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The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia, Part II
Contents:
Why Wikipedia started working
A series of controversies
The governance challenge
My resignation and final few months with the project
Some final attempts to save Nupedia
Conclusions
Why Wikipedia started working
This is a good place to explain why Wikipedia actually got started and why it worked (and still does work, at least as well as it does). The explanation involves a combination of quite a few factors, some borrowed from the open source movement, some borrowed from wiki software and culture, and some more idiosyncratic:
- Open content license. We promised contributors that their work would always remain free for others to read. This, as is well known, motivates people to work for the good of the world--and for the many people who would like to teach the whole world, that's a pretty strong motivation.
- Focus on the encyclopedia. We said that we were creating an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, etc., and we encouraged people to stick to creating the encyclopedia and not use the project as a debate forum.
- Openness. Anyone could contribute. Everyone was specifically made to feel welcome. (E.g., we encouraged the habit of writing on new contributors' user pages, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" etc.) There was no sense that someone would be turned away for not being bright enough, or not being a good enough writer, or whatever.
- Ease of editing. Wikis are pretty easy for most people to figure out. In other collaborative systems (like Nupedia), you have to learn all about the system first. Wikipedia had an almost flat learning curve.
- Collaborate radically; don't sign articles. Radical collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of anyone else's work, is one of the great innovations of the open source software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to avoid the big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish articles on popular topics to a fine luster.
- Offer unedited, unapproved content for further development. This is required if one wishes to collaborate radically. We encouraged putting up their unfinished drafts--as long as they were at least roughly correct--with the idea that they can only improve if there are others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were basically garbage (no offense to anyone--some of my own drafts were sometimes garbage), and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated that many articles have turned out very well indeed.
- Neutrality. A firm neutrality policy made it possible for people of widely divergent opinions to work together, without constantly fighting. It's a way to keep the peace.
- Start with a core of good people. I think it was essential that we began the project with a core group of intelligent good writers who understood what an encyclopedia should look like, and who were basically decent human beings.
- Enjoy the Google effect. We had little to do with this, but had Google not sent us an increasing amount of traffic each time they spidered the growing website, we would not have grown nearly as fast as we did. (See below.)
That's pretty much it. The focus on the encyclopedia provided the task and the open content license provided a natural motivation: people work hard if they believe they are teaching the world stuff. Openness and ease of editing made it easy for new people to join in and get to work. Collaboration helped move work forward quickly and efficiently, and posting unedited drafts made collaboration possible. The fact that we started with a core of good people from Nupedia meant that the project could develop a functional, cooperative community. Neutrality made it easy for people to work together with relatively little conflict. And the Google effect provided a steady supply of "fresh blood"--who in turn supplied increasing amounts of content.
Probably, all or nearly all other project rules were either optional, or straightforward applications of these principles. The project probably would still have succeeded nicely even if it had moderated or tweaked some of the above principles. For instance, radical openness, that is, being open even to those who brazenly flouted and disrespected the project's mission, was surely not necessary; after all, without them, the project would have been more welcoming to the many people who felt they could not work with such difficult people. And if we had required people to sign in, that would not have made very much difference (although it probably would have made some in the beginning; the project wouldn't have grown as fast). Of course we didn't have to use the GNU FDL for the license. Certainly, we did not need to set the community up initially as an anarchy governed by some vague consensus: instead, we could have adopted a charter from the very start. The project could have been managed quite differently; there could have been specially-designated and well-qualified editors. The project could have officially encouraged and deferred to experts. An article approval process could have been adopted without threatening the principle of posting unedited content for collaboration. Certainly, many of the later bells and whistles--the arbitration committee, a three-revert rule, having administrators with the particular configuration of rights they have, etc.--were not absolutely necessary to adopt in the precise forms they took. These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above.
So the basic principles that explain why Wikipedia could start working--and still does work--are relatively simple, few in number, and above all general. The more specific principles that Wikipedia wound up with was a matter of historical accident. There was a great deal of "wiggle room." Those intent on studying or replicating the Wikipedia model would do well to bear that in mind.
A series of controversies
So much for the very early history of Wikipedia; the next phase involved rapid growth and some serious internal controversies over policy and authority. If Wikipedia's basic policy was settled upon in the first nine months, its culture was solidified into something closer to its present form in the next nine.
The project continued to grow. We had 6000 articles by July 8; 8000 by August 7; 11,200 by September 9; and 13,000 by October 4. Consulting the website logs, we noted a Google effect: each time Google spidered the website, more pages would be indexed; the greater the number of pages indexed, the more people arrived at the project; the more people involved in the project, the more pages there were to index. In addition to this source of new contributors, Wikipedia was Slashdotted several times, and had large influxes of new users particularly after two articles I wrote for Kuro5hin were posted on Slashdot: "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias (July 25, 2001) and Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense? (September 24, 2001).
This growth brought difficult challenges, challenges that perhaps I did not sufficiently anticipate and plan for. Some of our earliest contributors were academics and other highly-qualified people, and it seems to me that they were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project. I hope they will not mind that I mention their names, but the two that stick in my mind are J. Hoffman Kemp and Michael Tinkler, a couple of Ph.D. historians. They helped to set what I think was a good precedent for the project in that they wrote about their own areas of expertise, and they contributed under their own, real names. The latter has the salutary effect of making the contributor more serious and more apt to take responsibility for his or her contributions. They are also very nice people, but did not "suffer fools gladly," as the phrase goes. Consequently, they wound up in some pretty silly disputes that would have driven less patient people away instantly. So there was a growing problem: persistent and difficult contributors tend to drive away many better, more valuable contributors; Kemp and Tinkler were only two examples. There were many more who quietly came and quietly left. Short of removing the problem contributors altogether--which we did only in the very worst cases--there was no easy solution, under the system as we had set it up. And I am sorry to have to admit that those aspects of the system that led to this problem were as much my responsibility as anyone else's. Obviously, I would not design the system the same way if given the chance again.
As a result, I grew both more protective of the project and increasingly sensitive to abuse of the system. As I tried to exercise what little authority I claimed, as a corrective to such abuse, many newer arrivals on the scene made great sport of challenging my authority. One of the earliest challenges happened in late summer, 2001. The front page of Wikipedia--then open to anyone to edit, like any other page on the project--was occasionally vandalized with infantile graffiti. Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. I maintained that to make such an archive would be to encourage such vandalism, so I deleted the archive. This occasioned much debate. Then a user made the archive a "subpage" of his own user page--and user pages were generally held to be the bailiwick of the user. Consequently I deleted that subpage, which occasioned a further hue and cry that, perhaps, I was abusing my authority. The vandalism-enshrining user in question proceeded to create a "deleted pages" page, on which the deleted vandalism archives were listed, as if to accuse me of trying to act without public scrutiny; but this was, of course, perfectly acceptable to me. At the time, I thought that this controversy was just as silly as it will sound to most people reading this; I thought that I needed only to "put my foot down" a little harder and, as had happened for the first six months of the project, participants would fall into line. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies, the ultimate upshot of which was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors.
Throughout this and other early controversies, much of the debate about project policy was conducted on the wiki itself. Other debates were conducted on mailing lists, Wikipedia-L and then later, for the English language project, WikiEN-L. In addition, people had taken to putting their own essays on Wikipedia, as subpages of their user pages. These too were occasioning debate. It seemed to me, and many other contributors, that this debate was distracting the community from our main goal: to create an encyclopedia. Consequently I proposed that we move the debate to another wiki that was to be created specifically for that purpose--what became known as the "meta wiki." This proposal was very widely supported, so we set it up.
As it happened, the meta-wiki became even more uncontrolled than Wikipedia itself, and for many months was continually infested with contributions by people that can only be called "trolls." That epithet came to be discouraged, however, for reasons soon to be explained. The existence of trolls was a problem we felt we should tolerate--and deal with only verbally, not with harsh penalties--for the sake of encouraging the broadest amount of participation. In the first years, only the worst trolls were ever expelled from the project. I do not know whether this policy has been changed as a result of the operation of the much-later installed Arbitration Committee.
The reasons the meta-wiki became (at least temporarily) more uncontrolled are not far to seek. First, it had no specific purpose, other than to host project debate and essays that do not belong on the main wiki--which was not enough to make anyone care very much about it. Second, because many people did not care what happened on the meta-wiki, they did not do the very necessary weeding that takes place on Wikipedia; besides, as the meta-wiki was a repository of opinion, people felt less comfortable editing or deleting what was, after all, only opinion.
What happened was that project policy discussions moved almost exclusively to the project mailing lists. There is a reason why this was a superior solution to having much debate on an uncontrolled, "unmoderated" wiki. On a wiki, contributions exist in perpetuity, as it were, or until they are deleted or radically changed; consequently, anyone new to a discussion sees the first contribution first. So whoever starts a new page for discussion also, to a great extent, sets the tone and agenda of the discussion. Moreover, nasty, heated exchanges live on forever on a wiki, festering like an open wound, unless deliberately toned down afterwards; if the same exchange takes place on a mailing list, it slips mercifully and quietly into the archives.
