An Interview with Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales 141
Raul654 writes "The Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's weekly in-house publication, is this week featuring an interview with Jimbo Wales. The questions, which were submitted by Wikipedia regulars, hit on subjects related to the Foundation, the budgeting and legal issues, the blocking of Wikipedia in China, as well as where Jimbo sees Wikipedia in the future."
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia Signpost: Raul654 [slashdot.org] asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturfing?"
Jimbo Wales: The question is invalid. There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".
WS: Nichalp [slashdot.org] asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"
JW: We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.
WS: An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"
JW: The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.
WS: ALoan [slashdot.org] asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"
JW: We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.
WS: GeorgeStepanek [slashdot.org] asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"
JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.
WS: Jacoplane [slashdot.org] asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude a
Interview text (Score:2, Informative)
Jimbo Wales: The question is invalid. There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".
WS: Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"
JW: We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.
WS: An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"
JW: The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.
WS: ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"
JW: We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.
WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"
JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.
WS: Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude at best. The Featured article process seems too slow, and the article validation feature seems to have died a quiet death. Are you planning a big push on this front?"
JW: Isn't that the same question as the quality question? The article validation feature has not died a quiet death at all.
WS: Quadell asks: "Most important decisions on Wikimedia projects are handled
Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows (Score:5, Informative)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral [wikipedia.org] point of view
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_persona
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility [wikipedia.org]
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiabil
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_goo
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikip
There is no indication that Wikipedia is turning into a trollfest. Of course, some subjects like the Muhammad cartoons cause a great deal of debate [wikipedia.org], but for the most part it is focused on writing an Encyclopedia, not a debate club. As it should be.
Good grief (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia: Dangerous Personality Cult? (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree:
Jimbo Wales has ultimate authority on Wikimedia projects, as a foundation issue that is beyond debate. [wikipedia.org]
The arbitration committee, akin to your example of a parliament, has already issued undying proclomations of fealty to Jimbo. So of course for him it is no big matter to proclaim that he will abide by their decisions.
Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working (Score:3, Informative)
Not at all. Here on Slashdot, no article about Wikipedia goes by without a bunch of people whining about how it'll never be useful.
"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."
There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa [wikipedia.org] which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.
Of course, Horn of Africa [wikipedia.org] does say, "However the Horn of Africa suffers largely from overgrazing and only 5% of its original habitat still remains." But, that's nothing like your claim.
Wikipedia works just fine, thank you, but it's young, and it can be said that articles which generate controversy will never be "perfect" in any given snapshot. For those stuck in the pre-edit-history mode of research, this is a showstopper. The rest of us will continue to get work done using Wikipedia.
Re:Why Wikipedia isn't working (Score:5, Informative)
Is that the best example you can come up with?
A six month old problem, that was fixed on the day you blogged about it [danzbb.com]. It now readsLook at the page's history [wikipedia.org] and you seeOK - Wikipedia isn't perfect, but to completely dismiss it is....somewhat shortsighted of you.
After all - it's the only (decent) game in town when it comes to free, online information.
Re:Balkanization Risk as Wiki Grows (Score:3, Informative)
Through early 2004, Jimbo handled all of the english wikipedia's "discipline problems" (for lack of a better word) himself. Of course, with all due respect to Jimbo, in retrospect it's clear that didn't do a particularly good job of it. Users like Helga and Lir - not quite vandals, but not good editors by any stretch of imagination - were allowed to troll the site for years without before Jimbo would intervene (if at all). Good users were stressed from having to deal with them, and some left the project as a result.
In early 2004, the Arbitration Committee was formed, to shift the burden of dealing with trolls from Jimbo. While things were rocky for the first 9 months or so (although the committee nominally had 12 members, only about 4 of them - including myself - were acitve on a regular basis, with 1 or 2 others active on a semi-regular basis. As a result, getting a majority on any issue was nearly impossible), over the last two years I think the site has become a lot more pleasant to edit.
Consider - one of the first arbitration cases was with a 'Plautus Satire', whose edits are hilarious, if you didn't have to clean up after him. Things along the lines of 'the hubble space telescope is an orbitting death ray laser', 'the shuttle columbia was shot down by the US military in order to secure more funding for Nasa', 'black holes are a myth like god', 'Albert Einstien was a theif who got all of his best ideas by plagurizing patent applications he came across while he was a patent clerk', and on and on. It took (I kid you not) 6 weeks to ban Plautus. 6 weeks of having to put up with that idiocy. Nowadays, we're much a much less tolerant place for nonsense like that, and (in my own personal view) it's a much nicer place to edit as a result.