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Got a Question for Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales?
We did our first Slashdot interview with Jimmy Wales back in 2001. We did another one in 2004. In 2005 we ran a feature article about Wikipedia's history. Now Wikipedia is in the news again, so this seems like a perfect time to make Jimmy Wales our first Slashdot Interview "three-peater." Ask whatever you like. Expect answers to 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions by next week.
I was a user and contributor to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia). Now I'm located in China and Wikipedia is nationally blocked, as are most caches (the Google cache work-around was eliminated a few days after becoming widly known). There have been blocks in the past, the present one in force since late October.
/. is viewable but any discussion on the issue from wikipedia.org is not. If this has been discussed on wikipedia.org then please excuse my redundancy, it would be sweet if you copied that discussion into this thread.
I was curious what Wikipedia's approach to blocking in the PRC was. Note that the entire wikipedia.org site is blocked, not only zh.wikipedia.org. Also 'wikis' are not blocked outright, such as blogs were in 2005 (for using 'blog' in the URL, a block which has now been reversed, now only selective blogs are blocked).
Does the Wikipedia organisation have any plan, such as a work-around or an agreement for a selective ban (such as blocking zh.wikipedia.org only, thus preventing casual browsing by Chinese internet users)? Has any analysis been done on the PRC's blocking of Wikipedia, and if so what is the status?
This message is sent from inside the PRC, where
Will you introduce a system of editors to moderate what people are saying? With how easy it is at the moment to put anything up regardless of its truth this might be a good way of avoiding possible law suits/ spreading of false info.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
What do you feel is more important to Wikipedia: Open-ness or accuracy? Do you feel that you have to make sacrifices in one to get the other? Has it been difficult to strike a balance?
Will Wikipedia ever become comercialised? Is a "Premium" Wikipedia planned for fee paying users? Will advertisements be shown on Wikipedia? Will "Paid Content" be introduced for marketeers? If not, what steps will be taken to ensure that Wikipedia remains committed to the spirit and goals of free, community contributed copyleft publishing?
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
...but somebody edited it to say something else.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Are you considering any major changes to Wikipedia's policy's? Many people have called for some sort of moderation or approval system. Are these or any other serious reforms likely to happen?
Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil.
Has the U.S. government ever attempted to outright censor any part of Wikipedia to your knowledge? Have you been contacted and asked to take down incriminating and/or secret information? Has anyone connected with the government tried to find out who has accessed/modified certain pages?
Lastly, I notice that Wikipedia is available in many languages, all across the world. Given that vantage point, could you describe the reaction (if any) of various governments to the possibility of the sum of human knowledge being available to their citizens with just a few keystrokes?
Thanks for the great resource!
Electric Monkey Pants
How hard was it to get funding for this project at the vision stage? Did you have to first produce some kind of working model? Or were you able to 'sell' the idea to benefactors at the idea stage. More generally can you comment on the challenges/opportunities about getting funding for projects that benefit the community?
"Is Wikipedia as fun now as you originally thought it would be?"
Two names for you...Jeff Merkey and John Byrne.
Do you see people like that being a longterm problem for Wikipedia and how can you deal with their issues?
Do you think that the current model will work for the next 5 years? Are you considering P2P as a way to reduce load on the servers ?
The Raven
In light of recent Congressional attempts to sanitize biographies, will there be any additional steps taken to ensure that biographical information is not only neutral in content, but accurate and complete? How much outcry was there in your attempts to sanitize your own biography and what have you learned from that?
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
There's a story I have seen in various internet forums that Wikipedia was largely funded by profits from porn sites at least in the beginning. Is that true?
Wikipedia appears to be founded on the principle that "with enough participants, you converge on correctnenss".
This seems similar to stock market theory and other areas (the "wisdom of crowds").
But this is obviously not always the case. You have market bubbles. You have widely believed fallicies (Eg, if you survey in Kansas on evolutionary theory). Etc.
The question: Is there any thought on how to deal with the situations where enough participants will converge on the consistantly wrong answer? There appears to be no mechanism for the correct minority to eliminate the large ignorant majority.
Test your net with Netalyzr
What do you think about copyright and its duration? Do you think that writers would stop writing, musicians would stop composing, and programmers would stop coding, if there wasn't a copyright law?
In open source development, the ability to be able to fork software is considered a major asset (although most agree that it should only be done when really necessary).
What do you think about allowing the same for wikipedia articles? Consider this - say there is a long complex wikipedia page. To rewrite to make it more clear requires a single massive commit by a single person.
It would be better to allow that page to be forked, then people can work on the rewrite, then tag the fork to be the main one once it's done.
Why does Jeff V Merkey hate you so much?
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
An expert in a field could 'sign' a version of an article that they deem to be accurate. This article can still be edited, amended etc. On the article page, the user is given the option to consult a frozen-from-edits version of the article
Moderators would be able to contact the 'expert' and confirm their authority in the field, since pre-authorising the individual before they can confirm the article's accuracy would deter busy individuals from making the effort in the first place.
I would be greatful if other Slashdotters would like to develop this into a more eloquent point and question.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
I know that you feel strongly about freedom of expression, and freedom of speech. Hence I ask you, how do you feel about the so-called "hate crime" laws that are present in many supposedly free Western nations?
