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Interview Looks at How and Why Wikipedia Works
driehle writes to tell us that he recently had a chance to interview Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working.
Wikipedia is of course an excellent resource. However I'd wish that people would also have an eye for Wikimedia Commons, a giant multimedia library to which everyone can upload files, all perfectly categorized. More importantly, every file that's in there can be linked to by Wikipedia.
From the help page:
The Wikimedia Commons (or "Commons") is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. Uploaded files can be used as local files by other projects on the Wikimedia servers, including Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary.
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One Wikipedia contributor, David Gerard, did a nice job of summarizing Wikipedia's dirty little secret of how it works: 'On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs'. Once someone establishes himself as being reliable, trustworthy, comptentent, 'etc, they tend to get handed a lot of responsability in short order. A relatively small number of people tend to wear many hats. (Myself included - I'm an administrator, burecreat, arbitrator, checkuser-weilder, member of the communications and press committees, handler of email via OTRS, 'etc)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"there is increasingly a distinction between 'normal' authors and 'high-end' authors who are explicitly trying to get their articles 'featured'."
Wikipedia, just like many other community sites, has some elements of a game. This can be both a good and a bad thing. The good thing is, this sort of rewards usually encourage more people to participate in the site by creating new content. The bad thing is, more and more people will eventually come to realize that it's just a game, and start taking advantage of this -- and of other people -- in order to 'win' (on Slashdot, this could mean Karma or Friend whoring). This, I think, can seriously hinder them from reaching (or even working towards) their goal of creating an encyclopedia "of the highest possible quality". We won't see more incorrect information because of this, but we might start seeing (or not seeing) more and more behind-the-scenes fighting, which could eventually lead to many people leaving the 'game'.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I generally use wiki as a reference text for something i already know, but can't completely remember. Something like the derivation of a commonly used function, or an exact date for an event etc. I wouldn't use it for more specialised "professional" information (i'm a research scientist). Basically i treat it like an encyclopedia rather than an authoritative reference text. It has value in that context, but i agree with your point that in other ways it doesn't.