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Interview with Jimbo Wales
xandroid writes to tell us that Wikinews has an interesting interview with Jimbo Wales of the Wikimedia Foundation. From the interview: "The [Wikinews] project is a bit over a year old, with the English and Deutsch editions opening their sites officially the first week of December, 2004. Since then the project has produced more than 13 000 articles in 16 languages, with recently created editions in Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese. The project has not been without its detractors, and the questions asked of Mr. Wales reflected some of the most common criticisms."
If you're going to try to sound pretentious and use the German spelling of "German" (which is totally wrong considering you're writing in English), at least spell it write: Deutsche.
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Wikinews has a depressing interview with Jimbo Wales of the Wikimedia Foundation. Mr. Wales had just returned from prison. From the interview: "The [Wikinews] project is a bit over a month old, with the English and Deutsch editions opening their sites officially the first week of December, 2005. Since then the project has produced more than 13 articles in 2 languages, with recently created editions in Pig Latin, and Klingon. The project has been a miserable failure, and the questions asked of Mr. Wales reflected some of the most common criticisms. At one point in the interview, Mr. Wales began quoting paragraphs from 1960's bicycle repair manuals and offered his interviewers a selection of delicious sausage. A quick dose of medication returned him to his usually coherent self."
Jimbo Wales! lol
Hey, what about Jimbo Jones, where did I hear that name before?
I first read that as 'Interview with Jumbo Whales'
Interesting article but it didn't answer something I've been pondering for a few months: the chance of Wikiregulations or censorship.
History tends to be written by the winners or at least the survivors. We've seen great measures taken to control speech, especially political speech. Wiki changes that. I've seen articles with definite left-bias, similar to what I'd expect from any geek forum.
With Wikis gaining ground (google searches seem attracted to them), will there be a push to put pressure on the wiki maintainers? Corporate and hegemony controlled major media don't seem different from one another. Wiki isn't a news source, but many articles could be taken as political speech, falling under who-knows-what regulations.
I find the interface pretty clean and easy to navigate, but how is this different than Google News or even Yahoo News for that matter? It has nice links to Wikipedia and Wikionary, but other that it seems rather "already been done".
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/The Associated Press has changed their copyright notice with articles to include "you may not rewrite this article." Is Wikinews creating an impact on how other news sources release their information?
Huh? What's ``you may not rewrite this article'' mean? AP syndicators (ie, every single newspaper) aren't allowed to add/embellish the content? You're not allowed to copy/paste portions of the article into your blog? The first is a contract issue, the second is protected under fair use.
WTF?
It should have been "deutsche" (adjectives don't start with capital letters in German, no special rules for country names).
As long as they have the Klingon language edition, I will be a happy tha'rav'.
I'm not trying to flame, I'm really wondering.
Are these people just repackaging news from the mainstream news sources? Doesn't duplication introduce the potential for there to be omissions of important information? What is the benefit of a service like this one?
The [Wikinews] project is a bit over a year old, with the English and Deutsch editions ... with recently created editions in Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese.
Don't you mean 'Ibriy, Russkiy and Nihongo? I mean, if we're gonna change the names of languages, shouldn't we change the names of all the languages the same?
Here's the explaination for any moderators that are a little slow
The average blogger (hell, the average person) doesn't seem to have a clue when it comes to how copyright really works. Stating the obvious - well, the AP blurb isn't really stating the obvious.
Wikimedia Commons is nice, and I use it now and then to find illustrations to add to some free textbooks I've written, but actually most of the good content on Wikimedia Commons just seems to be duplicates of images from WP articles (albeit organized in a different, and sometimes more convenient, way).
Wikinews doesn't seem to have reached the kind of critical mass it would need in order to serve as an alternative to a newspaper, and I don't think it ever will -- there just don't seem to be a lot of people who are willing to do the work of being newspaper reporters, and do it for free.
And finally Wikibooks, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is pretty pathetic. You can spend an hour clicking around on Wikibooks without ever finding a successful, well written, complete book. Of the hundreds of free books out there in the world, I know of exactly one that is a real, complete, successful book written using the wiki method: Wikipedia.
