About Jimmy Wales,
founder of Wikipedia, and the Name
Special Spring 2009 Photo Collection Issue
Photos:
Wikipedia's:
Jimmy Wales, Troy Cory, ePublisher, TVI; Josie
Cory, Publisher, TVI.
1.
Feature Story / About
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia / tviNews - May
4,
2005.
Crispin
Sartwell of Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania says Wikipedia is the best
Encyclopedias -- whether paper (Britannica, for
example) or software (Encarta) -- are intended to
be representations of the scope of human knowledge
at the moment of their publication. This idea, of
course, has a long history. But the most
interesting thing about it may be its future, as
represented by the magnificent, nonprofit
Wikipedia.
"Wiki" is the
Hawaiian word for quick, and it refers to a website
that can be updated easily by anyone from any Web
browser. The first wiki armature was developed in
1995, and Wikipedia -- the brainchild of one Jimmy
Wales -- was founded in 2001. Under Wales'
brilliant conception, anyone can go into Wikipedia
(wikipedia.org) and create a new article or edit an
old one: It is entirely accessible and entirely
alterable.
This is anarchy, of course, and completely
antithetical to the encyclopedic tradition, which
has emphasized a kind of solemn definitiveness and
authority. Britannica and Encarta, for instance,
not only employ experts to write their articles but
subject everything they publish to a rigorous
review process. At Wikipedia, you (or any old
maniac) can march right onto the "nuclear fusion"
page and add your thoughts.
But as Wikipedia says about
itself, the point is not that it's hard to make
mistakes but that it's easy to correct them.
Because thousands of people -- ordinary, unpaid,
outside participants -- monitor and edit Wikipedia,
errors and vandalism are often corrected in
seconds. One feature of the site is a list of
recently updated pages, so that one can keep track
of changes. One can even revert to a previous
version of an article if mistaken or malevolent
parties have messed it
up.
The result is not perfect. In
one brief instance, a character from "Star Wars"
was labeled Benedict XVI. But such is the
exception, not the rule, and usually quickly
rectified. Overall, the encyclopedia gets ever
larger and ever more accurate. The English version
has grown to more than half a million entries, and
in checking the "recent changes" section I once
found a dozen or more revisions every minute. The
site also provides contexts in which changes can be
proposed and discussed among
writers.
So is it to be trusted? Does
it have the credibility of Britannica? Well, I have
monitored over a decent period a number of entries
on matters about which I know something and have
found them almost invariably accurate. And I have
watched some of them grow, becoming ever more
elaborate and
interlinked.
In fact, open architecture is
in some sense the only possible way to do what an
encyclopedia purports to do: represent the state of
human knowledge in real time. Such a project is by
its nature so huge that it requires what Wikipedia
has: thousands of experts, editors, checkers and so
on with expertise in different fields working over
a period of years. Also, Wikipedia, unlike the
World Book, for example, or even Encarta, is
updated continuously. When we use the term "public
property," we usually mean state property, but
Wikipedia compromises the concept of ownership
without dispossessing anyone: It is truly public
property.
What is perhaps most
fascinating about Wikipedia is its demonstration in
practical anarchy. It is an ever-shifting,
voluntary, collaborative enterprise. If it is in
the long run successful, it would show that people
can make amazing things together without being
commanded, constrained, taxed, bribed or punished.
There are people who want to
deface or even destroy Wikipedia. The right-wing
blogger Ace of Spades -- out of mischief and
because he heard Wikipedia's operators were
liberals -- recently called on its readers to
"punk" the site to put up as much misinformation
and nonsense as possible. Other blogs gleefully
expose errors, even if those defects persist only
for a few minutes.
If the vandals are successful,
they'll more or less confirm the common wisdom that
people are too evil and miserable to be allowed to
govern themselves. 02.
More /
But if Wikipedia grows into
the greatest reference work ever made, it will
suggest that great things are possible when you
merely let people go and see what
happens.
