Volume 7 number 3, March 2005 A Man with a Wiki: An interview with Jimmy Wales “My goal is to put an encyclopedia into the hands of every person on the planet.” Jimmy Wales said during a recent phone interview from Florida. Wales is the president of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., the Tampa-based nonprofit organization that is the parent organization of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikisource. The goals of the foundation are to “maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full content of those projects to the public free of charge.” The definition of a wiki as listed on the Wikipedia site is as follows:
Though reaching every person on the planet may seem like a daunting goal, Wales is moving toward it at a steady pace. The Wikipedia, developed by Wales, has been around since January 14, 2001 and already boasts over one million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia in the world and roughly three times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “I loved to read encyclopedias as a child, especially all the science articles,” Wales said. “ I would spend hours poring over it.” Wikipedia is Wale’s vision of a cooperative community. Anyone can contribute articles and anyone can edit them. It is a sort of checks and balances system. Because Wikimedia is a nonprofit organization the success of its operation depends on the goodwill of volunteers. In December there were about 13,000 persons who made at least one edit to the site and 2,354 persons who made at least 100. “The community manages itself,” Wales said, “so people tend to take a more neutral tone in their entries and edits.” Though this all sounds idealistic and grand, the Wikipedia system is not without its problems. People vandalizing articles is a small problem but much larger ones arise when people feel very strongly about certain issues. Articles concerning the presidential election were particularly troublesome. “There were a lot of people who had very strong opinions about one candidate or the other,” Wales said, “so we ended up with some very one-sided entries.” In response to occurrences such as these Wales sets up online community forums so that contributors can discuss their opinions in a friendly, neutral environment. Wikipedia also has a policy called the NPOV that gives contributors guidelines for submitting acceptable articles. “NPOV stands for Neutral Point Of View and an NPOV article is an article that has been written without showing a stand on the issue in hand. This is especially important for the encyclopedia's treatment of controversial issues, in which very often there is an abundance of differing views and criticisms on the subject. In a neutral representation, the differing points of view are presented as such, not as facts.” Though anyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia there are an enormous number of rules to be followed. The rules help to filter out people who are not serious about contributing to the advancement of the community. One consequence of continuously not following the rules is banning, though Wales says that he hates to see that happen. He may be the president of Wikimedia but he is in no way a supreme power. The Wikipedia community relies on boards of volunteers who make the final decision about whether to ban someone from the site. Because he wants the Wikipedia to operate on a system where everyone contributes equally, he shies from making many edits or entries even if the article concerns him in particular. “I really should change some things in my biography entry but I don’t like to make too many entries,” he said, “People have a tendency to treat my word as final and that is not what Wikipedia is all about.” Wikipedia is not Wales’ first venture into the cyber world. In the mid-1990s he started Bomis, a search portal focusing on pop culture. After the company went out of business he started thinking on a larger scale and came up with the idea of the self-regulating encyclopedia. His next venture, Nupedia encyclopedia, was self-regulating but eventually failed because it relied too much on a hierarchy of power rather than an egalitarian distribution of control. Anyone could submit articles, but they were filtered through a seven-step review process. Wales invested thousands of his own dollars and ended up publishing only twenty-four articles. Finally he came up with Wikipedia, which is developed from a free software model. Programmers worldwide contribute to code, building on each other’s work, and in the end produce professional grade products. The major criticism Wikipedia faces is that researchers have no assurance that all of the information presented is accurate. This problem comes because anyone can submit articles or edit existing materials, and there is no filter system currently in place. Wales relies heavily on volunteers who edit and fact check articles on a regular basis. He does not want to employ any one person to write any one article, because the theory behind the site is that through the cooperation of many the whole can be achieved. The site provides guidelines for people using Wikipedia as a source. Accordingly, the accuracy of an article should be considered questionable if one or more of the following characteristics is observed: It contains a lot of unlikely information, without providing references; it contains information which is particularly difficult to verify; in, for example, a long list, some errors have been found, suggesting that the list as a whole may need further checking; or it has been written (or edited) by a user who is known to write inaccurately on the topic. Unfortunately this is a problem that is not easily remedied. Articles suspected of inaccuracy are flagged with an accuracy warning so that volunteers will be alerted that it may need editing. Editors are encouraged to verify the facts of the article even if it seems accurate. A talk page allows volunteers to see exactly what the suspected problems with any flagged article might be. And after articles have been edited volunteers are asked to cite their sources for future reference. If only a few lines seem inaccurate in the article a peer review can be organized to obtain correct information. But if more than five statements are in question articles are flagged as “disputed.” Wales suggests three methods to resolve disputes. These include discussing the problem with a third party, which can be done by requesting community comment on the issue; conducting a survey that is carefully designed to present all sides of the dispute fairly; and requesting mediation of the dispute. Because of the size to which Wikimedia has grown since its creation, Wales decided to register the foundation as a nonprofit organization in Florida in order to become eligible to receive donations. The foundation is financed solely by donations and grants and it has no full-time employees. As president of the foundation Wales travels and speaks at schools and companies about the importance of free media and education. He is also working on expanding the Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikiquotes and implementing fifteen new servers into the system, for a total of fifty-five. To check out the site or for information about donating to the Wikimedia Foundation go to www.wikimediafoundation.org. Carolyn Stice has moved steadily closer to Ester since her arrival in Alaska, and recently had a housewarming at her new cabin in the heart of the village.
| ||
 | | |
