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The Internet

C-SPAN Interviews Wikipedia Founder 160

Posted by Zonk from the multi-dimensional-knowledge dept.
TrentL writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (aka Jimbo) was recently interviewed on C-SPAN's primetime program Q&A. Topics included the origins of Wikipedia, governing philosophy, and criticisms from members of the print encyclopedia community." From the article: "I had the idea basically from watching the growth of the free software movement. So all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."
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C-SPAN Interviews Wikipedia Founder More

C-SPAN Interviews Wikipedia Founder

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  • I love WIkipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jack Earl ( 913275 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @04:38AM (#13649143) Homepage
    Wikipedia is amazing. A shining example of what people can do from working together as a community for the spread of information and making the world a better place. It is great to see Stallman's influence reaching to such extents that very awesome sites like Wiki are started and become what they are today.

    • Re:I love WIkipedia. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:14AM (#13649221)
      I love sneaking my name into articles. So far I've taught a famous guitarist how to play, worked for NASA during an Apollo mission, and got shot out of a cannon.

      • Re:I love WIkipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:28AM (#13649239) Journal
        Congratulations. You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does. It must make you feel like a big person to be able to vandalise a website.

        I know this will get modded down, but these sort of people annoy me.
        • I feel sorry for him. He's done something he considers clever and funny and yet, by definition, he can't tell anyone about it. That's a pretty tragic tail.

        • Sheesh, get over yourself (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Look like somebodies got a case of the serious. I'm not the original AC but I did mod him up because it is funny.

          Ever read the book 'Trickster makes the world' by Lewis Hyde? Tricksters and pranksters do more for society with their mischievous behavior than other archetypes. The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better. Without tricksters, cultures would stagnate. Tricksters cre

          • Re:Sheesh, get over yourself (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Wikipedia is not the voice of the Authority, but that of the people.

          • Re:Sheesh, get over yourself (Score:5, Insightful)

            by HoneyBunchesOfGoats ( 619017 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @06:11AM (#13649329)
            The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better.

            Unfortunately, he is also making an encyclopeida article (and thus the encyclopedia as a whole) into something worse.

            Tricksters create through destruction. It disappoints me that nerdish communities like Slashdot, metafilter, wikipedia et. al. don't have a collective sense of humour.

            Surely there could be some more outlet they could find which is more positive than crapping over someone else's hard work?
            • they probably should go to
              http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [uncyclopedia.org]
            • No, the trickster is good. The trickster demonstrates the weaknesses in a harmless way, and usually in a way nobody thought of before. A good trickster has pride in originality.

              Why is that good? The trickster is the herald of those who would exploit the weakness that the trickster has discovered. The trickster is just having a little harmless fun. The Jackals will try to make a living (and a killing) out of the same weaknesses the trickster discovers. What happens when wiki spammers figure out that if
              • Oh please. Do you like to trip little old ladies getting off the bus?

                *Real* tricksters stencil political slogans on police cars outside of donut shops.

                Before you tell someone else to "get over themselves", stop calling yourself a fucking "trickster". ("Troll", I might believe).

          • Re:Sheesh, get over yourself (Score:5, Insightful)

            by StrawberryFrog ( 67065 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @07:22AM (#13649616) Homepage Journal
            The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better

            Complete bollocks. How do you get from "different" to "better"? If I randomly flipped some bits on your computer's hard drive, what are the odds it would be an improvement? (asside from the obvious that it would get you off the internet)

            It disappoints me that nerdish communities like Slashdot, metafilter, wikipedia et. al. don't have a collective sense of humour.

            Oh yeah, a randomly chosen enyclopedia article is the right place for your attempt at humour (hint: it's only funny when other people laugh too), just like a random building in town is your urinal. You seriously need to grow up.
            • hint: it's only funny when other people laugh too
              hint: like when Duchamp presented a urinal at an art exhibition? I don't think the art establishment found that very funny but it opened the world up to a whole new genre of art.
              Complete bollocks.
              Things are rarely that black and white. I think you're missing something.
              • like when Duchamp presented a urinal at an art exhibition?

