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

I love WIkipedia.

[Jack Earl]

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.

Re:I love WIkipedia.

[aussie_a]

Congratulations. You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does. It must make you feel like a big person to be able to vandalise a website.

I know this will get modded down, but these sort of people annoy me.

The best bit is...

[gowen]

... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.

Election Stuff

[putko]

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.

Re:Election Stuff

[commodoresloat]

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.

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.

You heard it here first.

[uberchicken]

LAMB: When did Wikipedia start?

WALES: It started in January of 2001.

LAMB: Where?

WALES: On the Internet. [...]

I stopped reading right there.

Giving credit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You are kind of wrong

[jettoki]

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.

Wikipedia and vandalism

[typical]

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.

Re:Sheesh, get over yourself

[gowen]

Tricksters create through destruction.

Cool. So you wouldn't mind if I creatively scratched my name into your car door with a set of keys then?