The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia, Part II 140
Why Wikipedia started working
This is a good place to explain why Wikipedia actually got started and why it worked (and still does work, at least as well as it does). The explanation involves a combination of quite a few factors, some borrowed from the open source movement, some borrowed from wiki software and culture, and some more idiosyncratic:
- Open content license. We promised contributors that their work would always remain free for others to read. This, as is well known, motivates people to work for the good of the world--and for the many people who would like to teach the whole world, that's a pretty strong motivation.
- Focus on the encyclopedia. We said that we were creating an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, etc., and we encouraged people to stick to creating the encyclopedia and not use the project as a debate forum.
- Openness. Anyone could contribute. Everyone was specifically made to feel welcome. (E.g., we encouraged the habit of writing on new contributors' user pages, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" etc.) There was no sense that someone would be turned away for not being bright enough, or not being a good enough writer, or whatever.
- Ease of editing. Wikis are pretty easy for most people to figure out. In other collaborative systems (like Nupedia), you have to learn all about the system first. Wikipedia had an almost flat learning curve.
- Collaborate radically; don't sign articles. Radical collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of anyone else's work, is one of the great innovations of the open source software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to avoid the big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish articles on popular topics to a fine luster.
- Offer unedited, unapproved content for further development. This is required if one wishes to collaborate radically. We encouraged putting up their unfinished drafts--as long as they were at least roughly correct--with the idea that they can only improve if there are others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were basically garbage (no offense to anyone--some of my own drafts were sometimes garbage), and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated that many articles have turned out very well indeed.
- Neutrality. A firm neutrality policy made it possible for people of widely divergent opinions to work together, without constantly fighting. It's a way to keep the peace.
- Start with a core of good people. I think it was essential that we began the project with a core group of intelligent good writers who understood what an encyclopedia should look like, and who were basically decent human beings.
- Enjoy the Google effect. We had little to do with this, but had Google not sent us an increasing amount of traffic each time they spidered the growing website, we would not have grown nearly as fast as we did. (See below.)
That's pretty much it. The focus on the encyclopedia provided the task and the open content license provided a natural motivation: people work hard if they believe they are teaching the world stuff. Openness and ease of editing made it easy for new people to join in and get to work. Collaboration helped move work forward quickly and efficiently, and posting unedited drafts made collaboration possible. The fact that we started with a core of good people from Nupedia meant that the project could develop a functional, cooperative community. Neutrality made it easy for people to work together with relatively little conflict. And the Google effect provided a steady supply of "fresh blood"--who in turn supplied increasing amounts of content.
Probably, all or nearly all other project rules were either optional, or straightforward applications of these principles. The project probably would still have succeeded nicely even if it had moderated or tweaked some of the above principles. For instance, radical openness, that is, being open even to those who brazenly flouted and disrespected the project's mission, was surely not necessary; after all, without them, the project would have been more welcoming to the many people who felt they could not work with such difficult people. And if we had required people to sign in, that would not have made very much difference (although it probably would have made some in the beginning; the project wouldn't have grown as fast). Of course we didn't have to use the GNU FDL for the license. Certainly, we did not need to set the community up initially as an anarchy governed by some vague consensus: instead, we could have adopted a charter from the very start. The project could have been managed quite differently; there could have been specially-designated and well-qualified editors. The project could have officially encouraged and deferred to experts. An article approval process could have been adopted without threatening the principle of posting unedited content for collaboration. Certainly, many of the later bells and whistles--the arbitration committee, a three-revert rule, having administrators with the particular configuration of rights they have, etc.--were not absolutely necessary to adopt in the precise forms they took. These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above.
So the basic principles that explain why Wikipedia could start working--and still does work--are relatively simple, few in number, and above all general. The more specific principles that Wikipedia wound up with was a matter of historical accident. There was a great deal of "wiggle room." Those intent on studying or replicating the Wikipedia model would do well to bear that in mind.
A series of controversies
So much for the very early history of Wikipedia; the next phase involved rapid growth and some serious internal controversies over policy and authority. If Wikipedia's basic policy was settled upon in the first nine months, its culture was solidified into something closer to its present form in the next nine.