                A better analogy would be presenting art where art was not expected, like what Banksy [banksy.co.uk] does. However defacting wikipedia with hidden lies is just not of the same quality at all- it's neither big nor clever, and doesn't open up any new genres of anything except lack of potty-training.

                I think you're missing something.

                No, I think you're missing something, like being on the receiving end of this kind of shit for long enough.
              • Yeah a whole genre of shit art. In most meanings of the word. Crap art by bullshit artists.

                The talent you need to make "art" like that is not the same sort of talent that Michelangelo, Leonardo, Gauguin, Trumbull, etc had (the artists, not the turtles ;) ).

                Even I can make a sculpture of someone's head with solidified shit/blood/urine/spit or whatever. Bonus points if you pick a subject that offends 2 or more religious/conservative/cultural groups or something. No artistic talent needed.

                Same goes for throwin

          • Re:Sheesh, get over yourself (Score:5, Funny)

            by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @08:27AM (#13650008) Homepage Journal
            Tricksters create through destruction.
            Cool. So you wouldn't mind if I creatively scratched my name into your car door with a set of keys then?

          • The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better.

            Your logic is wrong. And your thinking is grandiose. But before getting into that, let's spend two paragraphs on some background that you apparently missed in your studies:

            If you had read up on the trickster archetype with care, you would have noticed that all of the societal changes that Trickster brought about arose from his ver

        • > You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.

          No wikipedia is the reason wikipedia has the problems it does. would you sit $10,000 in unmarked bills in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and expect someone not to fuck with it? No you'd take it away and keep it among people you can trust only.

          the internet is like that shopping mall and is everywhere and contains everyone. you can try to change all of the possible vandals but you'll eventually work up just working against
          • No wikipedia is the reason wikipedia has the problems it does. would you sit $10,000 in unmarked bills in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and expect someone not to fuck with it?

            But your rather stretched analogy relies on the information in Wikipedia being of some value - since anyone can come along and edit it, where exactly is the value? Exactly how will you be able to gather "kudos" amongst your peers just because you can edit a freely-editable page? Big deal. No, slipping your own name into Wiki

        • Wikipedia and vandalism (Score:5, Insightful)

          by typical ( 886006 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @08:14AM (#13649920) Journal
          You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.

          Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.

          As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.

          Someone that contributes 95% useful information with a few wrong things thrown in could probably cause some damage -- but nobody seems to want to really hurt Wikipedia thus far. [shrug]

          Also, most of the vandals seem to be schoolchildren, and the vandalism is pretty amateur, whereas the regular Wiki contributors have worked such that the grammar and writing style of the bulk of Wikipedia is of excellent quality. Against this backdrop, vandalism tends to stand out -- someone who has graduated from high school with a solid English background seems to be less likely to be interested in running around vandalising other people's donations. "Teacher" is a popular article to vandalize, for instance, as are those of pop bands.

          Slashdot sees a lot of trolls, but I think that part of the "troll psychology" is that trolling is considered fun -- successful trolling takes some skill, causes little or no damage (at least on the individual level, though Slashdot being flooded with trolls can get annoying), and people see an immediate reaction to what they've written. On Wiki, where vandalizing articles does hurt people, the most common reaction is just to see some inert text followed by the vandalism being backed out. There's no "modding up", and messages don't become part of a timeless archive (as they can be backed out).

          I, personally, think that creating/improving vandalism flagging to Wikipedia would be one of the more useful research projects out there (i.e. this is applicable to a lot of things besides Wikipedia, successfully doing this can directly cause a lot of good, and there is interesting data mining research involved), and I'm guessing that if someone hasn't already jumped on this, someone will at some point.

          • Re:Wikipedia and vandalism (Score:4, Insightful)

            by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater.gmail@com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @11:59AM (#13651698) Homepage
            Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.
            The growing problem at the 'pedia (and largely unnoticed to date) isn't malicious attacks, but what I call 'ignorance attacks'.

