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C-SPAN Interviews Wikipedia Founder
TrentL writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (aka Jimbo) was recently interviewed on C-SPAN's primetime program Q&A. Topics included the origins of Wikipedia, governing philosophy, and criticisms from members of the print encyclopedia community." From the article: "I had the idea basically from watching the growth of the free software movement. So all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."
Too bad the grammar isn't too really good top-shelf quality shtuff and shiat.
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
Wikipedia is amazing. A shining example of what people can do from working together as a community for the spread of information and making the world a better place. It is great to see Stallman's influence reaching to such extents that very awesome sites like Wiki are started and become what they are today.
... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
During the election, the bio on Kerry was full of lies. Perhaps it still it. It was like reading about Bizarro-Kerry, where everything bad was turned to good. I guess that's anti-Bizarro Kerry or something.
Wikipedia is great for articles on technical or trivia, but there's too much incentive for people who have a strong interest in a certain story being told to go in there and muck it up, whatever the cost. Usually there are two sides, but one side will win - and that's what you see.
E.g. I'm pretty sure that either the Zionists or anti-Zionists have filled up wikipedia with their viewpoint. One side has likely one and then twisted things freely.
That is similar to the book reviews at Amazon: authors routinely attempt to manipulate their rankings -- e.g. ordering a bunch of books, then returning them. They have too much of a stake in doing it.
If this guy could figure out some way to make Wikipedia correct on controversial issues (or at least not have blatant falsehoods), he'd do us all a lot of good. This would require some sort of motiviational/compensation system that I simply can't imagine, because the truth doesn't pay.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
LAMB: When did Wikipedia start?
WALES: It started in January of 2001.
LAMB: Where?
WALES: On the Internet. [...]
I stopped reading right there.
"Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners."
"Uncorrected" is right. Still a bit of tuning to do with that speech-interpretation engine, methinks. (To be fair, Jimmy Wales is not the most skillful of speakers.)
Still. Way cool that Wikipedia is on C-SPAN!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
I love Wiki...
but I always verify the info with another source or two because people (even the majority) are sometimes wrong.
For instance, most Americans still think there's a connection between Saddam and 911.
Every time there is a wikipedia article on slashdot, there's a bunch of arrogant, stupid posts that get modded informative. They usually state something like "you can edit the article to change that, and prove you wrong!!!!11111" They also usually fail to mention the fact that there's a nice "permenant link button" that links you to the specific revision of the page, NOT the most recent page, eliminating any such possibility.
I saw part of the interview and it's a shame that he didn't give credit to Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented wiki and showed what was possible wrt community building with the Portland Patterns Repository.
Wikipedia's main claim to fame is its ability to evolve with time as new facts are available. A topic like NASA can be updated just as frequently as the main NASA webpage by anyone with the gumption to do it. People who have extensive topical knowledge can give that information to the world with an entry in Wikipedia. And the more people that participate, the more voluminous and comprehensive the information gets.
Unfortunately, this is also the online encyclopedia's Achilles heel. When the entire database is open to anyone willing to edit the posts, it runs the risk of getting not only incorrect information but also maliciously incorrect information. As someone else mentioned in another post before this one, topics that engender strong emotions frequently succumb to "vandalism". But other less popular topics also run the risk of being vandalized, and since they are not as frequently viewed or commonly understood, the incorrect information presents a timebomb for any hapless dataminer.
So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us? Lexis Nexis is still around, charging outrageous fees for very good information. Does Wikipedia compete with authoritative encyclopedias, or is it just a condensed version of the Internet (which is to say a sometimes useful, sometimes useless collection of random topics)?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Some nice points made over at The Register critically commenting on wikipedia.
Wikipedia's Emergent People fail to impress readers. Makes the nice point that a bazaar might not necesarily create a better structure than a cathedral method of collating information, i.e. lots of ill-informed time rich people don't necessarily give you a great answer. I'm all for wikipedia, but I think it still needs to be treated with a certain scepticism like any other publication.
Look like somebodies got a case of the serious. I'm not the original AC but I did mod him up because it is funny.
Ever read the book 'Trickster makes the world' by Lewis Hyde? Tricksters and pranksters do more for society with their mischievous behavior than other archetypes. The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better. Without tricksters, cultures would stagnate. Tricksters create through destruction.
It disappoints me that nerdish communities like Slashdot, metafilter, wikipedia et. al. don't have a collective sense of humour. It is just like intellectuals to compartmentalize all aspects of the human condition.
PS. I just realised you have Aussie in the first part of your name! For shame! It is part of the Australian condition to pull the piss out of authority.
