Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds

Wikipedia is an excellent project, and Slashdot readers' questions for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were just as excellent -- as are Jimmy Wales' answers to 12 of the highest-moderated questions you submitted.

1) Donations - by southpolesammy
What's the current state of donations and what is the future of Wikipedia if fund raising without advertisements does not increase?

Jimmy Wales:
We are always in need of funds for hardware. I still cover the bandwidth and hosting charges, and will do so for the foreseeable future, but we rely on community donations for the hardware that we need to run the site.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

One of the reasons I was excited to be asked by Roblimo to do this interview is that the slashdot community in particular has been so generous to us in the past. This is an audience that understands the importance of what we're doing, the importance of spreading the idea of GNU-style freedom far beyond the free software community.

Anyone who would is interested in donating money to help, please visit the site to see how we use the money.

2) Advertising? - by obli
How has the word about wikipedia been spread? Has wikipedia actually paid a dime for all its publicity? I don't think I've seen any advertisement when I think about it.

Jimmy Wales:
No, we don't pay for publicity, never have and most likely never will; it hasn't been necessary, and I don't see that it will be necessary.

The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well.

3) Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs by ewanrg
Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

Jimmy Wales:
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.

Software is unique in that there are network externalities and various other mechanisms of "lock in" that make it hard for us to get people to switch to free alternatives. People are very comfortable with Microsoft products, and they fear that if they switch, they'll give up all the skills that they've learned (ctrl-alt-del!) and won't be able to share files with others.

But the things our community is producing are different. There's no cost to switching from an outdated old encyclopedia to Wikipedia -- just click and learn, and there you go. You can switch before your friends switch, but the knowledge you learn will be perfectly compatible.

4) Quality Control - by Raindance
First of all, the concept of a community-built encyclopedia, open to submissions and revisions from users, is wonderful. It's much like open-source, in fact, and Wikipedia certainly exemplifies how to reapply the OS model to other contexts.

However, the contexts of encyclopedias and software are different. Significantly so. I'm interested specifically in quality control- you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior.

In what ways can a Wiki article be bad, and how can one tell? Do you think QC is a large issue for Wikipedia, and do you have any plans to further integrate the community in the QC process (perhaps akin to the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system)?

Jimmy Wales:
Well, encyclopedia articles can be bad in a lot of obvious ways, and some subtle ways. Obvious ways include simply incorrect information, or grammatical errors, or strong bias. Subtle ways can include milder forms of bias, dull writing, etc.

Quality control is what a lot of our internal processes are all about. Every page on the site shows up on Special:Recentchanges, and individuals have 'watchlists' that they can (and do) use to keep an eye on particular articles.

I am currently working on a first draft proposal to the community for our "next phase" of review, which will involve getting serious about producing a "1.0 stable" release. The concept here is very analagous to that in the software world -- the existing site is always the cutting edge nightly build, which rocks of course, but we also need a stable release that's been reviewed and tested and found good.

I'll put out that draft in a couple of weeks, and get feedback and revisions from the community, and then we will hold a project-wide vote.

That process might involve some bits that are like the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system, but it's likely to be much more of an editing-oriented process than voting-oriented process.

5) How to balance coverage? - by mangu
Is there an effort to get articles written on specific missing topics? If one looks at a commercial encyclopedia, the full range of human knowledege is covered. On Wikipedia, OTOH, one finds several articles about slashdot trolls, for instance, while other (important) fields are still unwritten.

Jimmy Wales:
This is increasingly a solved problem. It is true that we have quite a bit of pertinent information about slashdot trolls, but we also have just about every important topic as well. Of course some areas are in greater need than others, and finding them and resolving them is an ongoing effort in the community.

I think you'd be pretty hard pressed anymore to find topics that are in Britannica that we don't cover at all. It's still not that hard, if you look around a bit, to find rare articles in Britannica that are better than our article on the same topic. But it's getting harder all the time.

So to answer your question directly, yes, there are constant efforts to get articles written on specific topics, and to flesh out areas that we haven't yet covered as well as we should.

6) The constant bickering... - by Rageon
How is (and how will) the constant bickering between differing sides of the more controversial issues (abortion, religion, etc...) be addressed? Do you expect any changes to the current system, in which it seems the same pages get edited by the same people back and forth every day?

Jimmy Wales:
In our community, we very strongly discourage that kind of bickering. One of the biggest social faux pas that one can commit is the dreaded "revert war". But humans are humans, and they will argue, and we have to understand that there will never be a process whereby we eliminate all of that.

7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?

Jimmy Wales:
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We're doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.

It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.

Those kinds of big picture ideals make people very passionate about what we're doing. And it makes it possible for people to set aside a lot of personal differences and disputes of the kind that I talked about above, and just compromise to keep getting the work done.

I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

8) Advertisers, Spammers, Search Engines, oh my! - by RomSteady
I like the concept of a wiki, but I'm a bit concerned about the current implementation.

Right now, we are seeing several instances where crawlers are disrupting wikis, spammers are embedding wiki links to their sites to boost their Google rankings, and advertisers are placing ads in wikis until someone goes through and nukes them.

Do you have any thoughts as to how wikis can be modified to prevent things like this in the future?

Jimmy Wales:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple to solve problems like that. One of the first tricks I would try is to parse the wiki text that someone inputs to see if it contains an external link. If so, then only in those cases, require an answer to a captcha.

Second step, keep editing wide open for everyone, but restrict the ability to post external links to people who are trusted by that community. Make it really easy for trusted users to extend the zone of trust, because you want to encourage participation.

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works.

People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community.

9) Webservices ? Data Formats ? - by sh0rtie
Ever thought of offering alternative data access services other than HTML ? examples of other successful community driven sites such as IMDB [imdb.com] can be queried via email (in a structured way) and a huge number of applications are now built upon these capabilities alone, ever thought of offering up the data in alternative formats (XML/SOAP/TELNET/TXT etc etc) so clever programmers can create applications that could utilise the data in new and interesting ways ?