The project continued to grow. We had 6000 articles by July 8; 8000 by August 7; 11,200 by September 9; and 13,000 by October 4. Consulting the website logs, we noted a Google effect: each time Google spidered the website, more pages would be indexed; the greater the number of pages indexed, the more people arrived at the project; the more people involved in the project, the more pages there were to index. In addition to this source of new contributors, Wikipedia was Slashdotted several times, and had large influxes of new users particularly after two articles I wrote for Kuro5hin were posted on Slashdot: "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias (July 25, 2001) and Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense? (September 24, 2001).
This growth brought difficult challenges, challenges that perhaps I did not sufficiently anticipate and plan for. Some of our earliest contributors were academics and other highly-qualified people, and it seems to me that they were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project. I hope they will not mind that I mention their names, but the two that stick in my mind are J. Hoffman Kemp and Michael Tinkler, a couple of Ph.D. historians. They helped to set what I think was a good precedent for the project in that they wrote about their own areas of expertise, and they contributed under their own, real names. The latter has the salutary effect of making the contributor more serious and more apt to take responsibility for his or her contributions. They are also very nice people, but did not "suffer fools gladly," as the phrase goes. Consequently, they wound up in some pretty silly disputes that would have driven less patient people away instantly. So there was a growing problem: persistent and difficult contributors tend to drive away many better, more valuable contributors; Kemp and Tinkler were only two examples. There were many more who quietly came and quietly left. Short of removing the problem contributors altogether--which we did only in the very worst cases--there was no easy solution, under the system as we had set it up. And I am sorry to have to admit that those aspects of the system that led to this problem were as much my responsibility as anyone else's. Obviously, I would not design the system the same way if given the chance again.
As a result, I grew both more protective of the project and increasingly sensitive to abuse of the system. As I tried to exercise what little authority I claimed, as a corrective to such abuse, many newer arrivals on the scene made great sport of challenging my authority. One of the earliest challenges happened in late summer, 2001. The front page of Wikipedia--then open to anyone to edit, like any other page on the project--was occasionally vandalized with infantile graffiti. Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. I maintained that to make such an archive would be to encourage such vandalism, so I deleted the archive. This occasioned much debate. Then a user made the archive a "subpage" of his own user page--and user pages were generally held to be the bailiwick of the user. Consequently I deleted that subpage, which occasioned a further hue and cry that, perhaps, I was abusing my authority. The vandalism-enshrining user in question proceeded to create a "deleted pages" page, on which the deleted vandalism archives were listed, as if to accuse me of trying to act without public scrutiny; but this was, of course, perfectly acceptable to me. At the time, I thought that this controversy was just as silly as it will sound to most people reading this; I thought that I needed only to "put my foot down" a little harder and, as had happened for the first six months of the project, participants would fall into line. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies, the ultimate upshot of which was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors.
Throughout this and other early controversies, much of the debate about project policy was conducted on the wiki itself. Other debates were conducted on mailing lists, Wikipedia-L and then later, for the English language project, WikiEN-L. In addition, people had taken to putting their own essays on Wikipedia, as subpages of their user pages. These too were occasioning debate. It seemed to me, and many other contributors, that this debate was distracting the community from our main goal: to create an encyclopedia. Consequently I proposed that we move the debate to another wiki that was to be created specifically for that purpose--what became known as the "meta wiki." This proposal was very widely supported, so we set it up.
As it happened, the meta-wiki became even more uncontrolled than Wikipedia itself, and for many months was continually infested with contributions by people that can only be called "trolls." That epithet came to be discouraged, however, for reasons soon to be explained. The existence of trolls was a problem we felt we should tolerate--and deal with only verbally, not with harsh penalties--for the sake of encouraging the broadest amount of participation. In the first years, only the worst trolls were ever expelled from the project. I do not know whether this policy has been changed as a result of the operation of the much-later installed Arbitration Committee.
The reasons the meta-wiki became (at least temporarily) more uncontrolled are not far to seek. First, it had no specific purpose, other than to host project debate and essays that do not belong on the main wiki--which was not enough to make anyone care very much about it. Second, because many people did not care what happened on the meta-wiki, they did not do the very necessary weeding that takes place on Wikipedia; besides, as the meta-wiki was a repository of opinion, people felt less comfortable editing or deleting what was, after all, only opinion.
