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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."
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."
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'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?
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.
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,"