How does such legislation impact on the ability of Wikipedia to provide accurate, truthful information, even if that information may be deemed to be "hate literature" by certain groups?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
What's your opinion about the large amount of "geeky" trivia that seems to have accumulated on Wikipedia? I'm particularly thinking of stuff like large articles about fictional characters, rather comprehensive episode guides and that sort of stuff, usually about Sci-Fi and anime etc.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Brass tacks, bottom line is that wikipedia is a political movement, not an encyclopedia, was this your intention from the get go? Anyone challenging this need only browse contorversial topics to quickly discern the political bias that overwhelms wikipedia.
I think the most well spoken criticism of Wikipedia was voiced by Jerry (tycho) Holkins over at Penny-arcade. He likened Wikipedia to a "quantum dictionary", where it can be both correct, and incorrect, depending on when you access it. Sensitive topics, like say, the formation of the state of Isreal, or Communism will obviously attract revisionists of all kinds. On /., abuse with moderation isn't terribly damaging, as people are stating opinions. When you are purporting to supply facts however, I can't see such a system wouldn't inevitably break down.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Now that Web development frameworks have come a long way since the Wikipedia infrastructure was first implemented, do you think a switch away from PHP would be a good idea?
Do you think that it would be possible to effectively reimplement the system around Ruby on Rails, Django, Seaside, or some of the other Web frameworks that are popular today? Also, do you think such a reimplementation would decrease the server requirements, thus potentially bringing financial benefits, in addition to an improved level of security?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
What did you have for lunch today?
Seriously, between the 2 interviews and all the articles we have about Wikipedia here, I feel like I know more about him and his site than I know about some of my co-workers
What was the first wiki entry, what's the most popular and which is your favourite?
Better yet: Mr. Wales should be able to change the questions, and, then, we should be able to change the answers!
I have a ton of other Ninnle Questions too.
The Wiki article format is essentially unstructured. Formatting and content standards are decided upon by the community and enforced by peer moderation, but it is not precise and it is not semantic. Are you thinking about a way of introducing enforced, queryable, structured data templates? Think Google Base with community moderation of both structure and data.
Have you ever considered a carreer in organized crime? I think you should. With a name like Jimmy Wales, the sky's the limit!
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
Is there anything off-limits or would never be added to Wikipedia?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Are you considering having a "stable" branch of the pages where only a "few" trusted sources are allowed to edit the pages, as well as an "experimental" branch which would be like the current version, ie. editable by anyone?
/Tomas
The reason would be because when I direct students to a certain page on Wikipedia on an assignment, I can't be sure it will contain the same, correct, information today as when I wrote the assignment description. For all I know, it can be edited by the first student reading the assignment!
If I could enter the "stable" version of the page, I'd be sure it will be correct in the future as well.
I assume lots and lots of people would like to have a "stable" version to use as reference in their papers and reports.
ps. I got the idea from a post by a fellow slashdotter...
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
Do you expect any direct competition from Google in the near future? Would you be surprised in Google made a bid for Wikipedia, given Google's propensity for snapping up useful companies and their technology? Would you say "no" if they offered you a large compensation package and the promise of continued autonomy over it?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
How about a system where people can "vote" the historical versions as "accurate" or "needs help", so if you want the latest news you look at the current article; but if you want the "most accurate" you look at the version history wiht the best accuracy score?
How would you feel about having multiple concurrent texts for article headings? It seems to me that some of the problems from wikipedia is there are several legitimate groups that want to put their own spin on certain issues. Presently it seems that this is handled by some text such as "this issue is controversial" and then each side gets some kind of summary. Then we get into problems with whose opinion comes first, who gets the short shrift in the summary, who is made to look like a crackpot, etc.
What I'm proposing is a system where the user sees an interface like the disambiguation page, which offers different articles for each title, including a purportedly nuetral one. So for example, the abortion article would have 3 or more texts: a nuetral one, a pro-life, and a pro-choice.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Uhh, Bomis Babes was soft core porn, despite what Mr. Wales claims today. Playboy is Playboy is Playboy. And that's what his site was. He lives in America and he understands the definition associated with such content.
In fact, when the controversy over his past started, he conveniently started directing all incoming traffic to that site as a 404. Now, ask yourself, why? And reflect upon the irony of his own past mirroring a highly innacurate and POV revisionist wikipedia...
Are you considering (or have you already implemented) some sort of official partnership with academic institutions (universities, research institutes, etc.). Such institutes of course have many knowledgeable experts who are accustomed to performing peer-review. Have you ever considered approaching, for instance, a particular department at a particular university, and asking the faculty to review their subject area(s) of expertise, and provide feedback and corrections.
If so, do you intend to have their edits/suggestions be treated identically to any other Wikipedia user, or would you give their input special status (as "experts").
If nothing of the sort is underway, what do you think of this idea? Does a more direct (and official/public) involvement of such institutes sound like a good idea? Thought?
(Note: Yes I'm well aware that a great deal of the content in many subject areas, especially sciences, already comes from these very academics... my question regardings making the partnerships more official, in order to encourage faculty who may not be aware of Wikipedia to contribute, and also to lend their "expert seal of approval" to a particular version of an article.)
Every editor should be required to submit and display their verifiable real name. Anonymous contributions, while still possible, would not go into the live article right away, but would rather be made available to all editors who "watch" the respective article, and to the last 5 editors who have worked on the article; any one of those editors could then easily accept the anonymous edits. (This requires a tiny bit of software support.)
