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."

Comments

The best bit is...

[gowen]

... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.

You heard it here first.

[uberchicken]

LAMB: When did Wikipedia start?

WALES: It started in January of 2001.

LAMB: Where?

WALES: On the Internet. [...]

I stopped reading right there.

Re:People are sometimes wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

"For instance, most Americans still think there's a connection between Saddam and 911."

But they don't have computers so theres no worries of them adding stuff to a wiki

Re:I love WIkipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love sneaking my name into articles. So far I've taught a famous guitarist how to play, worked for NASA during an Apollo mission, and got shot out of a cannon.

Re:People are sometimes wrong.

[maxwell demon]

For instance, most Americans still think there's a connection between Saddam and 911.

What, Saddam didn't create the Porsche 911? :-)

Re:People are sometimes wrong.

[gowen]

Idiot. He means Saddam got to pick the US emergency response telephone number.

Re:Sheesh, get over yourself

[gowen]

Tricksters create through destruction.

Cool. So you wouldn't mind if I creatively scratched my name into your car door with a set of keys then?

uh-oh

[TTL0]

"I had the idea basically from watching the growth of the free software movement"

so does that mean we should start calling it GNU\Wikipedia ?!?!

Re:Election Stuff

[br00tus]

I have been on Wikipedia for years. You are absolutely correct, Wikipedia does not handle controversial issues well. And I do not see much hope that it ever will. Things keep getting more and more complicated and large, and the issue gets more and more difficult to solve, and with every step, Wikipedia takes a step away from being able to solve it.

If you go to Wikipedia's fonr page, they have everything cataloged in eight master categories. Wikipedia does the Mathematics and Science categories very well. How many edit wars are there over Mandelbrot sets? Not many. Science is the same way, quantum mechanics is a good article everyone can agree on. Once in a while you get some nutty guy with weird theories, but the community will not put up with it. When politics and religion intrude on science, like with global warming or creationism, then some of the edit warring can come in, but in Science and Mathematics, arguments are small, and usually in categories with some crossover to other categories.

At the other end of the spectrum are the History and Society categories. I find these very biased, with edit wars that get worse and worse and so forth. If people are shooting each other in Kashmir, north Ireland, Gaza and whatnot, isn't it normal to expect people won't collaborate together on Wikipedia? With the situation not headed towards a solution, but getting worse, I see the eventual outcome of pro-Bush, pro-Israel people going to wikis like Wikinfo, and anti-Bush, pro-Palestinian people going to wikis like Demopedia, Dkosopedia, or even Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. There seem to be more left-wing wiki encyclopedias than right-wing ones - Wikinfo doesn't even call itself conservative, although the owner of Wikinfo is conservative, and Wikinfo's content is sort of conservative. Anyhow this is how I see things going, left and right wingers will have their own wikis for Society and History category articles, and perhaps they'll come to Wikipedia to duke it out over Wikipedia's article.