Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm at Wikimania, the Wikipedian convention/conference. Wikipedians are the core group of somehwere under 1,000 people who put in enormous amounts of time writing and editing. The conference is being held at Harvard Law (thank you, Berkman Center!)

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, starts with the hilarious clip from The Colbert Report where he edits Wikipedia on air because "when enough people agree with something, it's true." [As always, all my quotations are likely to be wrong. Which would make me a terrible Wikipedian. Also, I'm posting without re-reading. Be prepared for some baaaad blogging.]

(The MP3 of Jimmy's talk is here.]

He re-states Wikipedia's mission:

Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

He goes through some of the stats on the growth of articles.

He lists the Seigenthaler controversy first among the year's news. "Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia," he says, deadpan. (It was as terrible thing that was said about Seigenthaler, he says.) He notes that after he was dragged onto CNN "to be yelled at," page views tripled began its rise to triple where it was.

Next he talks about the Nature article that compared about 40 science articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. It showed people that "Wikipedia isn't rubbish," and that traditional references aren't as perfect as people imagine. Jimmy notes that Wikipedia lucked out a bit because it's strong on science. "If the comparison were on articles about poets, we wouldn't have done nearly as well." He acknowledges that many of the humanities articles aren't where they should be. Also, it was lucky because the Nature study ignored style. Some Wikipedia articles are very well written but some are choppy. Also, because Nature was studying articles of similar length, it didn't look at "stubs" (i.e., undeveloped articles." "We aren't as good as Britannica, yet." Jimmy says in the coming years Wikipedia needs a "turn toward quality."

He talks a bit about the Foundation, which is coming along. They've hired Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim CEO. Wikia has been funded by angel investors. They;ve hired engineers to inmprove wikimedia.

Jimmy launched Campaigns Wikia for dialgoue and understanding around political campaigns.

He makes some announcements. First, the One Laptop Per Child project (= $100 laptop) will include Wikipedia "as the first element in their content repository." Second, Wikiversity has been established as a "center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities," for all levels and languages. It includes learning communities.

Coming up in the next year, they'll becreating an advisory board. Also, Wikia is working with Socialtext to a wysiwyg editing environment. (Disclosure) He tihnks it'l lbe big. [Yup. Learning the Wikipedia markup language discourages lots of people from correcting small errors. It'll be fascinating to see if Wikipedia scales when the markup barrier to editing is removed.]

Jimmy says there should be more of a focus on quality. This past year, Wikipedia has refined its policies on biographies. They've also made progress on tagging images and ensuring that Wikipedia only uses fair use images.

He says they're experimenting with a "stable version," with an experiment with the German version. iut enables "semi-protection" instead of the full protection against vandalism when needed. Having a stable version would mean that anyone could edit the article but there'd still be a reliable version.

Finally, he goes back to the list of ten things that will be free he talked about at last year's Wikimania.

Free encyclopedia: Yup, in English and German. Still not doing much for people in developing nations. So, the Foundation should seek funding to hire community coordinators and recruiters for important languages where Wikipedia currently does poorly.

Dictionary: See WiktionaryZ, a multilingual dictionary, should be functional later this year.

Complete curiculum in every language. Wikibooks and Wikiversity Beta. He wants to work with people like Taddy Blecher at Cida City Campus in South Africa.

Q: Please allow vendors to list software and services in the articles about them. (Something like that.)
A: It's a tough question and people should talk about it.