Jimmy Wales:
Yes, yes, yes. I am 100% all for it. Join wikitech-l, the technical mailing list, and ask about specifics, and we'd be thrilled to have more developers volunteering to help us get those kinds of things implemented quickly and correctly.

10) China and Wiki - by Stargoat
How do you feel about China's blocking of Wiki, and what effect, if any, do you think it'll have on the service that Wikipedia can and cannot provide to both the Chinese and the world community?

Jimmy Wales:
The block in China only lasted for a couple of days, until some administrators in the Chinese-language wikipedia appealed the ban.

My thinking on that is two-fold. First, it's a huge embarassment for the censors if they block Wikipedia, because we are none of the things that they claim to want to censor. Censoring Wikipedia is an admission that it is unbiased factual information itself that frightens you. We are not political propaganda, we are not online gambling, we are not pr0n. We are an encyclopedia.

Second, I consider it a moral imperative for our overall mission that we will not bend our principles of freedom, of the freedom of speech, of a commitment to inclusiveness and neutrality, to meet any possible demands of any government anywhere. We are a _free_ encyclopedia, with all that entails.

11) One area Wikipedia seems to lack - by wcrowe
Other encyclopedias cite sources for their work. Wikipedia does not seem to have a facility for this, and I have yet to see sources cited in any of the articles. Am I correct in my assumptions? Why aren't sources cited? It would add credibility to the project.

Jimmy Wales:
I think you're mistaken. We do cite sources, about as much as most encyclopedias, I think. But I do agree with you that more sources is good, and there's no question that as we move forward towards a 1.0 stable release, one of our goals will be to provide more articles with more extensive information about "where to learn more", i.e. cite original research, etc., as much as we can.

12) Money issues - by Achoi77
Considering the fact that wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, are there any real potential fears that the lack of a steady cash flow may cause the whole project to collapse? Has any (and what kind of) unfavorable contingency plans been considered (like ads) and outright rejected, only to be reconsidered again at a later time?

Jimmy Wales:
Wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, and keeping us in enough servers to keep performance where we want it is a topic constantly on our minds.

But at the same time, I have every confidence that we'll be just fine. The thing is: everyone loves Wikipedia. When I asked the world for $20,000 last January, we raised nearly $50,000 in less than a week.

We are currently investigating the possibility of grants, and we are also asking you, here, today, to consider visiting the project to find out how you can help, if that's something you're comfortable with doing.

The question of advertising is discussed sometimes, but not really in the context of "will we need to accept ads to survive". The answer to that is clearly "no".

The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website.

That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission.

But it's more complex than that, even, because in large part, our success so far is due to the purity of what we're doing. We might find that accepting ad money would cut us off from possible grant money. It's a complex question.

But it is not a question that has to be answered for our continuing survival. We can keep going as we are now, with your help of course. :-)

Know someone *other than your favorite political candidate* who'd make a great Slashdot interview guest? Please email Roblimo with the person's name and contact information.

Backups

Wikipedia seems like a truly priceless knowledgebase. It would be a good idea if a non-electronic backup could be made and stored away in the event of a catastrophic world crisis. I realize it is over 700,000 articles, but it would be such a shame for something like a nuclear war to wipe out all of this knowledge. Perhaps a paper edition is printed every X years (to keep up with changing articles) and properly stored?

Re:Backups

Dude, if it came down to a nuclear war, I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is going to be the last thing on everyone's mind.

Re:Backups

Ummmm ... in case of Nuclear War, I think we should consult Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to see what it says about it! ;-)

Re:Backups

Possibly in the short term; in the longer term, people (i.e. historians) will want to know as much as possible about life pre-nuclear war.

Re:Backups

Perhaps a paper edition is printed every X years (to keep up with changing articles) and properly stored?

Excellent idea. Then that document is stored in the National Archives, and painstakingly scanned and OCR'd by an army of secretaries, and then we can have the whole thing online!

Re:Backups

Well, for starters, the EMP blast area is much bigger than the physical destruction blast area.

For another, it's easier to store an encyclopedia in a vault than a server farm.

And of course, the paper encyclopedia will work without power, A/C, etc. Just keep the hunmidity reasonable.

It's the time capsule approach.

Re:Backups

These folks [longnow.org] might be able to help with plans for long-term backups of WikiPedia content.

-Mark

Re:Backups

The SQL databases can be downloaded here [wikipedia.org], and the current revisions are 633MB, small enough to be put on a single CD. Anybody is more than welcome to use one of the existing scripts to convert this to static HTML, then print out the results.

Anyone care to calculate how many sheets of paper this would take, and how much time?

First post!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_post [wikipedia.org]

1.0 release hardcopy?

Will you burn DVDs for offline users to purchase? I like buying GNU manuals in dead tree format, to fetish, and support the community. Worth considering.

Re:1.0 release hardcopy?

I agree. I would gladly pay $20 or $30 for a DVD containing the whole wikipedia. I'd probably not want a million printed pages, but an offline format would certainly be something you should consider.

Re:1.0 release hardcopy?

You can already download a copy of wikipedia for offline use - it's about 180 MB for a PC; I use it for my laptop.

But yeah, I'd pay $30 for an offline DVD copy of 1.0!

Trolls

On Wikipedia, OTOH, one finds several articles about slashdot trolls, for instance, while other (important) fields are still unwritten.

Its obviously the slashdot TROLLs who are the generous donors to Wikipedia, and Wayne knows that he can't upset the troll or his funding might dissapear.

Then again, it might just be that more people know about slashdot trolls that they do about ancient slovian history.

In general, science (especially physics) is covered quite well and the humanities less so. But that's what you'd expect given the profile of people who form the pool of contributers. This will change over the next x years are more and more of todays infant computer users grow up to be humanitarians.