An encyclopedia is uniquely well suited to the wiki method. It's inherently parallelizable, and it makes sense for A. Random User to do five minutes worth of work on it and have that work constitute an improvement that's instantly visible to the world. That's just not true of other types of writing.
Find free books.
I doubt anyone over 15 edits Wikipedia.
Hey, I'm 16, and I still contribute to it.
Some joker has gone and protected the interview page (even for registered users). What's the point of it being on a wiki if I can't be bold and edit Jimbo Wales' answers to reflect a more neutral point of view?
With regards to Wilipedia, abuses of anonymity are the most serious problem affecting the system, and yet they are not mentioned anywhere in this discussion. At least not in the introduction or in any of the visible posts. (The visibility question would relate to the flaws in /. moderation--and I think that most of those flaws are also related to abuses of anonimity, too, so they're still an aspect of the same problem.)
There are two major arguments made in favor of anonymity, and they both reek like the big dog's m0e, so to speak. The convenience argument is the easiest to deal with. If someone is too lazy or incoompetent to register with a simple and free system, then that person is not worth listening to in the first place.
The other argument for anonymity is that sometimes very important information is possessed by people who could risk retribution for revealing it. This is certainly true, but in that case Wikipedia is not the correct place to be publishing it, since anyone else could change or obfuscate that important information. Actually, if I had something to hide, I'd frequently be searching the Internet to try to find out what leaks or rumors were circulating--and in the case of Wikipedia it would be quite easy to block the information or confuse, or even exaggerate it to make it sound ridiculous (elevating it to a Class 3 lie).
In conclusion, I think anonymity is not the way to defend our personal rights. It is mostly used by people who are simply trying to escape accountability for negative actions.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If someone is too lazy or incoompetent to register with a simple and free system, then that person is not worth listening to in the first place.
That's a fallacy. Someone's personal attributes, like laziness, gives no indication of the merit of their arguments. In fact, I find the more industrious someone is, the more likely they will go out of their way to use circuitous sophistry to hide the flaws in their reasoning. If anything, we should more skeptical of the folks who aren't lazy.
Hey, I'm 16, and I still contribute to it.
:P
I'm 17, and i contribute somewhat regularly as well. I find Wikipedia an incredibly extensive ocean of just... stuff. There's been many a time when i get sidetracked from homework and other projects that i'm working on with Wikipedia; i click an interesting-looking link and it takes me at least a half-hour to get back on task because i always find another link to click on the article i just went to. It's really annoying.
What you need in order to write The News is a flow of information coming from people who are able to witness a situation. In the past the mainstream news media has accomplished this by actually sending their people with vans and helicopters so they can stand next to dramatic events and utter such immortal words as, "Can you give us an idea, I know the towel's over her head, but what is your sense of her state of mind right now?" Obviously in principle that shouldn't be a cost-effective way of finding out what's going on in the world for much longer, but in order to effectively replace it you will need another way of getting close to where the action is.
One way to get close to the action is to start there. That is, to be someone who happens to live somewhere where the news happens to happen. This is already starting to manifest. Often when there's a big news story someone will point me to a personal blog written by someone whose life has unexpectedly become entangled with the story. As blogging becomes more deeply integrated into our culture, and more efficiently organized, I'm sure that this trend will solidify.
I do think that there can be a way for "citizen journalists" to collectively write The News, but obviously they would need to do more than rewrite AP articles. One way they could get to where the action is would be to get to it virtually (including, of course, that venerable VR known as the telephone)-- to find someone who might know what's going on, and ask them. It's my guess that some sort of collective strategy around that could work to effectively gather news, but it would be a challenge to find a structure that would inspire and empower large numbers of people to the task.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
Cryptome offers a free DVD (190MB) of this collection to public and .edu
libraries which do not have access to the Associated Press archive. Send
requests to jya[at]cryptome.net.