            Malicious attacks are actively defended against. A large portion of the userbase (but a proportion that is decreasing over time) actively watches for new articles, large numbers of edits by contributors who are not logged in, check controversial articles regularly, etc... etc...

            On the other hand, the single IP that makes a few minor edits and then gets bored almost always 'gets away', because he doesn't trip the flags of the watchers. In the pages I maintain - I have to revert or remove these minor (and incorrect) edits from one of more on almost a daily basis and I am seemingly the only one watching these far our of the mainstream articles. (I've left some of the crap edits in place for days to see if anyone else wanders by and fixes it. 90% of the time, nobody does.) Wandering among random pages - I find the same pattern.

            While the walls of the 'pedia are stoutly defended - meanwhile rats are gnawing away at the grain store and the cats are few and overworked.

            • The growing problem at the 'pedia (and largely unnoticed to date) isn't malicious attacks, but what I call 'ignorance attacks'. Malicious attacks are actively defended against. A large portion of the userbase (but a proportion that is decreasing over time) actively watches for new articles, large numbers of edits by contributors who are not logged in, check controversial articles regularly, etc... etc... On the other hand, the single IP that makes a few minor edits and then gets bored almost always 'gets

          • As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.

            Phew! It's a good thing the vast majority of web users aren't on dynamic IP addresses assigned from a large pool.

            Oh wait...
        • Sure, be angry at the vandal, but there are always going to be vandals. This just proves that Wikipedia is never going to be authoritative. That's the difference between idealism and realism. If we were all ideal persons, all of us, then Wikipedia would be the authoritative source we all wish it was, nobody would lie or steal, we would have world peace etc.
      • Actually, having just done a length SQL query on a recent dump of the wikipedia database, I'm 80% certain that he's just a bullshitter.

      • No, you probably didn't. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No, you most likely didn't do any of those things, and this kind of vandalism is not a significant problem for wikipedia. Those kinds of trivial vanity and false information are a dime a dozen on wikipedia, and the system handles them well. Please people, be a bit critical of self-proclamied successfull vandalizers, unless they can provide a diff showing something they have actually done.

        If someone has the time, feel free to look through all articles containing the word "cannon" (they're not that many). I d

  • The best bit is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @04:44AM (#13649155) Homepage Journal
    ... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.
    • ... if you log in, you can change his answers to what you think he should have said.

      The great thing about this comment is, its true. And what makes that so great is, the genius that makes wikipedia what it is. We take it for granted, but wikipedia proves to be a great community. Because for every guy that would log in and "fix" what his answers were, someone else will log in and change it to what it really should be. Not to mention, the edit on the fly of it, means up to date information for "hot topic

  • Election Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @04:50AM (#13649171) Homepage Journal
    During the election, the bio on Kerry was full of lies. Perhaps it still it. It was like reading about Bizarro-Kerry, where everything bad was turned to good. I guess that's anti-Bizarro Kerry or something.

    Wikipedia is great for articles on technical or trivia, but there's too much incentive for people who have a strong interest in a certain story being told to go in there and muck it up, whatever the cost. Usually there are two sides, but one side will win - and that's what you see.

    E.g. I'm pretty sure that either the Zionists or anti-Zionists have filled up wikipedia with their viewpoint. One side has likely one and then twisted things freely.

    That is similar to the book reviews at Amazon: authors routinely attempt to manipulate their rankings -- e.g. ordering a bunch of books, then returning them. They have too much of a stake in doing it.

    If this guy could figure out some way to make Wikipedia correct on controversial issues (or at least not have blatant falsehoods), he'd do us all a lot of good. This would require some sort of motiviational/compensation system that I simply can't imagine, because the truth doesn't pay.

