An Interview with Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales

Raul654 writes "The Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's weekly in-house publication, is this week featuring an interview with Jimbo Wales. The questions, which were submitted by Wikipedia regulars, hit on subjects related to the Foundation, the budgeting and legal issues, the blocking of Wikipedia in China, as well as where Jimbo sees Wikipedia in the future."

Comments

Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[JehCt]

Hey Jimbo, missed the interview... How will you prevent Wikipedia from becoming balkanized, just like ordinary society, as groups of users with differing views form up their own projects, and start slinging mud at each other and calling each other "trolls"? Won't additional restrictions on editing, in the name of "quality," drive potential contributors to other pursuits? How will you prevent Wikipedia from turning into a collection of cranks, slackers, and trolls?

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[erroneous]

I recommend a peer-moderated system.

That never fails.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Wikipedia has had policies that strive to prevent this for a long time. So far, they seem to be working very well. Here are some of them:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_personal _attacks
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiabili ty
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good _faith
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipe dia_is_not

There is no indication that Wikipedia is turning into a trollfest. Of course, some subjects like the Muhammad cartoons cause a great deal of debate, but for the most part it is focused on writing an Encyclopedia, not a debate club. As it should be.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[voice_of_all_reason]

Um, you won't?

Internet -- it's serious business.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Uber Banker]

Pretty intersting that questions were requested from the /. audience, to which Jimmy Wales would reply one week later. Now two weeks later we get replies from questions submitted by 'Wikipedia regulars'.

I wonder if the (highest moderated) /. questions were questions Jimmy Wales didn't want to answer. The questions from the 'Wikipedia regulars' seemed to facilitate snappy answers which were pretty obvious, though still useful as a snapshot of ambitions to refer against in the future.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Raul654]

(Speaking as someone who helps handle the press-related email Wikipedia gets) Jimbo gets something like a half-dozen interviews requests every day. The people at the signpost did the interview on IRC, and had to schedule it several weeks in advance (like early January). Your conjecture that is ignoring the slashdot interview is just idiotic, factually unsupported speculation.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[BecomingLumberg]

How will you prevent Wikipedia from turning into a collection of cranks, slackers, and trolls?

How can we stop /. from becoming this?

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[cerberusss]

*laughs*
Immediately slapped with '-1, Troll'. So mods do have a sense of humor.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Uber Banker]

Your conjecture that is ignoring the slashdot interview is just idiotic, factually unsupported speculation.

I am indeed sure Jimmy Wales is a busy man. I merely noticed that /. readers' questions were asked for, and the highest moderated questions would get responses. This has not been the case. So is it the fault of Slashdot editors jumping the gun somewhat.

Asking readers of a website for questions
|
Answering a different set of readers' quesions
|
Genuinely asking why the first set of questions were not asked...

...is not really idiotic and factually unsupported is it? Indeed they were about similar (but not identical themes). Indeed many IRC posters may have got ideas from the /. interview question request (not the 'Slashdot interview' as you state). But they are different interview questions, which was not explained in TFA nor by your somewhat flaming response to my (and possibly others' question). So were the /. editors to blame for being a little too keen?

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Raul654]

"I wonder if the (highest moderated) /. questions were questions Jimmy Wales didn't want to answer."

(1) Do you have a single bit of evidence to back up this speculation? No? Then it's unsupported by the facts.

(2) Somehow, I don't think that qualifies as a "geniune" attempt to ask why the slashdot questions where not answered. It sounds more like a conspiracy theory to me.

(3) "But they are different interview questions, which was not explained in TFA" - seeing as how the write up says explicitely that the questions were submitted by wikipedia regulars, any confusion between this and the slashdot interview request was entirely your fault.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Moryath]

"Oops, too late."

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Raven42rac]

I know I asked about him editing his own bio. I doubt he'll answer. Bock bock.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Raul654]

"There is no indication that Wikipedia is turning into a trollfest. " - quite the opposite. Just a bit of a history lesson from someone who lived it:

Through early 2004, Jimbo handled all of the english wikipedia's "discipline problems" (for lack of a better word) himself. Of course, with all due respect to Jimbo, in retrospect it's clear that didn't do a particularly good job of it. Users like Helga and Lir - not quite vandals, but not good editors by any stretch of imagination - were allowed to troll the site for years without before Jimbo would intervene (if at all). Good users were stressed from having to deal with them, and some left the project as a result.

In early 2004, the Arbitration Committee was formed, to shift the burden of dealing with trolls from Jimbo. While things were rocky for the first 9 months or so (although the committee nominally had 12 members, only about 4 of them - including myself - were acitve on a regular basis, with 1 or 2 others active on a semi-regular basis. As a result, getting a majority on any issue was nearly impossible), over the last two years I think the site has become a lot more pleasant to edit.

Consider - one of the first arbitration cases was with a 'Plautus Satire', whose edits are hilarious, if you didn't have to clean up after him. Things along the lines of 'the hubble space telescope is an orbitting death ray laser', 'the shuttle columbia was shot down by the US military in order to secure more funding for Nasa', 'black holes are a myth like god', 'Albert Einstien was a theif who got all of his best ideas by plagurizing patent applications he came across while he was a patent clerk', and on and on. It took (I kid you not) 6 weeks to ban Plautus. 6 weeks of having to put up with that idiocy. Nowadays, we're much a much less tolerant place for nonsense like that, and (in my own personal view) it's a much nicer place to edit as a result.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Angostura]

Blimey, if that's an example of your skill in answering off-kilter questions from people I'm surprised that the press coverage of Wikipedia remains so positive.

I think what you meant to say was "Actually, this interview is unrelated to Slashdot's original request for questions, I'm sure the Slashdot interview will be along in due course".

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[Raul654]

Ouch - touche.

Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows

[commanderfoxtrot]

Well, an "edit this article" button would certainly cut down on dupes.

This (comment) might feed the trolls though.

Cool!

[Black Parrot]

Can we edit his interview?

Re:Cool!

[Uber Banker]

It would be nice to be able to see his interview. As he answers a question on Wikipedia being blocked in China, and hosts that interview on Wikipedia (which is blanket blocked as a web domain in the PRC, and I've had little luck with Tor).

Could someone be kind enough to post the text of the interview in the discussion?

Re:Cool!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Here you go. Unmolested.

Wikipedia Signpost: Raul654 asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturfing?"

Jimbo Wales: The question is invalid. There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".

WS: Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"

JW: We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.

WS: An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"

JW: The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.

WS: ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"

JW: We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.

WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"

JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.

WS: Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude a

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. :-)

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many thanks.

Re:Cool!

[Raul654]

Easy answer - yes. Since this story hit slashdot, someone has already edited the interview to link certain phrases to their particular Wikipedia pages

Re:Cool!

[anaesthetica]

Yes you can: [edit].

Re:Cool!

[kamapuaa]

Even more prescient, can Jimmy Wales edit his own interview, to make himself seem more important to the interview process?

Re:Cool!

[john83]

Doubtless, this will cost me still more karma, but then I've none to lose.

What stupid wanker modded me down (parent post)? Someone asks whether we can edit the interview (GP), and it's +5 funny, but I point out that you actually can (as I said dipshit, click the link) and it's -1? I'm beginning to wonder if we actually deserve the editors we get, given how think some of the supposed nerds on /. are. Sure, an editor passed a perpetual motion machine story, but some plonker was stupid enough to submit it.

Jimbo's response

[Fiachra06]

Jimbo: I plan to burn them all in a stalinesque purge of glory. Interviewer: Isn't that a bit much? Jimbo: Everyone's got a hobby.

Quality standards

[ChristopherX]

The interview mentions the need for quality content. If not already wiki should be using automated tools to flag potentially low quality articles.

1. Use a static analyzer to detect large amounts of grammatical errors, etc.

2. Look for articles outside the normal word/source ratio.

Re:Quality standards

[jacoplane]

In the interview I asked a question about the article validation tools. We've been waiting for these tools for some time, since the current methods we have for validating articles are rather crude. Some efforts from within the community to perform more detailed article assessment have also recently sprung up. This is besides the already existing Featured article process and Peer review.

