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.

Comments

Re:Wikipedia's Roots

[cashman73]

The answer to this question can be found on Jimbo Wales Wikipedia Page.

"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.

Re:Wikipedia in China(PRC)

[stupidfoo]

lol - he can't read that link. Didn't you read the part about how he's in China and can't read Wikipedia?

Wikipedia:Advice to Tor users in China
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Tor is often blocked from editing due to its use by vandals. This presents a problem for Wikipedia users in mainland China, who currently (January 2006) can't edit Wikipedia by normal methods. Luckily there is another way, until such time as the Chinese authorities read this page and close the loophole. The solution is to edit your main Privoxy configuration file as shown below.

Please note that this introduces a significant privacy vulnerability. Your traffic to Wikipedia will be unencrypted and will give away your real IP address. Furthermore, any contentious webpage could be modified to include an image from Wikipedia, either by the author or any attacker who can modify the content. Then by gaining access to the traffic to or from the proxy, or the Wikipedia logs, the attacker can discover who is browsing the contentious webpage.

This configuration change should be considered to remove all privacy that Tor provides and if used, only perform your edits on Wikipedia which you are happy to be associated with. Doing anything else while this configuration is active puts your privacy at risk.

# Default Tor forward
forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

# Unencrypted Wikipedia forwarding
forward *.wikipedia.org 145.97.39.155:80
forward *.wikimedia.org 145.97.39.155:80
forward *.wiktionary.org 145.97.39.155:80
forward *.wikiquote.org 145.97.39.155:80
forward *.wikinews.org 145.97.39.155:80
forward *.wikibooks.org 145.97.39.155:80

# Special servers which 145.97.39.155 won't forward properly
forward-socks4a dumps.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a download.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a mail.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a irc.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a ftp.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a news.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a bugs.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a bugzilla.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a ganglia.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a kate.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a kohl.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a noc.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a stats.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a ticket.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a tools.wikimedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a mail.wikipedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a bugzilla.wikipedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a bugs.wikipedia.org localhost:9050 .
forward-socks4a download.wikipedia.org localhost:9050 .

The Tor forward line should already be there, you would have added it when you installed Tor. The important thing is that the Wikipedia lines must be after the Tor line.

This will give you unencrypted communications to the Wikipedia servers, and will allow the Wikipedia servers to determine your real IP address, for the purpose of blocking vandals. It should be faster than using Tor.

Re:Structured data

[AxelBoldt]

Check out

• Wikidata
• Structured data
• The ultimate Wikitionary
• WikiDB