At about the same time that we decided to start the meta-wiki, and soon after the vandalism archive affair, I was thinking a great deal about Wikipedia's apparent anarchy, and I wrote an essay titled, "Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy?" This and the discussion that ensued tended to ossify positions with regard to the authority issue: I and a few others agreed that Jimmy and I should have special authority within the system, to settle policy issues that needed settling. Jimmy was relatively quiet about this issue; this, I think, was probably because his authority was generally not in question, but mine was, because I was "in the trenches" and continuing to encourage good habits and solidify policy positions.
By November or December of 2001, Wikipedia was growing so fast and the subject of regular news reporting, even by the likes of The New York Times and MIT's Technology Review; after the two major Slashdottings earlier in the year, we knew that large influxes of members could have a tendency to change the nature of the project, and not necessarily for the better. If there were some major news coverage--an evening news story in the U.S., for example--there might be many new people who would need to be taught about Wikipedia's standards and positive cultural aspects. So I proposed what I thought was a humorously-named "Wikipedia Militia" which would manage new (and very welcome) "invasions" by new contributors. By this time, however, there was a small core group of people who were constantly on the watch for anything that smacked the least bit of authoritarianism; consequently, the name, and various aspects of how the proposal was presented, were vigorously debated. Eventually, we switched to "The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee" and finally, the "Volunteer Fire Department"--which eventually, it seems, fell into disuse.
The governance challenge
After the September Slashdotting, I composed a page originally called "Our Replies to Our Critics" (and now called "Replies to Common Objections"), in which I addressed the problem that "cranks and partisans" might abuse the system:
Moreover--and this is something that you might not be able to understand very well if you haven't actually experienced it--there is a fair bit of (mostly friendly) peer pressure, and community standards are constantly being reinforced. The cranks and partisans, etc., are not simply outgunned. They also receive considerable opprobrium if they abuse the system.
This reflects very well the conception I had in September 2001 of Wikipedia's culture; the reply above was as much hopeful and prescriptive as descriptive. But it turned out to be only partly true. As difficult users began to have more of a "run of the place," in late 2001 and 2002, opprobrium was in fact meted out only piecemeal and inconsistently. It seemed that participation in the community was becoming increasingly a struggle over principles, rather than a shared effort toward shared goals. Any attempt to enforce what should have been set policy--neutrality, no original research, and no wholesale deletion without explanation--was frequently if not usually met with resistance. It was difficult to claim the moral high ground in a dispute, because the basic project principles were constantly coming under attack. Consequently, Wikipedia's environment was not cooperative but instead competitive, and the competition often concerned what sort of community Wikipedia should be: radically anarchical and uncontrolled, or instead more singlemindedly devoted to building an encyclopedia. Sadly, few among those who would love to work on Wikipedia could thrive in such a protean environment.
It is one thing to lack any equivalent to "police" and "courts" that can quickly and effectively eliminate abuse; such enforcement systems were rarely entertained in Wikipedia's early years, because according to the wiki ideal, users can effectively police each other. It is another thing altogether to lack a community ethos that is unified in its commitment to its basic ideals, so that the community's champions could claim a moral high ground. So why was there no such unified community ethos and no uncontroversial "moral high ground"? I think it was a simple consequence of the fact that the community was to be largely self-organizing and to set its own policy by consensus. Any loud minority, even a persistent minority of one person, can remove the appearance of consensus. In fact, I recall that (in October 2002, after I resigned) I felt compelled by ongoing controversies to request that Jimmy declare that certain policies were in fact non-negotiable, which he did. Unfortunately, this declaration was too little, too late, in my opinion.
By late 2001, I had gained both friends and detractors. I think I had become, within the project, a symbol of opposition to anarchism, of the enforcement of standards, and consequently of the exercise of authority in a radically open project. But I was still trying to manage the project as I always had--by force of personality and "moral" authority. So when people arrived who clearly and openly disrespected established policy, I was, in my frustration, very short with them; and when the project continued to try to establish new policies, my role in articulating those policies and actually establishing them (attempting to express a "consensus") was challenged. This undermined what moral authority I had. I felt my job was on the line, and the project continued in turmoil day in and day out; from my point of view, fires were spreading everywhere, and as I had become a somewhat controversial figure, I did not have quite enough allies to help me put them out. Consequently I was rather too peremptory and short with some users. This, however, exacerbated the problem, because the attitude could not be backed up by punishment; harsh words from a leader are empty threats if unenforceable; I thereby handed my anti-authoritarian "wiki-anarchist" opponents an advantage, because--ironically--they were able to portray me as dictatorial, when I was anything but. I came to the view, finally and belatedly, that it would be better to "ignore the trolls." But as it turns out, this is particularly hard to do on a wiki, because, again, unlike on an e-mail list, trollish contributions do not just disappear into the archives; they sit out in the open, as available as the first day they appeared, and "festering." Attempts to delete or radically edit such contributions were often met by reposting the earlier, problem version: the ability to do that is a necessary feature of collaboration. Persistent trolls could, thus, be a serious problem, particularly if they were able to draw a sympathetic audience. And there was often an audience of sympathizers: contributors who philosophically were opposed to nearly any exercise of authority, but who were not trolls themselves.
It is surely very ironic that it was I personally who (initially) so strongly supported the lack any enforceable rules in the community. Some legal theorists would maintain that a community that lacks enforceable rules lacks any law at all. In retrospect it is clear that there was a fundamental problem with my role in the system: to have real authority, I needed both to be able to enforce the rules and, for both fairness and the perception of fairness, there needed to be clear rules from the beginning. But, by my own design, I had very early on rejected the label "editor-in-chief" and much real enforcement authority; a year into the game, it would have been difficult if not impossible to claim enforcement authority over active but problem users. Moreover, I was the author of the "ignore all rules" rule. My early rejection of any enforcement authority, my attempt to portray myself and behave as just another user who happened to have some special moral authority in the project, and my rejection of rules--these were all clearly mistakes on my part. They did, I think, help the project get off the ground; but I really needed a more subtle and forward-looking understanding of how an extremely open, decentralized project might work.
In retrospect, I wish I had taken Teddy Roosevelt's advice: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Since my "stick" was very small, I suppose I felt compelled to "speak loudly," which I regret. (This was not such a problem, by the way, on Nupedia; partly, that was because there were not nearly as many problem users on Nupedia, but partly it was because there was clear enforcement authority.) As it turns out, it was Jimmy who spoke softly and carried the big stick; he first exercised "enforcement authority." Since he was relatively silent throughout these controversies, he was the "good cop," and I was the "bad cop": that, in fact, is precisely how he (privately) described our relationship. Eventually, I became sick of this arrangement. Because Jimmy had remained relatively toward the background in the early days of the project, and showed that he was willing to exercise enforcement authority upon occasion, he was never so ripe for attack as I was.
Perhaps the root cause of the governance problem was that we did not realize well enough that a community would form, nor did we think carefully about what this entailed. For months I denied that Wikipedia was a community, claiming that it was, instead, only an encyclopedia project, and that there should not be any serious governance problems if people would simply stick to the task of making an encyclopedia. This was strictly wishful thinking. In fact, Wikipedia was from the beginning and is both a community and an encyclopedia project. And for a community attempting to achieve something, to be serious, effective, and fair, a charter seems necessary. In short, a collaborative community would do well to think of itself as a polity with everything that that entails: a representative legislative, a competent and fair judiciary, and an effective executive, all defined in advance by a charter. There are special requirements of nearly every serious community, however, best served by relevant experts; and so I think a prominent role for the relevant experts should be written into the charter. I would recommend all of this to anyone launching a serious online community. But indeed, in January 2001, we were in both "uncharted" and "unchartered" territory. The world, I think, will be able to benefit from this and our other initial mistakes.
But in fairness to ourselves, it was a good idea to allow the community to decide by experience and consensus what article content rules to endorse. This allowed us to generate a very sensible set of article content rules. To be clear, I think it was not such a good idea to apply the same thinking to the organization of the community itself; we should have acknowledged that a community would form, that it would have certain persistent and difficult issues that would need to be solved, and that a lack of any effective founding community charter might result in chaos.
My resignation and final few months with the project
Throughout the governance controversy, I was preparing for my wedding, which happened December 1, 2001. A few days after I arrived back from my honeymoon, I was informed that I should probably start looking for another job, because Bomis was having to lay off most of its workers; they had 10-12 workers at the end of 2000, and by the beginning of 2002 they were back to their original 4-5. My salary was reduced in December and then halved in January. This seemed inevitable because Wikipedia was not bringing in any money at all for Bomis, even if Wikipedia was becoming even more of a publicly-recognized, if still modest success. Our first anniversary came just before we announced having 20,000 articles, and I was invited to talk about the project at Stanford on January 16 (text here; you might notice that I was still plugging the notion of using Nupedia to vet Wikipedia articles, as an answer to the objection that Wikipedia articles are unreliable).
