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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.
"In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis, which also sold photographs of softcore pornography until mid-2005. Because of his past position with Bomis, Wales was asked in a September 2005 C-SPAN interview about his involvement with what the interviewer, Brian Lamb, called "dirty pictures." In response, Wales described Bomis as a "guy-oriented search engine." In an interview with Wired, he also explained that he disputed the categorization of Bomis content as "soft-core pornography": "If R-rated movies are porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not." Wales is no longer actively involved in the company."
While Wikipedia itself was not directly funded by the porn industry, Mr. Wales did invest a significant portion of his personal income in the project, which partially did come from this involvement with Bomis.
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?
Every Wikipedia article has a link called "permanent link" in the toolbox on the left. That link will always point to the precise article version you're currently reading. If you want to link to a previous article version, click on "History", and then on the date you want.
If you want to learn about a controversial topic in Wikipedia, you obviously need to read the article in conjunction with its history and its discussion page. If you do that, you'll get a very well rounded view of the controversy, including the positions, arguments, biases and lies of the involved parties. No ordinary encyclopedia (or newspaper, or peer-reviewed article) comes even close in this regard.
On Wikipedia, that stuff is referred to as "fancruft."
From that page:
As with most of the issues of importance and notability in Wikipedia, there is no firm policy on the inclusion of obscure branches of popular culture subjects. It is true that things labeled fancruft are often deleted from Wikipedia. This is primarily due to the fact that things labeled as fancruft are often poorly written, unreferenced, unwikified, and POV - all things that lead to deletion. Well-referenced and well-written articles on obscure topics are from time to time deleted as well, but such deletions are highly controversial. It is also worth noting that many articles on relatively obscure topics are featured articles. Generally speaking, the perception that an article is fancruft can be a contributing factor in its deletion, but it is rarely the sole factor.
https://beijing999.com/ - spread the joy.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Recently there was a new link added to the "toolbox" in the left column (below the search box):
:)
"Permanent link"
That should save you a bit of time.