What happened was that project policy discussions moved almost exclusively to the project mailing lists. There is a reason why this was a superior solution to having much debate on an uncontrolled, "unmoderated" wiki. On a wiki, contributions exist in perpetuity, as it were, or until they are deleted or radically changed; consequently, anyone new to a discussion sees the first contribution first. So whoever starts a new page for discussion also, to a great extent, sets the tone and agenda of the discussion. Moreover, nasty, heated exchanges live on forever on a wiki, festering like an open wound, unless deliberately toned down afterwards; if the same exchange takes place on a mailing list, it slips mercifully and quietly into the archives.
At about the same time that we decided to start the meta-wiki, and soon after the vandalism archive affair, I was thinking a great deal about Wikipedia's apparent anarchy, and I wrote an essay titled, "Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy?" This and the discussion that ensued tended to ossify positions with regard to the authority issue: I and a few others agreed that Jimmy and I should have special authority within the system, to settle policy issues that needed settling. Jimmy was relatively quiet about this issue; this, I think, was probably because his authority was generally not in question, but mine was, because I was "in the trenches" and continuing to encourage good habits and solidify policy positions.
By November or December of 2001, Wikipedia was growing so fast and the subject of regular news reporting, even by the likes of The New York Times and MIT's Technology Review; after the two major Slashdottings earlier in the year, we knew that large influxes of members could have a tendency to change the nature of the project, and not necessarily for the better. If there were some major news coverage--an evening news story in the U.S., for example--there might be many new people who would need to be taught about Wikipedia's standards and positive cultural aspects. So I proposed what I thought was a humorously-named "Wikipedia Militia" which would manage new (and very welcome) "invasions" by new contributors. By this time, however, there was a small core group of people who were constantly on the watch for anything that smacked the least bit of authoritarianism; consequently, the name, and various aspects of how the proposal was presented, were vigorously debated. Eventually, we switched to "The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee" and finally, the "Volunteer Fire Department"--which eventually, it seems, fell into disuse.
The governance challenge
After the September Slashdotting, I composed a page originally called "Our Replies to Our Critics" (and now called "Replies to Common Objections"), in which I addressed the problem that "cranks and partisans" might abuse the system:
Moreover--and this is something that you might not be able to understand very well if you haven't actually experienced it--there is a fair bit of (mostly friendly) peer pressure, and community standards are constantly being reinforced. The cranks and partisans, etc., are not simply outgunned. They also receive considerable opprobrium if they abuse the system.
This reflects very well the conception I had in September 2001 of Wikipedia's culture; the reply above was as much hopeful and prescriptive as descriptive. But it turned out to be only partly true. As difficult users began to have more of a "run of the place," in late 2001 and 2002, opprobrium was in fact meted out only piecemeal and inconsistently. It seemed that participation in the community was becoming increasingly a struggle over principles, rather than a shared effort toward shared goals. Any attempt to enforce what should have been set policy--neutrality, no original research, and no wholesale deletion without explanation--was frequently if not usually met with resistance. It was difficult to claim the moral high ground in a dispute, because the basic project principles were constantly coming under attack. Consequently, Wikipedia's environment was not cooperative but instead competitive, and the competition often concerned what sort of community Wikipedia should be: radically anarchical and uncontrolled, or instead more singlemindedly devoted to building an encyclopedia. Sadly, few among those who would love to work on Wikipedia could thrive in such a protean environment.
It is one thing to lack any equivalent to "police" and "courts" that can quickly and effectively eliminate abuse; such enforcement systems were rarely entertained in Wikipedia's early years, because according to the wiki ideal, users can effectively police each other. It is another thing altogether to lack a community ethos that is unified in its commitment to its basic ideals, so that the community's champions could claim a moral high ground. So why was there no such unified community ethos and no uncontroversial "moral high ground"? I think it was a simple consequence of the fact that the community was to be largely self-organizing and to set its own policy by consensus. Any loud minority, even a persistent minority of one person, can remove the appearance of consensus. In fact, I recall that (in October 2002, after I resigned) I felt compelled by ongoing controversies to request that Jimmy declare that certain policies were in fact non-negotiable, which he did. Unfortunately, this declaration was too little, too late, in my opinion.
