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Interview: Ask Jimmy Wales What You Will
The last time we talked to Jimmy Wales Wikipedia had just reached the 300,000 article mark, and there was some question about whether it would be a viable competitor to World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica. Things have changed a little since then. Wikipedia now includes over 26 million articles in 285 languages, and Wales is advising the UK government on making taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online. Jimmy has agreed to answer your questions about internet freedom and the enormous growth of Wikipedia. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
When will Wikipedia accept Bitcoin donations?
Paid Q&A/Research
Is it better to see giant Jimmy Wales harassing your mercilessly for money when you're the actual Jimmy Wales, or worse?
I'd rather have google ads than those donation campaigns.
A NY Times Sunday Magazine article was published about you today. I thought it was reasonably balnced telling good and bad things happening in your life recently. Would you like correct any misconceptions in this article?
Don't you feel ashamed for getting all the credit of "inventing Wikipedia" when in fact you didn't really create it?
Why did you try to find Eric Snowdon's editor account, a clear violation of Wikipedia rules?
Why do you assume he is guilty, and thus worthy of outing, when you have not been privy to all of the evidence pro- or con- his actions (and whether they constitute a crime), since you are not sitting on the Jury at his trial?
Every user has the full right to know that the content may have been written by a 6-year-old child, an insane person, troll, or the subject's competitor or another kind of enemy.
On the homepage you boldly say "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
Why then, on the individual article pages, you keep that fact a secret? The tagline is merely: "The free encyclopedia."
There was a change made to rectify that, but some "admins" quickly reverted the change. Can you explain why?
Do you feel they are a problem? If so, what should be done?
http://milowent.blogspot.com/2011/03/wikipedia-deletionists-delete-article.html
I'd like to ask if there's the possibility of collaborating with National Libraries in scanning material (specially +25 year books) and let people access them. I know there's a lot of material just gathering dust and I see a potential for collaboration.
[citation needed]
Wikipedia has become so large that students and youth in particular deem it the official truth. As such governments, companies, and individuals will constantly try to spin that to their own advantage.
Do you believe you will ever be able to reconcile with governments in regards to information they deem classified showing up on Wikipedia and private citizens that consider articles about them to be libel? Or, perhaps, is that just a fight you will need to struggle against for all eternity?
Currently, Wikipedia Foundation is a single point of failure. It is not difficult to imagine various Alexandria Library scenarios in which Humanity looses crucial information.
Instead of begging people for monetary donations to Wikimedia Foundation, wouldn't it be better to ask for donations of storage and bandwidth to keep the whole thing reduntant and de-centralized? Are there any ongoing efforts to change Wikipedia's model in this direction?
There have been several worthwhile articles that were removed just because people are under the mistaken impression that most human knowledge is on the internet, and that if they couldn't find a linkable source sometime didn't exist.
This foolishness has crippled wikipedia's usefulness and credibility.
How's Rachel doing?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's the notion that the information on wikipedia can be editted for anyone, and referencing wikipedia sometimes brings a smile.
I always wondered why Wikipedia does not ask known experts for article certification. For example, you as the co-founder of wikipedia could certify that a section of the wikipedia wiki article (or the entire wiki article for wikipedia) was correct. Maybe you could even pay in some cases.
Has this ever been considered, or do you have any other ideas on how to get wikipedia to be received as a irrefutable source of information?
openly rather than using ghosts? I suggest that your ban on PR people is counter-productive and works against transparency.
Just get the government involved.
Make a legitimate edit on a controversial article that fails to indulge the bias of an admin and you'll learn all about the ways admins have to ostracize non-admin contributors. Are you aware of this and if so, what has been done recently or what is planned to moderate abuse by admins? How frequently are admin privileges revoked for abuse? I hope this is frequent because I know for fact the abuse is frequent.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
On a more serious note, I'd like to ask Mr. Wales why most Wikipedia "editors" are "Class A" douchbags. Especially the "Admins".
This will be modded "flamebait" but it's a serious question.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Imagine aliens with Internet access have appeared on the edge of the solar system and are headed for earth. At the rate the are approaching, they will reach our planet in eight hours. We do not know if they are hostile, but they have set up a server for accepting incoming messages. What are the top three Wikipedia articles we should link them to?
Or even helped its reputation? And more generally, what's the impact of WikiXXX on WikiPedia?
It seems like most major articles are "owned" by some editors who want to impose their own views and opinions on them. The rules of Wikipedia seem to be designed to facilitate this. The only solution seems to be for other editors to sit on the article constantly undoing the other editors edits.
It's a war of attrition and it seems like the bad guys mostly win. A lot of good editors have given up. I gave up, tried it again a few years later and gave up again. Many previously good articles are now full of industry shill references and obviously biased rubbish. The quality of Wikipedia is degrading steadily over time.
What is being done to reverse this trend? Can anything be done, or is this as good as a wiki gets?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do you think that governments should fund the creation of other information projects as well as science? And make the information available in the public domain and free of copyright?
For example: Software, books, entertainment, and design blueprints.
Why on Earth did you think it was a good idea to put pictures of your smugly smirking face on the banners begging for donations?
