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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."
Wikipedia is amazing. A shining example of what people can do from working together as a community for the spread of information and making the world a better place. It is great to see Stallman's influence reaching to such extents that very awesome sites like Wiki are started and become what they are today.
... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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_
LAMB: When did Wikipedia start?
WALES: It started in January of 2001.
LAMB: Where?
WALES: On the Internet. [...]
I stopped reading right there.
I saw part of the interview and it's a shame that he didn't give credit to Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented wiki and showed what was possible wrt community building with the Portland Patterns Repository.
Wikipedia's main claim to fame is its ability to evolve with time as new facts are available. A topic like NASA can be updated just as frequently as the main NASA webpage by anyone with the gumption to do it. People who have extensive topical knowledge can give that information to the world with an entry in Wikipedia. And the more people that participate, the more voluminous and comprehensive the information gets.
Unfortunately, this is also the online encyclopedia's Achilles heel. When the entire database is open to anyone willing to edit the posts, it runs the risk of getting not only incorrect information but also maliciously incorrect information. As someone else mentioned in another post before this one, topics that engender strong emotions frequently succumb to "vandalism". But other less popular topics also run the risk of being vandalized, and since they are not as frequently viewed or commonly understood, the incorrect information presents a timebomb for any hapless dataminer.
So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us? Lexis Nexis is still around, charging outrageous fees for very good information. Does Wikipedia compete with authoritative encyclopedias, or is it just a condensed version of the Internet (which is to say a sometimes useful, sometimes useless collection of random topics)?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
but I always verify the info with another source or two because people (even the majority) are sometimes wrong.
You should always do this no matter what your source. Whether your source is NASA's website or the Brittanica.
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.
Wikipedia is not the voice of the Authority, but that of the people.
The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better.
Unfortunately, he is also making an encyclopeida article (and thus the encyclopedia as a whole) into something worse.
Tricksters create through destruction. It disappoints me that nerdish communities like Slashdot, metafilter, wikipedia et. al. don't have a collective sense of humour.
Surely there could be some more outlet they could find which is more positive than crapping over someone else's hard work?
Since Wiki can be updated by whomever has the greatest degree of brute force, it has changed the very nature of what truth, and accuracy are. One can reshape 'truth' and remake it in just about any image one desires. If for example one wanted to delegitimize evolution or uplift suicide bombing as a noble endevor one would be free to rewrite history as one saw fit. And the idea that there are even competing points of view would be driven by the sheer signal to noise ratio those competing points of view could drive through the Wiki system. Wiki is the perfect embodiment of our post modern view of the world where everything is everything, all values, ideas and beliefs are equally fair and might makes right.
I was struck by Jimmy Wales' remark that "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."
The odd thing is that Wikipedia itself is not a high quality site, in the sense of being fast and reliable. For a site that is so important--and it really is important now--with so much traffic, it is quite frequently either down, or so heavily loaded that you get odd behavior, such as error messages, uncertainty whether edits have actually been committed, and so forth.
I would guess that Wikipedia works "the way I'd expect" perhaps 80% of the time, and is "glacially slow, flaky, or outright down" maybe 5% of the time. It's in a completely different category from, say, Slashdot.
I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come. However, I note that every fund drive they've ever had has met its goals and reasonably quickly, too.
(The stock WIkipedian comment on such things is that being GFDL, anyone can mirror Wikipedia and many sites do, so Wikipedia being down tends to mostly inconvenience people who wish to edit Wikipedia, not people who are trying to read Wikipedia articles).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better
Complete bollocks. How do you get from "different" to "better"? If I randomly flipped some bits on your computer's hard drive, what are the odds it would be an improvement? (asside from the obvious that it would get you off the internet)
It disappoints me that nerdish communities like Slashdot, metafilter, wikipedia et. al. don't have a collective sense of humour.
Oh yeah, a randomly chosen enyclopedia article is the right place for your attempt at humour (hint: it's only funny when other people laugh too), just like a random building in town is your urinal. You seriously need to grow up.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Wikipedia has not changed the nature of truth. Wikipedia has only made it easier to access free, democratic information, thus allowing readers to make more informed choices about truth based on a larger range of fact and opinion. It is, in my opinion, very much preferable to watching news or the discovery channel, where fact-checking is such a tedious and after-the-fact process that it barely ever occurs.
If you want to criticize someone for homogenizing the truth, look to secondary school and university educators and textbook publishers, who cannot afford to have a definite perspective on truth, due to lobbyist groups and bureaucrats.
You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.
Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.
As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.
Someone that contributes 95% useful information with a few wrong things thrown in could probably cause some damage -- but nobody seems to want to really hurt Wikipedia thus far. [shrug]
Also, most of the vandals seem to be schoolchildren, and the vandalism is pretty amateur, whereas the regular Wiki contributors have worked such that the grammar and writing style of the bulk of Wikipedia is of excellent quality. Against this backdrop, vandalism tends to stand out -- someone who has graduated from high school with a solid English background seems to be less likely to be interested in running around vandalising other people's donations. "Teacher" is a popular article to vandalize, for instance, as are those of pop bands.
Slashdot sees a lot of trolls, but I think that part of the "troll psychology" is that trolling is considered fun -- successful trolling takes some skill, causes little or no damage (at least on the individual level, though Slashdot being flooded with trolls can get annoying), and people see an immediate reaction to what they've written. On Wiki, where vandalizing articles does hurt people, the most common reaction is just to see some inert text followed by the vandalism being backed out. There's no "modding up", and messages don't become part of a timeless archive (as they can be backed out).
I, personally, think that creating/improving vandalism flagging to Wikipedia would be one of the more useful research projects out there (i.e. this is applicable to a lot of things besides Wikipedia, successfully doing this can directly cause a lot of good, and there is interesting data mining research involved), and I'm guessing that if someone hasn't already jumped on this, someone will at some point.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The point is that WP does a fantastic job with recent, non-controversial topics. Older research is best found in textbooks, while controversial topics usually require multiple sources -- of which WP could be one.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.