Re:Quality standards

[Raul654]

(Speaking as the person who runs the Featured Article process) You call it crude, but a group of graduate students in library science at the University of Illinois studied the process and concluded that it "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." - Here's their paper

Re:Quality standards

[jacoplane]

I didn't mean to say the featured article process is cude. In fact I think it is very thorough. What I meant is that there is no easy way to vet a number of articles related to some subject area. If Wikipedia wants to move to a 1.0 stable version, articles will need to be verified on a much larger scale than is happening with the featured article process currently.

Re:Quality standards

[Raul654]

In any kind of vetting system - Speed and accuracy are all conflicting virtues. Wikipedia has a million articles. You can vet them quickly, or accurately, but not both. I do agree with you, though, that the rating system I saw on the test wikipedia was not something I cared for.

Personally, what I would like to see is admins given a "Copy to stable" button for each article. When pressed, it copies the article to http://en.wikipedia.org/stable/Article_name. The stable wikipedia would not be directly editable, but could only be changed by clicking the "Copy to stable" button. This would prevent stable from becoming a true fork.

Re:Quality standards

[Bluephonic]

I haven't read it yet, but this project to make wikipedia more machine-readable might help. (On the other hand, if you're talking about repuation systems, complex article ranking systems, etc., then I'm skeptical. Investing too much structure in automated, numeralized evaluation tends to undercut the fluid nature of real human social interaction and detailed language-based evaluation.)

someone post the interview, please

[Anonymous Coward]

it's all blocked in china... :(

Interview text

[stupid_is]

Wikipedia Signpost: Raul654 asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturfing?"

Jimbo Wales: The question is invalid. There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".

WS: Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"

JW: We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.

WS: An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"

JW: The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.

WS: ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"

JW: We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.

WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"

JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.

WS: Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude at best. The Featured article process seems too slow, and the article validation feature seems to have died a quiet death. Are you planning a big push on this front?"

JW: Isn't that the same question as the quality question? The article validation feature has not died a quiet death at all.

WS: Quadell asks: "Most important decisions on Wikimedia projects are handled

Knowledge in their own 'language'

[dtsazza]

Jimbo's comment, that "in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects," ties in in an interesting fashion with the current blocking of Wikipedia in China. At the moment, it's a relatively small issue in their grand scheme of things. But fast-forward 10 years, (if and) when the Chinese wikipedia is about the same size as the English version, and I wonder how the government will cope. It's already technologically very possible to circumvent the block with proxies - and although I don't envy those who go against the regime, doubtless many thousands, if not millions, will, and Wikipedia will continue to grow. Will the Chinese government continue to try to brush it under the carpet, perhaps coming up with more exotic and powerful blocking techniques? Or will it decide it can't just be stamped out, and perhaps more worryingly, attempt to influence the content of articles on Chinese Wikipedia? I would imagine that a government can't bring enough force to bear in a Wiki context to overcome the concensus of the userbase as a whole, which is fantastic and one of the major pluses of wikis. But a possibly more interesting question is those situations where the majority of the userbase does have a different viewpoint - how would Arabic Wikipedia relate the Danish cartoons incident as compared to the English one, for example? Scale that up to millions of entries, and then re-read Jimbo's goal:

"a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia for every single person on the planet"

and it seems that everyone will have an encyclopedia, but the knowledge contained therein may well differ depending on the flavour you have. Now I'm not knocking the concept and I think it's a great thing to aim for - but I see this as an extremely interesting issue for wiki-style collaberative projects in general. Most projects have a standardised community invisibly guiding them - and what we're seeing here is multiple communities with essentially the same task and input, so it'll be extremely interesting to see what comes out. Hopefully Wikipedia's emphasis on neutrality will be enough to overcome cultural bias, but I'm not sure if it'll be completely successful (I'm not sure that people will even notice that bias half the time)...

Re:Knowledge in their own 'language'

[Raul654]

"But fast-forward 10 years, (if and) when the Chinese wikipedia is about the same size as the English version" - this is a false comparison. We can now say empirically that, all things being equal, wikipedia projects tend to experience exponential growth, and that the relative growth rates are approximately the same.

Or, to put it another way - it is almost impossible for a smaller wiki to overtake a larger wiki (because articles bring visitors, visitors become contributors, and contributors write articles - this is my second law of Wikipedia. Wash, rinse, and repeat)

So to get back to your original statement - in 10 years, the Chinese wikipedia may be as big as the English Wikipedia is today, but the chances that the Chinese Wikipedia will overtake the english Wikipedia is basically nill.

Re:Knowledge in their own 'language'

[dtsazza]

That is a good point, and I'll admit that my phrasing was a little lax (I did mean "as big as the English one is currently).

Then again, what with Wikipedia's desire to converge to Wikipedia 1.0, new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles. Of course, there'll still be the collaberation, but the effort will go towards improving existing ones, not creating new ones on more obscure topics. And Wikipedia itself measures the size of its different language versions in article count (admittedly other metrics would be much more complicated).

As an interesting note, the Chinese version currently has 56,826 articles. The English version was this size in approximately October 2002, so ceteris paribus, my premise will occur in about June 2009. What with the Chinese government's efforts, though, ceteris is most certainly not paribus, so this is purely theoretical...

Re:Knowledge in their own 'language'

[cnflctd]

Son of a bitch! There's a latin wikipedia!

Think of all the enslaved students taking latin, forced to translate entries. Eventually la.wikipedia.org will take over the world!

I, for one ... latin teacher overlords ...

Re:Knowledge in their own 'language'

[Raul654]

"new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles" - this hypothesis has been floating around for a while. While it does seem like that should happen at some point, the fact of the matter is that we are seeing exactly the opposite --- as Wikipedia has grown larger and covered all of the topics you'd expect, the rate of new article creation is increasing at a fantastic rate, with no evidence yet of slowing down.

Re:Knowledge in their own 'language'

[jonwil]

Anyone know if there is any reference in the chinese language wikipedia to Tianmin Square (and specifically to the famous tanks photograph)?

Perspective Affinities & Wiki-certified Creden

[Selecto]

Should we look for new ways to deal with the inevitable vitality of Wikipedia, as a social mechanism to present additional sides of an argument or contentious issue? I'd say there are easy indicators of contention that we'll call 'revisionism,' where the sheer number of edits holds the greatest clue. Perhaps if there were some way to 'diff' the contents of edits / revisions in a summary fashion? It would be cool, for instance, to be able to summarize the changes one party made, and see all "relevant" historical changes on one page. Of course, what is 'relevant' as a summary topic or interpretation of a point, is subjective, but then, could this be user-interpreted, too? What if Wikipedia adopted learning 'preferences' to show a user what they deem to be relevant of issues they have researched on Wikipedia? That would be cool. These interpretation-affinities could be used to score related topics, or to make other suggestions. Some of this is already available, but in my opinion, not where it could be. Also, there are a lot of people who claim to be authoritative when their references are out of scope for Wikipedia. Why don't we provide authority within WikiP's scope, where a reader could judge on any particular poster's credibility based on accessible body of wiki 'precedence'... I'd rather not go all over to determine if s/o is credible as an informer regarding Earth Sciences. I would be glad to have available the highest-level scientific research, it's not really all that complicated if you've got the right attitude.

Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[Sub Zero 992]

Actions by Jimbo Wales may not be overturned except by appeal to Jimbo.

I mean, is that not the very epitomy of dictatorship?

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[dtsazza]

But from the very same link:

"I respectfully disagree with the assertion that actions by Jimbo Wales may not be overturned except by appeal to Jimbo. Jimbo seems to agree, noting he will accept it if the arbcom issued a ruling overturning something he did."

And that hasn't been seen in any dictatorship in history: "Yes, I have supreme ultimate power, but if you, the puppet parliament, don't like something I've done and decide against it, I'll go with what you want."

While I recognise that dictatorships (especially in the real world) are far from ideal, those powers let you get important things done rather quickly. From one angle, it's nice to know that Jimbo has the ability to immediately and permanently put a stop to childish back-and-forth 'arguments' between two contributers who both believe they're in the right.

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[voice_of_all_reason]

Insert the "It's not facism when we do it!" pic.

Seriously, wikipedia's fun for looking up klingons and that funny shoe in stage 5-3 of Super Mario Brothers 3, but it's never going to be anything much more.