    • Re:Election Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @04:56AM (#13649186)
      Blatant falsehoods are usually spotted quickly and fixed, at least in my experience. I work on a lot of the political pages that get mucked with a lot. It is a pain though and it only works because so many editors devote so much time to keeping articles accurate. I tell students to use wikipedia as a resource rather than a "source" - I don't let them cite it in papers but I encourage them to use it as a resource for finding other sources of information and for finding out basic background info. There is no guarantee that an entry is correct at any given time, but by and large corrections are made quickly, and it is very often a useful starting place for doing research or finding answers to questions.

      • Re:Election Stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gowen ( 141411 )
        The sad thing is, these days you find some info on wikipedia and do a google search to find a site that will verify/refute that information, and all you get are wikipedia mirrors :(
        • The sad thing is, these days you find some info on wikipedia and do a google search to find a site that will verify/refute that information, and all you get are wikipedia mirrors :(
          Equally, the 'pedia prefers the contents of webpages as sources (because they cab be googled), over the contents of $75.00 reference books that are in the hands of a few.

      • Re: Election Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gidds ( 56397 ) <slashdot@NospaM.gidds.me.uk> on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:32AM (#13649246) Homepage
        use wikipedia as a resource rather than a "source" - [not] cite it in papers but [...] as a resource for finding other sources of information and for finding out basic background info.

        So, just like every other encyclopaedia, then?

      • Re:Election Stuff (Score:4, Interesting)

        by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @08:03AM (#13649850) Journal

        Blatant falsehoods are usually spotted quickly and fixed, at least in my experience.

        Depends where they are. I found a few physics pages about a year ago which were filled with references to the "POOP equation". The references had been there for months.

        I work on a lot of the political pages that get mucked with a lot.

        Those are usually the high trafficked pages, so yeah things get fixed more quickly, unless they're popular myths among Wikipedians. Try reading some of the pages on the GPL for instance. I go back every once in a while and fix it, but it's constantly filled with misnomers and propaganda.

        It is a pain though and it only works because so many editors devote so much time to keeping articles accurate.

        What's probably worse is that many of the long standing editors overcompensate and will delete many things that are indeed true thinking that they're not. I'm not sure what the sense is in letting anonymous users contribute if you're going to have 100 non-anonymous users each fact checking anything they contribute anyway. Might as well just force the anonymous users to leave a message and let one of the logged in users fix things themselves.

        There is no guarantee that an entry is correct at any given time, but by and large corrections are made quickly, and it is very often a useful starting place for doing research or finding answers to questions.

        I completely agree there. In fact, I think Wikipedia *usually* shines when it comes to current events and obscure subjects or subjects with multiple points of view. Of course, they kind of totally screwed up in their initial coverage of the Menezes murder, but the vast majority of the media did too.

    • Re:Election Stuff (Score:3, Informative)

      by gowen ( 141411 )

      the bio on Kerry was full of lies. Perhaps it still is... I'm pretty sure that either the Zionists or anti-Zionists have filled up wikipedia with their viewpoint.

      I dunno, but I think your opinions might have more validity if you'd demonstrated evidence of even the slightest bit of research. But hey, you're such an intellectual heavyweight that you consider posting near the top of a slashdot discussion to be more important than actually supporting your assertions with evidence.

      And yes, during the US elect

      • Re:Election Stuff (Score:5, Informative)

        by shreevatsa ( 845645 ) <shreevatsa DOT slashdot AT gmail DOT com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @06:19AM (#13649358)
        Apart from what you said, there are several reasons why vandalism on Wikipedia really isn't such an issue:
        1. Nonsense and falsehoods are quickly spotted and fixed back.
        2. If a "hot" article like the one on Kerry during an election is being too frequently edited and fixed back (if there is a "revert war"), the article is locked, and visitors to the page are informed.
        3. Most importantly, there is always the History page for every article. This is in my opinion, Wikipedia's best feature -- if you suspect that a particular page might have false stuff on it, all you have to do is to click "History" at the top of the page, and see what edits have been made to the page lately. I do this for every article; it only takes a couple minutes more, at worst. Looking at the edit history (and comparing different versions) can instantly tell you whether you've landed on the page right during an edit war, show you both sides, show you what was last added or changed, etc.

