Interview: Ask Jimmy Wales What You Will 161
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? (Score:2)
When will Wikipedia accept Bitcoin donations?
Re:When will Wikipedia accept Bitcoin donations? (Score:5, Interesting)
On a more serious note, Wikipedia, quite clearly knocked off Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedias themselves evolved out of a need to catalog the immense amount of knowledge that existed.
What do you imagine to be the technology or concept that will eventually push Wikipedia(as it currently exists) off the throne of general knowledge?
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What do you imagine to be the technology or concept that will eventually push Wikipedia(as it currently exists) off the throne of general knowledge?
Knowlege in pill form. Or so it will go according to the lore and mythology of that hallowed paragon of entertainment "The Jetsons [wikipedia.org]."
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Honestly? Probably the same system made less messy and easier to browse, and likely caused by frustration over the elitist admins that control many areas of Wikipedia like dictators, no technological upgrade or concepts needed.
The way Wikipedia is now, you either need to know the things you need to find, or know words to get there.
That is a pretty big-ass fault in design. It needs to be bookified more to actually be really useful for even more people.
To be able to just skim through the entire Wiki in a lo
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If you honestly believe the name makes everything in Britannica true, you've made a serious mistake. There was a study a couple years ago that suggested for major topics wikipedia is both more in depth, and has approximately the same factual error/word rate.
You can't simply make a claim from personal incredulity anymore about Wikipedia. Society has moved past that.
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Wikipedia hasn't knocked off anything. When you look something up in Encarta or Britannica, you can be sure that it's accurate. With Wikipedia, you can't believe a single word.
Nah.
Easy to just assert things isn't it.
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The following is a simple statement about human nature and isn't intended to reflect too deeply on my own personal perception of digital currencies.
If you want to be taken seriously, the worst thing you can do is go to every important individual you can find, and demand they take you seriously. It seems puerile to the observer.
Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
NY Times magazine article (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are you a vigilante? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did you try to find Eric Snowdon's editor account [examiner.com], 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?
Re:Why are you a vigilante? (Score:4, Informative)
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Why do you assume he is guilty
I personally think in general Snowden is an "innocent party" - a hero, in fact. Discussion of questions surrounding identity, famous people in the news, editing of Wikipedia, and so on are all well within the scope of discussions about how to improve the encyclopedia. One of the important roles that we play in the world is to encourage and emphasize openness, honesty, and transparency.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:21, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
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I thought this worthy of just popping in to comment even before the real interview because the question is so ludicrously misinformed.
I am a strong supporter of personal privacy and freedom of speech. Based on everything that I have seen so far, Eric Snowden will go down in history as a hero. I have been reading lots about him, including his youthful posts to Ars Technica. I think it really interesting to think about the process by which the young man who made those posts became the man we see before us
Full disclosure where due (Score:1)
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?
Re:Full disclosure where due (Score:4, Interesting)
This question is such nonsense. Who's keeping it a secret? There's an [edit] link above every section of every article. A tagline isn't a full description of an object.
Also, the fact that people track changes on articles, with lots of people tracking popular and worthwhile pages, means that the quality is high on most pages that matter. They're also locked when necessary. It is very easy to tell roughly how reliable a given page is, and starred pages are always good. If I only heard a description of Wikipedia, I would guess that it's open to serious abuse and misinformation, but in fact, the system works.
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I think I can answer that one.
1. Free means free as in speech. It's not necessary to clarify that detail in a title. Anyone interested can read more about wikipedia on wikipedia.
2. Brevity is crucial. Since the title of individual pages is incorporated, it's natural to sacrifice some of the text to squeeze it in.
As an adendum, I think Jimmy Wales has more or less sworn off the work of actually managing wikipedia and its content, and has instead relegated himself as a neutral final arbiter of disputes a
Deletionists (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you feel they are a problem? If so, what should be done?
http://milowent.blogspot.com/2011/03/wikipedia-deletionists-delete-article.html
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Do you feel they are a problem? If so, what should be done?
http://milowent.blogspot.com/2011/03/wikipedia-deletionists-delete-article.html
{{subst:prod|This comment duplicates thousands of other comments all over the internet}}
But seriously, what constitutes signal, and what constitutes noise is a very complex question that can't really be answered by arbitrarily categorizing people into "deletionists" and "completionists". Some things, like hoaxes, ads, and self-promotion, hinder informed-ness, and some things are really boring and minute, but informative.
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I don't think anyone, even the most rabid inclusionist, would argue that statement. *Anyone* (other than the troll that put it up) would agree that hoaxes and ads should be deleted, speedily if possible. Inclusionists (and yes, I know it's a range, not a binary, but most people generally categorize themselves as one or the other to some extent) just feel that legitimate, accurate articles deserve to exist mostly regardless of notability. Even they would generally agree that a "band" consisting of two guys i
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Ah, but the secret is, what reason to we have to believe that what's in that article is true? When the knowledge becomes so esoteric as to have not a single published source describing it, is it really knowledge(that is to say a substantiated belief) and not data? No matter what criteria you use to separate the helpful from the helpful, something will fall into a gray area.