Rationale:
As I understand it, our devs played did some experimentation with adding the ability to semanticly associate two articles. I don't know the specifics, but last I heard it was a resounding flop.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
How do you justify allowing any user to edit pages without verifying their background? It seems like a good idea in light of most of your arguments, but what no one has discussed yet is the problem of terrorists maliciously editing pages to support their causes, either by portraying events from their point of view, or spreading misinformation to harm freedom. I don't see how you can continue allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia without extensive background checks to prove that they are not terrorists or connected to terrorism.
let's roll!
Openness and accuracy are not mutually exclusive. Often times when we have increased openness and a greater availability of information, we end up having more accurate information.
The ongoing war in Iraq is a perfect example. Those who had access to only the limited information provided by the American media, for instance, would not have gotten a very accurate picture of what was going on. Those of us in Europe, on the other hand, had a far wider variety of news sources to choose from, and hence were able to get a far more accurate view of the situation.
In fact, most of what we now know (that there were no such weapons, that the claims made by the various governments were complete lies, and so forth) for sure was known by the vast majority of the European public before the war even began. That is because we have a far more open media, and hence are able to better discern what information is accurate from that which is not.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Do you think there is a current conflict between academics and schools (in the terms of curriculum and indoctrination, and emphasis on independant thinking vs. the stamping out of citizens)? How does wikipedias ideology play into all of this?
As Wikipedia has developed, there has been a push for more metadata, more semantic markup. It seems to me that Wikipedia is in the best position to pioneer the "semantic web" - you can see the beginnings of it with "category" and "portal" pages, as well as the current discussion for "attribute" fields in Wikipedia (something like "Boston IS_CAPITAL_OF Massachusetts"). Beyond that, do you see Wikipedia itself having a strong hand in determining the future of the semantic structuring of all this data, or do you see this development as something outside of Wikipedia's mission, maybe to be picked up and advanced by other parties? Also, do you think semantic markup could be used as a way to address some of the credibility issues of the content, since it's easier to verify a structured fact than a blob of text?
Do you think it's possible for more complex moderation schemes for Wikipedia, or is full openness the only nature of the beast?
For example, it would be simple to set up a peer review process (peer reviewers simply assess an entry and post their credentials), but this falls apart as soon as the post they peer reviewed gets changed at all.
Related: most of the so-called "Web 2.0" sites & gizmos seem to do 1 thing well and work on a simple interface and network model (Flickr, Wikipedia, Blogger, etc.) Do you think we'll see a blending of these things into more complex systems, or do they only work if they are kept simple?
Wikipedia as an experiment in collaboration is indeed a success. But as an authoritative factual resource it is a cumulative failure. Articles are changed moment by moment by people around the world with no particular knowledge or ability, citations are often missing or wrong, a substantial number of articles are incomplete, a growing number of important articles are written to a particular agenda, and there is a growing list of articles and subjects being reverted and/or captured by political ideologues or extremists from all sides of the political spectrum. Some of these people have been promoted to wiki admins.
Will you ever consider implementing proper expert review to filter articles and prevent this anarchistic intellectual entropy which fosters paranoia, bickering, bias and unscholarly edit wars? Will you ever recognize scholarly expertise above such things as time available to revert or edit articles, ignorance or psychotic mental disorders?
Or put it another way, would you buy a car that was built by wikiengineers, including a few, some, many or all contributors having no expertise in car engineering, including an unknown number who'd like to see people crash and die because they think it would be fun to watch?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Wikipedia isn't an experiment any more - it is often the resource of choice. Especially for students. Bob Ney and Diebold are two topics much in the news. Neither of the articles is an adequate, encyclopedic, or even brief and fair, representation of the subject. How does Wikipedia accept the responsibilities now placed on it? Caveat lector, or caveat magister, seems not enough any more.
Instead of having a black-or-white system where someone is either allowed to edit a page or completely banned from touching it, what about making it so certain low-tier users (depending on the page: anonymous, freshly created, non-admin, etc) would be unable to edit a page outright, but they would be able to submit a change which would then await a more privileged user?
Such a system would effectively remove all immutable pages, reducing the inability to edit to a mere incovenience. If you want, you could even let people view the submitted draft, having as a result a safe, reviewed version aside of unchecked changes. And utilities such as diff3 can merge simultaneous submissions in an often fully automatic way, alleviating the problem of manually combining changesets.
Thus, instead of three current levels:
* free-for-all
* semi-protected
* immutable
we could have something that can be finely tuned. A heavily vandalised page could be turned into a submission-only one, letting anyone edit the draft but requiring an admin to actually commit it; regular slightly protected pages would have anonymous/fresh users in the draft-only mode, letting anyone who had an account for more than a few days to bring in the changes.
Heck, if any change could have comments attached, it can be as good as a full expert approval system. Would that be a viable idea?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why allow topics on current events? They're always volatile and politically biased nonsense. It could really cut your costs in terms of servers, and then maybe you wouldn't have to beg for money.
How many Wikipedia staff members are monitoring and editing Wikipedia content and what specific editorial/censorship guidelines and contributor sanctions do they impose?
Are future wikimedia projects possible anymore? Recently, there was a vote for the Wikiversity project. The vote came in with more than 300 participants, with a resounding majority in favor of it. After waiting weeks for the board to discuss the results, we were left with a confusing request to change the proposal with no explanation of what the board wished, and the request would have eliminated one of the key parts of the proposal. Repeated attempts to get clarification have resulted in no new information, causing the supporters of the project to schism into two different views of the project. Do you and the board truely have any interest in ever having wikiversity exist (or indeed, any future project) or is this neglect your way of passive-aggressively killing it?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...and I just used up my first batch of mod points!