I was officially laid off at the beginning of February, which I announced a few weeks later. I had continued on as a volunteer; Wikipedia and Nupedia were, after all, volunteer projects. But I was laboring in the aftermath of the governance controversies of the previous fall and winter, which promised to make the job of a volunteer project leader even more difficult. Moreover, I had to look for a real job. So throughout the month of February I considered resigning altogether.
But Jimmy had told me the previous December that Bomis would start trying to sell ads on Wikipedia in order to pay for my job. Even in that horrible market for Internet advertising, there were already enough pageviews on Wikipedia that advertising proceeds might have provided me a very meager living. We knew that this would be extremely controversial, because so many of the people who are involved in open source and open content projects absolutely hate the idea of advertising on the web pages of free projects, even to support project organizers. In fact, when this advertising plan was announced, in late February of 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia was forked (something I urged them not to do).
Bomis was not successful in selling any ads for Wikipedia anyway--you might recall that early 2002 was at about the very bottom of the market for Internet advertising. I also had some hope that we might, finally, set up the project's managing nonprofit, which we had discussed doing for a long time (and which eventually did come into being: Wikimedia). The job of setting up the nonprofit was left to me, but ongoing controversies seemed to eat up any time I had for Wikipedia, and frankly I had no idea where to begin. So, after a month without pay, I announced my general resignation; I completely stayed away from the project for a few months.
Just by the way, Wikipedia's offshoot projects--a dictionary, a textbook project, a quotation project, a public domain book repository, etc.--were all started in 2002 or later, and I cannot claim any credit for them. I did supply the name "Wiktionary" in April 2001, more or less on a whim. I quickly disavowed any responsibility for leading any such project, and it seems the Wiktionary project did not start up for another year and a half (December 12, 2002). My view now is that Webster's and the OED are quite good enough as far as English dictionaries go, and there will always be excellent free dictionaries in every language online. To try to develop a dictionary by collaboration among random Internet users, particularly in a completely uncontrolled wiki format, now strikes me as a nonstarter. I confess I am now puzzled why I didn't think so instantly; it was no doubt because I simply was throwing out ideas as they occurred to me, and also because we had too many dictionary definition-type entries in Wikipedia. (So why not give people a place to put their dictionary definitions?--Perhaps that's what I was thinking, but it hardly seems like a good justification for starting a project.) But Jimmy's first reaction was properly skeptical regarding the use of wikis and Ruth Ifcher made a stronger criticism very nicely. Dictionaries, even more than encyclopedias, must be extremely reliable to be even minimally usable; without direct oversight by linguists, a public dictionary project seems pointless. As to the other projects, they are mostly conducted using wikis and according to some of the basic founding principles of Wikipedia. But other sorts of project--for example, textbook projects, quotation repositories, and archives--necessarily require quite different specifications from those of an encyclopedia. For example, the fact that the wiki format works for encyclopedia development hardly means that it is appropriate for the hosting of public domain books. Since the same texts are available in many other places online, such as the wonderful Project Gutenberg, why would anyone choose to read The Iliad on a wiki, which could have been subtly changed by any random passer-by, without any oversight by someone who had access to an authoritative text? There is a fact about the way the text actually reads; so is editing via wiki software more apt to increase or reduce the number of errors over other systems, such as Project Gutenberg's? I do not mean to dismiss any such efforts. I simply think that considerable thought needs to be put into exactly how those other projects should be organized: the wiki format is not a magic pill that somehow makes all problems go away. Wiki is just one software paradigm, which must be adapted, supplemented, changed, or replaced in order to solve the unique set of problems a project faces.
In the spring, a controversy erupted. Caring as I did--and as I still do--about the future of free encyclopedias, I felt compelled to get involved. The controversy featured a troll who was putting up huge numbers of screeds on the "meta-wiki" and on Wikipedia as well. The controversy began with a discussion of what to do about, and how to react to, this particular troll. I maintained that one should not "feed the troll," and that the troll should be "outed" (it was an anonymous user, but it was not hard to use Google to determine the identity of the troll) and shamed.
There resulted a broader controversy about how to treat problem users generally. There were, as I recall, two main schools of thought. One, to which I adhered and still adhere, was that bona fide trolls should be "named and shamed" and, if they were unresponsive to shaming, they should be removed from the project (by a fair process) sooner rather than later. We held that a collaborative project requires commitment to ethical standards which are--as all ethical standards ultimately are--socially established by pointing out violations of those standards. Hence naming and shaming. A second school of thought held that all Wikipedia contributors, even the most difficult, should be treated respectfully and with so-called WikiLove. Hence trolls were not to be identified as such (since "troll" is a term of abuse), and were to be removed from the project only after a long (and painful) public discussion. For the latter school, it seemed to me, the only really egregious faux pas one could commit in the project was to suggest that there were objective standards that could be enforced via "shaming."
I felt at the time that the prevalence of the second school entailed rejection of both objective standards and rules-based authority. It is impossible to explain why one is removing some partisan screeds from the wiki without, in some way, identifying it as a partisan screed, and pointing out that such productions are inconsistent with the neutrality policy. This will necessarily be received as less than respectful and "loving," especially if one must engage the troll himself in a long, drawn-out dispute; in a very long dispute with any trollish type, it is only a matter of time before some epithet gets bandied about, since they are so darned useful (and accurate) when applied to trollish types. More generally, the very application of rules, or laws, entails a moral judgment, or what for its effectiveness must have the force of a moral judgment. I suppose I agree with those legal theorists who say that there is necessarily, in its core, a moral component to the law. Consequently, the new policy of "WikiLove" handed trolls and other difficult users a very effective weapon for purposes of combatting those who attempted to enforce rules. After all, any forthright declaration that a user is doing something that is clearly against established conventions--posting screeds, falsehoods, nonsense, personal opinion, etc.--is nearly always going to appear disrespectful, because such a declaration involves a moral accusation. The only way to avoid such an appearance of disrespect, perhaps, is to step very lightly and use much flattery and qualifications: "Now don't get me wrong, I think you're doing a good job overall, but it seems to me that in this particular case, your contribution is slightly inconsistent with the neutrality policy." Suppose the offender replies: "So what? I disagree with the neutrality policy." Or: "I disagree. What I wrote is perfectly neutral. Who do you think you are, anyway?" It is a very rare person who can practice "WikiLove" in such a case. In Wikipedia's developing culture, if anyone reacted out of frustration, or merely attempted to apply the law as a moral instrument, as laws typically are applied, he would become the problem, and a much more serious problem, than mere violations of the neutrality policy, say. The result is that, on pain of becoming persona non grata in the community, one had to treat brazen, self-conscious violators of basic policy with particular respect. It was a perfect coup for the resident wiki-anarchists. I again left the project for several months.
In fall of 2002, I had started teaching at a local community college, and with some extra time on my hands, I started editing Wikipedia a little and engaging in mailing list discussions. I think my first new post to Wikipedia-L, from September 1, 2002, was "Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement." In it I argued that the free software movement is led and dominated by highly-qualified programmers, and that the "free encyclopedia movement"--that is, Wikipedia, Nupedia, and other newer projects--needs to move in that direction. I suggested that Nupedia be redesigned to release "approved" versions of Wikipedia articles; Wikipedia itself was not to be touched. This proposal met with a very cool reception. After a few months of discussion, Jimmy himself was "intending to revive Nupedia in the near future" and "thinking very much along the lines of what is being discussed here." Unfortunately, this never happened.
By November or December, I think, I proposed, and Magnus Manske very helpfully coded, an expert-controlled approval process for Wikipedia that was in fact to be independent of both Nupedia and Wikipedia. It would not have affected the Wikipedia editorial process. It would have lived in a separate namespace or domain, as an independent add-on project for Wikipedia. Without explaining the details, expert reviewers, the recruitment of which I would organize, would examine Wikipedia articles and approve or disapprove of particular versions of those articles. We set up a mailing list, Sifter-L (archives no longer online, apparently), which for several weeks discussed policy issues.
There was not a great deal of support for the proposal on Wikipedia-L. There was little or no excitement that the new project might bring into Wikipedia a fresh crop of subject area specialists. But that was fine as far as I was concerned, since the project was to operate independently of Wikipedia. Still, I had the very distinct sense that any specialists arriving on the scene would not necessarily be met with open arms--particularly if before approving an article they wished to make whatever changes to articles that they felt necessary. There were even a few Wikipedians who made it clear that experts should not expect to be treated any differently than anyone else, even when writing about their areas of expertise.
I then considered whether the interaction between Wikipedians and the new reviewers might be a problem after all. Surely, I thought, most specialists would want to edit even very good articles before approving them (in the independent system). This would require that the reviewers interact with Wikipedians. Wikipedia's culture had become such that disrespect of expertise was tolerated, and, again, trolls were merely warned, but very politely (in keeping with the policy of WikiLove), that they please ought to stop their inflammatory behavior. Trolls would certainly find ripe targets in expert reviewers, I thought. I recalled that patient, well-educated Wikipedians like J. Hoffmann Kemp and Michael Tinkler had been driven off the project not only by trolls but by some of the more abrasive and disrespectful regulars. I then considered: could I in good conscience really ask academics, who are very busy, to engage in this activity that would probably annoy most of them and do nothing to contribute to their academic careers? Recruiting for Nupedia was very easy by comparison, and caused me no such pangs of conscience.