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Send bad links to info[at]iraq-kill-maim.org
A Cryptome site.
iraq-kill47.htm + Iraq Kill and Maim 10Dec05 December 10, 2005
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iraq-kill45.htm + Eyeballing the Iraq Kill and Maim Zone 22Mar05 March 22, 2005
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iraq-kill33.htm
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Here's a vivid and current exmaple of what's wrong with Wikipedia.
I came across the Arabic Numerals article on Wikipedia a little while ago and it shocked me how many errors there were in the article, all suggesting a strong Hindu Nationalist and Hindu revisionist bias. I have no personal anti-Indian bias as I listen to Indian music often (I'd particularly recommend Musafir, Gypsies of Rajasthan) and eat Indian food, never mind many Indian friends. I took the good part of the last week correcting the article so that it abides by Wikipedia policies that "content must be based on verifiable sources"; Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia: Cite sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and did so for every significant piece of information. To those whom I disagreed with I went over their version and in detail and at length, point-by-point, demostrated what was in error and cited verifiable and reliable source. I demanded that they do the same, and they have not done so, but responded with evasive and false one-liners, calling my sources "revisionist" though I cited sources that were Western, Chinese, and even a paper on the topic by a neutral Professor who is a member of the International Academy of the History of Science, and the literature of the Indian National Science Academy and the Bulletin of the National Institute of Sciences of India.
To cut the story short, and the story is in the talk pages for whomever wants to check the facts, they eventually got an administrator whose name is Gurubrahma and whose userpage has the Indian flag forefront (Gee, with such a username and userpage what are the chances that he's neutral?) to block me for pointing out to them that deliberate, demonstrable errors are lies, eventhough Wikipedia blocking policy states that Blocking on the basis of personal attacks should be "rarely used" and are limited to "Personal attacks which place users in danger", (ie "threats have been made or actions performed (including actions outside the Wikipedia site) which expose other Wikipedia editors to political, religious or other persecution by government, their employer or any others"), and it clearly states that in the case of "Excessive reverts" where "multiple parties violate the rule, sysops should treat all sides equally". He has not, and now they have removed a version that painstakingly cited its sources on a point-by-point basis to be hidden from view and even so stuck a "disputed", "original research", and even "hoax"(!) banner on it. Whereas their page in which I counted over 9 factual errors just in one section of it that I detailed in the talk page is now forefront, and it links to a personal blog titled ""Laputan Logic: Fanciful. Preposterous. Absurd." that lists no author in its about section.
I have complained left and right within the Wikipedia system without much help. I have complained on the sci.math newsgroup where I got the reply that "This is one of the problems with creating an encyclopedia that anyone and his brother can add information to. And this is also why I try to direct people away from Wikipedia and towards more neutral and established site (such as MathWorld)." Implying I should just give up on Wikipedia.
I'm sorry, but having just experienced what a circus Wikipedia is, I'm no longer inclined to recommend it to anyone.
Here are the pages for those who wish to verify what I said above
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_and _Arabic_numerals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_India n_and_Arabic_numerals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arabic_numerals
I've been most amused by the bad publicity given from the press following the John Seigenthaler Sr. incident - which shouldn't have become an incident anymore than any other sentance on the encyclopaedia, until a man who didn't udnerstand what it was googled himself.
Anyway, most recently I read that "Wikipedia had banned the anonymous editing of articles". I was shocked! Would those years of history proving the concept worked be abandoned just cos of one incident. Of course not. The press, who criticise Wikipedia's inaccuracy, were wrong thsemselves. Wikipedia had banned anonmymouis creatiion of pages. A very differennt thing but a good idea. Becoming a user leaves you anonymous still anyway.
please excuse my bad typing i had fingers qwhilst writing that.
Parent is being misleading. You were blocked under the 3RR - which means that reverting an article more than 3 times in 24 hours leads to an automatic 24 hour block. The opinions of the admin don't come into it. The 3RR rule is a policy designed to prevent unproductive revert wars like that which you were involved in. In your case, if you felt that the argument wasn't going anywhere, you should put a request up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Request_for _comment or further a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mediation instead if escalating the conflict into a full blown where you are yelling at people:
"Look here you liar, you're the one out of loop and inserting nonsense, you're worse, you're a liar, and you know you are,"
I came across the Arabic Numerals article on Wikipedia a little while ago and it shocked me how many errors there were in the article, all suggesting a strong Hindu Nationalist and Hindu revisionist bias.