Suppose we have an article on, say, "i kan reed" that suggests he is the legitimate heir to the throne of England. Since no one reall
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I just lost the game. I'm amazed I didn't lose it previously, as the article about the game is the quintessential example of something notable that kept getting deleted for non-notability and/or nonverifiability. I'd argue personally that if a bunch of people are talking about a band on the internet, that's probably good enough evidence that the band isn't a fake, unless someone offers proof that it is. But that's not wikipedia's way, and whatever, I can live with it. It does, however, make me far happier e
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On wikipedia, the criteria for both are identical. Published sources.
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Well, the original philosophy of wikipedia was that if somebody made an inaccurate article about a subject, then among the thousands of eyes reading the article, there would eventually be somebody knowledgable enough to improve it. That model seemed to work pretty well, and lead to wikipedia growing rapidly while still being pretty high quality, if I recall correctly. This was the big surprise about wikipedia - most people I knew (and myself included) were too cynical to believe something like that could wo
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I feel they are a problem.
I have seen two articles that I think should have been kept; but some asshole that Mr. Wales trusts decided that they should be deleted. Seems like deleting articles is a power trip to me.
So whenever Mr. Wales asks for money, I am reminded to say no because he allows power tripping editors to ruin Wikipedia. Why would I donate money to these people?
Collaboration with National Libraries (Score:3, Interesting)
Editing of Information (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
distortion and censoring of information (Score:3)
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.
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Oh, please. Wikipedia doesn't discriminate against offline sources; in fact, it encourages their use. The problem that you're coming up against is notability. Notability is established by adding sources -- online or offline -- to an article. Completely unsourced articles are essentially useless, because there's no verifiability, only original research. If you want to publish original research, put it on your blog. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; does not publish original research.
Re:distortion and censoring of information (Score:4)
Oh please, you actually bring up the third problem, the cry of "not notable" in the minds of a culturally ignorant young person who only relies on search engine counts to determine notability.
I was of course referring to articles with offline sources!
"Notability" in the minds of most of the young internet users means they find all kinds of information on the net, but they are too lazy to get off their rear end and research and discover just how notable subjects were in past decades. They only take the view of their own culture in the "reality" created on the net and mass media.
this disgusting attitude harms wikipedia, important topics have been deleted.
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Speaking on behalf of the lazy, with so much data online, there's very little bang for the buck in visiting a library (you're likely to find 90% of the same info you already got online). In addition, my loca
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no one is whining, but the need for "real" standard encyclopedia maintained by professional researchers will stand as long as projects like wikipedia have this juvenile problem
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thats right, become a vandal and disrupt the wiki in order to save it.
the wikiwhiners are out in full force tonight
SPOF (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:SPOF (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is not just one file, but the total of the files looks to be on the order of a few dozen gigabytes for the English Wikipedia.
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Wikipedia is mirrored by several sites. Additionally, anyone can download the entirety of the site, if they wish.
If the WMF pulled the plug tomorrow, there'd still be mirrors, hardcopy versions (check out the number of published books on Amazon that are nothing but printed Wikipedia articles), the official Wikipedia 1.0 hardcopy version, and numerous partial mirrors that were reconstructed through browser caches.
I'm not worried.
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Currently, Wikipedia Foundation is a single point of failure.
Its actually not, unless you belive digital media itself is a "single point of failure" (its not).
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It is not difficult to imagine various Alexandria Library scenarios in which Humanity looses crucial information.
Ok, let's imagine wikipedia going down like the Alexandria Library did.
So what? People will have kept snapshots of Wikipedia (at the very least). Wikipedia's content is not constrained by its physical medium, nor is it constrained by a copyright license that prevents republishing. Barring the end of the world, wikipedia content will live on just fine.
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An interesting point, but not necessarily accurate, unless you consider metadata to be worthless. Knowing where to find other knowledge is unique information. While Wikipedia does not host original research, it does present that information in a manner which is useful for specific purposes, providing a different, but very real value.
Question... (Score:2)
How's Rachel doing?
Certified articles? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Wouldn't it be better to have PR people posting (Score:2)
Great way to mess up something wonderful... (Score:1)
Just get the government involved.
Abusive admins (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Which articles should we give aliens? (Score:2)
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How are we tracking them, given that they're apparently traveling faster than light (for most definitions of "edge of our solar system")?
Has WikiLeaks harmed WikiPedia? (Score:2)
Or even helped its reputation? And more generally, what's the impact of WikiXXX on WikiPedia?
Game of Articles (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Evidence (Score:2)
Have you got any?
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Have you got any?
Sorry, it's not AmiMoJo's job to make up for your own stunning lack of what amounts to common knowledge and inability to look at the numerous examples of Wikipedia bias that have had articles on this very site.
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Someone makes an allegation, they can't expect Jimmy to respond unless they substantiate it in the process. I don't think it's unreasonable, and in fact by providing said substantiation the odds of the question being answered increase immeasurably. Is that stunning too? Are you stunned?
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Perhaps it is not a poster's "job" to do so, but if AmiMoJo actually wants the problem fixed, as opposed to simply bitching about it, then s/he should try and provide some examples while s/he has the ear of Mr. Wales.
