Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

An Interview with Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the friendly-interviews dept.

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."

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Quality standards by ChristopherX · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Quality standards by Raul654 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      (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

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
    2. Re:Quality standards by Raul654 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
  2. Facts vs. Opinion by digitaldc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  3. Re:Cool! by john83 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
  4. Re:should add a rating system... by WWWWolf · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.)