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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
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?"
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!"
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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?
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?
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...)