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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.''
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
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?"
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
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.
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
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
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
What was the first wiki entry, what's the most popular and which is your favourite?
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.
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
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:
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?
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
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?
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?
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).
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?
What are you doing about the rampant abuse of Wikipedia as a pickup ground for pedophiles? See http://www.theposc.com/blog/?p=7
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
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?"
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?"
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...)
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).
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.
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?