May 4, 2005 / Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson
College in Carlisle, Pennsulvania says Wikipedia is
the best.
Encyclopedias -- whether paper
(Britannica, for example) or software (Encarta) --
are intended to be representations of the scope of
human knowledge at the moment of their publication.
This idea, of course, has a long history. But the
most interesting thing about it may be its future,
as represented by the magnificent, nonprofit
Wikipedia.
"Wiki" is the Hawaiian word
for quick, and it refers to a website that can be
updated easily by anyone from any Web browser. The
first wiki armature was developed in 1995, and
Wikipedia -- the brainchild of one Jimmy Wales --
was founded in 2001. Under Wales' brilliant
conception, anyone can go into Wikipedia
(wikipedia.org) and create a new article or edit an
old one: It is entirely accessible and entirely
alterable.
This is anarchy, of course,
and completely antithetical to the encyclopedic
tradition, which has emphasized a kind of solemn
definitiveness and authority. Britannica and
Encarta, for instance, not only employ experts to
write their articles but subject everything they
publish to a rigorous review process. At Wikipedia,
you (or any old maniac) can march right onto the
"nuclear fusion" page and add your thoughts.
Part
03 /
But as Wikipedia says about
itself, the point is not that it's hard to make
mistakes but that it's easy to correct them.
Because thousands of people -- ordinary, unpaid,
outside participants -- monitor and edit Wikipedia,
errors and vandalism are often corrected in
seconds. One feature of the site is a list of
recently updated pages, so that one can keep track
of changes. One can even revert to a previous
version of an article if mistaken or malevolent
parties have messed it
up.
The result is not perfect. In one brief
instance, a character from "Star Wars" was labeled
Benedict XVI. But such is the exception, not the
rule, and usually quickly rectified. Overall, the
encyclopedia gets ever larger and ever more
accurate. The English version has grown to more
than half a million entries, and in checking the
"recent changes" section I once found a dozen or
more revisions every minute. The site also provides
contexts in which changes can be proposed and
discussed among writers.
So is it to be trusted? Does
it have the credibility of Britannica? Well, I have
monitored over a decent period a number of entries
on matters about which I know something and have
found them almost invariably accurate. And I have
watched some of them grow, becoming ever more
elaborate and
interlinked.
In fact, open architecture is
in some sense the only possible way to do what an
encyclopedia purports to do: represent the state of
human knowledge in real time. Such a project is by
its nature so huge that it requires what Wikipedia
has: thousands of experts, editors, checkers and so
on with expertise in different fields working over
a period of years. Also, Wikipedia, unlike the
World Book, for example, or even Encarta, is
updated continuously. When we use the term "public
property," we usually mean state property, but
Wikipedia compromises the concept of ownership
without dispossessing anyone: It is truly public
property.
What is perhaps most
fascinating about Wikipedia is its demonstration in
practical anarchy. It is an ever-shifting,
voluntary, collaborative enterprise. If it is in
the long run successful, it would show that people
can make amazing things together without being
commanded, constrained, taxed, bribed or punished.
There are people who want to
deface or even destroy Wikipedia. The right-wing
blogger Ace of Spades -- out of mischief and
because he heard Wikipedia's operators were
liberals -- recently called on its readers to
"punk" the site to put up as much misinformation
and nonsense as possible. Other blogs gleefully
expose errors, even if those defects persist only
for a few minutes.
If the vandals are successful,
they'll more or less confirm the common wisdom that
people are too evil and miserable to be allowed to
govern themselves.
But if Wikipedia grows into
the greatest reference work ever made, it will
suggest that great things are possible when you
merely let people go and see what happens.
We Preserve The Moment Yes90
tviNews
S90 102
About Jimmy Wales, founder
of Wikipedia, and the Name
May 4, 2005.
Wikipedia
Defines the Quickness of finding the
Truth
/ Feature Story.
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