It would be one thing if you actually believed that Wales hasn't heard this all before, but chances are, he gets some variation of the same question in interviews, in his inbox, and on talk pages all the time.
Additionally, by providing examples, other people can replicate his/her experience and
Re:Game of Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
As one of my favorite ongoing examples, check out Fractal Antennas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna [wikipedia.org]
See the Talk page for all the back and forth about the corporate involvement, meat puppets being used, links to competitors being removed (fractus.com), and all other manner of wonderful stuff. There's a history temporary protection when the occasional admin wanders by, but then that expires, and the paid shills come back, and continue.
It's a very important subject, and yet there's not a bunch of editors willing to sit on the article and continue to revert the info for years and years, as Nathan Cohen continues to corrupt it into fluffy advertising for his (and ONLY his) company.
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The article on nuclear power is pretty bad. Half the material is sourced from the industry and its shill sites.
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... some guy owned the article ...
*25 threads about spelling on the talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yogurt/Archive_index)
*One move discussion with about 25 votes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yogurt/Archive_2#Requested_move)
*Another with about 50 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yogurt/Archive_6#Move_page_to_yogurt)
Obviously this one guy who owned the article -- probably an admin -- was a real lamer (but the tons of people who wanted to move the article were not lamers).
Banners (Score:1)
Flagged Revisions (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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I think the lack of immediate result when editing would greatly decrease the interest in editing Wikipedia for new people, and hence harm recruitment and in the long term retard the growth of the encyclopedia. For fringe articles, there might not be any established editors with knowledge on the subject, but plenty of people outside wikipedia who could start a page. But since nobody would be qualified to review that page, it would hang in limbo indefinitely, and the potential new editor would probably give u
Interactive tours and applications (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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...will Wikipedia ever be able to flex any interactive multimedia muscle, and create a more interactive and guided experience for young learners?
Not to answer for Jimmy but NO! That would be a TERRIBLE idea. Wikimedia needs to concentrate on Wikipedia. But there's nothing to prevent some entrepreneur from copying the content and creating such a thing themselves. I'm sure they'd love to license up some one who wanted to do that.
Why not make Wikipedia self-sustaining? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 a
Donation with flattr (Score:2)
Editors Dwindling (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Good question! I would be intersted to hear the answer to this myself. I think the decline could be due to a combination of so many articles already existing, and too much deletionism.
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Many of the editors (not all) are a-holes. Unfortunately, the bad tends to drive out the good. Who wants to be associated with that?
Ideally, some editor reeducation would occur but unfortunately, I think it's gone a bit systemic.
Blame (Score:1)
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.
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The tool you describe exists; it's called WikiBlame. [ramselehof.de]
Better photos of you? (Score:2, Troll)
Most photos of you are ugly, for example, the photo in this N.Y. Times article: Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire. [nytimes.com]
Data (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikia.com] I created this template to do this: http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Approval [wikia.com] 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 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_Canada [wikipedia.org]
etc
etc
That you have a single article with tabbed perspectives?
Thanks for your answers!
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I would like to know 2 things:
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms. Oh, I'll come in again.
Seriously though, 1 question per post, dude.
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If he answers one, great, if he answers two all the better, if he answers them all - awesome!
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1) Not at all what I was referring to. WikiData is extremely limited, appears to only handle 1 to 1, and has a very clunky/non-intuitive interface. I was referring to something with perhaps an OpenRico spreadsheet style interface for managing data sets to allow better management/navigation/cross-referencing of data sets (examples might be Nvidia/Radeon articles). It also doesn't deal with dynamic data. Obviously security would be a concern but some constantly fluctuating data is impractical to update bu
Deletion (Score:2, Interesting)
Jimmy: Have anything you ever written on Wikipedia been deleted for no good reason?
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He added his own correct birthday, which was then reverted to an incorrect one that happened to be on his license. And according to the rules, the reverting editor had a good point in doing so because Wales did it himself without documentation.
Of course, Wales could have just put up his own web page, added the correct birth date and linked to his own site as a source.
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I think citations are supposed to be independent sources.
Search Parameters (Score:2)
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?
Editor decline, long rang plans (Score:2)
Simple question... (Score:1)
Will you make the disclaimer a bit more in the face of readers?
Criticism of Wikipedia -- there is a place for it (Score:1)
How will VisualEditor better your word processor? (Score:1)
Wikicurriculums & Wikitextbooks (Score:2)
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...
Quackery and the NPOV (Score:2)
Please (Score:2)
Could you add the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters to the homepage? It would be really helpful.
Collaboration tool to gather news (Score:1)
advice on starting a web community? (Score:2)
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
Does Wikipedia Make People Smarter? (Score:3)
Email exchanges (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Entry criteria (Score:2)
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[citation needed]
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I'd rather have google ads than those donation campaigns.
Don't be drammatic, they come along once in a blue moon.
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Care to cite that? I do a fair amount of astronomical observations and to date I haven't noticed any correlations between lunar cycles and the pledge campaigns.
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Does the complete corruption infesting Wikipedia's administrative structure bother you yet?