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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. Election Stuff by putko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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_s tone_your_children/dt21_18a.html
    1. Re:Election Stuff by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Blatant falsehoods are usually spotted quickly and fixed, at least in my experience. I work on a lot of the political pages that get mucked with a lot. It is a pain though and it only works because so many editors devote so much time to keeping articles accurate. I tell students to use wikipedia as a resource rather than a "source" - I don't let them cite it in papers but I encourage them to use it as a resource for finding other sources of information and for finding out basic background info. There is no guarantee that an entry is correct at any given time, but by and large corrections are made quickly, and it is very often a useful starting place for doing research or finding answers to questions.