Re:Trolls

so is the donation link kinda like a...

Troll booth?

HAHAHAHAHAHA I crack my self up. To bad noone else thinks I'm funny.

sources

The cited sources might be a major issue for people doing research projects on it. I asked my librarian at the school I go to, and she had thought that it would be a bad idea to use it, because it's written by random people, instead of scholars like in "traditional" encyclopedias. Maybe this can be changed somehow to get Wikipedia look more credible.

Re:sources

I think one possible way around this is to have an author/owner for each article. Any updates/insertions for that article would have to be vetted by the author.

Perhaps this should only apply to the periodic stable releases of the encyclopedia that Jimmy mentioned in one of his replies. That way if you're doing research intended for eventual publication, you'd use the most recent release of the encyclopdia since each article would have content vetted by its author/owner.

Re:sources

That's where this comes in...

That way if you're doing research intended for eventual publication, you'd use the most recent release of the encyclopdia since each article would have content vetted by its author/owner.

The URL in the citation would point to that release of the article which would remain fixed over time. Jimmy mentioned in one of his answers that he plans to acheive a "stable 1.0" version in the future. Each release should always be available along with the "normal" view of the encyclopedia which would always be instantaneous. URLs would look like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1/Albert_Einstein where the 1 would refer to the first fixed release of the encyclopedia.

Re:sources

> If I cite the 2003 edition of an encyclopedia, someone reading my paper can go look up the relevant article. If I cite something on Wikipedia, and someone changes the article the day after I read it, a reader looking up the cited article might find it says something completely different than what I said it says.

Not so ! Why ? Well, because Wikipedia uses computers and their near-unlimited storage and processing power *intelligently*. Want to see that in action ? A poster in this discussion linked to the Wikipedia page about nuclear warfare [wikipedia.org]. Should you want to cite a stable version of it, you would go to the corresponding history page [wikipedia.org], and select the version you want after looking at the changes between versions. For instance, to link to the "nuclear warfare" page, as it stood on 2004-07-25, you would use this URL [wikipedia.org]. Problem solved :-)

Re:sources

This may be an "interesting" post, but this is the same mindset of "Aren't professionals better? How can it work if it's free?" that has plagued Open Source Software from the outset, and I think it's important to understand that the implication behind it that "free and open = cheap and undependable" is false.

In open source software, the dependability comes from the fact that anyone can view the code, see potential problems, and apply fixes. There is no obscurity. People don't hide behind credentials. Same thing with Wikipedia.

In closed source software, the dangers of laziness and 'not made here' syndrome arise; people tend to trust the professionals and assume that everything is taken care of, hence issues like the current security crisis and lack of innovation in some apps (such as web browsers) arise. Same thing with proprietary encyclopedias - there is just as much, or arguably more, of a risk of publishing misinformation because the peer review process can NEVER be as thorough.

Somebody back me up on this...

Re:sources

I have to agree that this could be the weakness in the foundation.

If Wikipedia does not change their current format and add a full references and citations section to each entry, this model might never gain academic acceptance. Without that, it's just a really quick way of getting data off the web, instead of being a viable and credible source.

Since they are still in a beta stage, Wikipedia should focus on addressing any and all possible issues, and not just stick with what they got cause they're already so far into development. As in this post, they should accept all of the feedback they can and address the necessarry issues instead of painting them over with an almost-superiority complex. I don't doubt the value of their work, but I think now is when you need to spot weaknesses and fix them so they don't haunt you down the line.

The goal I would like to see is for Wikipedia to be interchangeable with any other source for a refereed paper. And to get to that stage you need to follow certain protocol. I'd hate to see them never make it that far...

Re:sources

Traditional encyclopedias are also written by random people. The only guarantees you have about their quality comes from their reputation and the hope that the publisher won't cut to much cost on quality control. Traditional encyclopedias have another disadvantage: room for argumentation and literature references is constrained. Articles are kept short to make them fit in the dead tree version at a reasonable cost. Wikipedia has no such limitations.

Literature references can be added and as I understand are being added when appropriate. A good researcher would never depend on vague formulations in an encyclopedia anyway but either back them up with more references or more evidence.

Now when it comes to references, you can judge the quality of a scientific article by looking at the references. If it only includes some obscure references (and maybe a handfull of wikipedia references) the author probably didn't do his homework. This is the way I used to review articles when I was still in academia: read the abstract, skim through the reference list and then the article. Usually my opinion after reading the abstract was confirmed by the reference list and argued by reading the rest of the article (I usually stopped reading after a few pages if it was really bad).

Reviewers have the liberty and the obligation to lookup references if that is essential to the argumentation of an article. If some author would make some vague claim that is essential to whatever he is trying to argue and would point to wikipedia for more material that would be suspicious already. A reviewer should then at least look up the wikipedia article and review that.

Now unlike a traditional encyclopedia, both author and reviewer can also use their knowledge to improve the wikipedia article if it would need improvement. For instance a reviewer might actually agree with the wikipedia article but add some footnote with a reference to some article to strengthen its argument and then continue to slap the author (of the reviewed article, not the wikipedia article) on his wrist for not arguing his point properly.

Now citing wikipedia articles might be a bit more problematic because the wikipedia article might change over time. Basically you have no guarantee that the version of an article you look up is the same as the version that was cited. Version history is the solution to that.

honest question

how is Jimmy Wales covering his own living costs?

I'm in no way bashing, just wondering how it could be possible for me myself to work on such a project? or even start some GPL style work in another context.

Re:honest question

He runs a web hosting firm. I forget what it's called, but that's also how he's able to donate all the bandwidth for Wikipedia, and where all the servers are located.

Gotta admit, saying that you host Wikipedia is a serious selling point, in terms of proving you can cope with a big site.

No

Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.

