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August 4, 2006
Notes From Jimmy Wales' Wikimania Talk
Jimmy Wales notes from the Wikimania conference:
Shows a Stephen Colbert clip: "Any website that has a longer entry on truthiness than Lutheranism has got its priorities straight." Colbert then logged in, saying "Idaho is Oregon's Portugal."
Wikiality. "I'm a fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias."
Wales: Talking about the Wikipedia movement, past present and future.
This is the one talk I give each year where the audience knows everything I know plus more.
Wikipedia's radical idea: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
2005 Milestones: Swedish site passed 100,000 entries, English surpass one million, German 400,000 etc, etc.
Lots of news this year, including the Siegenthaler controversy. "Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia. Who knew?" "I will say that it was a really bad error and a terrible thing." He then showed a chart of site traffic - traffic tripled because of the controversy.
When this was going on, Nature magazine showed him the article they were working on, but it was under embargo, so he couldn't talk about it on CNN and other outlets. The article showed that Wikipedia had four errors per page compared to Britannica's three errors, when comparing a select group of science articles. Wikipedia "isn't complete rubbish; it's pretty good. We as Wikipedians working day to do know how hard it is to get things right...."
"We actually, in my opinion, got pretty lucky... because we're stronger in science than other areas... If we'd done a similar study in an area like poets... we probably wouldn't have done as well.... We know we have systemic biases - the articles in humanities aren't as good as they ought to be."
The Nature study focused on error, not style. In some cases, Wikipedia articles "are a complete wreck of style... That is something that also gets better over time." After we achieve consensus, someone who's a good writer can come in and smooth things out."
"We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn't even heard of - but I'm just teasing there."
"We're not there yet. We're not as good as Britannica - yet.... So in the coming years we're going to see a turn towards quality."
"We also need to be very interested to focusing our attention on the quality of the core topics" and working to make these things better.
Wikimedia projects are always far ahead of the foundation's organizational capacity. But the foundation is maturing as an org, and this'll be important to its future success. "We're becoming a better run organization... and we're finally getting to the point where we can actually apply for grants... and undertake new projects."
Met Jimmy Carter last week, talked about African aid. Many African countries only get 20 percent of the aid they're eligible for because the process is so confusing. Sounds like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sept 2005 - got an email from Brad Patrick. He's now Wikimedia's legal consul. "We were at a point where we were getting overwhelmed with legal complaints" and we needed to take them seriously. He's also serving as the interim CEO.
Wikia, Inc has also received funding for building for-profit wiki communities. We managed to raise venture capital. They're hiring full-time engineers to work on the MediaWiki software. Wikia has "a total commitment to free knowledge and respect for communities."
Unlike any other medium, wiki seem to people to build a consensus view.
Campaigns Wikia: project to improve political discourse.
Some announcements (the news for today):
We're announcing that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)
Wikiversity: A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research baed in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing.
The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.
Final thoughts:
Wikipedia. More than 100 languages have 1000+ articles. But we need to do more for countries in the developing world. So the foundation will seek funding to hire coordinators to represent under-represented languages. "My view is we should be looking to hire some people... in order to be an advocate and a coach... to actually reach out to volunteers."
WiktionaryZ incorporates the ability for users to edit an entry in multiple languages using a single interface. It'll probably be functional later this year.
Wikiversity. They want to work with free universities like Cida City Campus in South Africa to learn what they need, try to help provide it.
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at August 4, 2006 10:11 AM
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