Mr. Wales, what are your views on introducing a system-wide flagged revisions implementation that requires the first 500 edits by new editors (both IP and regular) to be reviewed and flagged before these revisions are shown to readers?
In my opinion this would make vandalism on Wikipedia an extremely rare occurrence, and semi-protecting articles would no longer be necessary anywhere.
New editors (both IP and regular) get away with so much, so much slips through, unfortunately.
Some examples of vandalism by new editors; on the History pages you can see it takes months before their edits are being reverted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Getdownwithspencer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/2602:306:CFC8:9F70:A40D:A9E4:55FB:3252
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Mustaqim.221815
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/58.164.63.41
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/77.248.13.242
You've recently been honored by acceptance into the Internet Hall of Fame, meanwhile your co-founder remains unnamed. Do you still keep contact with him? How did he take the news?
Some of my fondest memories as a child was firing up the old 486 and playing through the interactive quests and games in Encarta. Some of them were timelines and guided learning experiences, others were programs that simulated things like gravity and orbits, and I liked playing with some software that could model particle behavior based on your parameters to describe gas diffusion and so on.
My question is, will Wikipedia ever be able to flex any interactive multimedia muscle, and create a more interactive and guided experience for young learners? People may be willing to devote their time writing out separate articles in the pages of an encyclopedia, but I imagine attracting multimedia development would be difficult (unless you can find whoever has been wasting their time writing a plethora of useless apps for browsers and mobiles).
Aside from a few snarky comments about begging, I just do not understand why Wikipedia cannot be self-sustaining?
While I know you do not like ads on Wikipedia, by now you should have created an infrastructure and solutions to problems that could be used by other companies. So why not sell the SDK or API or solutions so that you can sustain Wikipedia without begging for donations?
Sure if you do not want to be rich off of Wikipedia, that is fine. I don't consider it noble by any means, but its your choice after all.
There is no reason however why Wikipedia could not be a non-profit entity that is self-sustaining by generating revenue in some way. Non-profit does not mean "no revenue" btw.
What I feel is a shame is that even if Wikipedia was a money making enterprise with obscene profits you could have put 100% of the proceeds BACK into the community, whether through educational programs, creating new solutions for education that builds off the Wikipedia platform, or otherwise have done more then be a one trick pony.
Wikipedia has not changed much over the years, it could be more interactive, dynamic, fresh. Its a shame that products like Encarta had to demise in favour of a collection of static boring web-pages. By begging for money to barely exist means you have ignored real opportunities to grow the platform and make it awesome, instead of just mediocre.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Dear mr. Wales, Has Wikipedia considered the possibility of accepting donations via Flattr?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Back in 2011 the AP reported that you commented that the ranks of Editors was slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks...it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." What's have you and Wikipedia done to address that? Do you see problems do you think need to be addressed with the editor population? What do you think is working well with Editors? How hands on are you with the editor population?
Have you got any?
Would there be a blame function to find which revision introduced a particular wording? It would be useful as most editions don't have any helpful summary.
Jimmy, please have some good photos of you taken.
Most photos of you are ugly, for example, the photo in this N.Y. Times article: Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire.
I would like to know 2 things:
1) What and when is Wiki going to do something about data sets? By this I mean having easy to access, modular data sets which can be used across articles in a user understandable format (ie: a format users can interact with while maintaining the underlying structure needed for templates)
2) What is being done to simplify Wiki code? Here's an example of what a mess it can be:
http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Approval?action=edit I created this template to do this: http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Approval which should be simple but due to the convoluted mess that is wiki code it ballooned into something virtually unreadable.
3) Will citations ever evolve beyond "here's a generic link to a page on the subject"?
4) Is there an effort underway to clarify complex topic pages such as maths & chemistry which use abstract, unlinkable, symbols?
5) Will we ever see summary previews for links? ie: hover over a wiki link to get the summary of the topic instead of the tooltip.
6) Are their any plans for article perspectives? ie:
Instead of having the following articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_Canada
etc
etc
That you have a single article with tabbed perspectives?
Thanks for your answers!
Jimmy: Have anything you ever written on Wikipedia been deleted for no good reason?
Do the Japanese stalk you much ???
How come all your pictures look like you're squeezing out a turd?
Dear Mr. Wales. Do you understand how grateful I am to you? Do you really???
My university (University of Washington) required people to take some writing classes, and the engineers also had to take some technical writing classes. It really seemed to me like having an option that covered how to effectively use and contribute to Wikipedia would have been a fantastic option. Most students don't know how to evaluate the quality of a page, look at the cited sources, check the history and talk etc.
I also had a case where my my quantum mechanics TA (a graduate student) and a couple of post-docs managed to prove an equation on a Wikipedia page was incorrect in basically all cases (It was a typo I suspect) after it causes several students to get the wrong answers. Their reaction: email the class about it. This is bad: they should have also fixed it (as I did). When I asked them to fix such issues when they find them, they objected they didn't have time for that kind of thing. Our most educated people don't know how to fix a typo on Wikipedia: this makes me sad.
