"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.
(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
(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.
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.
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.
"it would only take 15 minutes for any other organization to pick up where a comercialized-Wikipedia left off." - that's true only as far as the content. You can't fork all of the thousands of long term editors (who are respondible for virtually all content creation and cleanup). A fork like you describe would essentially result in a frozen copy.
Also, it's worth bearing in mind that wikipedia's users (the long term editor base I just referred to who are so intergral to the site) are *rabidly* against commercialization in any form - even the small "Personal appeal from Jimbo" link you see about donations. Even discussions that happen to hit tangentially on that topic result in people getting hysterical. (Yes, it's happened) So commericalization is not a realistic prospect.
A moderation system has already been implimented in Mediawiki, and is currently going through a shakedown on one of the test wikis. See for yourself here.
I honestly cannot tell if that was meant to be trolling or not, but I'll presume that it wasn't. Wikipedia is simply not a very enticing target for terrorists to expound their views. Why would a terrorist bother putting up a rant, when any admin can take it down with 2 clicks and then ban him from the site? It would be much easier to put it up on any of a thousand free web hosts.
Sorry, I cannot remember where I saw that bit. You could try asking the Mediawiki developers on IRC (#mediawiki on freenode) and they might be able to help you.
"It would be better to allow that page to be forked, then people can work on the rewrite, then tag the fork to be the main one once it's done." - actually, it's much more common for one person to tag it as in use (using the inuse template), do a big edit, and then mark it as no longer in use.
For big changes that require multiple days and/or multiple editors, it's not uncommon for someone to copy the contents of the page to a temp subpage (so for article foo, you would copy the article to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo/temp and work on it there)
"How hard was it to get funding for this project at the vision stage?" - easy answer: he didn't. Jimbo has payed more than $500,000 out of pocket to get Wikipedia started, most of that invested in the early stages (during the Nupedia and early Wikipedia days).
As I understand it, our devs played did some experimentation with adding the ability to semanticly associate two articles. I don't know the specifics, but last I heard it was a resounding flop.
"Your question is based on an invalid premise, namely, that there is anything preventing anybody from suing anybody else for any or no reason."
There does exist such a mechanism. A court can deem a party to be a "vexatious litigant", at which point they have to get permission of a judge to file suit. On the other hand, these are usually used against people who represent themselves and file many, many frivilous suits.
(I'm sure to get modded a troll or something, but...) I have my share of dislike for Hatch too -- he led the charge to get Clinton impeached, while angrily dismissing all complaints about the ludicrious amounts of money being spent by the independent counsel (over $50 million by the end). He's the archtypical right-wing nutjob, BUT - read And the Band Played On. Hatch was personally responsible for getting the Senate to approve most of the AIDS funding during the early years of AIDS, when the Reagan administration was adamantly refusing to spend anything on AIDS (the administration claimed it was spending "$100 million for AIDS related research." But since even the common flu can kill you when you have AIDS, they were counting basically everything they were spending on any disease. In reality, the only agency doing any research on AIDS was the CDC - something they were not set up for.) Anyway, as the book says, Hatch was one of the few right-wingers who wasn't willing to play politics with health-related issues. So he (an extreme-right winger) was at the forefront of getting money for AIDS research at a time when it was primarily a "gay disease".
"I think hosting was discounted or free for several of those years.." - no, Bomis (A company Jimbo is involved with) picked it up for free so the foundation didn't have to. That worked back in the days when we were getting 500 edits a day; now that we're getting 100 edits a minute, it doesn't quite cut it anymore.
Considering that Wikipedia's traffic has been doubling every four months, and that in a single year it has gone from 35 servers (January 1, 2005) to 165 servers (January 1, 2006) and 0 employees to 4 employees (an executive assistant, a developer, an intern to maintence the servers, and a coordinator for the international meetup) -- comparing bugets from 2005Q1 and 2006Q1 is clearly wrong.
"Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?" - see for yourself. Wikimedia has spent roughly $400,000 dollars on hardware this year alone (the inevitable downside of having your traffic double every 4 months). Hosting adds roughly another $100,000 per year to the costs. And that's not counting the tons of other actual expenses that a real life charity (as opposed to some person's hobby on sourceforge) has to deal with - legal fees, banking fees, office supplies. So please check your facts before spreading FUD.
What a lie. Check the 2005 budget for yourself. There are four employees (two full time - Jimbo's assistant and Wikimedia's chief developer and two part time - a coordinator for the International Wikimedia meetup and an intern to help physically maintence the servers). Notice, Jimbo isn't one of them.
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs? I mean, if customers found out that Microsoft Windows = your ISP cuts down your rate, are people more or less likely to buy Windows? Their actions seems like obvious good buisness practice to me.
You are assuming that the DOJ is willing to go after corportations that audaciously break the law. They're too busy sending college students to prison for file sharing, modders for installing mod chips, 'etc. The administration clearly has a corporation-friendly agenda and has no intention of filing such a case.
About the unmanned planes - you're flat out wrong. A predator is built with mostly COTS parts, with a price-tag of $4.5 million - compared with the $300 million price tag of a manned fighter jet.
Slashdot Mirror
"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.
(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
Easy answer - yes. Since this story hit slashdot, someone has already edited the interview to link certain phrases to their particular Wikipedia pages
(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.
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.