As it stands, you can quote Encyclopedia Britannica in any school essay. If I was marking some homework that relied on referencing Wikipedia, I'd have to fail them. Because (with some limitations) anybody with enough craftyness can write just about anything into Wikipedia. They could even write in what they're quoting. Nor is anything in there it verified 99.9% of the time.

I know many people *want* to love Wikipedia, and it has its uses, but it does have its faults. People trying to pretend those faults don't exist are starting to look like Linux zealots who have been saying Linux is about to take the desktop for the last 8 years. Don't blind yourself, realize this is not a researched encyclopedia but an interenet scrapbook. Britannica may have made errors in the past, but there're more things wrong with a handful of individual articles on Wikipedia than Britannica has made mistakes in their entire history.

Cite specific revision of article

Cite the specific revision of the article at the time you site [utexas.edu] it. You can always pull up a previous revision of an article.

E.g.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Yassin , Revision of 16:20, 6 Apr 2004)

Re:No

Nor is anything in there it verified 99.9% of the time.

You sure about that? One time, I added a note to the article on the M1 Abrams tank about reactive armor, and later that day I got a note from an army mechanic who stated that that particular modification had never actually been made. Seems to me there's plenty of verification.

And this is different from a printed encyclopedia?

I don't think you realize how printed encyclopedias are written. Basically, they contact someone in a field and they can write basically anything they want and it goes in. Gary Olsen, who was my doctoral advisor, was contacted to write the World Book entry on Archaeabacteria. Now, he knows his stuff, and is honest, so it's a good article. But what if he didn't and wasn't? Certainly I've read just plain wrong things in printed encyclopedias

see: a-non-y-mous cow-ard

a-non-y-mous cow-ard

n.

A rare breed of nocturnal technologically savvy coffee drinker. The anti-social A.C. is related to the neo-ludite family. The North American variety is known to infest networks of varied bandwidths and breeds quickly when the practically extinct female of the species is introduced to its natural habitat. The cubicle habitat has been providing more space and hope for the survival of these species. This important creature is part of an ecosystem that even supports the all important parasitic management weasels that live alongside them in relative harmony.

That's Beautiful.

It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content...

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

Good luck and godspeed. That last sentence brings a tear to my eye. This what I thought the Internet would be about before the bubble. I may just start to believe again.

Re:That's Beautiful.

I agree it's beautiful thing, but my next thought was that is sounds like Asimov's Harry Seldon creating Foundation.

Re:That's Beautiful.

I must admit the last sentence hit me so hard I opened up my wallet.

More power to wikipedia.

Re:That's Beautiful.

Well Ron Gilbert said it best.
"the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn."
http://www.grumpygamer.com/7615642

Re:That's Beautiful.

Every single person on the planet. Does that mean couples can forget about it? ;)

Seriously. IMHO he is pure Nobel-prize material. Spreading knowledge is of the utmost importance to improve the situation on this blue speck.

Wikipedia vs Traditional Encyclopedia's

First, let me say that I love wikipedia and think its a great resource. I use it regularly. I also work at a traditional encyclopedia company (based in chicago, owned by someone real rich - you guess).

The problem I have with Jimmy's assertion that companies like mine will be out of buisness in 5 years is this: wikipedia and most thriving encyclopedias have different markets.

Our products (both print and online) are geared to the K-12 student and very little else. We take special pains to ensure that the content is at a level that our audience can digest. We talk with teachers and librarians across the world to ensure readership. We also take great pains to make sure the writing and style is consistent across the product - something that seems very important to educators.

Now, Wikipedia has many many more articles than our online product, but quantity doesn't always win out, especially in the education world. Secondly, I doubt very much that wikipedia can attain the same amount of attention to the K-12 market as we do. Its hard to offer something for free and then do all the editing and research into the market. The educators that purchase our products want to have a good qaulity resource they can point pupils to, not something they have to contribute to make it that way. This is why I don't see Wikipedia and our product as a direct competitor, Wikipedia reaches a different market altogether. For instance, I really enjoy reading Wikipedia now, just as I really enjoyed reading encyclopedia's when I was younger. The difference is I am an educated adult now and can digest the Wikipedia content. When I was in elementary school, I think most of the Wikipedia articles would have been out of my reach.

It goes without saying that traditional encyclopedia's have to change their buisness in a new information age (something we are working on very hard). However, as a product, we don't see our core audience (K-12 School and Libraries) running away from us for Wikipedia in the near future.

Keep up the work on the amazing product.

Re:Wikipedia vs Traditional Encyclopedia's

The beauty of Wikipedia is that it can adapt. There already is a simple version (Simple [wikipedia.org]). All you need is more volunteers. Considering that there are only about 6000 active editors throughout the different projects (Active wikipedians [wikipedia.org]), and we have achieved this much, can you imagine what could be achieved if 10% of students throughout the world got involved. You could have a K-12 edition in one year. Likewise, once Wikipedia hits 1.0 you have a reviewed edition.

Don't think that this is that it is just a dream, it can happen with enough people, which just means enough access and exposure. There is a very low barrier to participating in Wikipedia (yes, I can hear people saying that will just mean the unwashed/uneducated masses), compared to other open source projects. Most people really are good. Once the Internet takes off in the world, and once Wikipedia becomes more well known, you will see it become an even more useful project.

He underestimates evil nature

I liked most of his responses (although his "they'll be crushed in 5 years" was a little too brunt for my tastes. Still, I think Jimmy underestimates one of the basic tenants of human nature: it's fun to be bad.

The first time I saw a Wiki, and learned enough to understand how to add to it, I was a bit surprised on how easily you could destroy the whole thing. A few types and, bam, the article was gone. Sure, there was versioning and all, so they could go back to an earlier version if they wanted, but the preventative measures they had in place for preventing random deletions (just showing the guy's IP) were crude.