Why would you ever boast about number of articles? Isn't that just a sign that no one can agree - as they splinter off every article about every group into a 'Criticism of' article about every group? Shouldn't the number of articles be static at some point? We're only adding a day of history once every 24 hours. If everyone writes their own viewpoint, we may as well read blogs, right?
There have been alot of articles in wikipedia that have been defaced or changed to falsify information, right now the problems are only fixed after they have happened and the articles locked. are there any plans to increase the security around articles to stop these attacks in the first place?
portfolio
The DUF (http://www.digitaluniverse.net/ promises to be a revolutionary "PBS of the web", with ad-free, multimedia-rich content. Do you expect the Digital Universe Foundation to [eventually] surpass Wikipedia in its content and presentation?
Do you foresee perhaps a partnership with DUF if this were to happen?
With the recent episode of U.S. Congress politicians using Stalinistic tactics of "rewriting history", the viability of Wikipedia has been seriously compromised, IMHO. The recent content violations were only caught because they were so conspicuous.
Nevertheless, the Wikipedia remains one of mankind's biggest "dream", the New Library of Alexandria, as it were.
Are you considering employing any "countermeasures" to avoid such content violations such as web-of-trust of academics, digitally signing contents, or other such means?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Related to this:
How will you stop the edit wars?
How will you make it so that Wikipedia has proper sources?
How will you stop dimwits writing BS?
How will you make Wikipedia respect expertise?
I really wish Wikipedia worked, could you please fix it?
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Having spent years of your life thinking about online communities, signal-to-noise, and participation, you'd undoubtedly bring an interesting perspective to the meta-discussion that we're having now on Slashdot.
If you had to suggest changing something about how Slashdot works, what would it be? And how would that tie into things you've done, encountered, or seen on Wikipedia?
Could Jimmy comment about the supposed high numbers of pedophiles within wikipedia? www.theposc.com
There's been much talk about how Wikipedia is or isn't "elitist" or "anti-elitist". Do you feel it needs to stay strongly anti-elitist? Or can a balance be struck which, while still upholding the virtues of a free encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, has some acknowledged notion of the differential quality of different editors (and different articles)? Could a well-integrated feedback mechanism somehow be implemented (automatically and objectively applied) which would reward editors for the quality of their edits and their interactions with other editors, while simultaneously reducing the amount of damage which can be done by vandals, trolls, and incorrigible, argumentative POV pushers?
That's why a wikipedia article, if used for a serious purpose, cannot be considered as an article alone. The article's history needs to be taken into account. In such a case, schrodinger's cat does not apply, because you can see inside the box.
And besides, the quantum truth is true of any other source. A website could be hacked or hoaxed at the time you read it. A newspaper could print a page that was complete garbage and delete it 20 minutes later. Britannica is known to have a number of errors that will probably not be corrected for years. The difference here with Wikipedia is that you would know if it had happened. Despite the crap that happens from time to time, the whole thing has not broken down, is not breaking down, and probably won't break down any time soon.
Holkins is just mouthing off because his attempt at abusing the system was thwarted. And his comic that time directly contradicted his post. The possibility of Skeletor editing He-man is precisely the reason wikipedia doesn't accept 'expertism', which really should be called 'arguments from authority'. Skeletor is obviously an expert on He-man, but his edit was obviously a piece of vandalism that has to be reverted as soon as possible. Edits need to be judged on their own merits, and users need to be judged on what they have done. Any other way is unworkable.
In what ways does Wikipedia as it is today, with its complex structure of guidelines and user groups, reflect your original vision? In what ways does it not?
Why was MySQL chosen as the backend to MediaWiki? What other RDBMs did you test in addition to MySQL and why were they not chosen?
I would also like to know whether the idea for an openly editable encyclopedia came from Richard Stallman. The history on that bit is fuzzy. Nevertheless, the idea wouldn have come about in the great way it has if JW hadn't developed it (like how free OS's wouldnt be where it is today if it wasnt for Linux).
Parent makes great point! Grandparent is a troll!
I've checked out the Wikipedia site a few times and saw information that looked pretty accurate and detailed.
Then I heard on the radio that Capitol Hill staffers had edited/rewritten entries about their bosses to remove or slant all sorts of information, to make their reps or senators look better, remove divorces, etc etc.
How do you expect someone like me, a Wikipedia neophyte, to trust the information in Wikipedia when it can be so easily changed/falsified/distorted ?
Where do you want Wikipedia to be after five more years of editing? Where do you want the world to be after five more years of Wikipedia?
Of the Russian livestock shortage of 1987?
d iff=37107477&oldid=37080986
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russia&
A shame that one was fixed.
Comment of the year
...is the the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
A: What do you mean, African or European?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
How often have you edited your own bio to make yourself look good? :D
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
What are you doing about the rampant abuse of Wikipedia as a pickup ground for pedophiles? See http://www.theposc.com/blog/?p=7
It seems that the majority of established media outlets are extremely quck to print negative stories about Wikipedia any time there is the tiniest hint of a question as to the credibility or impartiality of a Wikipedia article. How much of this do you think has to do with mainstream media seeing the wiki model of journalism as a threat to their livleyhood and how much is appropriate concern about truth in reporting?