By late 2001, I had gained both friends and detractors. I think I had become, within the project, a symbol of opposition to anarchism, of the enforcement of standards, and consequently of the exercise of authority in a radically open project. But I was still trying to manage the project as I always had--by force of personality and "moral" authority. So when people arrived who clearly and openly disrespected established policy, I was, in my frustration, very short with them; and when the project continued to try to establish new policies, my role in articulating those policies and actually establishing them (attempting to express a "consensus") was challenged. This undermined what moral authority I had. I felt my job was on the line, and the project continued in turmoil day in and day out; from my point of view, fires were spreading everywhere, and as I had become a somewhat controversial figure, I did not have quite enough allies to help me put them out. Consequently I was rather too peremptory and short with some users. This, however, exacerbated the problem, because the attitude could not be backed up by punishment; harsh words from a leader are empty threats if unenforceable; I thereby handed my anti-authoritarian "wiki-anarchist" opponents an advantage, because--ironically--they were able to portray me as dictatorial, when I was anything but. I came to the view, finally and belatedly, that it would be better to "ignore the trolls." But as it turns out, this is particularly hard to do on a wiki, because, again, unlike on an e-mail list, trollish contributions do not just disappear into the archives; they sit out in the open, as available as the first day they appeared, and "festering." Attempts to delete or radically edit such contributions were often met by reposting the earlier, problem version: the ability to do that is a necessary feature of collaboration. Persistent trolls could, thus, be a serious problem, particularly if they were able to draw a sympathetic audience. And there was often an audience of sympathizers: contributors who philosophically were opposed to nearly any exercise of authority, but who were not trolls themselves.
It is surely very ironic that it was I personally who (initially) so strongly supported the lack any enforceable rules in the community. Some legal theorists would maintain that a community that lacks enforceable rules lacks any law at all. In retrospect it is clear that there was a fundamental problem with my role in the system: to have real authority, I needed both to be able to enforce the rules and, for both fairness and the perception of fairness, there needed to be clear rules from the beginning. But, by my own design, I had very early on rejected the label "editor-in-chief" and much real enforcement authority; a year into the game, it would have been difficult if not impossible to claim enforcement authority over active but problem users. Moreover, I was the author of the "ignore all rules" rule. My early rejection of any enforcement authority, my attempt to portray myself and behave as just another user who happened to have some special moral authority in the project, and my rejection of rules--these were all clearly mistakes on my part. They did, I think, help the project get off the ground; but I really needed a more subtle and forward-looking understanding of how an extremely open, decentralized project might work.
In retrospect, I wish I had taken Teddy Roosevelt's advice: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Since my "stick" was very small, I suppose I felt compelled to "speak loudly," which I regret. (This was not such a problem, by the way, on Nupedia; partly, that was because there were not nearly as many problem users on Nupedia, but partly it was because there was clear enforcement authority.) As it turns out, it was Jimmy who spoke softly and carried the big stick; he first exercised "enforcement authority." Since he was relatively silent throughout these controversies, he was the "good cop," and I was the "bad cop": that, in fact, is precisely how he (privately) described our relationship. Eventually, I became sick of this arrangement. Because Jimmy had remained relatively toward the background in the early days of the project, and showed that he was willing to exercise enforcement authority upon occasion, he was never so ripe for attack as I was.
Perhaps the root cause of the governance problem was that we did not realize well enough that a community would form, nor did we think carefully about what this entailed. For months I denied that Wikipedia was a community, claiming that it was, instead, only an encyclopedia project, and that there should not be any serious governance problems if people would simply stick to the task of making an encyclopedia. This was strictly wishful thinking. In fact, Wikipedia was from the beginning and is both a community and an encyclopedia project. And for a community attempting to achieve something, to be serious, effective, and fair, a charter seems necessary. In short, a collaborative community would do well to think of itself as a polity with everything that that entails: a representative legislative, a competent and fair judiciary, and an effective executive, all defined in advance by a charter. There are special requirements of nearly every serious community, however, best served by relevant experts; and so I think a prominent role for the relevant experts should be written into the charter. I would recommend all of this to anyone launching a serious online community. But indeed, in January 2001, we were in both "uncharted" and "unchartered" territory. The world, I think, will be able to benefit from this and our other initial mistakes.
