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?

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.