Do you think wikipedia should be off limits to politicians?
...just so you know, the persons responsible for this comment's subject have been sacked.
Wikipedia is like a snowball: there is no stopping it now. Get on the train or be left behind. That being said, I'd like to get off the train/snowball before it gets too cold and too far down the hill.
..." All of these subjects are the memes that could be said to infest the human brain. A field of knowledge is pop-culture (less or more -- I do not know much about this mystical thing): does that imply that Wikipedia should have content written about every single meme that emerges from such a thing? For the stated purpose of Wikipedia, the answer is yes.
/. (sometime before this post) (search term: Isaac Asimov). It is even less like what Leibniz was attempting to get people to work on in his life time, which seems like what some people think Wikipedia is -- in a sense. (It's indeed not.)
/me ties himself up to the stake and lights the fire
Memes are units of information that can be said to spread from one person to another. Wikipedia specifically reports on these memes. Science, humanities, flip-flops: you name it, the meme is there. Encyclopedia = " work containing factual articles on subjects in every field of knowledge,
Wikipedia is not the glorious knight in armor that people think it is. It is not at all like the Foundation project that was referenced here on
To the Wikipedians (and slashdotters): What do you say to this? The solution to the problems of society and human knowledge are not being solved. Something else is being done than what is being said.
Note that this message was written in (1) spare time and (2) more as an experiment than anything else.
Recently, I did a paper for a class and used a number of Wikipedia articles as sources. While I know (within reasonable limits) that the articles I referenced where accurate (I've done a lot of research already and in the past on this topic), my professor wasn't so sure of them, especially after all the bad press that Wikipedia's recieved in the past few months.
A basic rule of research is to never trust a single source alone; to always find corroborating stories/explanations/etc. in another source. Unfortunately, for a lot of the topics in which I am interested, there are very few official sources, and Wikipedia is the most prominent of them.
What can we, the people who trust Wikipedia the most, do to convince our professors and colleagues that Wikipedia is still a highly trustworthy source of accurate information?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Why is my safety not guaranteed?
In your opinion, as wikkipedia evolves, will the data that it holds become more and more formalized (via the various user-driven markup mechanisms), so that the vast amounts of data can ultimately be read/used by machines for automated processing or reasoning tasks, natural language interfaces, etc? Or would the level of markup necessary to do this be too far beyond what's easy/obvious for the general userbase to reliably do?
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Nowadays, when you, as the founder of Wikipedia, edit a Wikipedia article related to yourself or otherwise controversial, you risk finding your name in the news the next day. Do you have a username other than JimboWales that you use to remain anonymous?
...on any given topic?
:)
Why I ask, is some subjects seem to be edited quite often, while others do not.
Does the edit history seem important to you as a means of , for instance, flagging an article to keep watch on, or as an indicator that the subject may not have a "nuetral" or "true" answer?
BTW, I really like using Wikipedia- I find the depth of info amazing sometimes. I think it is a valuble tool to get preliminary info on a subject, and usually have enough links to do more detailed research. Thanks!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The amount of time and effort put into Wikipedia by unpaid editors is astounding. However, in my time spent on the site, I've noticed that a great deal of the work is spent on controlling content rather than contributing it. In addition to the much-discussed vandalism issues, editors spend great amounts of time discussing issues, developing templates, writing rules/policies, working on user pages, etc. What percentage of the edits on WP are adding content as opposed to controlling that content?
-Brandon "How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?"
The key to Wikipedia's policy is assuming that, with enough input, the correct information will come out on top. Unfortunately, a determined vandal or large amounts of misinformed people can easily reverse this trend.
Yes, cream floats to the top of the milk, but shit floats to the top of the toilet water.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I have often heard Wiki technology described as a democracy.
I would probably describe it better as an Aristocracy. at least how it functions at the large level of Wikipedia, and Wikinews.
while sites like Kuro5hin, and digg
would function like a traditional democracy.
so my question is
Do you see it as a feasible, that one might look to the oganizational structure of websites as a model for new forms of democratic renewal. at a local, state/province or national, or international levels?
--meh--
n/t
sulli
RTFJ.
I recently read that the German Wikipedia is planning on releasing a 100 volume set of its encyclopedia. Are there any plans to create a print and DVD version of the English Wikipedia and how is it coming along? Expected release date?
You can meet the wikipedia team at SCALE in person this weekend. Wikipedia will have a booth at SCALE 4x on Feb 11-12, 2006. Use the promo code "free" for a free exhibit hall pass.
Wikipedia stores all article versions. If you look on the left, you can get a permanent link to the article you direct students to. And it won't matter if the article gets edited later, that link will point to the version you saw first.
After speaking with a few heavy Wikipedia contributors at RecentChanges, I got the impression that many editors burn out because they get no recognition or thanks when they do things right, but people complain and argue when they do something they percieve as wrong. Do you think MediaWiki should add some explicit method of indicating agreement with edits or trust of other editors, to give users a simple way of acknowledging an editor's contributions? This could be as simple as an "I agree with this edit" link next to each edit in the page history, and a tally for each user of the number of edits other users have approved. (An "I disagree with this edit" link could be useful as well, for other reasons...)
How scalable is the current system? Will there need to be a structural change if the number of editors continue to increase?