But in fairness to ourselves, it was a good idea to allow the community to decide by experience and consensus what article content rules to endorse. This allowed us to generate a very sensible set of article content rules. To be clear, I think it was not such a good idea to apply the same thinking to the organization of the community itself; we should have acknowledged that a community would form, that it would have certain persistent and difficult issues that would need to be solved, and that a lack of any effective founding community charter might result in chaos.
My resignation and final few months with the project
Throughout the governance controversy, I was preparing for my wedding, which happened December 1, 2001. A few days after I arrived back from my honeymoon, I was informed that I should probably start looking for another job, because Bomis was having to lay off most of its workers; they had 10-12 workers at the end of 2000, and by the beginning of 2002 they were back to their original 4-5. My salary was reduced in December and then halved in January. This seemed inevitable because Wikipedia was not bringing in any money at all for Bomis, even if Wikipedia was becoming even more of a publicly-recognized, if still modest success. Our first anniversary came just before we announced having 20,000 articles, and I was invited to talk about the project at Stanford on January 16 (text here; you might notice that I was still plugging the notion of using Nupedia to vet Wikipedia articles, as an answer to the objection that Wikipedia articles are unreliable).
I was officially laid off at the beginning of February, which I announced a few weeks later. I had continued on as a volunteer; Wikipedia and Nupedia were, after all, volunteer projects. But I was laboring in the aftermath of the governance controversies of the previous fall and winter, which promised to make the job of a volunteer project leader even more difficult. Moreover, I had to look for a real job. So throughout the month of February I considered resigning altogether.
But Jimmy had told me the previous December that Bomis would start trying to sell ads on Wikipedia in order to pay for my job. Even in that horrible market for Internet advertising, there were already enough pageviews on Wikipedia that advertising proceeds might have provided me a very meager living. We knew that this would be extremely controversial, because so many of the people who are involved in open source and open content projects absolutely hate the idea of advertising on the web pages of free projects, even to support project organizers. In fact, when this advertising plan was announced, in late February of 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia was forked (something I urged them not to do).
Bomis was not successful in selling any ads for Wikipedia anyway--you might recall that early 2002 was at about the very bottom of the market for Internet advertising. I also had some hope that we might, finally, set up the project's managing nonprofit, which we had discussed doing for a long time (and which eventually did come into being: Wikimedia). The job of setting up the nonprofit was left to me, but ongoing controversies seemed to eat up any time I had for Wikipedia, and frankly I had no idea where to begin. So, after a month without pay, I announced my general resignation; I completely stayed away from the project for a few months.
Just by the way, Wikipedia's offshoot projects--a dictionary, a textbook project, a quotation project, a public domain book repository, etc.--were all started in 2002 or later, and I cannot claim any credit for them. I did supply the name "Wiktionary" in April 2001, more or less on a whim. I quickly disavowed any responsibility for leading any such project, and it seems the Wiktionary project did not start up for another year and a half (December 12, 2002). My view now is that Webster's and the OED are quite good enough as far as English dictionaries go, and there will always be excellent free dictionaries in every language online. To try to develop a dictionary by collaboration among random Internet users, particularly in a completely uncontrolled wiki format, now strikes me as a nonstarter. I confess I am now puzzled why I didn't think so instantly; it was no doubt because I simply was throwing out ideas as they occurred to me, and also because we had too many dictionary definition-type entries in Wikipedia. (So why not give people a place to put their dictionary definitions?--Perhaps that's what I was thinking, but it hardly seems like a good justification for starting a project.) But Jimmy's first reaction was properly skeptical regarding the use of wikis and Ruth Ifcher made a stronger criticism very nicely. Dictionaries, even more than encyclopedias, must be extremely reliable to be even minimally usable; without direct oversight by linguists, a public dictionary project seems pointless. As to the other projects, they are mostly conducted using wikis and according to some of the basic founding principles of Wikipedia. But other sorts of project--for example, textbook projects, quotation repositories, and archives--necessarily require quite different specifications from those of an encyclopedia. For example, the fact that the wiki format works for encyclopedia development hardly means that it is appropriate for the hosting of public domain books. Since the same texts are available in many other places online, such as the wonderful Project Gutenberg, why would anyone choose to read The Iliad on a wiki, which could have been subtly changed by any random passer-by, without any oversight by someone who had access to an authoritative text? There is a fact about the way the text actually reads; so is editing via wiki software more apt to increase or reduce the number of errors over other systems, such as Project Gutenberg's? I do not mean to dismiss any such efforts. I simply think that considerable thought needs to be put into exactly how those other projects should be organized: the wiki format is not a magic pill that somehow makes all problems go away. Wiki is just one software paradigm, which must be adapted, supplemented, changed, or replaced in order to solve the unique set of problems a project faces.