I believe it was this problem that finally prompted me, in I believe January of 2003, to inform Jimmy as follows (by private e-mail): I was breaking with the project altogether; the only way he could prevent this, I told him, was that he personally crack down on problem users, and make the project more officially welcoming to experts. I also told him that I did not expect this information to change his mind, and that I did not mean to issue an ultimatum. And in fact our exchange did not change his mind. I concluded that we had a fundamental philosophical disagreement about how the project should be run. I respected and still respect his view. That is where matters ended, and it was then that I broke with Wikipedia altogether.
Some final attempts to save Nupedia
Nevertheless, I was interested in pursuing Nupedia's development. It still seemed rescuable to me.
I recall two incidents in which I tried to have Nupedia revived, in 2002 or 2003, but I don't recall exactly. First, I approached Jimmy with the offer to try to find a buyer/managing organization for Nupedia. The suggestion was that, since Bomis did not have enough money to support it, and since Jimmy did not appear to have any specific intentions with the project other than to let it run on the system set up in 2000-1, I might be able to find a university or other organization that would take on the responsibility. I do not recall the details, but we did not pursue this possibility. Second, and later, I offered to buy Nupedia myself--that is, the domain name, the membership list, and whatever other proprietary material Bomis might have controlled. I wanted to start it up again as a simpler, more streamlined, but still fully peer-reviewed project; I thought, moreover, that if I owned it I might be able to give it to a suitable sponsoring educational or nonprofit institution. Jimmy seemed cool to the idea, and did not ask for any specific offers.
Perhaps it is, therefore, not entirely accurate to say that Nupedia died due to the inefficiency of its system. To some extent it was also allowed to die, even after it was clear that its former editor-in-chief expressed an interest in continuing the project under an entirely different system. The result was that, without a leader or organization that could support its mission, Nupedia died a slow death. The server it lived on had some trouble in 2003, and as a result the website went offline. For whatever reason, the website was never brought up again after that.
I obviously cannot speak for Jimmy, but I will say that, if he was worried that Nupedia would essentially fork Wikipedia--again, I don't claim that he had that concern--then it seems to me that such a concern would not have justified letting Nupedia wither untended. The projects, Wikipedia and Nupedia, were naturally complementary parts of a single, symbiotic whole. That at least is how I always regarded them, indeed, from the very founding of Wikipedia. From the founding of Wikipedia, I always thought Wikipedia without Nupedia would have been unreliable, and that Nupedia without Wikipedia would have been unproductive. Together they were to be an "unstoppable high-quality article-creation juggernaut."
It is still disappointing to me, that we made plans and promises to thousands of Nupedians, including hundreds of extremely well-qualified people, some of them leaders in their fields. We spent many thousands of person-hours, all told, on the project. I apologize to those people, and I can only hope that they will find some future open content encyclopedia project worthy of their participation, one that will show the world the potential that Nupedia had.
Conclusions
I have some advice for anyone who would like to start new projects on the model of Wikipedia.
You can learn from Wikipedia's success; so, first and most importantly, see above for considerations about why Wikipedia works.
But you can also learn from our mistakes. The following primarily concerns project governance, because governance issues are, in my opinion, the primary failing of Wikipedia. Bear in mind, also, that these are only rough guidelines, for those who are starting projects that have enough resemblance to Wikipedia. These are not perfectly general rules:
- If you intend to create a very large, complex project, establish early on that there will be some non-negotiable policy. Wikis and collaborative projects necessarily build communities, and once a community becomes large enough, it absolutely must have rules to keep order and to keep people at work on the mission of the project. "Force of personality" might be enough to make a small group of people hang together; for better or worse, however, clearly enunciated rules are needed to make larger groups of people hang together.
- There is some policy that, with forethought, can be easily predicted will be necessary. Articulate this policy as soon as possible. Indeed, consider making a project charter to make it clear from the beginning what the basic principles governing the project will be. This will help the community to run more smoothly and allow participants to self-select correctly.
- Establish any necessary authority early and clearly. Managers should not be afraid to enforce the project charter by removing people from the project; as soon as it becomes necessary, it should be done. Standards that are not enforced in any way do not exist in any robust sense. Do not tolerate deliberate disruption from those who oppose your aims; tell them to start their own project; there's a potentially infinite amount of cyberspace.
- As any disagreements among project managers are apt to be publicly visible in a collaborative project, and as this is apt to undermine the (very important) moral authority of at least one manager, make sure management is on the same page from the beginning--preferably before launch. This requires a great deal of thinking through issues together.
- In knowledge-creation projects, and perhaps many other kinds of projects, make special roles for experts from the very beginning; do not attempt to add those roles later, as an afterthought. Specialists are one of your most important resources, and it is irrational not to use them as much as you can. Preferably, design the charter so that they are included and encouraged. Moreover, make the volunteer project management a meritocracy, and not based on longevity but based on the ability to lead and contribute to the project; that is the only condition under which very many of the best qualified people will want to participate.
Another point needs more in-depth development.
Radical and untried new ideas require constant refinement and adaptation in order to succeed; the first proposal is very rarely the best, and project designers must learn from their mistakes and constantly redesign better projects. Nupedia's Advisory Board failed to admit to inherent flaws in its system, and its delay in admission shut the window of opportunity to its improvement. And it seems to me that the Wikipedia community fell into a mistake by thinking that just one or two features--the wiki feature and the neutrality policy and a few other things--explained Wikipedia's success, and that those features can thus be applied with no significant changes to new projects. But there is no substitute for constant creativity and problem-solving--nor for honesty about what problems need solving. The honesty to recognize problems and creativity in solving them are, after all, what made Wikipedia succeed in the first place.
This is a crucial point: if you use a tool or model from another project, think through very carefully how that tool or model should be adapted. Do not assume that you need to use every feature, or every aspect of the surrounding culture, that you are borrowing. Wikipedia borrowed rather too much from (1) the culture of wikis, (2) unmoderated online discussions, and (3) free-wheeling online culture generally. To be sure, Wikipedia is also a product of those cultures, and works as well as it does largely because of what it borrowed from those cultures. But it also shares some of its more serious current flaws with such cultures. Those planning new projects, or wanting to overhaul old ones, might well bear in mind that a certain cultural context, including the context that has grown up around a tool, just might not be right for that project. Let me elaborate.
(1) Consider first the culture of wikis. On the one hand, I said we wanted to determine the best rules, and experience would help us determine that; so we had no rules to begin with. On the other hand, one might add that another reason we began without rules was that we were partaking in the extremely uncontrolled, free-wheeling nature of "traditional" wikis. I think that's right. But there is an excellent reason why an encyclopedia project should not partake in that extremely uncontrolled nature of wiki culture, and why it should adopt actually enforceable rules: unlike traditional wikis, encyclopedia projects have a very specific aim, with very specific constraints, and efficient work toward that aim, within those constraints, practically requires the adoption of enforceable rules. The mere fact that most wikis, when Wikipedia was created, did not have enforceable rules hardly meant that one could not innovate further, and create one that did have rules.
(2) Moreover, Jimmy and I and most of the first participants on Wikipedia were veterans of unmoderated Internet discussion groups, and hence, naturally, we could appreciate the advantages of letting a virtual community develop in the absence of any real (enforcement) authority. In unmoderated forums there is often found a sense, among some participants, that any attempt to oust a particularly troublesome user amounts to unjustifiable censorship. The result is that the existence of many unmoderated forums online has created a small army of people militantly opposed to the slightest restriction on speech, who feel that they do and should have a right to say whatever they like, wherever they like, online. Any attempt to create and enforce rules for Internet projects, when that small army is ready to cry "censorship," will seem daring or even outrageous in many contexts online. But there is an excellent reason why such anarchy is inappropriate for many projects, including encyclopedia projects, even one that is self-policing like a wiki: there simply must be a way to enforce rules in order for rules to be effective. Given that encyclopedia project development happens almost entirely using words, nearly any rules will also be restrictions on speech. Anyone who advocates many enforceable rules on a collaborative project, in the cultural context of an Internet filled with so many unmoderated discussion groups, can be made to seem reactionary. But this is only a result of that cultural context; in any other context, the existence of rules would be perfectly natural and unobjectionable.
(3) Finally, and generally speaking, the Internet is a great leveller. Since social interaction can proceed among complete strangers who cannot so much as see each other, things that seem to matter in many "meatspace" discussions, such as age, social status, and level of education, are often dismissed as unimportant online. Many Internet forums, chatrooms, and blogs are populated by people who are identified by only a "handle," and any suggestion that communication should be restricted or in any way altered in accordance with "expertise" or "authority" is likely to be met with outrage, in most forums. But there are several excellent and obvious reasons why expertise does need special consideration in an encyclopedia project, and in other collaborative projects. First, there are many subjects that dilettantes cannot write about credibly; I, for example, could not write very credibly about astronomy or speleology, but I have a passing interest in both. If I am working only with other dilettantes, our articles are apt to remain amateurish at best; we can fill in the gaps in each other's knowledge, and do research, but the results will remain problematic until someone with more knowledge of the subject contributes. Second, there are very many specialized subjects about which no one but experts has any significant knowledge at all. Third, it is only the opinions of experts that will be trusted by most of the public as authoritative in determining whether an article is generally reliable or not. Moreover, the standards of public credibility are not likely to be changed by the widespread use of Wikipedia or by online debate about the reliability of Wikipedia. Like them or hate them, those are the facts. But if one points these facts out online, culturally "levelled" as it is, particularly in forums or projects like Wikipedia which go out of their way to ignore individual differences among people, one finds a frosty reception at best.
Consider, if you will, that it was because Wikipedia was started in the context of the ingrained cultures of wikis, of unmoderated discussion forums, and of the levelling, anti-elitist influence of the Internet at large, that it was very difficult for us to exercise the maximal amount of creativity that a maximally successful project would require. In establishing a new cultural context, we were deeply constrained by the old. Now, to be sure, I have said above and many times elsewhere that Wikipedia did not have to adopt the particular conjunction of policies that it did. But it is not surprising that it did adopt its particular conjunction of policies, considering the conjunction of influences on its development. So it would have required much more explanation and persuasion, and indeed, much more struggle, for us to, for example, have persuaded potential participants that some persons, even in a wiki environment, should have special rights that others do not. So powerful is the influence of cultural context that there are quite a few people whose lack of imagination is such that they believe I simply must not understand "why Wikipedia works" if I am willing to suggest that it does not have to work in precisely the way it does work. Constantly-reinforced cultural habits die very hard indeed, and place very strong constraints upon what can be imagined, and what bare possibilities seem even worth thinking about.
But it was our willingness to exercise our creativity and follow our imagination, and create what is, to some extent, a new kind of culture, that led to Wikipedia's success. For the overall project of creating open content encyclopedias--and indeed, for the fantastic collaborative Internet that has yet to be created--to reach its full potential, the process of identifying mistakes honestly and creatively seeking solutions must be ramped up and continued unabated.
Many thanks to Larry Sanger and to O'Reilly for this memoir.
Everything you always wanted to know about Wikipedia here.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well, I can finally get on with my day. I've been waiting for the cliff-hanger for 24 hours...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
well.. I don't think so. I have contributed a single article till date. And it was very very easy to contribute. Just click a links and type away. But when I go back it said this article needs to be wikified. I followed the link only to be overvhelmed by the stuff I have to do to get it wikified.
Please dont get me wrong. I'm just intend to provide some constructive feedback. "Please make it simpler for Joe Sixpack"
fuvoo: watch something
I don't think he cares, he's a known troll anyway...
There is a saying, the victors often write history. With most encyclopedia's there is an editorial board that decides what gets in. It is often culture specific. The encyclopedia you will find at the State U will be very different than the encyclopedias you find at Universities in Iran. With this project, it says people write articles, and edit other peoples work. Does that mean I can edit your article? It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling.
For example, if someone wanted to write about the war in Iraq, and the first article was submitted by Osama Bin Laden, I am sure others would come be at the polar opposite.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
now thats funny...
zzt
if you didn't type letter "t" by accident, I think that this comment would be moderated 'funny' and on-topic.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Um, is there a printable version? Maybe someone could put this on the Wikipedia? If that hasn't already been done...
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
This story's a dupe!
Oh, wait...
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Larry,
Now would be an excellent time to stop all the self-serving "I helped start all this" publicity. You've had your say, several times over now. The sour grapes thing is getting really old now.
They've even started numbering their dupes now!
Is there any place I can buy a Liberal Army of Death t-shirt?
Actually probably some truth in that.
9 /Jimbo_Wales_in_France_cropped.jpg
You can see the leftism dripping off of this guy:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1
Here's the Coral Cache of the article, just in case it get's Slashdotted...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
And the original poster Utah Eagle in the Free Repulic is completely without bias.
ok Moderators...
what the hell is the deal?
parent comment gets modded down while a dupe comment a few threads down gets modded up?
"Since my "stick" was very small"
Why I'm bitter and need to justify it in 10 pages... yawn.
It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling.
Seem? You obviously haven't read many of the Discussion pages for some of the more controversial (and even some of the mundane) topics.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
It would be interesting to see ./ actually slashdot itself. Hurray for infinite recursion!
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Okay, I looked at the description and just started thinking, "I swear I've read this before somewhere (well, sort of)". Where did I see this? Oh YEAH!
The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir
Even some of the posts seem to be the same! Someone please tell me I'm not in one of those infinite looping groundhog days.
a printable version can be found here:/ 19/1746205&tid=95
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04
Nudepedia.com would be more interesting to the average slashdotter.
In C++, friends can touch each other's private parts.
That means ancestors can also touch their descendants private parts. So, you support child molestation don't you!
If there is one thing these articles have convinced me of, it's that Wikipedia exists as it does today despite Larry Sanger not because of Larry Sanger.
That was no accident. ZZT wiki
"How many young students have read or copied false text from Wikipedia? Is the fact that it's a wiki relevant to the question?"
Specific Criticisms
Various readers and editors of Wikipedia, and administrators of rival encyclopedias, see several valid bases on which to criticize Wikipedia. Readers and editors often have different concerns, but chief among them are:
Lack of Authenticity
Wikipedia's utility as a reference work has been questioned by many diverse sources. The lack of credentials and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by most people. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea", but that he would not use it in practice and is:
"not aware of a single librarian who would [use it]. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
However, Wikipedians commonly encounter this argument. Wikipedia, they say, is a more of an independent source than most traditional encyclopedias, and the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately. Yet, this is only a potential strength, as in reality, Wikipedia cannot be relied upon for accuracy, except on a limited range of topics. Wikipedians say one should not solely rely on any one source in their research. Yet, critics must counter that relying on a trusted source is the fundamental use of an encyclopedia.
Systemic Biases
Wikipedia's systemic bias of covering some topics in much greater depth than others is also considered significant, something that even the site's proponents admit. In an interview with The Guardian, the executive team of Encyclopædia Britannica noted that:
"people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."
One user on a Wikipedia discussion board noted that the Wikipedia entry on Tony Blair was still several times longer than the corresponding entry in Encyclopædia Britannica, but this is a non sequitur. One should note that a vast number of Wikipedias articles cover topics which would not be included in print encyclopedias.
A common Wikipedia maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence." The site founder admits that the variation in quality between different articles and topics is certainly not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be "pretty good", getting better by the day. The "competing" Encyclopædia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian.
It should be noted, however, that Wikipedia articles have been referenced in enhanced perspectives provided online in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious (and unmercifully selective) scientific publications in the world. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", by Hartmut Linden, in the August, 2002 issue. Since then, dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided hyperlinks to Wikipedia. A search on "Wikipedia" in Science's web site
I said some of this on k5 already, but it bears repetition.
Hey, Larry---why are you writing about Wikipedia when you yourself proved incapable of sticking with the project? Since your departure, it's grown tremendously, the power structure has changed (Board, Arbitration Committee), the category system has been implemented, providing a totally different kind of structural organization... it's not really the same place that you left. I take issue with the idea that your understanding of Wikipedia carries some kind of added weight because you were a contributor two and a half years ago.
Larry Sanger is still riding the coattails of his earlier glory. It's over, Larry. You have as much to do with Wikipedia's eventual success as my last week's bowel movements do with the green and verdant grass growing near the sewage treatment plant. Get a new project. Get a life.
If he returned to Wikipedia today, Larry's attempts to foist his elitist attitudes and strong POV on every article he touched would end with him stumbling out with his underwear yanked up in an atomic wedgie and "COCK SOCKET" sharpied on his forehead. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
If Larry Sanger were really an expert about Wikipedia, he'd still be editing it. As it is, he's too scared to dip his feet in the water, and so he pretends to be important. He's sorta like the Eric S. Raymond of Wikipedia.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Larry mentions the lack of enforceable government in wikipedia. This seems like a good time to mention the website I'm working on: debatepoint.com. It could represent the judicial branch of such a government. I would consider the source code of the website its constitution. The computer isn't going to become corrupt unless there is something wrong with the code. Administrators should vow not to bypass the code in order to modify the data.
-metric
Thanks for your personal history of Wikipedia. Your narative provides an interesting perspective on the origins of the project.
Your essay is a great description of the phases each of us has gone through as we learn to collaborate with perfect strangers. The initial influx of people is encouraging but the compromises of working with inefficient or unpleasant people make the work less pleasant. Nonetheless, the overall experience can be wonderful.
My main point is that your perspective, rooted as it is in the value of the "authority", prevents you from taking the one analytic perspective that seems the most obvious. Wikipedia may work *because* of its anarchic structure. Give it twenty years before you decide what it is and what value it has---an encyclopedia is a huge, long-term project. I suspect we will find that the energy people are willing to put into building the project will far, far outstrip the energy of those defacing it. This will mean two things: first, that the overall utility to the project will greatly increase over time. Second, that the project will always contain a non-negligible element of junk. That, then, will become part and parcel of the resource. For those who can't stand junk, edited encyclopedias will provide a low junk alternative albeit one which may have less coverage and which may cost money to access.
