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

Re:Election Stuff

[gowen]

the bio on Kerry was full of lies. Perhaps it still is... I'm pretty sure that either the Zionists or anti-Zionists have filled up wikipedia with their viewpoint.

I dunno, but I think your opinions might have more validity if you'd demonstrated evidence of even the slightest bit of research. But hey, you're such an intellectual heavyweight that you consider posting near the top of a slashdot discussion to be more important than actually supporting your assertions with evidence.

And yes, during the US election, the Kerry and Bush articles were frequently vandalised, and eventually locked from further editing until all the partisan bullshit that constitutes the US democratic process blew over. (And besides, remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the forged Bush furlough papers? It's not as if the mainstream media wasn't equally full of lies. Read the Washington Mail or the Boston Globe lately?)

People are so ignorant.

[Silverlancer]

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.

A critical commentary on wikipedia

[fantomas]

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.

Re:User-defined facts vs. AUTHORITY

[gowen]

So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us?

You can continue to use Britannica if you like. However, if you believe it is in any sense without error, you're an idiot. (Incidentally, my usual example here is the Britannica article on Frank Zappa, which said his given name was "Francis" [wrong]. This was particularlty amusing because it proved the "expert" commisioned to write the "authoritative" article on Zappa, hadn't even read the man's autobiography.)

Re:Sheesh, get over yourself

[richlv]

they probably should go to
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re:Election Stuff

[shreevatsa]

Apart from what you said, there are several reasons why vandalism on Wikipedia really isn't such an issue:

1. Nonsense and falsehoods are quickly spotted and fixed back.
   
2. If a "hot" article like the one on Kerry during an election is being too frequently edited and fixed back (if there is a "revert war"), the article is locked, and visitors to the page are informed.
   
3. Most importantly, there is always the History page for every article. This is in my opinion, Wikipedia's best feature -- if you suspect that a particular page might have false stuff on it, all you have to do is to click "History" at the top of the page, and see what edits have been made to the page lately. I do this for every article; it only takes a couple minutes more, at worst. Looking at the edit history (and comparing different versions) can instantly tell you whether you've landed on the page right during an edit war, show you both sides, show you what was last added or changed, etc.

No, you probably didn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wikipedia's own servers are somewhat flaky...

[ral315]

It's not necessarily the money. Wikipedia is budgeting about a million dollars for the next year (about $240,000 was raised in the last fundraising drive, with more drives to come), and most of this money will be spent on servers. In the interview, Jimbo said that 150 Wikimedia servers should be up by the end of the year.

But, how many sites have to face what Wikipedia does? Wikipedia has numerous database servers as well as Squid caches across the world, and has literally terabytes of information in databases that can never be fully deleted for GFDL reasons (although it may not be viewable to the public, all information ever created in Wikipedia can be displayed to administrators). Save for a few search engines and e-mail providers, nobody faces these unique problems.

Jeeesus. What a mind job

[gringer]

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

Re:Wikipedia's own servers are somewhat flaky...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia's big problem isn't the net intrastructure (squid caches etc)... it's MySQL. It was chosen at the beginning because it was easy to setup, but it has now wildly exceeded its capabilities. Most of the failures you see come from MySQL not being able to handle load, not being able to do ACID (look carefully while editing at Wikipedia and you'll see examples of MySQL's lack ACID often enough). Take a look at the Wikimedia code: it's loaded with extra code just to create a type of client-code transaction system that's only effective 80% of the time.

It's just a shame that choice of MySQL and its quirks and incompatibilities now prevent Wikipedia from switching to something more reliable and better coded.