        • Re:Election Stuff (Score:2, Insightful)

          by David Off ( 101038 )
          > Nonsense and falsehoods are quickly spotted and fixed back.

          The problem is not so much the obvious vandalism and falsehoods but the seemingly plausible but incorrect information that people put in and some over zealous "guardians" who protect pages from any evolution.

    • A critical commentary on wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)

      by fantomas ( 94850 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:33AM (#13649248)
      Some nice points made over at The Register critically commenting on wikipedia.

        Wikipedia's Emergent People fail to impress readers [theregister.co.uk]. Makes the nice point that a bazaar might not necesarily create a better structure than a cathedral method of collating information, i.e. lots of ill-informed time rich people don't necessarily give you a great answer. I'm all for wikipedia, but I think it still needs to be treated with a certain scepticism like any other publication.

      • Re:A critical commentary on wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "it still needs to be treated with a certain scepticism like any other publication."

        This is a meaningless statement. He basically just said that it is just as good as any other publication. I mean, was he expecting Wikipedia to be the one and only publication in existence that you can assume to be absolutely 100% accurate 100% of the time? No. Obviously with any publication, as he stated, a certain skepticism is needed, and obviously Wikipedia is no exception.

        His criticism is meaningless.

    • Re:Election Stuff (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hachete ( 473378 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:59AM (#13649302) Homepage Journal
      I like the current system that tags certain articles controversial. One way of insuring accountability is to ban easily obtained accounts, or having identity checked and then tracking the changes made. But then it wouldn't be wikipedia would.

      Even hard-copy publications like the Encylopaedia Britannica has bias.

      I don't believe there is such a thing as "the truth". Just doesn't exist. I think the best you can get is to identify the changer, mark articles which are controversial as controversial. Certainly sensitive articles like Kerry's or Bush's should be marked as such, possibly banning editing during sensitive times. These are fine-tuning issues. I think the basic model is sound, and based on a well-founded historical precedent.

      I regard the original large-edition OED as the ultimate volunteer-effort. In fact, I don't think the original could have been completed without volunteer effort. Compare and contrast the OED with simmilar projects in other countries i.e. Sweden which, as far as I am aware, use a more academic-type effort to try achieve a similar aim as the OED but with less success in that they're prover harder to complete with this methodology. Most of these projects are works in progress after a very long time.
      • I don't believe there is such a thing as "the truth". Just doesn't exist.

        Is that the truth?

    • Taking what's written in Wikipedia as sole proof of something being true is obviously not smart. However, that's also true of conventional media (books, TV, newspapers etc). The difference with Wikipedia is that it does allow all sides of a debate to put forward their point of view on a subject if they want.

      Taking your Zionist/Anti-Zionist comment - the page on the holocaust is mostly devoted to the commonly accepted facts about what happened, but there is also a section at the bottom about holocaust denier
    • With all due respect, this is crap.

      I read an article just the other night that was locked, for exactly the reasons you state.

      One side had a very biased point of view, as did the other.

      The fact that the article you mention was not also locked speaks volumes about whether there really were lies in it at all.

    • Re:Election Stuff (Score:4, Funny)

      by br00tus ( 528477 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @10:35PM (#13655931)
      I have been on Wikipedia for years. You are absolutely correct, Wikipedia does not handle controversial issues well. And I do not see much hope that it ever will. Things keep getting more and more complicated and large, and the issue gets more and more difficult to solve, and with every step, Wikipedia takes a step away from being able to solve it.

      If you go to Wikipedia's fonr page, they have everything cataloged in eight master categories. Wikipedia does the Mathematics and Science categories very well. How many edit wars are there over Mandelbrot sets? Not many. Science is the same way, quantum mechanics is a good article everyone can agree on. Once in a while you get some nutty guy with weird theories, but the community will not put up with it. When politics and religion intrude on science, like with global warming or creationism, then some of the edit warring can come in, but in Science and Mathematics, arguments are small, and usually in categories with some crossover to other categories.