So you might say "no one in the community would do that". But guess what... it's human nature to test the system, to break things. That's where an Encyclopedia Britanica or whatever, with an established history, has a leg up over Wiki.

When I open a commercial encyclopedia, I know the article I'm reading was usually typed by someone educated in the subject, edited by multiple people, and will never disappear while I'm reading it. True, there's bias and errors, and everything, but they're in all media. Quality control, which he barely addresses, is much more difficult in an environment where Joe Public can randomly delete articles.

I think Wikis are eventually going to die off, and blogs with rating systems will ultimately reign supreme. Everyone talks, everyone determines what articles are top notch, and someone truly in control can axe things if necessary. There's no true control with Wiki, and that's its biggest hurdle.

Re:He underestimates evil nature

I think Wikis are eventually going to die off, and blogs with rating systems will ultimately reign supreme. Everyone talks, everyone determines what articles are top notch, and someone truly in control can axe things if necessary. There's no true control with Wiki, and that's its biggest hurdle.

Have you looked at the internal process at Wikipedia? There's plenty of control.

Vandalize an article? Unless you pick something very minor and obscure, there's someone who has it on a watchlist who will find what you've done and fix it quickly.

Repeated vandalism? You (or your IP address) can get a one-day ban by any of the administrators. A longer ban can be placed if needed.

Having an edit war? One of the admins can protect the page from further changes, while arranging for a mediator to sort out the differences.

There are plenty of procedures in place for dealing with problem users. They're not needed very often, which is why it doesn't look like they exist.

Re:He underestimates evil nature

People don't do graffiti in pencil.

What about physical goods...

has anybody thought about applying this community development towards the creation of some sort of mechanical device. Inventions could be perfected and perhaps someday there could even be open-source automobile designs. does this sound plausible to anyone? what are your thoughts?

nastalgia

When the wikipedia project was first announced on /. a number of years ago I remember I was writing a paper on Tiberius Gracchus. Currently there was nothing on wikipedia about him so I decided to edit my paper into an encyclopedia-ish form and upload it. This is when I was a sophomore in HS by the way. Anyway the article actually stayed as is for about two years before someone else rewrote it to make it not suck. However there are one or two sentences that bear just a hint of my original writing. Kind of neat I think.

Ah, fuck.

This kind of unabashed optimism has got to stop. Now I'm at work and I'm getting all bleary eyed.

Success via trusting people & purity of ideals. G'damnit, this is going to have me verklempt for like a week.

Offline format

May I have mine in a small PDA format with the messages "DON'T PANIC" printed in large friendly letters on the glossy plastic slipcover?

Make Donating Easier!

Thirty seconds ago, I followed the link to donate to Wikipedia. Fifteen seconds ago, I had decided against giving anything. Why?

1) You only accept paypal and snail-mail. Not gonna happen.
2) You only have one-time donations.

There should be a secure form for credit cards. You should allow for small, monthly donations from the provided card. This will make donating convenient, less difficult to give (over time) large amounts, and will provide a steady stream of income for wikipedia (which is more important than getting random jabs of cash, although those are nice too.)

Make donating easy, and getting donations will be easy.

Re:Make Donating Easier!

There plans for everything you mention. We are in the process of setting up a new website that will have several donation pages.

Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO

Sources and References

When an encyclopedia article is written by an academic 'expert', the reader might be willing to forego detailed references because there's a certain trust and appeal to authority. If I read an article about physics by Stephen Hawking, in a sense he serves as his own reference.

This situation does not apply when the encyclopedia article is written by essentially anonymous contributors. There's some reliability to be derived from open community editing, but ultimately as a reader, I need to see where the info came from. In fact, unless the article is making an original contribution to knowledge, a reader should be able to reproduce all the information in the article by looking up the references.

This 'replicability' standard is nothing new; any refereed academic journal will insist on it for the portions of an article that do not represent original knowledge. IMO, It is the only way to make Wikipedia authoritative.

Finally, I hope 'references' are not lumped or confused with 'to learn more' links. They serve completely different functions.

Re:Sources and References

Academics can be as dangerously biased as anyone else. A trawl through academic history in the 1930's and the whole sorry "arian race" saga shows just how easily 'academia' is corrupted.

Academia also has its "religions" that come and go and shut out opposing views. Microkernel people spent years being nearly as good as existing technology in part because if it wasn't Microkernel work you didn't get funding.

Similarly references in academic journals merely indicate that someone somewhere once probably said something vaguely like the authors claims. If a fundamental assumption is later found wrong people will continue to build upon and reference the invalid data. Journal referencing because it is not entirely represented in a mappable electronic space doesn't have an effective "revoke" mechanism, nor a way to look for which subtrees of data in use have been invalidated by other research.

Finally academic journals are reviewed by experts in the field - which means there is a tendancy to exclude papers that disagree with the current experts beliefs.

Wikipedia has a large and very different set of problems, but I don't think holding up current practice as perfection is wise. Those ivory towers are built on the blood of grad students, corporate research money, political favours and academic backstabbing.

Re:Sources and References

What I suggested had little to do with *preventing* bias and more to do with possibly identifying it. If a piece of information comes from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I view it through a different filter than if it came from the New York Times editorial page. If a piece of information comes from Wikipedia, what filter am I supposed to use? Surely you're not suggesting I take it as 'objective truth'?

That's where references come in. They allow me, the reader, to adjust my filters according to my opinion of the sources. No one is suggesting that only "academic" sources be used, but if the information comes from a source (and it usually does), the reader has the right to know the source in order to judge its veracity for him- or herself. As a reader, I learn as much from the list of cited references to an article as I do from the article itself.

It's easy to dismiss academia as "built on the blood of grad students, corporate research money..." etc., and it's true that there are whole fields that are shamefully inadequate (as you point out historically, and as the Sokol hoax demonstrated more recently). But academia is also what gave us modern science (physical and social) and a good chunk of modern technology and medicine, and it's not fair to tar it with such a broad brush.

