics will blame YOU for not fixing it.
Frankly, I would rather have a known expert in archeaobacteria write about archeaobacteria than some anonymous FOSS advocate write about archeaobacteria.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Whenether I whant to check something, is it an complex mathematical question or ancient history or latest movie I first check wikipedia and only after that Google.
Distributing wikipedia (electronically) via a p2p protocol would not only solve the need to raise hardware/bandwidth funds. Other benefits would (in a while) be a more scalable information store as it grows (popular articles are faster to download) and getting some serious content into the Freenet or GNUnet networks. Since it would also attract new nodes to the p2p network, theese networks may actually grow to be more usable as more nodes gives a faster network.
In the last week or so, I've stumbled on two totally independent sites that were basically exports of either large chunks or the entirety of the Wikipedia with some banners and Adsense ads for revenue.
It rather irks me... of course, they're well within their rights, since the Wikipedia is some type of free license.
I would speculate that the Wikipedia would get more in ad revenue from AdSense than they would be able to fetch in grants - unless we're talking about really big grants.
Is the encylopedia just a cover up for The Foundation designed to create a new Galactic Empire when the first one crumbles?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I am very curious how version 1.0 will work out. I guess we will first get a beta 1 version. Very probably the editors will be only a selected group and alongside you would still have the main Wiki where everybody can contribute.
At the sideline you would have a discussion board where everybody could place his comments about the beta, including remarks about partiality. It would probably take half a year to solve the main issues and one can declare version 1.0. However, all the thousands of small conflicts in the world (like a controversial extension to your city) can never be solved.
It is also nice to speculate how the Wikipedia will develop once there is a version 1 (V1) alongside the freely editable (FE) version. My guess would be that every new entry in the FE version will be compared to the V1 version. At that point the editor will make one of the following decisions:
- it makes the text worse: the FE text is set back to the V1 version
- no change in quality: nothing to do, the FE text will stay different from the V1 version
- it is an improvement. In this case the text might either be immediately included in the V1 version or it might me marked for later consideration.
This would make the version 1 a constant work in progress. You would have version 1.0.9999 at some time.
Just be glad I didn't say "cite...sight...site."
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
This translation stuff is great and I'm glad it's happening. From the Wikipedia:
So I'm not sure why "translation" is a bad word, because it's commonly the activity that occurs to create the non-English Wikipedias. Wikipedia encourages you to translate the English version (i.e. the one with the most pages) into other languages and also vice versa. The translation instructions there suggest you pick an original version (sometimes English, sometimes not), and then create a translation of it. "Translate the page", "translate the navigation"; I'm just calling it as I read it.
So the different language versions are independent in that there's no automagic machine translation off a master set of facts happening (yet, but see below), but there is a constant translation process that binds all the different languages (including English) together.
Whichever language contains the best research effectively becomes the master, and translations fall out of it. It's just the efficient way a community project like this will avoid some duplicate effort.
For example, if I'm doing edits on the English entry for Marcus Aurelius, I'll scan the Italian entry for more useful external links, images, section headings, interwiki links, names, people, places, etc. This just seems obvious since I'd expect Italians to have contributed some interesting content about him. I'll translate those parts to the best of my ability, and now the English version is a partial translation of the italian version. In this specific case, the English version is actually the most comprehensive, but you can also see that the German and French entries have near word-for-word translations of some of the paragraphs. The other language entries are smaller, but when they grow, they typically follow the English article. I can place a watch on the Italian page so when large contributions are made there, I can see if I have the measly skills to translate at least some of the changes into English.
Too bad I don't have mod points. That was insightful indeed.
A while ago I was looking for material for my 9 year old son's homework. I found some stuff on Wikipedia and the same stuff (identical) on other websites. Some of it looked like whole paragraphs copied from the official website of the organization described in the Wiki entry (the particular case I encountered was not in the English version).
;) )
How does the Wikipedia avoid plagiarism, or can it? Anyone can paste in anything, and many people don't even realize there's a problem: they just see that they can "contribute" by pasting in some more info they found somewhere that is missing from the Wikipedia.
This can of thing can be real damaging, since the Wikipedia project certainly cannot afford the legal fees if it would be sued for copyright infringement (at least it is not backed up by someone like IBM
I just think the whole thing about using or not Wikipedia as a trustful source of information in academic environments is very arguable. Why? Because it is already happening! I am studying in the last year of a College in Brazil, and in the beginning of the year I had an interesting presentation about the Falklands War. It contained a lot of interesting information and pictures, and in the end, the History professor included a "References" section to the slides. I was surprised and pleased to see, along the so called "respected" references, like history books, the link to the Wikipedia site. I don't know what portion of that stuff came from Wikipedia, but just seeing recognition of this work (that I already knew at the time) made me think "why not?". Yes. Why not? Knowledge is everywhere. If one says that something must be attached to a recognized name to be true, ask him if his parents were "recognized" to teach him what they did. People are recognized for their knowledge, not the other way. Geez, this could be a slashdot quote.
A professor recently mentioned Foundation during the lecture. He said (paraphased), Psychohistory was invented 50 years ago, it's called Macroeconomics.
In one discussion about finding sponsors, some Wikipedians expressed concern about external funding from companies or governments. The question is, what if a government was to sponsor Wikipedia? Would that then encourage bias in the articles about the government? Same can be said about any company that were to sponsor Wikipedia. Even if it is the beloved Google =)
www.diyaudio.com is a pretty good approximation of what you are trying to get at I think. I spend a lot of time browsing around those forums, people post schematics, think up new ideas and test them against the community, and help newbies out with building the stuff. Also, they often do "group buys" of the hardware that is necessary so many people can get the stuff relatively cheap.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
How do you think those alien looking robots from the future who are part human knew enough about the past to find the A.I. frozen under the ice? They HAD to have had access to Wikipedia. :)
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