      At the other end of the spectrum are the History and Society categories. I find these very biased, with edit wars that get worse and worse and so forth. If people are shooting each other in Kashmir, north Ireland, Gaza and whatnot, isn't it normal to expect people won't collaborate together on Wikipedia? With the situation not headed towards a solution, but getting worse, I see the eventual outcome of pro-Bush, pro-Israel people going to wikis like Wikinfo, and anti-Bush, pro-Palestinian people going to wikis like Demopedia, Dkosopedia, or even Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. There seem to be more left-wing wiki encyclopedias than right-wing ones - Wikinfo doesn't even call itself conservative, although the owner of Wikinfo is conservative, and Wikinfo's content is sort of conservative. Anyhow this is how I see things going, left and right wingers will have their own wikis for Society and History category articles, and perhaps they'll come to Wikipedia to duke it out over Wikipedia's article.

    • Re:Election Stuff (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SuperFes ( 831946 )
      I know this message only has a 0.003% chance of being read by anybody.

      It doesn't make any sense for one guy to be forced to fix our society when all he has is a web-site. I don't understand why you would blame the creator of a community for the issues that exist in our society.

      Any time you provide access for a human or many humans for that matter to make one or more mistakes, inevitability it will happen, there are enough humans prone to at least a few more mistakes (And we're always making more!).

      I've rea

  • You heard it here first. (Score:5, Funny)

    by uberchicken ( 121048 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @04:53AM (#13649173)
    LAMB: When did Wikipedia start?

    WALES: It started in January of 2001.

    LAMB: Where?

    WALES: On the Internet. [...]

    I stopped reading right there.
  • "Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners."

    "Uncorrected" is right. Still a bit of tuning to do with that speech-interpretation engine, methinks. (To be fair, Jimmy Wales is not the most skillful of speakers.)

    Still. Way cool that Wikipedia is on C-SPAN!
  • I love Wiki...

    but I always verify the info with another source or two because people (even the majority) are sometimes wrong.

    For instance, most Americans still think there's a connection between Saddam and 911.

  • People are so ignorant. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Silverlancer ( 786390 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:08AM (#13649208)
    Every time there is a wikipedia article on slashdot, there's a bunch of arrogant, stupid posts that get modded informative. They usually state something like "you can edit the article to change that, and prove you wrong!!!!11111" They also usually fail to mention the fact that there's a nice "permenant link button" that links you to the specific revision of the page, NOT the most recent page, eliminating any such possibility.
    • Great, so once I'm satisfied that the facts are correct to my liking, I can keep them that way for as long as I like.

      Sounds fantastic, I'll just post that "Silverlancer" is synonymous with baby goat raper in Yiddish, then link to it every time I see your posts come up.

      Magnificent!

    • Dude, cool down. Since the "permanent link" was introduced only a few weeks ago, it would have been difficult for previous Slashdot comments to reference it.

  • Giving credit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:13AM (#13649216)
    I saw part of the interview and it's a shame that he didn't give credit to Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented wiki and showed what was possible wrt community building with the Portland Patterns Repository.

  • User-defined facts vs. AUTHORITY (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Monday September 26, 2005 @05:20AM (#13649230)
    Wikipedia's main claim to fame is its ability to evolve with time as new facts are available. A topic like NASA can be updated just as frequently as the main NASA webpage by anyone with the gumption to do it. People who have extensive topical knowledge can give that information to the world with an entry in Wikipedia. And the more people that participate, the more voluminous and comprehensive the information gets.

    Unfortunately, this is also the online encyclopedia's Achilles heel. When the entire database is open to anyone willing to edit the posts, it runs the risk of getting not only incorrect information but also maliciously incorrect information. As someone else mentioned in another post before this one, topics that engender strong emotions frequently succumb to "vandalism". But other less popular topics also run the risk of being vandalized, and since they are not as frequently viewed or commonly understood, the incorrect information presents a timebomb for any hapless dataminer.