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like an operator in some chat room once told me when I questioned his fairness:

"Who told you we have a democracy in here?" :)

*Bans you*

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[Sub Zero 992]

And that hasn't been seen in any dictatorship in history: "Yes, I have supreme ultimate power, but if you, the puppet parliament, don't like something I've done and decide against it, I'll go with what you want."

I disagree:

Jimbo Wales has ultimate authority on Wikimedia projects, as a foundation issue that is beyond debate.

The arbitration committee, akin to your example of a parliament, has already issued undying proclomations of fealty to Jimbo. So of course for him it is no big matter to proclaim that he will abide by their decisions.

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[thegnu]

Actions by Jimbo Wales may not be overturned except by appeal to Jimbo.

I mean, is that not the very epitomy of dictatorship?

Yes, except:

-Not a government, Wikipedia is an online user-editable encyclopedia
-Somebody needs super admin ability to stop people from continually adding stuff about the N-words and the F-words and the J-words and so on, ad nauseum
-Someone said at the link provided that they hope he realizes he makes mistakes; at worst, this is one of them ...I just read a little further, and I realize that what I said has no anchoring in reality. Jimbo is, in fact, an N-word loving F-word J-word! Off to edit his Wikipedia entry!

~Love~

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[BecomingLumberg]

Actions by Jimbo Wales may not be overturned except by appeal to Jimbo. I mean, is that not the very epitomy of dictatorship?

Well, he is the HNIC (head nerd in charge)

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[2short]

Yes, Wikipedia is at root a non-democratic institution, and, were it a govenment, would be a dictatorship. Kind of like every privately held company or charitable foundation in the world.

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[julesh]

What you quote is a "proposed principle" that was considered for reaching an arbitration decision on a particular case where a particular user had repeatedly undone a particular action of Jimbo's. While it will likely be taken into account in similar cases in future, it is not a wikipedia policy.

Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult?

[FhnuZoag]

Well, so what?

In theory, the guy with access to the server on-off switch always has supreme authority. The question is: Is Jimbo likely to abuse the power? What would be the consequences of that?

1. No.

2. People will just fork and work on a mirror - Jimbo is legally constrained to allow this, because of the licensing agreement that is implicit in each and every edit.

Facts vs. Opinion

[digitaldc]

The only threat to the ideal of a global encyclopedia is to filter out opinion from facts. But one has to ask, who knows all the 'facts'?

It must be very difficult with some topics to derive what exactly is the 'truth.'

For instance, what about the perception about how an economy works vs. the reality of gray and black markets affecting that economy?
How does the military work? The government? Who is really in charge and makes the decisions?
Do we rely on CIA and Census figures? Do we rely on 'official' government papers? Encyclopedia Britannica? The internet? The mass media?

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[Finuvir]

The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article. We may not be able to say that "the population of X is N" with any certainty, but we can be quite sure of ourselves in reporting that "According to the CIA world factbook, the population of X was N in 2003"

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[natmakarvitch]

> The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article.

It is also, AFAIK, to somewhat put it into perspective, for example by revealing patent lies.

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[Raul654]

" The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article." - really? So when you look up earth, there should be a section about how the earth is flat (Or so some people would have you believe) Or how the Holocaust is a myth perpetrated by Zionists bankers? Or when you look up the Universe, it tells you about how it's all supported by turtles? The moral of the story is that for almost any article you can name, there is at least one group out there that has demonstrably false notions about it. It is an encyclopedia's job to exclude the falsities, and for subjects that have a legitimate debate (like string theory does, and evolution does not) to present them in a neutral tone

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[Finuvir]

I see how you read my post, but that's not how I intended it. When I wrote "all sources", I meant "all sources used in compiling the article", not "all sources available".

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[Raul654]

Funny you should mention that. I was asked, in my capacity as an arbitrator, about that same thing yesterday. Here is the reply I sent

Re:Facts vs. Opinion

[natmakarvitch]

In your comment you wrote 'We do expect our users to be able to distinguish between political propaganda and legitimate scientific sources.'. I'm affraid this is inadequate because, as already stated:

-=-=-=-=-
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, in their own minds, it's a fact, it's true.
=-=-=-=-

A growing number of authors of disinformaton authored by big entitites is aware of this and acts accordingly, putting Wikipedia at risk.

Good grief

[QuietLagoon]

Am I the only one around here who is tired of reading all of this WikiPedia this and WikiPedia that stuff? Aren't there any other websites to talk about?

Re:Good grief

[amliebsch]

Let's see...according to Wikipedia, there are.

Re:Good grief

[ian_mackereth]

Am I the only one around here who is tired of reading all of this WikiPedia this and WikiPedia that stuff? Aren't there any other websites to talk about?

OK... So, what's the latest at google.com?

Re:Good grief

[QuietLagoon]

:)

Re:Good grief

[slavemowgli]

Am I the only one around here who is tired of reading all of this WikiPedia this and WikiPedia that stuff?

Yes, you are. :)

Why Wikipedia isn't working

[blueZ3]

or, The Emperor's New Clothes

I have karma to burn, so here goes...

Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia, to revel in the wild-west democracy of it all, and break into rapturous platitudes about what a terrific source of high-quality information it is. Unfortunately, the reality (which none of the Wiki-boosters is likely to admit) is that Wikipedia is broken... fundamentally flawed, and can't be fixed.

Here's a tidbit for you concerning the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: drought is caused by high prices, overpopulation, and conflict. From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia: "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions." (1/11/06)

This is another example of why you can't rely on Wikipedia-the online encyclopedia written and edited by people with a limited grasp of the English language and (frequently) an even more limited knowledge of the subject matter. If you think that things written by committee are the epitome of bad writing, wait until you read articles that were both written AND edited by committee. And not just any committee, this a committee composed of your average basement-dwelling Net geeks, know-nothing Web noobs, and agenda-driven politicos.

Drought is a condition created by a shortage of water. That's the definition of the word. But here we have a Wikipedia article that plainly states that 'high cereal prices' are causal. Hmmmm... Explain to me again, oh geniuses, how high prices for cereals have 'led to severe drought conditions'? Apparently high prices are drying up the water supply. Clearly the author of this one is confused, either in their understanding of causality, or their understanding of the definition of the word 'drought.' Yet they felt competent to write (or edit) an article about the issue. Welcome to the world of the encyclopedia written by the ignorant.

The usual response of Wikipedia-philes is to answer any concern about the quality or accuracy of articles with 'anyone can edit it.' Which leads us to the immediate response (mine when I saw the above error): Why would I? Why would anyone waste their time? The person or persons who wrote this incorrect article will either a) change it back, or b) edit it further to destroy whatever correction I make. Where's the value proposition in this editing task? Am I supposed to feel satisfaction if I can see that it's corrected for 20 minutes before being reverted or overwritten? How am I supposed to feel tomorrow when I come back and see my efforts undone? Why would anyone with writing or editing ability or subject matter knowledge go to the effort of changing something that will almost immediately be screwed up again by someone without any.

No one is willing to address this issue. In forums, anyone who questions the problems of articles being written by people lacking essential subject-matter expertise is immediately shouted down. Long Live Wikipedia! Nothing possibly can be wrong! You just don't like the egalitarian nature of a "people's encyclopedia"... and on and on. Hello, McFly! If Wikipedia worked, it would be a wonderful resource. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, as the old saying goes.

In a community where everyone is 'equal' in power, despite inequalities in knowledge and ability, those with the later will, eventually -- inevitably, decline to participate. This particular type of communism (and that's not a pejorative) leads inexorably to a devaluing of the best in favor of not just the good, but the bad. In the case of Wiki articles, this means that a physics article is as likely to be written by a 12-year-old as a physicist. Or that 'drought' is as likely to mean 'famine' as 'water shortage.'