In any case, I was only advocating a *method* used in academia for referencing/sourcing, not the *content* of academic research. Referencing for replicability is hardly a perfect system, and it's not particularly useful in eliminating bias, but it has its (very important) functions and I don't see a superior alternative for it.

Google, Gutenberg?

I have to think that Wikipedia would be _exactly_ something that Google could sponsor with its pending million$ or massive infrastructure..

Also, I notice that a bunch of entries are taken from public domain encyclopedia editions. An interesting feature would be to, say, allow 'shading' of citation sources, so that sections of text would have background colors based on a citation key... With the user's ability to filter out sources if they wish, or set a 'trust' level..

Cross-language dictionaries?

I missed the original question round, but are there any plans for cross-language dictionaries?

They'd be mighty useful, and might even support open-source machine translation efforts. Besides, the idea of a trolled hungarian-english dictionary would make for a hilarious skit.

online trust

"Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works."

What the man said. It's become more and more difficult to trust anything on the net, with all the people trying to make a fast buck and all the endless scams, all the media stories about people taking advantage.

But somewhere between the Pollyanna [wikipedia.org] attitudes of the pre-boom (and during-boom) years, and the more recent/current attitudes of cynical distrust and ironic distance -- somewhere remains the truth, that the net still remains a new place where good people can sometimes invest their hopes, and give some good honest work to genuinely help other people. Where good new resources can still arise.

Bravo to Jimmy Wales and all volunteers of the various Wiki projects. They're earning back the trust they give, and all of us are better for it.
-madmagic [wikipedia.org]

congratulations, wikipedia!

ahh how i long for the days when everything is free and open, we can share information over p2p on our linux desktops, we do all our research on wikipedia, and we all live in arcologies.
what do you think is the best niche to start converting the general public to trusting open source? they seem awfully wary of open source software and open source information sharing (perhaps rightly so), so how can we prove that it works?
oh and have people seen sketchzilla [sketchzilla.com]? it rules.
--

Advertising -- like PBS used to be

I would not mind unobtrusive advertising on Wikipedia if it was like the old days of PBS, where a program would begin with "The following was brought to you from a grant by Pan Am"

So, the following are things I could deal with:
1) A link on every page to "Sponsorship" which would list the biggest and/or most recent donations, and how You Too can contribute.

2) A logo-of-the-day on the start page, rotating amongst the major donors

3) This would push my limits, but the arrival page (where the referred is not on Wikipedia) could display a rotating sponsor ad, then take you on to the article. But that had better be the only time that happens, not like the every-five-or-so you see with, say Yahoo Groups.

Wikipedia and Bias

A possible patch(note:not solution) for the bias issue is to have certain topics like abortion, religion and politics to have a central topic that is modified by admins.

Then to have people post under that with their various biases. Thus, you can read about Abortion and then read responses to key topics side by side from both perspectives. Those who are pro-life can modify the pro-life sub pages but not the pro-choice pages and vice versa.

Something like this

Abortion: Should I get one?
View point 1 | View point 2
It is your choice to do so | It is murder and is
nobody has the right to tell you | morally wrong to get an abortion
that you cannot get one. It is | many people who have gotten
your body and you can do what | an abortion regret having
you want with it | done so many years later.

And, a person looking at the wiki can modify it to show only one or more viewpoints that they agree with or that they want to see.

Don't know.. just an idea.

Ghetto blades

For improving power/CPU and size ratios, how about going to mini-ITX systems arranged on a decent 1U tray, with a central powersupply or some lucite fabricated 'rack' where they could be stacked vertically?

Kind of what blade servers do, but ghetto.

Opensource movement scares me

Please do not mod this as a troll on reflex. I'm continually scared by the opensource movement. This is probably the best example: true, encyclopedias aren't a huge bussiness, but the entire industry might have been eliminated. And who (potentially) can profit from it? The people who use Wikipedia, and in thsi case, a select group who (if they want to take the oppurtunity) can publish it and reap the profits. The people who contribute never get compensated. It's probably impossible, since the labor is so diffused. In my opinion, writing an encylopedia article or editing are skilled jobs and should be paid. It's sad and scary to see them eliminated.

Article of the Day

You know what feature I'd love to see? I'd love to have a random Wikipedia article show up in my mailbox each morning, just like a Word of the Day.

Just clicking on the Random Page link gave me articles on Butha-Buthe, the Chestnut-headed Bee-eater, and Farragut North. I love learning how much I don't know.

Wikipedia's servers

Have a look at the servers [wikimedia.org] Wikipedia is using! That's some hardware Slashdot will surely like - master db is a dual Opteron with Fedora Core 2 64-bit and 1+0 RAID. The cash seems well spent.

Personal Wikipedia pages

I've noticed that several well-known individuals have Wikipedia pages (rms [wikipedia.org], Dubya [wikipedia.org],
Ghandi [wikipedia.org]).

So I wonder, at what point is it appropriate to add a person to Wikipedia? At one extreme, every person who wants a page for him or herself could create one; in fact, one's Wikipedia page could replace one's home page. But this doesn't seem right somehow. Certainly a personal wikipedia page could contain an (auto)biography and links to related topics and people. But other stuff---like vacation photos and fan sites---do not really belong there (and we wouldn't want to clutter "the sum of all knowledge" with this).

Is this just a matter of good sense and public consensus? Would it make sense to have some kind of Wiki-social-network thing?

Re:Personal Wikipedia pages

Is this just a matter of good sense and public consensus?