    So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us? Lexis Nexis is still around, charging outrageous fees for very good information. Does Wikipedia compete with authoritative encyclopedias, or is it just a condensed version of the Internet (which is to say a sometimes useful, sometimes useless collection of random topics)?
    • If Wikipedia was a condensed version of the internet, 9 out of 10 entries would be porn.
    • So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us? Lexis Nexis is still around, charging outrageous fees for very good information. Does Wikipedia compete with authoritative encyclopedias, or is it just a condensed version of the Internet (which is to say a sometimes useful, sometimes useless collection of random topics)?

      Wikipedia in its current state is like the knowledge corpus of a bot that could beat any human at Trivial Pursuit, by knowing cor

    • So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us?

      You can continue to use Britannica if you like. However, if you believe it is in any sense without error, you're an idiot. (Incidentally, my usual example here is the Britannica article on Frank Zappa, which said his given name was "Francis" [wrong]. This was particularlty amusing because it proved the "expert" commisioned to write the "authoritative" article on Zappa, hadn't even read the man's a

  • Wiki has changed the basic nature of truth itself (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @06:11AM (#13649330) Homepage Journal
    Since Wiki can be updated by whomever has the greatest degree of brute force, it has changed the very nature of what truth, and accuracy are. One can reshape 'truth' and remake it in just about any image one desires. If for example one wanted to delegitimize evolution or uplift suicide bombing as a noble endevor one would be free to rewrite history as one saw fit. And the idea that there are even competing points of view would be driven by the sheer signal to noise ratio those competing points of view could drive through the Wiki system. Wiki is the perfect embodiment of our post modern view of the world where everything is everything, all values, ideas and beliefs are equally fair and might makes right.
    • From Jimbos wikipage:
      This article has recently been posted on Slashdot. Please watch out for any trolls that may target this article.

      What on earth do they mean?

    • You are kind of wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jettoki ( 894493 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @07:33AM (#13649667)
      Wikipedia has not changed the nature of truth. Wikipedia has only made it easier to access free, democratic information, thus allowing readers to make more informed choices about truth based on a larger range of fact and opinion. It is, in my opinion, very much preferable to watching news or the discovery channel, where fact-checking is such a tedious and after-the-fact process that it barely ever occurs.

      If you want to criticize someone for homogenizing the truth, look to secondary school and university educators and textbook publishers, who cannot afford to have a definite perspective on truth, due to lobbyist groups and bureaucrats.
      • Else I could fire all the professional historians in the world who's job it is to evaluate and vett the facts and simply toss everything up to whomever thinks they have a credible opinion.
        • I think that we need to temper this discussion with the word 'polemic' (a posh word for black-and-whitism). Wikipedia is terrible when anyone can post factually incorrect content which damages its usefulness to inform. Wikipedia is great when there are other sources than the Orthodoxy -- any of the religious, political, historical or other expressions of fact -- allowed to make contribution to its content. Wikipedia is best when the alternatives to mainstream views are represented, listened to and learnt
          • If I wanted a quick reference for Boyle's Law or Newton's gravitational constant or the average number of young in a litter of hedgehogs I could probably find some fairly undisputed sources for that practically anywhere. But clearly the intent of Wiki is to add 'currency' to things which are in fact, current. And that is the great danger, isn't it?
            • Are you talking about the difficulties of peer-contributed and unregulated texts like Wikipedia to transcend the problems of spin and personal interest? It's the same problem with open source code, which is met with the claiming that distributed development makes more reliable program code ("with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"): sufficient people viewing and vetting the Wikipedia's content will ensure that its 'currency' is not devalued.

    • Re:Wiki has changed the basic nature of truth itse (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who says anything was ever written correctly the first time anyways. If anything, wikipedia encourgaes an exchange of opposing truths. The more perspectives provided of an object or subject the more accurate a picture may be drawn by reader. One thing is certain that humans never get it right the first time though. Wiki allows revisions by various authors and exposure to ideas that would go otherwise un-noted. The full truth on anything should contain the ideas of those on all sides.