Wikipedia is an amusing read, but I wouldn't look to it for accuracy or anything resembling an even-handed explanation of a topic. The most that can be said for it is that it's an interesting social experiment. Nothing more.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ZombieWomble]

Well, since you already stymied the "Why don't you edit it yourself?" response from the Wiki-fanatics, it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out, and then flaunts this as the great strength of Wikipedia. On the one hand, they're right - when criticism arises, Wikipedia can respond pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, on articles which aren't contentious enough to get people angry and editing vigorously, these criticisms are often not forthcoming, and errors persist for a very long time. Wikipedia should not be reacting to criticism, but rather pre-empting it. Unfortunately, with the present editing policies that's not often the case.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[BenjyD]

I think the basic Wikipedia problem is that the more obscure a fact is, the more likely a user is to want to look it up (nobody uses Wikipedia to look up things they already know). But the more obscure facts are the ones with fewer people qualified to write about them and the ones with more people who don't fully understand them, so they are the least trustworthy.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[gowen]

Now, I don't disagree that that's a badly written sentence, and, interpreted literally, wrong for exactly the reason you say.

But, even though that sentence is rubbish, it's also abundantly clear what is meant. High cereal prices exacerbated the food shortage caused by the drought.

So, there are two responses :
i) correct the sentence so that it reflects the intended meaning [needless to say, someone has already done this].
ii) generalise from this mistake into a lengthy diatribe about the inaccuracy of Wikipedia, pretending there exist infallible sources of information elsewhere.

I would suggest, that exactly one of these would not constitute an enormous waste of your time.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[LnxAddct]

I was going to mod you flamebait, but I guess you'd be expecting that. Wikipedia is significantly more reputable than *any* encyclopedia that I've ever used. Look up Crooke's Radiometer on Wikipedia, then go look it up in Encyclopedia Britannica, then go look it up from at a reputable 3rd party in the sciences field. You'll see that Britannica has been giving out the wrong explanation for decades, and you know what? There is nothing any of us can do about it. Britannica is filled with innaccuracies, typos, and biases that have propagated from one version to the next for years. Wikipedia is the best source of information I've yet to come across. Every now and then there are some errors, as there are in all works done by humans, but they are often quickly corrected. If you get into a revert war, there are provisions in place to put an end to it and to facilitate debate and discussion. Essentially, not only does Wikipedia cover a significantly larger base of human knowledge, but it does so more accurately than any source I've come across and in a way that encourages little to no bias. Everybody has something to add, regardless of what you think of their intelligence. Don't be so full of yourself.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[cyclomedia]

what i reckon it needs is a versioning system, so there would be a JFK assasination article version 1.0, which is what you see when you go there, and a 1.1 beta version alongside it, and a 1.2 alpha next to that, which you can contribute edits to. an article would get from alpha to beta to "current" (old versions would still be available in a way similar to the page history) via some kind of revision voting system.

i havent thought this through properly, i just thought of it just now

also, you could then, when citing references for your essay, permalink to the article you're referencing by specifying the "released" version number you used in your research

---

http://www.cyclomedia.co.uk/ - ASP, CSS and AJAX demos, examples and tutorials with source code

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[dtsazza]

Those are all reasonable points, but on balance, wiki-style collaberations have proved surprisingly successful. Take a look at WhyWikiWorks on Ward Cunningham's wiki (which IIRC was one of the first wikis) for the other side of the coin. Particularly relevant highlights include:

• Wiki pages represent consensus because it's much easier to delete insults and remove WikiSpam than indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful and has been essentially collated from multiple points of view.
• To make an impact on Wiki, you need to generate real content. Anything else will be removed. So anyone can play, but only good players remain.

I'd say that I agree in general - there's no real motivation to edit a wiki in an unconstructive way - any vandalism is incredibly temporary, and can easily be undone. Going back to your question:

"Anyone can edit it... [but] why would I? Why would anyone waste their time?"

that can be considered one of the strengths, and applies to those who would do harm as well as good. People who do take the trouble to edit articles in a non-trivial fashion are doing so because they really want to - perhaps because they enjoy sharing their specialist knowledge with everyone freely, but in any case because they get a reward (feeling good, peer acclaim) from doing so. Essentially, this reward is what keeps good wiki-users coming back and leads to bad ones losing interest.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ajs]

"Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia"

Not at all. Here on Slashdot, no article about Wikipedia goes by without a bunch of people whining about how it'll never be useful.

"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."

There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.

Of course, Horn of Africa does say, "However the Horn of Africa suffers largely from overgrazing and only 5% of its original habitat still remains." But, that's nothing like your claim.

Wikipedia works just fine, thank you, but it's young, and it can be said that articles which generate controversy will never be "perfect" in any given snapshot. For those stuck in the pre-edit-history mode of research, this is a showstopper. The rest of us will continue to get work done using Wikipedia.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[mdwh2]

Here's a tidbit for you concerning the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: drought is caused by high prices, overpopulation, and conflict. From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia: "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions." (1/11/06)

Let's look at that article again, shall we? It now says: "These conditions of drought, together with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, are leading to conditions of famine."

So, despite your claims, it has been fixed. It doesn't have to be YOU who has to fix it - the claim is that someone else will. The idea that someone else will revert it is mistaken - if your change if genuinely better, but it gets reverted, then someone else what put your change back.

The article was fixed on 11 January, the same day that you quoted - let's have a look at the progress:
* Some changes "drought" to "famine" (I don't know if this was you?)
* Someone reverts - it's clear from their edit summary that they misunderstood the intent, and they have a point when they say it isn't being referred to a famine yet.
* Someone *else* then rewords it, to the current form. So even if the original editor was no longer paying attention, despite the revert, the change has made it through, in a manner that's even clearer than the original edit.

So, you posted an example supposedly showing Wikipedia's flaws, but it disproves the claims you make! Namely - the claim that no one else will spot the error (they did), and the claim that if it's reverted, the improvement is lost (it was fixed, despite a revert).

And let's be clear here - this wasn't some badly worded article which remained for months - this was sorted out in a matter of hours, just one day after the article was first created!

I have karma to burn, so here goes...

Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia

On the contrary - on Slashdot it's trendy to criticise Wikipedia at every opportunity, far more than any other source that is ever mentioned. After all, look how you've got modded up ;)

It's popular to write long-winded explanations of why Wikipedia supposedly can't work in theory, completely ignoring the reality of the situation of how things actually work in practice. And when they do post an example, it only disproves the claims they make!

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[tpgp]

Here's a tidbit for you concerning the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: drought is caused by high prices, overpopulation, and conflict. From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia: "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions." (1/11/06)

Is that the best example you can come up with?

A six month old problem, that was fixed on the day you blogged about it. It now reads

These conditions of drought, together with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, are leading to conditions of famine.

Look at the page's history and you see

21:31, 11 January 2006 Boud (summary: drought vs famine; +several cosmetic corrections)

OK - Wikipedia isn't perfect, but to completely dismiss it is....somewhat shortsighted of you.

After all - it's the only (decent) game in town when it comes to free, online information.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'm not the grandparent, I'll toss out some links.

"There is no such article."

Well, there actually is. Here's the link to the article in question.

Along with that, it should be pointed out that the article no longer says, "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions."

However, the article has been edited to say, "These conditions of drought, together with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, are leading to conditions of famine."

The edit pretty much sums it all up.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[IIH]

I think the problem lies not so much with Wikipedia, but the perception thereof. If you go there expecting every article to be high quality, proof read and in depth, then you will be disappointed, even though many articles are of that standard.

The issue of allowing unskilled people overwrite the actions of skilled people is tricky. Yes, there is nothing stopping brilliant prose being overwritten with substandard writing. Yes, the edit might get missed, but it often is noticed and the better piece reinstated. Sometimes the change is an improvement, but the original author can't see it as they've falling in love with their own way of writing. No, it's not perfect, but I cannot see anyway of solving it without creating more problems.

Wikipedia has never claimed to be accurate or completely neutral. However, it does strive to be so, and I think it does as good a job as can be expected.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ajs]

Good find (frustrating that the GP didn't just give a link to or name of the article he was referencing).

Yeah, it looks like there was a bad edit in there, and it was fixed. Not much of a story to that.... Most of the problems that people have with Wikipedia end up being, "some article said something braindead when I looked at it," rather than, "some article says something braindead and continues to."

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in flux. The good part of that is that you get to partake in the process, and can research both the accepted "common knowledge" and the controversies that arise. The bad part is that there's more leg work involved in reading edit history and talk pages to distinguish the two.

Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive single resource available, but taking correct advantage of it requires more work than most sources. It's a trade-off that I find workable.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[DeadCatX2]

Why must everyone think Wikipedia is of a pass/fail nature? Just because some parts of Wikipedia don't work doesn't make it entirely a failure. Some of Wikipedia is excellent, depending on how you use it.

There's just browsing around to burn time. You could stumble on Shallow Water Blackout and read around for a bit, learning about something totally useless. But who knows, maybe one day it could help break the ice with that hot swimmer chick at the beach.

Then there's also the launching point. The article could give external links to assist in future research.

Finally, there are some topics for which the false information rate would be ridiculously low. Consider some highly technical sorts of articles, like maybe Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. As an individual with some knowledge of data communications, I would be able to spot a grotesque error, similar to the drought one above. And why would anyone go and insert a subtle error? I would think most people who are malicious enough to edit articles with harmful intent would not be skilled enough in the art to construct a non-grotesque error. Not only that, but with the huge amount of highly technical articles, one could spend days adding subtle errors everywhere. Even if there was a subtle error, I'm sure I could find it if I was actually implementing QAM. The details there would be more than enough to get me close. Bonus: there's a citation at the bottom!

Finally, perhaps this could help alleviate some of the Parent's concern. Don't let people anonymously edit WikiPedia entries that were have been edited more than n times, and give certain users a sort of karma to keep their entries from being edited. Or perhaps a combination of the above, and an email notification system for when an entry made by a user is edited, so they can go check it out. With the aforementioned system, it would become a great burden to attack an article, because they would have to keep registering with a new name to be able to edit it, because the higher-karma would prevent the same lower-karma from repeatedly editing the same material.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[tetromino]

But the more obscure facts are the ones with fewer people qualified to write about them and the ones with more people who don't fully understand them, so they are the least trustworthy.

I would disagree. I often look up a mathematical theorem or an algorithm in Wikipedia, and have always been surprised by how accurate it is. The quality of writing might be mediocre compared to planetmath or journal articles, but the basic information is always there and correct. The reason (I suspect) is that most people looking up obscure mathematical topics do so for professional reasons. Morons wanting to enlighten the internet with their idiocy wouldn't even know whtat to search for... So sometimes obscurity is good.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I believe that holding a knowledge collaboration to the standard of perfection is not thinking realistically. For instance, if Wiki would have been around in the days prior to Copernicus and was 100% accurate according to the knowledge of the day, it would have stated that the world is flat. However, today we know that is incorrect and seems to be a little funny. This is analgous to the modern Wiki. The process of information gathering and distribution is an iterative process. It takes TIME (and a lot of it) to gather the most accurate information, but even that does not guarnatee that it IS accurate. Wiki has leveraged one of the most advanced knowledge distribution systems in the world. Lets give it a little more time to advance knowledge before we criticise its admitted shortcomings.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[BenjyD]

I'm not denying that Wikipedia is a fantastic resource: I use it daily. But I only rely on it for things that are fairly non-controversial or provably correct.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[kebes]

Good response. I'll add to your anecedotal description of "Wikipedia vs. Britannica" that a survey performed by the highly respected Nature Magazine found that Wikipedia has fewer errors that Britannica, at least for scientific articles (see slashdot story too).

Both Wikipedia and Britannica have errors in them (some are factual, some are poorly worded sentences, etc.). It turns out that for scientific content, Wikipedia is more reliable (I wouldn't be surprised if, for highly controversial topics in politics and religion, Britannica has fewer errors per entry than Wikipedia, on the other hand).

But the most important point that people should take away from this is that no source is infallible. People have to stop believing that perfect sources exist. You should consider every source of information as fallible, and double-check any facts that sound suspicious or out-of-the ordinary. For truly obscure facts, you should be doubly vigilant to obtain multiple sources. This is not new to the internet age, either. When doing research, using only a single source is very sloppy... and it always has been.

I think too many people simply accept what they are told without questioning it (witness the number of patently false emails that get forwarded). On the other hand, once you are preparred to intelligently contextualize the data you get from sources, then flawed sources like Wikipedia and Britannica become extremely useful ways of getting the information you need.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[jc42]

[T]he more likely a user is to want to look it up (nobody uses Wikipedia to look up things they already know). But the more obscure facts are the ones with fewer people qualified to write about them and the ones with more people who don't fully understand them, so they are the least trustworthy.

Well, I dunno about that. A few days ago, I used wikipedia to look up info about the orbits of Titan, Enceladus, and a couple other Saturnian moons. I'd guess that almost everyone would consider this to be extremely obscure information. Most would probably say "worthless". And I might agree, with a grin.

But I'd also guess that the data I found was quite trustworthy. Such data is rarely provided by some n00b or politico. It usually comes from someone with the technical knowledge to get it right.

The articles on those bodies also contain a number of comments that some things aren't known. This I'd consider somewhat less trustworthy, since some astronomer might have found the info just yesterday. This doesn't bother me, of course, since any reasonably intelligent reader would understand this situation. And, if I stumble across the info somewhere else, I might just copy it over to the wikipedia article.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[Anonymous Coward]

(sarcastic) How right you are ! Wikipedia is useless...

Strangely, when I look for something, I generally google for it. More and more, the wiki is the only relevant link that google find in its first 2 dozen hits. More and more, I find myself adding site:wikipedia.org to my google queries.

Google is turning into a spam-shit fest, most interesting links I have in my 10 years old bookmarks are points to cybersquatters, dmoz is next to useless, etc, etc.

Wikipedia is THE place where you can find quick and somewhat accurate information on pretty much any topic you want. Is the info perfect ? No. But is it worse than the average web page ? Nope. It is way better. The overall quality of the net is going down, and the overall quality of wikipedia is going up.

I think that in 10 years, for many people, wikipedia will BE the web.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[Anonymous Coward]

> But I only rely on it for things that are fairly non-controversial or provably correct.

By opposition to ?

I mean, how can you lookup controversial and non-provably correct info on the web ?

At least, if controversial, the wiki will say it. If incorrect, well, that's why you are supposed to check the info you get from anywhere, and not rely exclusively on the web...

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[DerekLyons]

But, even though that sentence is rubbish, it's also abundantly clear what is meant. High cereal prices exacerbated the food shortage caused by the drought.

By no possible standard reading of the English lanquage can that sentence be interpreted that way. None.

So, there are two responses :
i) correct the sentence so that it reflects the intended meaning [needless to say, someone has already done this].

You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place. This basic error in logic has persisted for over a month.

ii) generalise from this mistake into a lengthy diatribe about the inaccuracy of Wikipedia, pretending there exist infallible sources of information elsewhere.

Had the grandparent post mentioned anything about other sources - you'd have a point. But he didn't. Instead, just like with i), you simply cut and paste the standard Wikipedia cheerleader strawmen - without actually reading and thinking about what he wrote.

The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia. I find at least half a dozen every time I do a random browse across the 'pedia on topics that interest me. (In fact, it's why I stopped editing the 'pedia - I got tired of fixing minor mistakes, again, and again, and again. Not to mention the reversion of re-written and corrected articles back to their faulty states.)

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[AxelBoldt]

The one-sentence summary of your 500+ word essay is this: a resource that can be edited by anyone at any time is not necessarily accurate or even-handed. You will agree that this insight of yours is not a particularly deep one. In fact, I hope that it is completely obvious to every reader of Wikipedia.

How about this for an insight: an information source can be quite useful even if it is not completely accurate and even-handed. Think for instance of your senses, or your memory.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[DerekLyons]

"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."

There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.

Hmm.. A few moments with Google yeilds: 2006 Horn of Africa food crisis.

[snippage the usual Wikipedia cheerleader rhetoric by the OP.]

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[clear_thought_05]

It does not invalidate the claims of the original post. The author is still correct. If there is no gaurantee whatsoever of any content at any given time, then how can I possibly use it? I use an encyclopedia when I want to find information and facts, for those who do not know Wikipedia's intrinsic flaws, you could be sending them down any random path.

Furthermore, am I to come back to an article 5, 10, 50 times over days or weeks to make sure my "information" was valid (or is still valid)?

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in flux. The good part of that is that you get to partake in the process, and can research both the accepted "common knowledge" and the controversies that arise. The bad part is that there's more leg work involved in reading edit history and talk pages to distinguish the two."