WALES: Yes, yes, yes, no
Apparently the mastermind behind Wikipedia is in fact the wife of Jim Trott from the 'Vicar of dibley'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Dibley
Since Wiki can be updated by whomever has the greatest degree of brute force, it has changed the very nature of what truth, and accuracy are. One can reshape 'truth' and remake it in just about any image one desires. If for example one wanted to delegitimize evolution or uplift suicide bombing as a noble endevor one would be free to rewrite history as one saw fit. And the idea that there are even competing points of view would be driven by the sheer signal to noise ratio those competing points of view could drive through the Wiki system. Wiki is the perfect embodiment of our post modern view of the world where everything is everything, all values, ideas and beliefs are equally fair and might makes right.
No, you most likely didn't do any of those things, and this kind of vandalism is not a significant problem for wikipedia. Those kinds of trivial vanity and false information are a dime a dozen on wikipedia, and the system handles them well. Please people, be a bit critical of self-proclamied successfull vandalizers, unless they can provide a diff showing something they have actually done.
If someone has the time, feel free to look through all articles containing the word "cannon" (they're not that many). I doubt you'll find any trace of this persons alleged vandalism.
This article has recently been posted on Slashdot. Please watch out for any trolls that may target this article.
What on earth do they mean?
One main difference is that standard encyclopedias cite their sources, so you can then go read them. Wikipedia is closer to asking an informed acquaintance; their anwser is probably correct, they just might not remember where they learned it.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I was struck by Jimmy Wales' remark that "all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."
The odd thing is that Wikipedia itself is not a high quality site, in the sense of being fast and reliable. For a site that is so important--and it really is important now--with so much traffic, it is quite frequently either down, or so heavily loaded that you get odd behavior, such as error messages, uncertainty whether edits have actually been committed, and so forth.
I would guess that Wikipedia works "the way I'd expect" perhaps 80% of the time, and is "glacially slow, flaky, or outright down" maybe 5% of the time. It's in a completely different category from, say, Slashdot.
I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come. However, I note that every fund drive they've ever had has met its goals and reasonably quickly, too.
(The stock WIkipedian comment on such things is that being GFDL, anyone can mirror Wikipedia and many sites do, so Wikipedia being down tends to mostly inconvenience people who wish to edit Wikipedia, not people who are trying to read Wikipedia articles).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wikipedia has not changed the nature of truth. Wikipedia has only made it easier to access free, democratic information, thus allowing readers to make more informed choices about truth based on a larger range of fact and opinion. It is, in my opinion, very much preferable to watching news or the discovery channel, where fact-checking is such a tedious and after-the-fact process that it barely ever occurs.
If you want to criticize someone for homogenizing the truth, look to secondary school and university educators and textbook publishers, who cannot afford to have a definite perspective on truth, due to lobbyist groups and bureaucrats.
Yup. It sure does. All the free stuff like SONET terminals and routers.
All that heavy iron that makes up the internet is all created and
built in the bazaar. No cathedral work going on there. No way.
Else I could fire all the professional historians in the world who's job it is to evaluate and vett the facts and simply toss everything up to whomever thinks they have a credible opinion.
Who says anything was ever written correctly the first time anyways. If anything, wikipedia encourgaes an exchange of opposing truths. The more perspectives provided of an object or subject the more accurate a picture may be drawn by reader. One thing is certain that humans never get it right the first time though. Wiki allows revisions by various authors and exposure to ideas that would go otherwise un-noted. The full truth on anything should contain the ideas of those on all sides.
Wikipedia allows discussion areas and in some cases even locks certain articles prone to vandalism.
It's a worldwide knowledge base that's free for anyone to access or edit, ever-expanding with the scope and depth of human intelligence.
Using a PDA, we've practically got The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth now, ya know?
Initiate snu-snu!
You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.
Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.
As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.
Someone that contributes 95% useful information with a few wrong things thrown in could probably cause some damage -- but nobody seems to want to really hurt Wikipedia thus far. [shrug]
Also, most of the vandals seem to be schoolchildren, and the vandalism is pretty amateur, whereas the regular Wiki contributors have worked such that the grammar and writing style of the bulk of Wikipedia is of excellent quality. Against this backdrop, vandalism tends to stand out -- someone who has graduated from high school with a solid English background seems to be less likely to be interested in running around vandalising other people's donations. "Teacher" is a popular article to vandalize, for instance, as are those of pop bands.
Slashdot sees a lot of trolls, but I think that part of the "troll psychology" is that trolling is considered fun -- successful trolling takes some skill, causes little or no damage (at least on the individual level, though Slashdot being flooded with trolls can get annoying), and people see an immediate reaction to what they've written. On Wiki, where vandalizing articles does hurt people, the most common reaction is just to see some inert text followed by the vandalism being backed out. There's no "modding up", and messages don't become part of a timeless archive (as they can be backed out).
