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C-SPAN Interviews Wikipedia Founder

Posted by Zonk on from the multi-dimensional-knowledge dept.

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."

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. A critical commentary on wikipedia by fantomas · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Election Stuff by shreevatsa · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.