To the people who know nothing about how an average person thinks: people are simple. They find what they want and leave. They have a purpose, do it, and move on. Unless their purpose was any form of verfication (with some degree of validity), they won't bother checking history or talk pages, or a troll's IP address.

"Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive single resource available, but taking correct advantage of it requires more work than most sources. It's a trade-off that I find workable."

That is probably the most subjective assertion you can make. You may find it valuable and comprehensive but you can't measure any sort of detriment it may produce to the populace as a whole, only that on some abritrary plane of "averages", its merits outweighs its flaws. ... And that is just not satisfactory.

Of course, you're welcome to think otherwise or disagree (I hope you do), but I will stay clear of wikipedia and advise others to do the same.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[Pollardito]

anything related to math or science is much less obscure to the group of people that is using Wikipedia than it would be to the world at-large, it's a technical crowd. perhaps there is some obscure example from butter-churning history or cross-stitching theory that would be a better test case.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ajs]

You can stay clear of any reference work you like. In the end, I'm sure that those who take advantage of Wikipedia will either see the benefits that I suggest or they will suffer from the failures taht you suggest... or both (probably more likely). We'll know better in 50 years.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[jdavidb]

You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place.

If you understood the Wikipedia Way, you would understand why that assertion is a strawman.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[juancnuno]

Why does something either have to be worthless or perfect? To me, it's enough that Wikipedia has value. Why would anyone use it as a serious information source? I don't think Wikipedia tries to be anything more than it is. I can't find anywhere on the front page where it says, "The contents therein are the gospel truth. Feel free to bet your life on it and use it for your thesis paper."

Part of being a good critical thinker is questioning everything. Take in all available input, and form your own conclusions. Not just blindly believing what you're fed. Whether it comes from CNN or Wikipedia.

Slashdot used to be the website I'd take to a desert island with me. Now it's Wikipedia. And in the near future, it might be something completely different. That's what excites me about the future. Because I am not so jaded and cynical to believe that humanity has become incapable of great things.

I believe Wikipedia is one of those great things.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[2short]

"it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out"

Any response to the fact that said fix was in fact "stuck in" 6 months ago? The same day the parent poster noticed the problem, and did nothing about it, others noticed it and did do something about it.

Discussions of why Wikipedia can't possibly work become quickly tiresome when they ignore the fact that it does work and/or fail to identify any standard to compare against. Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[DerekLyons]

You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place.

If you understood the Wikipedia Way, you would understand why that assertion is a strawman.

It's a basic assertion, repeated again and again, that errors [in the 'pedia] don't survive any length of time.

It's a stone cold fact that they do - by the thousands and tens and of thousands. But each time it's pointed out - 'pedia boosters just bury their heads in the sand and wish and handwave that inconvienent fact away.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ZombieWomble]

Any response to the fact that said fix was in fact "stuck in" 6 months ago? The same day the parent poster noticed the problem, and did nothing about it, others noticed it and did do something about it.

My response would have to be to apologise for taking the parent poster at face value, I must have forgotten where I was reading for a moment.

Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!

Two responses: 1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you. 2) Wikipedia's status as "authoritative" is questionalbe at best, given its current editorial policies. Being authoritative should not carry a footnote saying it's only true if you catch a good edit.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[mdwh2]

My response would have to be to apologise for taking the parent poster at face value, I must have forgotten where I was reading for a moment.

If only people were as suspicious of the validity other sources as everyone seems to be of Wikipedia!

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[mdwh2]

You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place. This basic error in logic has persisted for over a month

A month? The error was fixed within one day. One day from when the article first appeared!

It sounds like you're the one arguing against a strawman - no one claims that no article will ever have errors, but that errors will be fixed, and will be far less likely in mature articles rather than one that's only just appeared.

The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia.

Give us some examples - as the one that the earlier poster gave doesn't support his claims.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[jdavidb]

It's a basic assertion, repeated again and again, that errors [in the 'pedia] don't survive any length of time.

Maybe some people repeat that, but that (erroneous) assumption is not central to why Wikipedia works.

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[ta bu shi da yu]

"Wikipedia's status as "authoritative" is questionalbe at best, given its current editorial policies."

Where does Wikipedia position itself as being authoritative?

TBSDY

Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working

[2short]

"1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you"

It need not be free, open or what have you; but clearly it must be "What I have". I have Wikipedia at my fingertips anywhere I have web access. Furhtermore, I question whether "actual" encyclopedias status as "autoritative" are in any sense beyond question. I've looked up subjects I know well in paper encylopedias, and the fact they don't have a footnote saying it's only true if you cath a good edit is not because they don't need one. Both Wikipedia and Britanica are only true if you cath a good edit; with wikipedia, this is acknowledged, the edits come faster, and the full edit history and discussion thereof is laid out for you to see.

China blocking

[jez9999]

WS: On a similar topic, Vsion asks: "Are there currently any efforts being undertaken by the Foundation to address the People's Republic of China's blocking of Wikipedia or to alleviate its effect?"

JW: Beijing-area Wikipedians are working to have the block lifted. Our position is that the block is in error, even given China's normal policies. Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted.

Huh? Doesn't he understand the nature of Chinese censorship?

Re:China blocking

[Raul654]

You may be giving the Chinese government too much credit. They aren't some monotholic evil force - like all modern governments, it's a huge bureacracy. Assuming that the Chinese are blocking Wikipedia ostensibly on the basis that it is political propaganda (to my knowledge, they have not given any reason) - by demonstrating that Wikipedia is not political propaganda, they may be inclined to reverse the block.

Re:China blocking

[Crayon Kid]

Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted.

Huh? Doesn't he understand the nature of Chinese censorship?

Exactly. The Chinese government policy is very simple: they either control information, or they censor it.

It's frightening to see how the Chinese market is making governments, companies and organizations all over the world give in an inch at a time, for some small favor, thinking that things will change. The Chinese never change. They absorb whoever attempts to conquer them and they change them. It's like that old saying: if you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you.

Giving in to the Chinese gov demands and arranging compromises with it is not the answer. Offering the Chinese citizens complete access through alternate means is the answer.

Did I miss anything?

[mrbarkeeper]

Did I miss anything? Or was this basically a non-interview? Every answer was little more than "It's all roses over here!" or "We're doing a heck of a job!". There was one question where I was really interested in his opinion and he only said "I don't know".

china

[minus_273]

"WS: On a similar topic, Vsion [slashdot.org] asks: "Are there currently any efforts being undertaken by the Foundation to address the People's Republic of China's blocking of Wikipedia or to alleviate its effect?"

JW: Beijing-area Wikipedians are working to have the block lifted. Our position is that the block is in error, even given China's normal policies. Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted."


does anyone see this really happening? i mean without a change like a removal of certian sections on banned material like google did. Are there really people who think the the communist chinese govenrment would allow material on Taiwan, falun gong and Dalai Lama to be freely accessable in a central neatly categorized location? Hello?

Re:Perspective Affinities & Wiki-certified Cre

[Raul654]

What you are describing - automatic analysis of texual differnces used to extrapolate "relavance" - is far, far beyond the realm of reality. AI *might* be that sophisticated in 100 years, but is nowhere near that today.

He Sounds Like a Politician

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

That was a really content free interview. Perhaps, for the next interview, a team of Wikipedians can be present to answer questions so that some real answers might result.

You failed

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't even make the first position at Wikipedia's entry for GNAA...

should add a rating system...

[orion41us]

I think Wikipedia articals should be rateable by anyone. Similar to /.s..

Re:should add a rating system...

[Ailure]

Thing is that a article can turn from really crap to really good as soon as a few editors gone through the article. :)

That's the beuty of Wikipedia! And that's why a rating system wouldn't really work....

But there is a way to mark articles who needs a "cleanup" of their language, or is just... too short.

Re:should add a rating system...

[slavemowgli]

Slashdot articles aren't rateable by everyone. In fact, they're not rateable at all; they're taggable, but you can only tag them if you're a subscriber, and tagging is not the same as rating, anyway.

Re:should add a rating system...