I, personally, think that creating/improving vandalism flagging to Wikipedia would be one of the more useful research projects out there (i.e. this is applicable to a lot of things besides Wikipedia, successfully doing this can directly cause a lot of good, and there is interesting data mining research involved), and I'm guessing that if someone hasn't already jumped on this, someone will at some point.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
On the one hand, it's not like that sort of consensus truth building hasn't been around at least since the 17th century (the circle of people whose opinions matter has just changed). But really, if you look at a few articles on controversial topics (try Intelligent Design) and particularly at the discussion pages, you'll find that the articles get pared down to mostly facts and statements of the views of each side. The editors do a pretty good job of keeping blatant bias out of the articles. It's still the wisdom of crowds, but with some pretty clear standards. In fact, I'd say Wikipedia is much less ideological and political than the first Encyclopdia of Diderot and D'Alembert.
Indeed. If people would just realize that you need to corroborate Wikipedia facts before relying on them, almost all the arguments against it would evaporate.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Okay, so I've read the article, and learnt a few things about the personal life of Jimmy Wales that I didn't know before. Okay, I admit it. I knew nothing about him. When I started reading the article, I looked at the text and wondered why it hadn't been cleaned up a bit before publication. After a bit more reading, I thought of a reason — it's damn long.
So, to save you the trouble, here's a brief summary of what happens in the article:
1. Description of some part of Wikipedia
2. Examples, emphasising the community nature of things
3. A sidebar into some small part of Jimmy Wales' Life
4. Go back to step 1... many times
Ask me about repetitive DNA
"How likely is it that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks? Would you say that it is very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not at all likely?"
The 70% figure included the people that said both "very likely" and "somewhat likely". Of course, the media turns around and spins the results to say that 70% "believe the link"
Here is the source.
so does that mean we should start calling it GNU\Wikipedia ?!?!
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
My only complaint with Wikipedia does have to do with people being able to edit articles. Namely, those people who use grammar in such a way that makes a sentence hard to read and removes any useful information that was contained in the sentence. I hate having to reead a sentence three times to figure out what it is supposed to mean. After a point, seldom used words makes a person sound stupid instead of more intelligent.
Beyond the possibility of vandalism, I think thats the Wikipedia's biggest flaw.
If I wanted a quick reference for Boyle's Law or Newton's gravitational constant or the average number of young in a litter of hedgehogs I could probably find some fairly undisputed sources for that practically anywhere. But clearly the intent of Wiki is to add 'currency' to things which are in fact, current. And that is the great danger, isn't it?
Between an agreed upon set of circumstances generally conceived as fact or at least factually based, a set which is therefore possible to have a discussion, and the vague opinions and feelings of the discussion itself? That's pathetic.
Julius Caesar invented the artesian well, I guess because it is my sense of it that that statement is true.
Are you talking about the difficulties of peer-contributed and unregulated texts like Wikipedia to transcend the problems of spin and personal interest? It's the same problem with open source code, which is met with the claiming that distributed development makes more reliable program code ("with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"): sufficient people viewing and vetting the Wikipedia's content will ensure that its 'currency' is not devalued.
Just the ones watching Fox News.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sufficient people instituted The Inquisition based on their common sense understanding of the world around them, too.
The point is that WP does a fantastic job with recent, non-controversial topics. Older research is best found in textbooks, while controversial topics usually require multiple sources -- of which WP could be one.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
You're complaining about the use of grammar, correct? I have to ask because your post is a shining example of appalling grammar - there isn't a single sentence that doesn't contain at least one error. If that's an illustration of your own grasp of English grammar (rather than being the subtle troll some might suspect), it's no wonder you find others' grammar confusing.
"How does a young student reading an article about something they know nothing about know whether its information is correct or not?"
t _Fact_and_Reference_Check
Because the Wikiproject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec
is adding citations and references for all articles so knowing if the information is correct or not can easily be seen by the quality of the references. Eventually each fact will be referenced numerious times, and each reference will be double checked by dozens of contributors.
What higher standard of quality assurance in information would you like than this?
You may be on to something...there's not one mention of this new nature of truth in the entry, and there doesn't appear to be any debate about this new nature of truth in the discussion page, and I can't find anyone who has even attempted to note its new nature in any prior revision. Therefore we can conclude that this change to the nature of truth is unprecedented, and it's probably undocumented because the contributors to that entry have an agenda to conceal it from us.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
However, they had the relative freedom to do what they wished because they were free from the accountability that holds back today's politcal leaders from doing similar things (although that last one is contentious). While not perfect, Wikipedia holds anyone who writes for it to account by it being published immediately.
How is anyone held accountable?
Again, an interviewer that talks to Jimbo without knowing about Nupedia?
If it wasn't for all the trouble Nupedia had, there would never have been a Wikipedia. Larry Sanger wanted to do everything right in the Nupedia project, but when that sort of got caught in bureaucracy, he and Jimmy thought up a better, quicker, simpler system: Wikipedia.
What the hell, all the info is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia
May the better bots win.
In other words, you really don't give a shit about wasting somebody else's time.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga