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."

Comments

Speech control?

[dada21]

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.

Wikinews? What's the point?

[ScottyH]

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?

one-hit wonder

[bcrowell]

As far as I can tell, the Wikimedia Empire is a one-hit wonder. Wikipedia is a huge success, judged on its own terms (i.e., you shouldn't expect it to be as well written or authoritative as a print encyclopedia, but it's bigger and more current).

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.

Re:one-hit wonder

[WWWWolf]

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).

So it would seem, but that's just because if you stick a picture in Commons, you can automatically use it in all Wikipedias. Suppose if I translate an article for fi.wikipedia from en.wikipedia, I get the images for the new article without copying the images over.

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.

I agree, I think it's just because Wikibooks is seriously understaffed and all of the bright people who work on Wikipedia articles never bother to touch Wikibooks side - people need to take responsibility and stay working on the books. I'm working on a walkthrough and guide for Final Fantasy VII (just testing how well wiki principle works for writing game guides), and had great dreams like "Okay, I'll make a table of contents, people will fill in the chapters", but guess who has written like 90% of the guide now? =)

What, no mention of abuses of anonymity?

[shanen]

One of the big problems with discussions on /. is the incomprehensible race to be the first to post something. That's another form of abuse of anonymity (thoush sometimes the secondary form of anonymity), and the usual result is a bunch of tripe topics to start the discussions.

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.

Re:What, no mention of abuses of anonymity?

[bcrowell]

I agree with you that anonymity is having bad effects on Wikipedia. However, I think you're a little off-base with your criticisms.

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.
Many people just flat-out refuse to register on web sites. They've had too many bad experiences with spam, etc., and they (rightly, IMO) resist the idea of changing the internet from a free press into a shopping mall. This was a big consideration when WP was first starting out, and needed to build a viable pool of users. Now, it shouldn't be such a big issue.

The other argument for anonymity is that sometimes very important information is possessed by people who could risk retribution for revealing it.
The logical merits of this argument depend a lot on what you're proposing as an alternative to anonymity on WP. If you just want people to have to be logged in if they want to edit, then it has nothing to do with fear of political repression, workplace reprisals, etc., because edits by logged-in users are actually harder to tie to a real-world identity than edits by anons (whose IP addresses are recorded). On the other hand, if you're proposing requiring people to tie their WP identities to real-world identities, then that's just not practical -- WP would have to start acting like porn sites that demand a credit card number before they'll let you in.

the future of "news"

[mungojelly]

Wikinews might have some short term utility, but it doesn't seem to me like it's destined to be a replacement for The News-- or at least, I think it's missing something.

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

Here's an example of what's wrong with Wikipedia

[johansalk]

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