[anaesthetica]

That's a fine idea, but what happens once an article is edited? Say I add a rather large amount of information to an article that was rated poorly for being incomplete. Should all the previous low ratings for incompleteness remain? Or should all the ratings be wiped now that the article is substantively different? What if my edit is only very minor--perhaps a typo fix. Should all the ratings be wiped then? Probably not. What about controversial articles, like the one on Terri Schaivo, or on Abortion, or on George W. Bush. These would be maliciously rated without a doubt. A ratings system seems to be nearly unworkable.

Re:should add a rating system...

[WWWWolf]

And how do you rate the articles?

Most of the "rating" systems online don't measure quality; they measure popularity. You always get five stars on some popular topic that gets a lot of attention anyway, while marginal topics don't.

One way would be that you'd have to make sure each user would be subjected to mandatory daily "metamoderation" of random articles on their field of expertise, and the thing that kills that is that the "expertise" of all users varies depending on whether or not they've had their morning coffee, or whatever. Currently, Wikipedia works because editors are monitoring topics they care about when they care about.

Re:should add a rating system...

[j1m 5n0w]

And how do you rate the articles?

This doesn't seem like such a hard problem, though it would probably entail some interface modifications. I could imagine a drop-down list of characteristics that a page might have (accuracy, neutrality, clarity, writing quality, relevance), and then, say, another drop-down with a 1-5 rating.

Most of the "rating" systems online don't measure quality; they measure popularity.

The average rating for a particular characteristic should be a good indicator of quality, whereas the absolute number of ratings could indicate popularity. (Alternatively, popularity could be determined from frequency of accesses to that page, or by running the pagerank algorithm (assuming Stanford's pagerank patent isn't a hinderance) on the whole wiki.)

Ratings should probably expire after awhile (but only if the page has been edited since the rating was issued), so that the rating is more likely to reflect the current state of the article, rather than some prior state.

You always get five stars on some popular topic that gets a lot of attention anyway, while marginal topics don't.

This is probably what we want to happen, in the case where popularity results in quality. Ratings should draw attention to the low quality of articles on topics that don't attract enough attention.

Re:should add a rating system...

[WWWWolf]

Ratings should draw attention to the low quality of articles on topics that don't attract enough attention.

Which brings us to another social problem: It's one thing to list good articles, interesting articles, or like. There's always a few of them. I love browsing the Unusual Articles, for example. But then for the opposite end of the coin you can go look at the Articles for Deletion, or Dead-End Pages, or most of the cleanup or stub categories. What happens if you slap those on people's faces? "350,000 articles that don't draw attention, please fix these"? That's right: People say "damn that, there's too much work to do" and go away.

I like the current approach where we have WikiProjects and people can list articles that need work. I think it's better this way: I'm going somewhere, saying "this page needs work" I can comment on why the thing needs work. "here's what needs to be done." What you're proposing is a faceless system that just screams "this article needs attention" and doesn't tell why people should spend time fixing this particular article right now. It's easy to slap down a few stars, but it'd help a lot more if people would tell what's wrong with the article. An automated rating would just encourage faceless, unhelpful critique. It's not *always* obvious why you gave just one star - maybe it's just because you hate misplaced commas, maybe it's a political act against the incumbent president. (Hey, uncovering an NPOV problem with this approach, too.)

Somebody ...

[Martin Spamer]

... has already edited the original

The Tank Picture

[cryfreedomlove]

This picture is in WikiPedia. You may want to ask that guy in front of the tank if it represents political propaganda or simple fact. Either way, the Chinese government will block it.

Re:The Tank Picture

[Raul654]

That's one of the most famous photos of all time, right - it would be logistically impossible to block every website that features it.

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

WS: Kevin Myers asks: "The values reflected in certain Wikipedia policies (anti-censorship, neutral point-of-view) are problematic in cultures where freedom of expression is limited, as the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China and arguably the Muhammad cartoons controversy attest. As Wikipedia expands internationally, do you foresee Wikipedia becoming increasingly controversial in countries where "Western values" are seen as a potential threat?"

JW: I don't think that neutrality and objectivity are really controversial among most people of the world. It is true that the leadership in some places does not value these things, and may actually work against these things, but we can not deviate from our goals to accomodate them.

Perhaps Google would do well to look at this.

Userboxes were invented by Willy on Wheels

[Anonymous Coward]

The controversial userbox templates was created by a sockpuppet of Willy on Wheels. So if you are one of the many userbox lovers, just remember that you are using the work of a vandal.

Of course the truth is always "reverted" on Wikipedia, so not many wikipedians will ever know the truth, and even if they know it, they will not accept it.

The Selfish principle

[wowbagger]

Good analysis - may I add my own?

It is what I call The Selfish Principle - that a collaborative operation is most successful when every member has a very selfish reason for contributing. Sad, but true.

Consider free software - I'll use Wine as an example. The Wine joystick drivers didn't work. I fixed them - not because of some enlightened idea of "giving back to the community", but because *I needed them to work* - I had a very selfish reason for spending my time to make them work. I then contributed my changes back, again not for some enlightened reason, but because doing so saved me from having to merge my changes back into the code every time an update happened.

Consider this post - I am making it not because of some enlightened desire, but because it is my belief that if people will accept these suppositions as true, that they will better structure online collaborations and that I will have access to better tools.

In other words, there is nothing intrinsically *wrong* with selfishness so long as you are considering how your actions affect others and pick options that benefit them (or at least don't harm them) as well as benefiting yourself - enlightened self-interest.

Now, let us consider Wikipedia - what is *my* motivation for, say, improving the article on Big Brutus. I already know about Big Brutus, and so there is little advantage to me to improve the article. The only advantage to me is ego boost - the joy of seeing my article be lauded as a great article. Now, do you really want an encyclopedia written by a bunch of egotists?

Re:The Selfish principle

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but the selfish principle still applies to Wikipedia (along with a number of others, such as Worse is Better, imo).

I'll take an example from my own experience. I've long had an interest in ancient Japanese poetry, an area Wikipedia is not so good in, and I was reading the then (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fujiwar a_no_Teika&oldid=23157355) rather bad Fujiwara no Teika article. I decided to add in what I knew since it would be more convenient to have it in one place rather than a dozen sites and fragments scattered over the web, or library books that I'd have to return. In the process of writing it up, I discovered quite a few other articles I never knew existed and a number of things I had gotten wrong. Certainly it took quote a bit of effort, but it directly benefited me as a result. This scenario plays itself out repeatedly for me- I go to a bad/small article on a subject that interests me, research it to improve it, and find that in the course of improving it, I learned even more from the research than I would otherwise have.

Living people cateogry

[Anonymous Coward]

This sensitive and critical question was not answered.

This category was created outside of the already existing births/deaths categories. A simple media wiki patch to add category flags such as:

[[Category:1968 births|living=yes|Wales, Jimbo]]

would of worked.

But a convolted system was created instead, using this much more bloated code:

[[Category:1968 births|Wales, Jimbo]]
[[Category:Living people|Wales, Jimbo]]

Another category was added which makes the category system less useful. After I found out about this category I gave up categorizing Wikipedia and I have aided in the categorization of many thousands of articles.

Its a fact that Jimbos Mis-management of the very software that runs Wikipedia that makes it so easy to vandalize because it is based on flimsy PHP code on which vandals have exploited security vulnerablities in.

Willy on Wheels, Autofellatio redirector, Wik, SuperTroll, Squidward, MARMOT, NSMB and other vandals prove how sensitive Wikipedia really is to vandalism, and until these flaws are fixed Wikipedia can not grow propely.

You wouldn't print an encyclopedia on tabloid newspaper, so why base it on the software equivilant of one?

Translating for third-world countries...

[Rxke]

TFA: "WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?" JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access." If I were an English teacher in said countries, and had computer-access, I'd give them excercises by letting them translate some (printouts) of the entry-level stuff to their own language. Then, when they grow more proficient, give them more complex stuff (interesting articles, stuff to discuss etc.) I bet they'd be proud to see their stuff up at 'their' Wikipedia.

Wait a minute

[pHatidic]

Didn't Slashdot submit questions for Jimbo to answer? Is this instead of that, or is he still doing the Slashdot interview?

Re:Wait a minute

[BrokenSegue]

This is seperate and unrelated.

Question for Jimbo

[Anonymous Coward]

Jimbo, Bart says that you are dating Kearney's mom - is that true?