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Do you see the free software movement and its derivatives as a significant threshold in the way humanity evolves? In other words, is the best still to come, or has it already happened? Is the conservative resistance against these modern principles way too much to overcome?
Clarification:
How ironically - we live both in a dramatic and boring world where the creator of commercialist solutions deliberately slows our passage through time for his own sake.
We tend to think markets perform naturally, while better realities do exist. These new realities imply the disappearance of social classes, solve the problem of politics, nepotism, etc... I'm talking about the free software movement - it sounds like the best equation of all time, and seems to put us in line with our greatest virtue (truth and happiness) while sustaining the greatest growth rate possible.
It sounds like one of those passages from futurists like Ray Kurzweil who think science and technology will outgrow everything and turn the world upside down. [Great passages btw].
What thinkers often ignore, however, is the question of resistance, and how much of it is there.
Detailed version:
By fact many mean widely propagated information.
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some copy/paste of 'published' information, presented as 'facts', are pure and simple bullshit. For example because the authors omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie.
Moreover there is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the factual status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this confusion.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body): ...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it it's a fact, it's true.
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor. For the time being some Wikipedia articles (outside of the tech and sci fields) relay plain disinformation.
As a sidenote: I experienced such mess (French) on Wikipedia fr: where an 'information' is presented as scientific albeit it is very easy to prove that this is not scientific and very crippled (here is an short abstract written in English).
We all know that a reader must not believe each and every published material ('tin-foil hat' ), but is there any effort planned to avoid letting WP becoming JAPKP (Just Another Parrot for Known Publishers of (even bad) information)?
There is a detailed perspective (French), and a potential solution (WebDSign, English).
Let's set up a proxy-type service / botnet where the chinese can get wikipedia (or any other censored web site).
Given that Wikipedia articles vary wildly in terms of quality, it seems that it would be useful to present the user with some form of quality metric at the top of each article. This metric could be generated in quite a few ways: number of unique contributors to an article, number of pageviews since the last edit, pagerank of the article within the link structure of wikipedia, or an explicit rating system could be added on (perhaps a "rate this article" and/or a "rate a random article" interface). Is this something that might some day be implemented in MediaWiki, or is this something that many people are likely to be philosophically opposed to?
Most articles have dozens of contributors at most, but there's a ton of articles, and only a finite number of moderators to monitor ALL of them. And the truly malicious can always call in their friends to spam the process.
Recently Google has come under fire for changing the result of searches for specific countries. Since the release of GoogleAds, Google changes the results for searches in order to support their advertising business model. Google has also "punished" organizations that try to take advantage of this model in a manner that is not "traditional searching", for cases where GoogleAds were used, and even where they were not.
Given this context, with a recent slashdot article describing how various politicians have had their constituents edit their respective wiki topics, do you see a model for the wiki to inhibit this kind of abuse, without removing the means of the wiki which allows for open editing?
Thanks! ~tim
To say that Wikipedia has gotten bad press would be an understatement. The mainstream media has done nothing but demonize Wikipdeia. I remember watching a CNN interview with Jimmy Wales a while back and it was outrageous. They even tried to make a big deal out of the fact that Wikipedia has a disclaimer saying that they can't assure the validity of the information on their site, when CNN has basically the same thing! (It would have been nice if Mr. Wales had pointed that out during the interview.)
Isn't it time that Wikipedia stand up for itself and stop taking all this unfair criticism? Taking valid criticism is one thing, but what I've seen in the mainstream media is something completely different.
... a new set of questions? Can't we just let everyone edit the old set into a better list of inquiries?
Do you still feel that writing or editing an article on yourself is still a no-no? What do you have to say regarding the recent flap where someone with your name edited your biography page?
I hate sigs.
I *always* wanted to know that!
This sounds good in theory, but what happens when the unpaid "editors" get lazy? Who's going to verify every identity submission? How many wiki authors are willing to submit all this biodata and identity proofs? Do the unapproved edits get auto-added in 5 days? In that case it may as well not exist or it will become encarta (people can submit entries there if they like) or brittanica. I don't want my real name exposed .. even to random "editor" loonies on the net especially when writing controversial articles about say religion or geographical/ethnic disputes etc. Can wikipedia guarantee the security of all the personal info people submit?
.. fork Wikipedia (you are allowed to use its existing content) and start your own Elitipedia or whatever.
Plus, there are other encyclopedias that follow this non-open philosophy. Wikipedia shouldn't change it's core philosophy. If you think you have a better way
My opinion is that this idea if implemented will "elitize" and slow down wikipedia.
Since you have called Wikipedia a "killer apps" for the $100 Laptop, I was wondering if plans have been made for a snapshot of Wikipedia to be installed on them. Is there a way to kick start coverage for third world areas?
One very frequent comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica is the number of entries, in which your encyclopedia has a huge advantage. But is size a good way to measure quality? Isn't there a disporportionate amount of effort put into creating and editing entries that should never make it into an encyclopedia in the first place? Shouldn't there be some way of prioritizing relevant entries or subjects?
The page you link is unclear as to what it means for an edit to be "patrolled". As far as I can tell from the description, "patrolled" is just a tag applied to an edit to mean "this edit has been looked at and approved by someone". If that is the case (I suspect it isn't and that I'm misunderstanding something), then what is to stop a vandalizer from editing a page, and then marking it as patrolled by another account?
Google news is pointing me back to slasdot...