What do you think about universities offering seminars, of even technical writing classes that cover use of Wikipedia (and other similar sites)? It seems like it could really improve the attitude toward wikis in the academic communities, and produce drastically more editors, while providing very useful skills to the students.
Does the complete corruption infesting Wikipedia's administrative structure bother you yet?
Defend why it is not time to leave wikipedia, the entity you created, to the community which you've helped form. If you love something, set it free, and all that.
Do you find yourself searching the web with -wikipedia as a parameter, so that you can actually find sources of information and not endless repeats of what people copied from your site?
Can I have just $5?
What do you think Wikipedia is going to need to do to keep up with content maintenance in the long term? Is editor decline inevitable, and thus the focus should be on making vandalism harder, or do you think current trends can be reversed with the right tools or policy?
Will you make the disclaimer a bit more in the face of readers?
If anyone wants to see evidence of Wikipedia's many, many (many!) problems, try Wikipediocracy. There is a blog with regular posts full of horror and madness, plus a forum where you can be lectured at length about the failings of Wikipedia, and Jimbo. And all nonprofit too.
You are a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. One of the highest-priority projects for the Wikimedia Foundation is the VisualEditor. I wanted to ask something a bit surprising about it. It is essentially a word processor. It's web-based and it's targeted at a particular task, but it's still a word processor. So I want to ask: What is your favorite word processor? It can be one from the past - I actually met a lot of people whose favorite word processor was discontinued. What was your favorite word processor? And how can Wikipedia's new VisualEditor be better than your favorite processor? Thank you.
When can we see this be developed? I know there is a start with Wikitextbooks. But they seem sporadic. I think we could create an entire curriculum and support library (textbooks) to accompany said curriculum. And have it freely available for all...
You are aware that homeopathy is nothing but a hoax (source), and try to enforce the neutral point of view of Wikipedia. However, in some of the editions of wikipedia, such as the spanish one, it's quite common to find entries that give a positive spin to hoaxes such as homeopathy or acupuncture; even the spanish entry on the neutral point of view is constantly edited and "interpreted" to make room to "all opinions" no matter their reliability. How feasibile is to truly enforce the NPOV in all the editions of Wikipedia?
Could you add the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters to the homepage? It would be really helpful.
Why did it take you so long to stomp on the anti-science bias of your admins? The mess a few years ago on altmed articles is a perfect example.
work in progress
Do you reckon it's possible to create a tool to gather news from the crowd on a reliable way using a mode similar to Wikipedia's?
My Master's paper for my academic specialty is a proposal for a computer system that would allow a common activity in this field to happen on a sort of centralized website. I think my idea is fairly detailed and good, but a lot of the people and institutions in my field aren't very computer-savvy. I don't think I am a good enough programmer to build the entire thing myself -- it doesn't have to ultimately be Wikipedia-size, but if successful, it would have several tens of thousands of users, and things like security would be important.
How would you recommend I proceed? Get some (bad) working code and early adopters and iterate? Try to organize a team of planners and programmers? Try to get funding first? Any tips?
Does Wikipedia Make People Smarter? It seems that wikipedia is developing a very clicky culuture; you read the first few sentences of an article before clicking on to the next. It repudiates hard study and concentration in exchange for instant gratification. Is this a good thing? Shouldn't our culture strive to make incredible objects of beauty and knowledge rather than a shallow understanding of everything?
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I noticed numerous articles are poorly edited or written without fact checking. Among other things I notice, Articles are missing facts, these facts are publicly known. There are too many articles to site or use as a source. There has also been rampant talk over how celebrities, government, copyright trolls, non-copyright trolls have forced many articles to become censored, or deleted completely.
This has been widely talked about, and many that use wikipedia use it loosely because of this. Is it do to the editors not caring, laziness or not enough people volunteering to help clarify problems within an article, as well as wikipedia just caving into threats without the resources to combat copyright infringement allegations?
I think the site should become more informing, including, articles that cite incidents, such as possible reasons or motives for lets say NFL player Ray Lewis (don't why I use that but I did) instead of getting a simple or striped down, paragraph, or a few sentences for a explanation..
Do you sometimes read an article, see that the talk page is non-empty, and check it out to find only the banners telling you of how great this article could be?
Jimmy,
You and I had a very nice, very short email exchange many, many years ago. You ended it with thanking me, in case you've forgotten (ha!). I like to mention it when people bring up your name in connection to Wikipedia. I suppose it's my way of thanking you back.
Are there any email exchanges you remember fondly?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Noticeboards such as AN/I and various other discussion areas continue to show an ever increasing problem with bullying within Wikipedia's community.
Why does Wikipedia still lack a comprehensive behavioral policy to deal with bullying?
While this essay is certainly a good start, neither the Harassment policy nor the Disruptive editing guideline directly address bullying. The only things that appear to briefly address bullying behavior are the WP:CTDAPE section of the Disruptive editing guideline and the Identifying incivility section of the Civility policy.
What will it take for the community to finally draft and enact a policy that directly addresses bullying?
I noticed today that a very well known motivational speaker/salesman (Tom Hopkins) is not in wikipedia. How do you decide who gets entry into Wikipedia?
I come here for the love