The outcome

[gidds]

Indeed. In fact, I suspect the real outcome of all this controversy will be loss of trust and respect -- not for Wikipedia, but for 'authoritative' sources as a whole. So Wikipedia's relative rating will rise!

Pick a subject you have particular knowledge of -- maybe a local event or situation, or an area of learning or technology. Then take a look at how it's reported in the newspapers, in books and encyclopaedias, in movies and documentaries and news programmes. It's a fair bet that you'll come across inaccuracies, ranging from oversimplifications and typos to bias and misrepresentation to plain ignorance and blatant lies.

Now, stop and consider that that's how everything else gets covered, too. Frightening, isn't it?

Of course, some sources are much less likely to get things wrong than others. But very few sources are as authoritative as we tend to assume; all get things wrong from time to time. We should treat all printed and broadcast material with a little scepticism.

Now, look at Wikipedia in that light. Maybe it doesn't seem that much worse than the others after all?

Yes, it's true that there's vastly greater opportunity for errors to be introduced. But to balance that, there's vastly greater opportunity for them to be fixed, too. Wikipedia's far from perfect, but the huge majority of articles seem well worth reading, and its average doesn't seem noticeably lower than other reference works.

(In fact, rather than quality, I think its main problem is coverage; it's very patchy, and has too many gaps and stubs.)

Basically, as long as enough people want Wikipedia to be accurate, it will be!

Wikipedia should move to an Open Source model.

[balls199]

I've made this comment before (previous comment), so I won't repeat myself too much. Basically, they should different levels of contributers, based on trust.

1. Maintainer
2. Commiters
3. Submitters
4. Users

Last time I asked if anyone would be interested in starting a website like this, but, not surprisingly, no one was willing.

So, in DIY fashion, I've started my own project: OSWiki (The name will likely change, as a project already exists with the name OSWiki.)

The initial release is still a little lacking, but it's written entirely in Ruby on Rails. Download it and start hacking away, and if you're interested in helping out, send me a message.

Questions I missed

[musicmaster]

1) What to do about the non-text media?
Wikipedia says that some pictures are public domain and other have been released by the publisher just for use by Wikipedia. It does not indicate which rights apply to which picture and so we are left with their conclusion that copying is at your own risk. Something similar seems to apply for the sound fragments.
Shouldn't Wikipedia have a strict PD or GPL license only policy in these areas? Or will it slowly eclipse the copy sites by depriving them of the multimedia files.

2) Is their a limit to the growth of the articles?
As a webmaster for a classical music site I regularly check the pages with composer biographies and I have concluded that they keep growing. This leads me to question whether there is a limit to this process. Or will it go on until we have book size documents. More philosophical the question would be: does Wikipedia want to be just an encyclopedia online or does it have the higher goal of including all human knowledge.

Re:Questions I missed

[BrokenSegue]

1) What? Most pictures indicate their copyright status on their image page and ones that don't should be deleted. This picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Battle_of_Inch on.png) indicates that it is in the public domain. While this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Water_drop_ani mation.gif) is GPL and creative commons.

2) Articles are supposed to grow to about 35kB (rough estimate). After that an article is split should be split into subpages (History oft he United States, Economy of the United States, etc.) The amount of information on one topic is unlimited as long as each fact is notable and verifiable (broadly defined). More content isn't bad as long as the details are on subpages and the main article gives a reasonably detailed account of the subject.

Yeah I don't know how to make the links correctly (can I just use HTML?).

Re:Questions I missed

[FhnuZoag]

Wikipedia says that some pictures are public domain and other have been released by the publisher just for use by Wikipedia. It does not indicate which rights apply to which picture and so we are left with their conclusion that copying is at your own risk.

Copyrighting is pretty much one of the most annoying things with Wikipedia. *Most* media should be tagged on upload with an appropiate license information. So if you click on it, it should tell you what terms it is available for use on. Some, though - especially some of the earlier images - have not been tagged, and it's a bit of a chore to hunt them down.

In general, the policy is that if it is safe for use on wikipedia, it should be safe to use on a mirror.

I doubt article size can/should grow indefinitely. The preferred approach is always to split up larger articles into subpages, if there is enough material.

Re:Questions I missed

[musicmaster]

In general, the policy is that if it is safe for use on wikipedia, it should be safe to use on a mirror.
Many of the copying happens automatic or semi-automatic. You cannot expect people to go for every image to a descriptive page where they can find somewhere in the middle the license.

I doubt article size can/should grow indefinitely. The preferred approach is always to split up larger articles into subpages, if there is enough material.
There is always enough material: many books have been written about the lifes of great composers like Bach and Mozart. And the splitting up has already started. I wouldn't be astonished if one day we had a seperate subpage for Mozart's youth and below that a seperate subpage for his youth before 8.

Worst story ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

He answers his own questions! seig heil mein fuhrer! No I did not even bother reading. Wiki is the new Linux on /. Beyond serious criticism because it makes teenagers feel special.

WIkipedia, wonders and China

[randyjg2]

First of all, I want to state that I think Wikipedia is the single greatest achievement of our age. and to thank everyone involved for it. Even with all the controversies, it has been a learning tool beyond my wildest dreams.

I learned higher math from it (It is the single greatest higher math textbook ever, in my opinion) and for those following the Chinese American economic war, the discussion areas on Chinese topics are often the equivalent of the Daily Show.

But I think they do give themselves a bit too much credit for the why of the Chinese blocking. I doubt that the Chinese cared all that much about massacre articles, the information is all over the net, and half the rumors about the massacre circulating China are far worse than the article. From the PRC's point of view, the article was actually good publicity, comparatively speaking.

What they were probably worried about was the Asian Cup 2004, scheduled to start a few weeks later. In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Asian Cup is the world series of soccer games for the middle and far east countries, with the usual rioting afterwards. Add in the fact that the list of participating countries is a superset of a list of countries supporting terrorism, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions a few months earlier igniting cultural tensions, and you get one hypergolic mix ready to explode.

Now toss in the fact that it was being held in China, and Chinese Japanese relations were at their lowest since the Japanese invasion, and you have some very worried politicians in the PRC. They probably looked at incidents like the 1.2 million signature petition against Japan organized by seven Chinese web sites a year earlier http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3118850.st m and ordered a block on all potentially disruptive web sites until they could figure out what threat to stability the web sites posed and how to prevent it from exploding into riots (which it did, in spite of everything they did to prevent it. http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FH10Dh01.html) To their credit, it was a fairly civilized riot, by soccer standards.

When the PRC officials were contacted, they got around to looking at Wikipedia (it was probably just another website on the list, and somewhere near the bottom) and decided it wasn't a threat and immediately removed it from the list.

When you consider how much damage, say, the Danish cartoons have caused, it is not all that unreasonable for authorities to try and delay publication until they can prepare for the possible effects...It's their equivalent of parade permits, not mind control.

As economic convergence and class gaps cause the PRC to be stressed to it's breaking point, the PRC officials are trying to deny the inevitable political instability as best they can, but it is far beyond their abilities to do much. Remember, the vast amount of people and country involved...the riots due in a few years will be the equivalent of a 100 Katrina's all at once.

In addition, remember, Wikipedia is far vaster than most web sites and changes rapidly, and I imagine the PRC spends a lot of time trying to figure out what articles may cause a riot and where. The blocks seem to be when they start falling behind, or some critical event is about to happen and they want some time to catch up with the backlog.

And it is critical for China to manage Japanese relations; the Chinese and Japanese governments need each other, but the Chinese people are still fighting the Japanese in a lot of the PRC. The Chinese government is doing its best to avoid wide scale riots over the Japanese.

It is also important because China is hosting the Olympics in 2008, and class tensions in China are going to be near the flash point by then. It was announced recently that China
is training sharpshooters(!) for crowd protection for the Olympics, (probably to prevent a Japanese version of what happened when Germany hosted the Olympics) so this should probably be the first sporting event to come under the Geneva convention...

Yes, well

[ta bu shi da yu]

Speaking as one who has several FAs under my belt, this is all fine and dandy, but we only have 1 in 1000 articles reaching FA. Can you imagine submitting all 800,000 articles to FA at once?! :)

TBSDY