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?)

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: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.

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.