Yes. :) If it makes it through Votes for Deletion [wikipedia.org] it's generally OK. :)

But adding a page about yourself? Generally considered very bad. Vanity pages, advertising: Bad No. Get an account and stick up a user page, if you want that. (Be aware, however, that Wikipedia is not [wikipedia.org] a free web host. =b)

PKI and a web of trust

At first glance, it seems to me that Wikipedia would benefit from a public key system and reputation service. Allow editors to endorse articles by signing a revision with their public key, and allow visitors to establish a trust level for each editor whose signatures they encounter.

If J. Random Hacker endorsed the "Cryptography" and "PKI" articles, and I agree with him that those articles are accurate, then I would be likely to trust his endorsement of "Elliptical Curves" (which I know little about). Similarly, if Pete Cruft endorsed "Linux Are Teh R0ck0rz", then his opinion on "Critiquing SHA-1" may not hold much weight with me.

The same could be done on a lesser trust level without PKI by allowing visitors to "vote" on the accuracy of articles and using that to generate trust scores on other articles based on the editors.

How 'bout it, Jimmy? Is a reputation server viable for Wikipedia? It seems like that would alleviate a lot of the concerns people are expressing about the reliability of your information.

Google AdSense is perfect for this

Could any ad service be better suited for this than Google AdSense? Or any other well targeted ad service for that matter.

Wikipedia has tons of pages of unique and coherant content. Each page could have a simple google ad (There are a variety of different formats... A skyscraper is best). The ads within that google ad would relate directly to the content of the wiki.

Google gives "Premium" service to clients with over 20 million pageviews a month. According to Wikipedia's graphs, they get about 25 million requests per day, or 750 million per month. Now, a lot of those requests are probably for images and such, but I'm pretty sure they're over the 20 million per month needed for premium service :p

Wikipedia could do pretty well on AdSense alone; I'd say they'd be able to stop relying on donations entirely, and still have money left over for charity.

Some thoughts on improving Wikipedia.

As many people have already commented, as of yet, a general audience can't invest as much trust in Wikipedia, as in a regular encyclopedia, irrespective of the actual relative merits.

As an internal benchmarking tool, the regular Wikipedia community should employ a 'Quality' metric to judge the state of the project. Roughly, this involves randomly selecting articles from all ends of the spectrum (featured articles, some estoric subjects, some mundane topics, most visited topics, in-between traffic...etc) and have a trusted & skilful panel compare these specimens against socially and academically accepted sources like regular encyclopedias, journals and books. These reviews ought to be conducted at a suitable frequency, like every 6-8 weeks.

Other areas, directly connected to improvement, involve the wiki engine. Currently, there are many articles that could be subsumed within larger articles. Instead of maintaining the data in a separate node, they should be accessible as extracts from within the larger article. HTML anchor targets only do half the work, as they load the entire article. The mediawiki engine should be specialized to handle a modern encyclopedia. Some articles have external citations, some don't. Some articles have category boxes underneath, some don't. Some articles have structured content, some don't. Like the country entries, there ought to be article templates and tools that one can inject into, and transform a page, e.g. there can be a tool: Citations, a section of the page where all citations are collected and linked to the content they're responsible for. The difference between this feature and manually creating a HTML "citations" section is that the HTML solution is context agnostic. I should be able to search only citations from a specific group of articles or check if a citation is used elsewhere on Wikipedia, e.g. let there be a single comprehensive external link "resource repository". So, if I write an article on the sport of cricket and I inject a link to a cricket history website, that link alongwith suitable keywords I provide (metadata) gets indexed. Then anyone who searches this repository and bring up all cricket links, will have my link also come up. One can cite the same source by citing the index ID of the link. Subsequently, one can call up all articles that reference that specific link.

Basically, this is about imposing some order on this wonderful initiative.

Know Your Wiki Hierarchy!

The Legion of Trolls recognizes the following ranks for troll behavior, from lowest to highest:

• sysops [wikipedia.org] are the lowest of the low, incapable of holding his own in debate, the sysop resorts to IP bans [wikipedia.org] and other technological tactics [wikipedia.org], based on the trust that the Dictator [wikipedia.org] has in him. They make truly wrong decisions, and have no clear basis for what they do - which is more or less random damage to the fabric of the Wikipedia.
• cretins are better than sysops, since they actually raise issues that matter, and show what's wrong with training and orientation material or the pseudo-socialization process that passes for "community" on this system. Their articles are generally stubs, since they know very little about the actual topics; however, regardless of their shortcomings, cretins fancy themselves to be "editors." Their agendas are transparent, and in general uninteresting, and they plod along with 'good intentions' trying to 'fix things' which they just make worse; such users must be continually reverted.
• vandals [wikipedia.org] are almost as low, for they justify the existence of sysops, but at least they do not cripple the entire project with the behavior, just a page or so at a time, and usually they give up. The main virtue that puts them higher on the scale than cretins, is that they distract and drive off sysops, which is a contribution that stands the test of time, whereas cretins don't do that nearly as well.
• authors write pedestrian articles that stand until something better comes along - they are best employed compiling lists, checking facts and asking dumb questions in Talk files, and usually log in by the same name as their body answers to on the street. They are not contemptible but they have no idea how their information is used, and they don't care, as long as they get to claim that their articles are "published".
• editors train authors to be better authors, and typically fix up things that authors don't really understand, without ever insulting them (if they do, they drop to cretins immediately, and if they drive away good authors, they are basically vandals, if they IP ban them, they drop to sysops, lowest of the low). Editors have specialties and should stick to them; they are likely to make big mistakes if they go beyond their limited understanding. They should be learning from authors all the time, and must trust other editors' judgement on topics that they simply don't care about. They are not creative but they are smart - typically they use pseudonyms but do not hide their body identities.
• ontologists solve the difficult name-space problems, noticing potential namespace conflicts far in advance, often proposing and advancing WikiProjects [wikipedia.org] when an area is well-defined and important. They actually understand how Wikipedia is used! They argue fiercely but sparsely on Talk pages and etc., and in particular are responsible for arbitrating between editors and ending revert duels creatively. The best of them are very smart, but all of them are thorough, and this thoroughness is what marks them clearly. To ontologists the most important file in the Wikipedia is Self-references [wikipedia.org], since it marks what the Wiki itself thinks it is - its reflexive identity, its actual own self-image. An ontologist usually uses a pseudonym and does not reveal his body name. Or, alternatively, a constantly shifting IP with no name whatsoever, if s/he is engaged in cleaning up problems left by poor editors and previous ontologists.

genealogy

I've long wanted a genealogy wiki. For example, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Benjamin Stinnett has several thousand descendents, about a dozen of which are building family trees, but each researcher maintains their own sets of notes on Benjamin. The wikipedia explicitly does not allow genealogical wikis, except for famous people.