/. qualified as a news source, since most of what /. does is gather news (not generate them)...Oh well...
And slashdot is pointing me back to google news.
I don't know when to stop...
On other news, I didn't think
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
WikiPedia has a long history of contributions. What would you think about giving karma points to the top contributors, starting a kind of reputation system? Most pages would stay open, but the most experienced users would be able to lock and unlock pages, give and take karma points. Wouldn't that make wikipedia better, without pushin new users away? (Pages would be open by default)
You have said that "[Friedrich] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Or you've said things in interviews such as "Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information." (which of course implies that the supposedly "very far left" Indymedia is not a good source of information, whereas Wikipedia is).
Regarding the most powerful group of your lietenants, the Arbitration Committee, last year you had an election. This year you wanted to appoint them with little input until an uproar allowed more input from the community. During this (s)election, you put in the people with the highest vote rates, except for JayJG, who had people ahead of him since so many people voted against him due to his lack of the neutrality you espouse in interviews. You say you did this because he was on ArbCom - which he is, because you appointed him to it in the past few months. This was after the election last year, where he received no votes. Instead of having another election, or going down the 2005 election list, you appoint your crony who shares your point of view. When in the election he has people ahead of him due to strong opposition over his lack of opposition, you appoint him anyway.
As a post-script to this message, which is not part of my question, I would note to the readers that Wikipedia review is a board where people discuss their unhappiness with the Wikipedia "cabal". That board has some trolls, but some of the discussions are enlightening, from experienced users. Wikipedia looks open and inviting, but experience shows that is not the case. The one good thing about Wikipedia is the licenses for Mediawiki and English Wikipedia are GPL and GFDL, so that if people become unhappy enough they can fork. I myself tend to edit on other wikis since I'm tired of the nonsense on Wikipedia. I began editing in 2003, and have watched it go downhill from then. A lot of smart experts in the field have been driven off, and the cabal, Jimbo and his lieutenants hold sway. The fact that 2005 had elections from ArbCom and 2006 had "selections" should say something about how things are headed on Wikipedia. This is a policy everyone becomes familiar with after a time.
Actually, I think Wikipedia does a decent job on articles like quantum mechanics, but it is a complete mess in articles pertaining to say relations between the Israelis and Palestinians and that type of thing. And it has just gotten worse and worse. So Wikipedia isn't all bad, just anything to do with politics or history is a mess.
I suggested this same idea a few times before on the IRC wikipedia channel (actually just a couple days ago is most recent), but people said it would lead the the formation of cliques and schisms. I didnt see a problem with that .. in fact "Phys1cs_xperts groups" etc. could form and try to build a reputation in a particular field or whatever ,... for example they can even specialize in verification). The groups can deal with membership question. Ones that are highly respected could be the default signers for anonymous wikipedia users (this could be determined by regular admins). If a page exists that is signed by elevated signers, this can be the one shown by default to anon browsers. Of course users can select people who's reputations they prefer.
One question that many /.ers might wonder about is if there plans to start rewriting bits of the 'engine' in a faster language than PHP (or a combination such as C/C++/Python)? Do you think optimising the cacheing is enough?
How do you feel about Wikipedia Watch and Daniel Brandt's crusade to end Wikipedia as we know it? Will you require editors to have to have their full names and addresses on file or will people continue to be able to contribute to WP (semi-)anonymously?
As much as the content part of Wikipedia has been a success, infrastructure seems to have been a critical limitation several times - in terms of stability and funding. The last fund drive for just one quarter of $500k showed that there is a substantial annual fee for devoted Wikipedians. Wouldn't it be much more in the spirit of the Wikipedia-project to switch over to a distributed hosting scheme which many public institutions (like universities - but also of course google) would very likely embrace and making Wikipedia-hosting essentially free? Apart from technical issues shoudn't be this the aim of future hosting making it free and reliable?
This should be universal knowledge for educators/students/anyone who wants to use Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia article revision is given an id/timestamp and every revision can be accessed by URI with the id. In this regard, Wikipedia is more reliable than most websites.
i cle
:// en.wikipedia. org /w/ index.php?title=wikiarticle &oldid=5139350
The typical Wikipedia article URL looks like so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=wikiart
Now, on the history page of the article, you can see a list of article versions in chronological order. When you view an older revision, the article URI changes to reflect this older version. The URI of a past revision will look like this (+/. filter):
http
Just copy the URI which specifies an id.
For more information on citations, see Citing Wikipedia
After the recent uproar about the Dutch cartoons what problems do you forsee with articles about 'blasphemous' content, information or ideas? Besides, in the case of religion, your own safety, in situations where two or more sides have conflicting 'narratives' (see: Israel / Palestine for one), does Wikipedia have plans - or, to you, an obligation - to present, and probably have to lock the pages of, all or some sides of the story. Would you lock for instance a page presenting current Iranian theories (propaganda - take your pick) encompassing Holocaust denial to prevent 'vandalism'.
Given inevitable attempts at 'big lie' historical revisionism - repeat the lie over and over again - does the ability to lock a Wikipedia page impose a level of responsibility? If your editors have decided that figures have been falsified in an effort to 'prove' a point and/or spread Fear Uncertainty Doupt, do you have the moral right and or obligation to point this out and lock or unlock the page?