Welcome to Wikipedia. Writing a well organized and factual entry takes time, time which very scholars have incentive to spend knowing that their work could get edited/mangled by anyone. It may sound like an ego thing, but it's more part of the discipline that all scholars/researchers follow. A discipline that requires facts to be verifiable and duplicateable, as well as having works thoroughly edited before published.
The bottom line is, with scholars mainly uninterested, the main Wikipedia contributor is usually less than qualified to write correctly about a topic and often does so with colloquial facts rather than researched/quotable ones. Think I'm wrong? Then please stray from the highlighted articles and jump a few random pages.
Last week, in the wake of John Seigenthaler's anti-Wikipedia op-ed in USA Today, CNN had a televised discussion with both Seigenthaler and Jimbo Wales. There's a video and transcript available (the Wales/Seigenthaler interview starts).
I don't think the discussion went too well for Wales. The interviewer, Kyra Philips, was pretty peeved about the status of the Wikipedia article on herself, and I think Wales could have done a better job of addressing her concerns.
The #1 problem I see with your assessment of Wikibooks, Mr. Crowell, is that it is very premature to realistically judge the final output of what you find there. Some progress is being made, and some discussions are being done to make a "best of..." section that really shows off the substantive books (not just computer gaming guides) that might be valuable to those involved.
It is much harder to write a book than a simple encyclopedia article, and like almost all book publishing about 90% of everything written is pure garbage not even worth the time to composte. Wikibooks also suffers from the specter of being a vanity book publisher after a fashion, and I have been involved personally in trying to stem that tide. Still, there are some real gems of books that can be viewed, and some very interesting progress with a number of projects.
I'll also openly admit that the participants of Wikibooks need to do a better job of advertising the high quality books and removing the cruft. As an e-book author, I hope you also appreciate the huge commitment it takes to actually sit down and author a book on any subject, particularly one that requires in depth technical knowledge. Getting a group of volunteers together to write something coherant is particularly difficult.
I'm in the middle of writing/publishing my own little e-book, and using Wikibooks as a work-in-progress forum. The thing that I have found beneficial is that while I'm writing there has already been a substantial amount of input from people who are reading it, including technical corrections where I made a mistake. Upon review I found out I was wrong... and that was on a very obscure technical point that many people even familiar with the content would likely miss. Or correcting typos on very technical tables and footnotes. I have even placed a temporary note in the middle of my text suggesting that I do some research to flesh out a point, only to find that somebody has gone in and filled in that missing space removing the need to do the research. In short, I have had a very positive experience in writing using Wikibooks as a forum. And all of this through what amounts to be volunteer labor.
In short, especially with technical documentation, I think it is better to use something like a Wiki than sitting down with a Word Processor. Proofreading and peer review are especially invaluable from my experience, and something that for a novice to book publishing is almost impossible to find. For somebody who already has the book publishing background and connections to reviewers and competent editors, there is no need for something like Wikibooks.
I wonder if Wikipedia holds articles where people complain of being modded down on Slashdot... That would be interesting, in a delightfully pointless post-modern sort of way.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I took the good part of the last week correcting the article so that it abides by Wikipedia policies that "content must be based on verifiable sources"; Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia: Cite sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:Reliable sources
Well, the funny thing about Wikipedia is that while in principle it has all those policies, in practice those policies only hold in cases where the active editorial majority wants to hold to those policies. So mob rule will always trump those policies, when it wants to. There exist mechanisms and committees which could enforce those policies, but they only enforce them in cases where they agree with the content in dispute, rather than holding to the policies as principles. Thus, the end result is mob rule by the active editorial majority, with point-of-view based enforcement of policies.
Wikipedia has great potential, but clearly has a way to go yet before those policies are universally enforced.
Was I the only one who thought it said an interview with Jimbo Jones from the simpsons?!?!?