You may also be mis-apprehending a fundamental shift which may be happening in science and other disciplines away from "authorities" and "editors" towards something less structured. Certainly none of us trust the newspaper in the same way that people did fifty years ago. I suspect we are moving toward a system where we all evaluate information much more critically than we did before. If this is true, the importance of editorial oversight may be deminishing. Where it exists and we trust it, we may be able to arrive more quickly at useful information. However, we may all be becoming much more functional in systems where such trusted oversight does not exist. In such a context, an unvetted encyclopedia can readily provide useful information. The internet itself is a useful example of rampant unvetted information in which we all, nonetheless, find value.
Finally, the comparison of free content to free software ignores the presence of two fundamental filtering mechanisms which elminate the possibilty of facile gibberish: the compiler and the host. All contributions, to get anywhere, must compile and run. Therefore the addition of randomness can be filtered immediately and the addition of negative content takes a lot of effort. The presence of dictators or dicatorial committees also deeply alters the framework for collaborations in free software from the much more anarchic environment possible in the wiki.
Consider that the anarchy, despite providing troll-like personalities, may provide all the other reasons which make Wikipedia successful. And let's see what happens over the next decades.
ciao,
adrian custer
This is recursion:
Everything you always wanted to know about Wikipedia here.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Atheism in Wikipedia and Atheism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosti cism/) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy differ. Which is more reliable? Edit atheism to improve it with anything from the more reliable source. Like what. The definition perhaps. But really, anything NPOV that you think is an improvement. The result will be what? A better article or being reverted for spurious reasons? Try it and see. Do it as an anon if you want that test. I think some articles on Wikipedia demonstate the evolution of the commons into property, and atheism is an example of that. But maybe I'm wrong. Read any reliable source (I gave one). Make an edit on atheism in an honest attempt at making it better. See the results for yourself. (I hope I'm wrong)
Very few people will have the time to argue with aggressive cranks, especially when what they write is obviously biased, they use personal attacks and never seem to run out of free time.
Sometimes even a look at the discussion page is enough to turn a potential contributor away...
This is especially bad in a much smaller Wikipedia, such as the Hungarian one, where unlike in EnWiki there is a shortage of contributors and expertise in specific fields is extremely scarce. This way, if a problem person can drive away the only expert in a field, he's going to have free reign over an article or an entire topic.
Wikipedia could be so much better if it had a better way to deal with this.
Nyenyec
It occurs to me (from talking to others) that Larry's authority was under question not because he was "encouraging" editors to have good conduct, but because he had intractible positions on most things.
I was an admin on Wikipedia for quite a while, and I largely succeeded because I:
1. Listened to people
2. Took action against people I felt were causing problems
3. Followed the procedures as best I could, however sometimes I bypassed them - I made sure I didn't do this often
4. When I made a mistake, I acknowledged it and took action to correct it (whether this be a public apology - this was always tough - or by unblocking, or by holding firm but be willing to accept the consequences).
Larry, from what I understand, often held intractible views and did not hold towards a neutral point of view. Consequently, he seems to have been disappointed in the project, and been a pretty controversial participant in Wikipedia. The subpage deletion episode he detailed in this slashdot piece just confirms my opinion.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Honestly, I don't know how great Larry's contributions were. Maybe you're right -- maybe he hasn't really got anything substantial to do with Wikipedia's success, and maybe he should get a life.
But, why so exceedingly rude about it? You come off like someone who gets a kick out of putting people down. "It's over, Larry." Sure, whatever. You're still an ass.
If you want to liken Larry's contributions or non-contributions to your bowel movements, fine. Just make sure nobody else has to read about it next time. You're pathetic.
Does wikipedia remind anyone of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series?
Think wikipedia will stop the fall of galactic civilisation into a 30,000 year dark ages?
Will the wikipedia writers be sequestered on a remote planet near the edge of the galaxy? (wait, wouldn't that be all of us??)
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Yup, Classic Wikipedian response.
Sanger could be a goat molester for all I care, and his point that Wikipedia needs expertise would remain valid. It desperately needs expertise. You don't appear to have an answer to that.
I'm probably the only one fascinated by this kind of situation.
Guy #1 "Good for the Wiki"
This guy is being promoted as hard-working honest person working toward a common social good. The stereotypical "honest working man."
Guy #2 "Good for Guy #2"
This guy is portrayed as a status seeker whose sole purpose is to extend his control of the wiki world. That's a kind of selfish good with the sole purpose of seeking praise. Stereotypical executive manager maybe?
I'm fascinated at how #2's drive away a few and attack (managing?) the ones that hang around for the punishment, decrease the production of quality content AND be praised for doing it. It's counter intuitive to me.
What book teaches you how to be a #2? Being a #1 isn't working for me.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Well, in defense of admin ("#2"), he climbed to power based on going after unpopular editors.
Basically, there's a lot of groupthink at Wikipedia, and a tremendous amount of defensiveness too. Why, I'm not quite sure, but there's a cadre there that takes any criticism very personally, and, believing themselves all to be central to the smooth functioning of Wikipedia, they take personal criticism as criticism of, and a threat to, Wikipedia itself.
Guy #2 -- and let me apologize for mincing words, as anyone familiar with Wikipedia knows who I'm talking about, guy #2 is a user who calls himself "Snowspinner". Snowspinner made his Wikipedia "career" by attacking those critics. Some of them were genuinely bad editors, and many Wikipedia users were relived to see them gone and willing to overlook the way Snowspinner got rid of them, by means fair or foul. Because in many cases, Snowspinner got rid of people by relentless, petty harassment, until the victim finally broke a Wikipedia rule in his frustration (usually the rule against personal attacks).
One of his tactics should be familiar to any student of recent American politics: Snowspinner declared his victims to be "trolls" -- an elastic term with no real meaning but with strongly pejorative connotations. He then said or implied that anyone defending a troll must also be a troll -- compare to John Ashcroft's "Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve...."
While there were real disruptive editors, Snowspinner pretty much called anyone who questioned his tactics a "troll", and implied that arguing for due process was a "delaying tactic" only used by trolls. (Compare to the Slashdot chestnut, "if you're innocent, why do you fear police surveillance?") So it became politically highly costly to oppose Snowspinner, or defend his victims, or even to argue that his victims -- whatever they'd done -- deserved due process and fair treatment.
Snowspinner himself made it abundantly clear -- he has stated with pride on his user page -- that even as he "prosecutes" dissenters for breaking Wikipedia rules, he does not feel himself bound by the very rules he enforces. So Snowspinner was willing to go farther and take more risks in going after the questioners who threatened the established powers. And those in the power structure were delighted to have Snowspinner as their attack dog. Due process and fair treatment got thrown out the window as the established Wikipedians saw a quick and easy way to get rid of thorns in their sides that had bothered them for some time.
Ironically enough, for someone so concerned about ridding Wikipedia of trolls, Snowspinner may himself be a troll. Unlike most new users, Snowspinner
How does a new user even know about these esoteric corners of Wikipedia? And what new user involves himself so confidently and so quickly? Either a fire-brand or someone who is not really a new user and is editing as under a sockpuppet account.
Once Snowspinner had burrowed into the power structure, by being the "dishonorable hatchet-man" willing to go to almost any lengths to get rid of "bad" editors, he then went after anyone threatening the status quo. Because whether or
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
If the elitism is a meritocracy, sure. But much of academia is not a meritocracy, based instead of networking. There are certain portions of major conferences that accept and reject papers largely based on long-running personal feuds, where an important person (and usually his/her disciples) exerts substantial sway. Often competing for grant money is involved as well.
That's the sort of elitism Wikipedia doesn't have time for.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I cannot express how honored I am that there's an entire Slashdot post moderated at +2 devoted purely to lies and false insinuations about me.
While we're clarifying the record, let's note that you fled Wikipedia just as an arbcom case was accepted against you in which you no doubt would have finally been sanctioned for the unending stream of personal attacks and trolling that you were submitting me to.
As for the apparently valid information, Peter Yarrow's conviction had nothing to do with the dissolution of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
"let's note that you fled Wikipedia just as an arbcom case was accepted against you"
Fled? You really do think you're running a police-state, don't you? Yes, I was shaking in fear, one step ahead of your thought-policing.
Actually I did "flee" -- to Ohio. I gave up my apartment lease, moved out, and moved to Ohio for a month to volunteer at the Ohio headquarters for Kerry-Edwards.
After weeks of 18 hour days seven days a week, I created from scratch (and local Boards of Election data) a distributable offline database that could be taken on laptops all over the state, which probably got somewhere from 5,000-15,000 Democrats to their correct polling places on Election Day. This was especially important, as Ohio had redistricted since the original Kerry-Edwards database had been populated, and Ohio's Republican Secretary of State had ruled that votes cast at incorrect polling places wouldn't be counted.