In a worst case scenario, do you end up with Winston's job (1984)?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Maybe I should have tagged this question as Commitment to Teachers. The kids are the end receivers, but the teachers are stuck in a world where the kids barely know what a paper encyclopedia is.
our first Slashdot Interview "three-peater."
With three peters, do you have difficulty in finding well-fitting underwear?
Jim Wales is a Indiana University Kelly School dropout. I would like to here from him what his college experience was like. Did he party too hard, not fit in, etc? Why did he choose Indiana University? Article from IU Student Paper
I used to help heavily in the categorization of articles. But the living people category made a big stir. It adds a lot of extra categorization and it is hard work. I practiaclly gave up categorization due to this. A simpler solution would of been as simple as this
[[Category:1950 births|living=yes]]
But instead there is a redundant overpopulated category. There are thousands of unproperly categorizied articles, so what solutions would there be to imporve the situation so I can categorize with confidence.
With the advances of mobile computing and storage, I think it is very relevant to create a way to download the encyclopedia (at least partially) to carry on a long trip or bus. Are there any plans to do this?
When a view becomes popular enough, people can change, have changed, and will continue to change articles to represent the most popular viewpoint rather than the most factual.
Or people defend the existing articles that aren't completely factual based on the view that "this is most popular view" because so many like-minded editors keep an article on their watchlist. (I.E. Wikiprojects)
How do you prevent populism and cliquish behavior from distorting the articles?
How do you keep NPOV truly non-negotiable when 80% of the editors who have certain specific articles on their watchlists are strongly in favor of a particularly non-neutral point of view?
In your view, is "most popular" in any way related to "neutral"?
There it is, plain for all to see. This legitimate question, aimed at the one person who can best answer it, should he ever dare to, has been marked as flamebait. All it takes is one or two people who regard a discussion of the issue to declare it 'absurd', 'out of bounds' or, at Slashdot, 'Flamebait', and you see exactly the same dynamic at work here at Slashdot that you see happening at Wikipedia. Isn't that interesting? Censorship at its best! Good thing I wasn't logged in!
Flemming Rose, the cultural editor responsible for the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons is a Sayanim who lives in Denmark, and is doing his part to bring about a 'self-fulfilment' of the Zionist "clash of civilizations" promoted by the Neo-Con Daniel Pipes. This was part of an orchestrated false flag campaign aimed at deliberately pissing off the muslims who were most susceptible to this kind of manipulation. It has nothing to do with Denmark, really, or with freedom. It has to do with abusing freedom to deliberately insulting people and placing their reaction under a microscope to portray them as unreasonable and deserving of whatever you do to them next.
Tune in to Free Speech TV and get some truth.
Ever think of incentive programs to encourage more people to edit more often? I gather that regularly contributing, core editors are few and far in-between, and with so many topics to be either cleaned up and even created, wouldn't that be a priority?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Whats the story with Semantic Wikipedia? When will it be implemented?
I used to write a bit to Wikipedia in both english and my native language. I encountered two major problems, which become an overwhelming source of Wikistress for me. The first was the old "babysitting the Internet"-problem and the other was the constant need for manual synchronization between localized pages. Do you see any technical or social solutions to the latter problem? When a localized page on certain subject is modified, how can the cost of keeping the other pages on the same subject up to date be minimized?
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Boxers or briefs?
Wikipediareview seems rather limp and lame compared to (say) Wikien-l. Good to see an alternative forum for criticism, but very little of the criticism seems to be what I might call mature and adult. Then again, I've only had a quick look over the forum.
Sigh...
Hello.
I feel the amount of time/effort put into dispute resolution could be a reason to many for leaving the project. I am thinking about requests for comment, mediation, arbitration. I feel some users are gaming the project by trying to play smart ass during discussions. As an example, a recent RFC saw it's subject try to define gently the term fuck-off. No joke here. (No link because my point now is not to have fun).
I reduced drastically my contributions to WP for this very reason. It is exhausting having to work around cruft/fun/gamers.
My question. Is there any plan to have somehow more restrictive policies during disputes ? It would not be about a higher price to enter the WP "game" (need to show credits for example...), but a higher one to stay in the "game". Something like any strong words or any one caught at disrespecting the consensus (as an example re-creation of an AFD'ed article) will immediately trigger a short term block, or a way to slow down hot contributions. The goal would be to alleviate the burden by stopping at once what I identify as noise. Give every one a real chance at thinking within a collaborative spirit. Indeed, to my opinion there is a lack of understanding from some user that WP is not a forum or a game where one scores points.
I have seen recent new policies (no anonymous creation, semi protection...) with interest. A next step seems needed.
Note: I am well aware of things like consensus is not necessarily right. This is not the point of my question now.
For less WP aware people, a quick analogy : If one plays chess game, one have to abide by the chess game rules. There is no other way. The difference being if one wants to change WP rules, well... there are rules and processes to do so. It _IS_ possible. Yet, one still have to abide by the rules.
Thanks for this tool. Thanks for time and consideration.
Zijus.
Do you think that Bomis helped financially (or otherwise) with the success of Wikipedia?
I admit that I had seen bomis.com before I knew about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a regular stop for me now, while Bomis is somewhat forgotten.
Really, I think I'm not the only one who would love a "hard copy" of Wikipedia; not only as insurance against a future disappearance (God forbid) but for use in places with no Net access, or simply for the warm, fuzzy feeling of "owning" a copy. As well as helping distribute the information, it might be a good source of income. Are there any plans? And if not, why not?