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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.
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?
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.
The whole site is editors to moderate what people are saying. Anybody (or at least any registered user) can change/delete/revert/add/modify (almost) any article at (almost) any time.
Wikipedia's greatest weakness is also its greatest strength -- 50 million editors and contributors. Some of whom are brilliant, some of whom are morons. Hopefully the brilliant ones win out but every now and then you have to put up with (or even step in and edit) some inanity.
Just like democracy, it only works when informed, concerned and intelligent people step forward and take an active role.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
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?
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.
I like how your 'rebuttal' containts no facts nor any arguments, just name-calling.
Actually, I don't like it. I was just being sarcastic. There is nothing more hypocritical than 'skeptics' and 'debunkers' who are nothing but trolls.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
It's an interesting idea but I see a couple of immediate problems. First it will tend to promote polarisation and probably lessen the quality of the articles. With 2 or more parties arguing over a page new material tends to get vetted heavily. Separate that to two or more point of view pages and they will each rapidly diverge and start to contain significant dubious material. You'll end up with a pro-life page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a pro-choice page filled with all manner of ridiculous claims and misinformation, and a neutral one with not a lot of content.
Secondly it will lead to a ridiculous proliferation of parallel pages in many cases. If you've seen enough disputes on Wikipedia over content you'll know that everyone seems to have their own particular spin and there are plenty of people who will defend their point of view as one that is entirely legitimate and not adequately represented. For example you will probably end up with a Communism page with parallel versions by Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, libertarian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists... And a similar representation for Capitalism page.
Sorry, while I think the idea is good in spirit, in practice I think it will just cause more problems.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Ha. This after going into detail about the truly vast amount of effort an expert needs to go to in order to impose the facts against stubborn idiots! Not to mention that cranks usually have much more free time than experts (who are busy writing books and giving lectures on the topic). No, I don't see that the system as it stands favors anyone except those who have lots of time to waste.
It isn't a vast amount of effort. Summarising my post, all you need to do is:
Post an initial edit. Give the reason for your edit in the talk page.
If that fails, put a request for a third opinion, comment or mediation, depending on how many stubborn idiots there are.
And that is all. In total, only TWO edits are required, in the worst. And the result will be almost permanent. Compare to the difficulty of getting Britannica to correct an error. The difficulty you occasionally hear about from people always happens because they get hot headed and just keep escalating, or because they are actually wrong.
Obviously, every editor can provide their own procedure of verification. Verification then consists of carrying out this procedure.
Possible methods would be "Call the information desk of Metropolitan State University, have them connect you to Axel Boldt; the guy who picks up the phone is me. If you say 'quick' I'll answer 'quack'." or "Come on over to 1572 Portland Av. #5, Saint Paul, MN and I'll buy you a beer and show you my driver's license."
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.
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.
No, what you have described is properly called a republic.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
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.