You of course, spent your time more wisely, getting people banned from Wikipedia.
I thought saving America from George Bush was just a leetle more important than, oh, your (admittedly successful) effort to save "Steak and Blowjob Day" from deletion at Wikipedia.
I blame myself for having the wrong priorities.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I have been following a dispute on the Armenian genocide article.
There is this character Coolcat who openly admitted on 22:32, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC):
"Dear sir. I am not knowlegable in the Armenian Genocide article enough to comment. I am merely folowing wikipedia NPOV article."
Yet he is knowledgeable enough to edit the article and add Turkish POV, he just does not want to debate against someone who has read so many works on the subject.
On the other hand Fadix who has a vast knowledge on the subject is handicapped in his dispute with Coolcat because of Wikipedia's anti-elitism. His article on the Ottoman Armenian Population has 25 footnotes to books referenced. His article on Ottoman Armenian Casaulties(in progress) has 20 footnotes referenced. So contrary to Coolcat he is knowledgeable on the subject and can make a better article on the Armenian genocide than encyclopedia's such as Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, etc., as their articles on this subject are very poor compared to his progress to the parts of the Armenian genocide article he has posted on those links.
Wikipedia only recognizes in disputes how polite you are, if you are assumming good faith and other such bullshit. It does not recognize expertise or if you are contributing to a better article. This project is a joke. It does not matter what research you do, even if you use footnotes, someone can change the article without using references. It does not matter what research you do in a library in Wikipedia's world, it matters how much time you spent in Wikipedia instead, tiem spent not doing researching, time spent doing POV and not using references to academic and historic works. If you revert too much you will be in trouble, not the person without expertise, so I see little point to even bother with this project if you have done serious research. The mods will castigate for exceeding the revert rule; tell you to work things out with the ignorant editor and that "assuming good faith and NPOV you can make a better article together", a joke to say the least. Fadix who has been studying for 5 years and supporting his thesis with references should get together with someone using on purpose to their advantage Wikipedia's lame anti-elitism should get together.
Wikipedia should be an unbiased source already.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Steak and Blowjob day, on the other hand, got saved, while Kerry still lost Ohio. Something to be said for picking battles where you make a difference.
And strangely, I haven't seen you back since the election. Wonder why.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I spent a good deal of time in research on various articles, and in next to know time I was a respected editor. I also spent some time on the site, but I'd say at one point more time on research than on the site itself.
I might also point out that many footnotes does not make a clear or well written article, though it does show a lot of effort. If you don't believe me, try reading The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, or any work by David Irvine.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Did you even follow the example I showed you? This man fadix has been researching the subject for five years. I linked to his sub-articles he is working on for the Armenian genocide and they are good scholarly articles, he mentions what his source is basing their population numbers on, the Armenian Patriarch Records, the taxable hearths from Ottoman records, etc. Citing an example like read this book "The Two Babylons", this book shows footnotes are not all that, is typical Wikipedia anti-elitism. Footnotes in historical narratives are the only thing to anchor the narrative to written sources. Just because some people use dubious and manipulated sources like Holocaust denier David Irving, does not make footnotes bad.
I doubt you have done any deep research on any articles. At least you could cite the articles and your username. To do deep research takes time and people do not really do research just because they want to edit a wiki. You have to be interested in more than editing a wiki to do serious research, you have to be interested in the subject beyond just the desire to make wiki edits.
Further your example has nothing to do with this case. This case is highly politicized because almost all Turks deny the Armenian genocide. You saying "I was highly respected for doing research" does not disprove Wikipedia's widespread anti-elitism. One moderator "Tony Sidaway" of this dispute said in Coolcat's Arbcom case on 15:19, 8 Apr 2005:
"Coolcat and Fadix are opinionated but not malicious editors with radically different points of view. I have found both to be fairly responsive to reason and highly appreciative of good faith intervention. Both have attracted some extreme personal attacks as well as a fair amount of legitimate criticism, and both have produced excellent work that is a credit to Wikipedia. While it is true that they seem to have had what could become a feud, it hasn't really been that nasty given the extremely contentious ground upon which they encounter one another (Armenia/Turkey). I am on reasonably good terms with both, and I don't think the behavior of either is yet beyond the reach of normal dispute resolution. I ask the arbitrators to reject this case unless evidence of gross abuse by either of them comes to light."
He made no mention of Coolcat's open claim to have no knowledge of the subject at hand yet still demanding to edit the article. Tony made no deference of Fadix's expertise. This is why Wikipedia is a joke. There is only penalties for not being polite, for reverting too much and such things, there is no reward for expertise, not only is there no reward there is no deference to it.
The following Kuro5hin comment echos this example that time spent on Wikipedia trumps time spent reading actual books and journals:
""The underlying problem is that Wikipedia behaves as a community. Members call themselves "Wikipedians." They hold online elections and real-life meetups, and gossip with each other in IRC and on mailing lists. They're more interested in being a community than in building an encyclopedia." The anti-elitism talks about is cultivated and desperately defended as it allows just about anyone with absolutely no qualifications who have a lot of time on their hands to become community "insiders" and control the activities of others. Who cares if anyone is reading the articles the wikipedians are having fun, right? Expertise and the amount of time required to become a respected member of the Wikipedia community are mutually exclusive. This demand for time screens out experts and allows officious (and oh so self important) bureaucrats with dubious qualifications to control the process."
Just for the record, my username was Ta bu shi da yu, and I wrote:
* Exploding whale
* Btrieve
* CUPS, and
* Municipality of Strathfield
(amongst many, many others).
You are correct, however. I did not follow the example (though I could have). I didn't need to, because I wasn't referring to just that example. What I was responding to was the following:
I pointed out that references by themselves do not make a good article. You said that those who don't do research take over articles and that those who do research don't get recognised. I showed you that this is incorrect. You stated that, based on one article dispute, the whole project is a joke.
You stated that "The mods will castigate for exceeding the revert rule; tell you to work things out with the ignorant editor and that "assuming good faith and NPOV you can make a better article together", a joke to say the least." - there is a dispute resolution process for Wikipedia. I suggest you do a search for it on Google or visit the admin noticeboard to ask for general assistance or for a link to the process. Lastly, I'd like to say that if you can't play nicely, then don't play at all. Even if you have expertise, you still might be writing from a one-sided POV (like that's never happened before to an academic!), in which case you seriously need to start asking whether your goals and Wikipedia's goals are mutually compatible.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A few sources with no footnotes is not serious research, it is more worthy of a report in highschool. It is common in non-specialist encylopedia's though to have such a number of sources. Serious research is when you study for over 20 years something like how David C. Young has studied the Olympics or like Vahakn Dadrian has studied the Armenian genocide. People who just wanted to gain edits will not in all likelihood take years of their lives to do research.
The point is fadix is capable of making a much better article than the present article on Wiklipedia, he can make a better article than the Encylopedia of Genocide edited by Israel Charny has even on the Armenian genocide, the two stubs he wrote are much better researched than all your articles combined. The problem is anyone who read nothing can deter him by editing and the mods will ask him to collaborate using faith to "produce a better article" but you cannot collaborate with someone with no knowledge to make a better article, they will only hinder. Further your attempt to equate people defering to your expertise on an article like CUPS and btrieve with historical issues is weak at best. Just because you are editing non-politicized articles like CUPS and bstream and using this anecdotal evidence to try to minimize the problem of Wikipedia's anti-elitism does not mean on politized issues there is no problem to defering to authority. You will not even examine the case I gave, which shows what your whole agenda is regarding the anti-elitism you say does not exist because you edit CUPS.
Even on Kuro5hin you show you are not objective regarding Wikipedia. Estanislao Martínez gave specific example of the Taino controvesy, on CUPS or bstream, a locality, etc. your experience is not relevant. CUPS is not a politicalized issue.
So in other words, experts can never make mistakes and are never biased. I find that an interesting take, and wish you all the best in your future endeavours.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As you point out, my example articles are not about political issues (well, not strictly true, if you look at the Strathfield article... but let's forget this for this argument). Yet, "the two stubs he wrote are much better researched than all your articles combined." Ever heard the English expression, "comparing apples with oranges"?
I don't think you've thought things out very well...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
WTF? No, idiot give a specific example. You cannot just dismissing doing real research like that: "experts make mistakes". So anyone's opinion without knowing a subject is as valid as real research. This is typical of Wikipedians and this is why Dan Brown is a bestseller, and why Wikipedia is a hobby and not somethng to take serious.
Everyone is human and makes mistakes. But to say that Wikipedia's article on the Olympics is better than the things David C. Young has written in "The Modern Olympics a Struggle for Revival" is a joke since "experts make mistakes". David C. Young to let you know was a classics scholar of ancient Greek specializing in Pindar(who wrote poems lauding the Olympics and it athletes). This man knows ancient Greek, modern Greek, French, English, etc. has done primary research in England in Brooke's archives, in Greece in the Gennadius library the Greek IOC, in Switzerland, has read all the major secondary works on the Olympics in addition to his primary research, etc. This kind of work takes years. To learn a language take years, etc. Wikipedia's article on the Olympics is a joke, Soutsos first proposed a revival of the Olympics in his poetry in 1833 not Coubertin as Wikipedia says. The only thing Coubertin revived is nothing, he created an interenational Olympic that could not have survived without the pre-existing local Olympic movements of Greece and England.