      Wikipedia allows di
      • Between an agreed upon set of circumstances generally conceived as fact or at least factually based, a set which is therefore possible to have a discussion, and the vague opinions and feelings of the discussion itself? That's pathetic.

        Julius Caesar invented the artesian well, I guess because it is my sense of it that that statement is true.
    • You may be on to something...there's not one mention of this new nature of truth in the entry [wikipedia.org], and there doesn't appear to be any debate about this new nature of truth in the discussion page [wikipedia.org], and I can't find anyone who has even attempted to note its new nature in any prior revision [wikipedia.org]. Therefore we can conclude that this change to the nature of truth is unprecedented, and it's probably undocumented because the contributors to that entry have an agenda to conceal it from us.

  • Wikipedia's own servers are somewhat flaky... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @07:16AM (#13649591) Homepage
    I was struck by Jimmy Wales' remark that "all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."

    The odd thing is that Wikipedia itself is not a high quality site, in the sense of being fast and reliable. For a site that is so important--and it really is important now--with so much traffic, it is quite frequently either down, or so heavily loaded that you get odd behavior, such as error messages, uncertainty whether edits have actually been committed, and so forth.

    I would guess that Wikipedia works "the way I'd expect" perhaps 80% of the time, and is "glacially slow, flaky, or outright down" maybe 5% of the time. It's in a completely different category from, say, Slashdot.

    I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come. However, I note that every fund drive they've ever had has met its goals and reasonably quickly, too.

    (The stock WIkipedian comment on such things is that being GFDL, anyone can mirror Wikipedia and many sites do, so Wikipedia being down tends to mostly inconvenience people who wish to edit Wikipedia, not people who are trying to read Wikipedia articles).

    • I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come.

      They need to include (small and easily to disable) text ads. Sure, begging for money is raising a lot, but with text ads they could be raising many times that much, and frankly I'd rather look at an ad for something I migh

    • It's not necessarily the money. Wikipedia is budgeting about a million dollars for the next year (about $240,000 was raised in the last fundraising drive, with more drives to come), and most of this money will be spent on servers. In the interview, Jimbo said that 150 Wikimedia servers should be up by the end of the year.

      But, how many sites have to face what Wikipedia does? Wikipedia has numerous database servers as well as Squid caches across the world, and has literally terabytes of information in data
    • Big shocker tonight at 9 - another case of PHP failing to scale.
  • It's a worldwide knowledge base that's free for anyone to access or edit, ever-expanding with the scope and depth of human intelligence.

    Using a PDA, we've practically got The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth now, ya know?
  • Okay, so I've read the article, and learnt a few things about the personal life of Jimmy Wales that I didn't know before. Okay, I admit it. I knew nothing about him. When I started reading the article, I looked at the text and wondered why it hadn't been cleaned up a bit before publication. After a bit more reading, I thought of a reason — it's damn long.

    So, to save you the trouble, here's a brief summary of what happens in the article:
    1. Description of some part of Wikipedia
    2. Examples, emphasising t
    • What's the go with this bit? Non-sequiturs aplenty!

      LAMB: What's your mom's name by the way?
      WALES: Doris.
      LAMB: What's your grandmother's name?
      WALES: Irma.
      LAMB: Is she alive?
      WALES: No, she passed away some years ago.
      LAMB: Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia we're out of time on that.
      WALES: OK.

  • uh-oh (Score:2, Funny)

    by TTL0 ( 546351 )
    "I had the idea basically from watching the growth of the free software movement"

    so does that mean we should start calling it GNU\Wikipedia ?!?!

  • The value of WP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cagle_.25 ( 715952 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @01:08PM (#13652212) Journal
    The best illustration of the value of the Wikipedia is the Hurricane Katrina article. Within 48 hours of the event, it was the best single source of facts about the storm on the 'Net, and remains so to this day.

    The point is that WP does a fantastic job with recent, non-controversial topics. Older research is best found in textbooks, while controversial topics usually require multiple sources -- of which WP could be one.

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