What you can do to help

Wikipedia has replaced Google as my favorite site. It's arguably the one site I would actually pay to access, and I'm so grateful I don't have to.

That being said, I don't like being a leech, but I don't have any spare money right now, so I'm working on a couple of articles, but mostly, I'm correcting grammatical and spelling errors whenever I see them. This is an excellent thing for everyone with good language skills to do, and it's almost effortless. Simply editing the text of an article to correct errors or to replace an awkward phrase doesn't require one to learn Wikipedia's peculiar markup system.

Of course, this only applies to you if you're part of the minority of Slashdot readers who know how to spell "ludicrous" and "ridiculous," can tell "e.g." from "i.e.," know that the expression is "just as soon," not "just assume," and understand that, unlike in C, the closing punctuation mark in English comes before the final quote, not after.

Getting people involved

7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?

I was really looking forward to the answer for this question. There are so many cool social and technical devices in wikipedia that could potentially be talked about, and I was very interested to get a better idea of how the wikipedia operators saw it from their point of view.

Jimy doesn't seem to've answered the question by simply saying that "love for what they're doing" is what keeps people involved. Believing in wikipedia would be important, but I don't personally think that it's something that would keep people coming back.

For instance, what about the following?

• Placing edit links on every page, making it incredibly easy to change information without any overheads. (One doesn't even need to log in.)
• Supporting an infrastructure where people can take responsibility for the pages they're interested in. Watchlists, in particular.
• Defaulting to making people more involved. eg. Any edit you make on a page causes it to be added to your watchlist by default, meaning everyone can keep in touch with how others have adjusted their edits in the future.
• Providing a tidy presentation and a relatively easy-to-understand editing system, making people feel proud of what they've produced with an incentive to do more.

There are only starters. There are heaps of devices in wikipedia that seek to hook and involve people and give them every possible excuse to keep contributing once they've started. Jimmy's answer about "make them love what they're doing" just struck me as quite shallow.

Oh well; the rest of the interview was interesting. Thanks to Jimmy and the slashdot editors for producing it.

It's hardwired into my brain :)

Whenether I whant to check something, is it an complex mathematical question or ancient history or latest movie I first check wikipedia and only after that Google.

What is wikipedia really up to?

Is the encylopedia just a cover up for The Foundation designed to create a new Galactic Empire when the first one crumbles?

What about copyrighted material "slipping in"?

A while ago I was looking for material for my 9 year old son's homework. I found some stuff on Wikipedia and the same stuff (identical) on other websites. Some of it looked like whole paragraphs copied from the official website of the organization described in the Wiki entry (the particular case I encountered was not in the English version).

How does the Wikipedia avoid plagiarism, or can it? Anyone can paste in anything, and many people don't even realize there's a problem: they just see that they can "contribute" by pasting in some more info they found somewhere that is missing from the Wikipedia.

This can of thing can be real damaging, since the Wikipedia project certainly cannot afford the legal fees if it would be sued for copyright infringement (at least it is not backed up by someone like IBM ;) )

Use as reference in Colleges

I just think the whole thing about using or not Wikipedia as a trustful source of information in academic environments is very arguable. Why? Because it is already happening! I am studying in the last year of a College in Brazil, and in the beginning of the year I had an interesting presentation about the Falklands War. It contained a lot of interesting information and pictures, and in the end, the History professor included a "References" section to the slides. I was surprised and pleased to see, along the so called "respected" references, like history books, the link to the Wikipedia site. I don't know what portion of that stuff came from Wikipedia, but just seeing recognition of this work (that I already knew at the time) made me think "why not?". Yes. Why not? Knowledge is everywhere. If one says that something must be attached to a recognized name to be true, ask him if his parents were "recognized" to teach him what they did. People are recognized for their knowledge, not the other way. Geez, this could be a slashdot quote.

Re:heh

I'm not convinced. I love having a 32 volume set of black leather bound Brittanica in my house, but we bought it something like 20 years ago, and its still in great condition due to the little use its actually had. I'm definitely not in a hurry to update it. Everything's on the web or, if I need something more specialist, I'll go and buy a book dedicated to that subject. Usually from amazon.

Re:In Five Years...

The AC has a point, although I wouldn't go as far as "they're flat-out wrong" in this case... last I heard, paper encyclopedia sales weren't doing all that well.

Re:I run Gentoo

If it's the same Gentoo as on Stargate Atlantis last night, apparently you get lost by walking into closets that are really elevators or transporters or something.

Re:heh

The only possible reason that I can see for wikipedia _not_ crushing the old school out of existence is the percieved lack of scholarly quality. But I doubt that this is a concern for most users of an encyclopedia.

Or do you have another reason to believe that crushing sounds won't be heard?

Re:503 errors

Seems that somebody replaced ./ with ./../.

Problem always resides with bad parenting doesn't it?

Re:In Five Years...

No, I think it'll go down alongside "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." as one of the cute things geeks say.

Re:503 errors

Perhaps you should write a Wikipedia article about /. 503 errors.

Re:503?

yup, it appears to be slashdotted [wikipedia.org].

:)