And all your articles which you wrote are not examples of deep research. You have a bibliography but no footnotes. In high school reports I had to source 4 books minumium and use footnotes.
When you cite articles that combined are citing less than one of his two articles I am not comparing apples and oranges. You confirm what Martinez says about vanity being a motivation in Wikipedia. If that was not so you could recognize when someone who writes one article has cited more material than you. I have no problem that thousands of people are doing better research in subjects I have no idea about know more than me. But I am no Wikipedian. :-)
His article would be better than the Encyclopedia of Genocide articles on the subject. Some of these entries can be found here The entries written by Dobkin are not on that site. The Encyclopedia of Genocide actually sucks since it cost so much and does not really cite things.
You called me an idiot, I think this really says it all. I've got better things to do than be insulted by an AC on slashdot!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In one article he is citing 20 books. Citing not a bibliography. To cite you have to read and take notes or read and re-consult the works. To do biblography you use what you acquire from memory, it takes much less time, you should know since you used this method and not citing.
You are being way too Wiki-arrogant. Assume good faith. We can resolve this dispute and release a Nuetral Truth[TM].
I have been too patient with you. You have not even followed my examples. Not only are you so arrogant to dismiss experts, which means you are know it all expert at everything, you just plain do not read or listen either.
Have you even dealt with my example that Coubertin did not even start the modern Olympics. He even got the idea of an Olympic revival from Brookes. Young has done research on correspondance between Brookes and Coubertin. Coubertin was at first interested only in physical education because he thought Germany produced better physical specimens than France because of its gymnasiums and this had an effect on French military vis a vis Germany.
Or my example that a Fadix can write a better article but it does not matter because there is a Coolcat who will sabotage his efforts. I forgot you are too arrogant to follow a link. But you will assert you it is to compare apples and oranges to compare his citations to your small bibliographies.
People like you are why Wikipedia is something not worth time. So you still have not even took a look at that article instead making up examples to ignore this real example? He does not just try to present one side as truth. He cites works that give Ottoman Turkish sources on the Armenian population. But only after the founding of modern Turkey did Turkey ever concern itself with a real census, it only cared for taxes during the period in question so only taxable hearths can be known from Ottoman sources. Armenian Religious figures on the other hand took birth and death records of all the Armenian population, marriage records, etc.
You have a blind faith in Wikipedia. No one can objectively talk to you about this subject. The whole problem with Wikipedia is nowhere is there a deference to who can make a better article. It is about edit count, how long your tenure is, how polite you are, in essence everything that is trivial matters and what matters most on wikipedia matters least.
Gah!!! I never said he was biased! All I said was that just because you have references does not make a good article!!!!! Your entire argument is based on the fact that he is an "expert" and that he gives lots of references, and that based on one dispute on Wikipedia you think the whole project is rubbish. That's what I was responding to, I never said that your friend wrote rubbish! In fact, I never said whether one side or the other was wrong or right. I merely poked some holes in your sweeping assertions about Wikipedia.
How can one person misunderstand oh so much? Sheesh.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The example I gave is not "made-up". It exists, and if you actually bothered to look up Arab Israeli conflict, you'd see what I mean.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
... considering that I'm actually finding it extremely hard to understand what you are writing (is English your first language), and you seem to going off on tangents and talking at cross purposes with me, I don't know how to respond.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wikipedia has a court reprimanding users for breaking the 3RR and making personal attacks. But it lacks an authority reprimanding users for chronically undermining Wikipedia's progress with original research, POV nonsense, and ungrammatical prose. My suggestion on Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards was an alternative arbitration committee with public credibility, composed of qualified encyclopedists who have the calhones not to edit anonymously. (Such a review board would "kill two birds with one stone": making Wikipedia more "expert"-friendly and solidifying its public credibility.) However, other people may have better ideas, and my suggestion is certainly not the only one on the table warranting attention."
No wonder why you do not like it.
I talked all about the editorial review process controversy in all my comments (which is the reason 172 left, mores the pity). Uh, I don't think so! Funny, really, how I've never even introduced this concept into ANY of my comments in this thread. Please don't put words in my mouth.
You seem to be trying to make this into a competition on who has the most references. More references do not necessarily make a better article (though it's a good indication of good intent to research an article). Experts can be biased, and Wikipedia attempts to write from a neutral point of view, with neutral language. I've stated my position on this, if English is not your first language and you can't follow what I've been trying to say, I can't help this!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you can show me an encyclopedia with footnotes, then I'd be interested in your argument. An encyclopedia is a general reference work, and references should be fine. If you look at my CUPS article, you'll notice that I do inline referencing - the same with the Strathfield article.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Maybe I got it all wrong describing Wikipedia as a religious cult. It's only really a religious crusade for techno utopian supporters in the media, and marketing consultants who blog. But it is a cult, and only in a cult can behavior like this flourish. Someday Wikipedia is going to be a sociological case study.
I'm bookmarking this part of the thread. It's as good an introduction to Wikipedia for outsiders as any article I've read about it. Thanks again, Orthogonal.
For me the key phrase was the insistence that Wikipedia was from the beginning "... singlemindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia". That was _exactly_ what Hari Seldon's poor dupes insisted to all visitors in the first decades. But after Asimov's Foundation had existed for fifty years, its founder finally showed up in a holorecording to explain: "...the Encyclopedia Project is a sham, and has always been!" If the parallels hold up, the fall of civilization is coming maybe around 2025, give or take a decade, though most people won't recognize it for a while -- but Jimmy Wales' true aims won't be revealed until 2050. And yes, due to the Wikipedia's efforts, the Interregnum will be only a thousand years instead of 30,000. Given that we're hitting Hubbert's Peak now (again, give or take a decade), psychohistory might be preceding itself pretty nicely here...
I was not always so colorful in my reaction to Larry's pontifications, but have become so relatively recently.
Larry is not just another guy in the comments section talking smack. He's purporting to represent an organization which he's had no part of for going on three years now. It's when he gets on his high, fraudulent horse, that he needs to be taken down a peg.
Do you understand why I don't think Larry deserves "a break", as you say, so long as he continues to ride the coattails of a project he once was involved with? Do you understand why I fully believe exciting, fecal metaphors are justified?
Oh, and note that I managed to refrain from ad hominem attacks on you, since you're not misrepresenting yourself or an organization. Get it?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You're welcome to look over my contributions; I take Wikipedia quite seriously. I do engage, while there, in the sort of colorful metaphor you see above.
I think this is Larry's sour grapes over quitting in a huff and discovering that the project did just fine, nay, did even better, without him. And now he wants to feel important again, so he talks about the project without deigning to actually, you know, contribute to it.
But, hey, good personal attack against me rather than any attempt to dispute actual points... yup... that looks like a Slashdotter response if ever I read one.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Make that "I do not engage, while there, in the sort of colorful metaphor you see above.". I suppose having the ability to go back and edit everything has made me soft...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
For me what Larry has to say was a letdown. Apparently Larry did not have one look at the current wiktionary. If he had typed in wiktionary.org He would have found a portal page for several wiktionaries. He would have known that it is not possible to make a comparison with the likes of Webster's and the OED because wiktionary is not like these pillars of wisdom. Wiktionary is not only about the English language. He would have found many projects in many languages. A bit like Wikipedia but different. Different because if Larry had looked into any of these projects, he would have found that all these projects have the ambition to have all words in all languages. He would have found that current wiktionary has moved far beyond what where the issues at the start. So it is no suprise that Larry has not learned about the Ultimate Wiktionary. A new ambitious project that may integrate all Wiktionary projects and that will be the first "any to any" dictionary. His arguments against the use of a wiki in relation to dictionaries is a rehash of his POV that you need authority to do some work. If he had done some research, he could have found the soundfiles, something anyone with a "standard" pronounciation can produce. He could have found (with some difficulty) all the Papiamento words in the Dutch Wiktionary, a resource that has (as far as I can find) no equal on the Internet. He could have found that collaboration that exists between Wiktionaries resulting in things like the "Cristianesimo" list of words. So I am disapointed. As Larry Sanger is a man respected for his contributions in the initial stage of the Wikipedia project, I would be ever so pleased if he had another look. I would really look forward to an opportunity to discuss the opportunies that I foresee in the Ultimate Wiktionary. It would be ever so cool if Larry had a serious look at the current Wiktionary because then we could compare notes on what is wrong with the current crop of Wiktionary projects. It would also make him relevant because what he wrote in slashdot is for me nothing but a blast from the past. Thanks, GerardM
Keeping Steak and Blowjob Day in Wikipedia is "making a difference"?! Man, you should add an entry for "Pathetic" with just your photo above that statement.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If you reread what I said, actually, I said that I made a difference in whether Steak and Blowjob day was kept.
Philip Sandifer's academic website