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.
"it would only take 15 minutes for any other organization to pick up where a comercialized-Wikipedia left off." - that's true only as far as the content. You can't fork all of the thousands of long term editors (who are respondible for virtually all content creation and cleanup). A fork like you describe would essentially result in a frozen copy.
Also, it's worth bearing in mind that wikipedia's users (the long term editor base I just referred to who are so intergral to the site) are *rabidly* against commercialization in any form - even the small "Personal appeal from Jimbo" link you see about donations. Even discussions that happen to hit tangentially on that topic result in people getting hysterical. (Yes, it's happened) So commericalization is not a realistic prospect.
Whoops - disregard the link in the above post - it's the wrong test wiki. I can't find the correct one at the moment, but it's out there.
A moderation system has already been implimented in Mediawiki, and is currently going through a shakedown on one of the test wikis. See for yourself here.
I honestly cannot tell if that was meant to be trolling or not, but I'll presume that it wasn't. Wikipedia is simply not a very enticing target for terrorists to expound their views. Why would a terrorist bother putting up a rant, when any admin can take it down with 2 clicks and then ban him from the site? It would be much easier to put it up on any of a thousand free web hosts.
Sorry, I cannot remember where I saw that bit. You could try asking the Mediawiki developers on IRC (#mediawiki on freenode) and they might be able to help you.
"It would be better to allow that page to be forked, then people can work on the rewrite, then tag the fork to be the main one once it's done." - actually, it's much more common for one person to tag it as in use (using the inuse template), do a big edit, and then mark it as no longer in use.
For big changes that require multiple days and/or multiple editors, it's not uncommon for someone to copy the contents of the page to a temp subpage (so for article foo, you would copy the article to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo/temp and work on it there)
"How hard was it to get funding for this project at the vision stage?" - easy answer: he didn't. Jimbo has payed more than $500,000 out of pocket to get Wikipedia started, most of that invested in the early stages (during the Nupedia and early Wikipedia days).
As I understand it, our devs played did some experimentation with adding the ability to semanticly associate two articles. I don't know the specifics, but last I heard it was a resounding flop.
"Your question is based on an invalid premise, namely, that there is anything preventing anybody from suing anybody else for any or no reason."
There does exist such a mechanism. A court can deem a party to be a "vexatious litigant", at which point they have to get permission of a judge to file suit. On the other hand, these are usually used against people who represent themselves and file many, many frivilous suits.
Could you clarify here. When talking about bad guidance software for planes, "crashing" is an ambigious term ;)
(I'm sure to get modded a troll or something, but...) I have my share of dislike for Hatch too -- he led the charge to get Clinton impeached, while angrily dismissing all complaints about the ludicrious amounts of money being spent by the independent counsel (over $50 million by the end). He's the archtypical right-wing nutjob, BUT - read And the Band Played On. Hatch was personally responsible for getting the Senate to approve most of the AIDS funding during the early years of AIDS, when the Reagan administration was adamantly refusing to spend anything on AIDS (the administration claimed it was spending "$100 million for AIDS related research." But since even the common flu can kill you when you have AIDS, they were counting basically everything they were spending on any disease. In reality, the only agency doing any research on AIDS was the CDC - something they were not set up for.) Anyway, as the book says, Hatch was one of the few right-wingers who wasn't willing to play politics with health-related issues. So he (an extreme-right winger) was at the forefront of getting money for AIDS research at a time when it was primarily a "gay disease".
"I think hosting was discounted or free for several of those years.." - no, Bomis (A company Jimbo is involved with) picked it up for free so the foundation didn't have to. That worked back in the days when we were getting 500 edits a day; now that we're getting 100 edits a minute, it doesn't quite cut it anymore.
Considering that Wikipedia's traffic has been doubling every four months, and that in a single year it has gone from 35 servers (January 1, 2005) to 165 servers (January 1, 2006) and 0 employees to 4 employees (an executive assistant, a developer, an intern to maintence the servers, and a coordinator for the international meetup) -- comparing bugets from 2005Q1 and 2006Q1 is clearly wrong.
"Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?" - see for yourself. Wikimedia has spent roughly $400,000 dollars on hardware this year alone (the inevitable downside of having your traffic double every 4 months). Hosting adds roughly another $100,000 per year to the costs. And that's not counting the tons of other actual expenses that a real life charity (as opposed to some person's hobby on sourceforge) has to deal with - legal fees, banking fees, office supplies. So please check your facts before spreading FUD.
What a lie. Check the 2005 budget for yourself. There are four employees (two full time - Jimbo's assistant and Wikimedia's chief developer and two part time - a coordinator for the International Wikimedia meetup and an intern to help physically maintence the servers). Notice, Jimbo isn't one of them.
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs? I mean, if customers found out that Microsoft Windows = your ISP cuts down your rate, are people more or less likely to buy Windows? Their actions seems like obvious good buisness practice to me.
You are assuming that the DOJ is willing to go after corportations that audaciously break the law. They're too busy sending college students to prison for file sharing, modders for installing mod chips, 'etc. The administration clearly has a corporation-friendly agenda and has no intention of filing such a case.
More than a few times
About the unmanned planes - you're flat out wrong. A predator is built with mostly COTS parts, with a price-tag of $4.5 million - compared with the $300 million price tag of a manned fighter jet.