In the spring, a controversy erupted. Caring as I did--and as I still do--about the future of free encyclopedias, I felt compelled to get involved. The controversy featured a troll who was putting up huge numbers of screeds on the "meta-wiki" and on Wikipedia as well. The controversy began with a discussion of what to do about, and how to react to, this particular troll. I maintained that one should not "feed the troll," and that the troll should be "outed" (it was an anonymous user, but it was not hard to use Google to determine the identity of the troll) and shamed.
There resulted a broader controversy about how to treat problem users generally. There were, as I recall, two main schools of thought. One, to which I adhered and still adhere, was that bona fide trolls should be "named and shamed" and, if they were unresponsive to shaming, they should be removed from the project (by a fair process) sooner rather than later. We held that a collaborative project requires commitment to ethical standards which are--as all ethical standards ultimately are--socially established by pointing out violations of those standards. Hence naming and shaming. A second school of thought held that all Wikipedia contributors, even the most difficult, should be treated respectfully and with so-called WikiLove. Hence trolls were not to be identified as such (since "troll" is a term of abuse), and were to be removed from the project only after a long (and painful) public discussion. For the latter school, it seemed to me, the only really egregious faux pas one could commit in the project was to suggest that there were objective standards that could be enforced via "shaming."
I felt at the time that the prevalence of the second school entailed rejection of both objective standards and rules-based authority. It is impossible to explain why one is removing some partisan screeds from the wiki without, in some way, identifying it as a partisan screed, and pointing out that such productions are inconsistent with the neutrality policy. This will necessarily be received as less than respectful and "loving," especially if one must engage the troll himself in a long, drawn-out dispute; in a very long dispute with any trollish type, it is only a matter of time before some epithet gets bandied about, since they are so darned useful (and accurate) when applied to trollish types. More generally, the very application of rules, or laws, entails a moral judgment, or what for its effectiveness must have the force of a moral judgment. I suppose I agree with those legal theorists who say that there is necessarily, in its core, a moral component to the law. Consequently, the new policy of "WikiLove" handed trolls and other difficult users a very effective weapon for purposes of combatting those who attempted to enforce rules. After all, any forthright declaration that a user is doing something that is clearly against established conventions--posting screeds, falsehoods, nonsense, personal opinion, etc.--is nearly always going to appear disrespectful, because such a declaration involves a moral accusation. The only way to avoid such an appearance of disrespect, perhaps, is to step very lightly and use much flattery and qualifications: "Now don't get me wrong, I think you're doing a good job overall, but it seems to me that in this particular case, your contribution is slightly inconsistent with the neutrality policy." Suppose the offender replies: "So what? I disagree with the neutrality policy." Or: "I disagree. What I wrote is perfectly neutral. Who do you think you are, anyway?" It is a very rare person who can practice "WikiLove" in such a case. In Wikipedia's developing culture, if anyone reacted out of frustration, or merely attempted to apply the law as a moral instrument, as laws typically are applied, he would become the problem, and a much more serious problem, than mere violations of the neutrality policy, say. The result is that, on pain of becoming persona non grata in the community, one had to treat brazen, self-conscious violators of basic policy with particular respect. It was a perfect coup for the resident wiki-anarchists. I again left the project for several months.
In fall of 2002, I had started teaching at a local community college, and with some extra time on my hands, I started editing Wikipedia a little and engaging in mailing list discussions. I think my first new post to Wikipedia-L, from September 1, 2002, was "Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement." In it I argued that the free software movement is led and dominated by highly-qualified programmers, and that the "free encyclopedia movement"--that is, Wikipedia, Nupedia, and other newer projects--needs to move in that direction. I suggested that Nupedia be redesigned to release "approved" versions of Wikipedia articles; Wikipedia itself was not to be touched. This proposal met with a very cool reception. After a few months of discussion, Jimmy himself was "intending to revive Nupedia in the near future" and "thinking very much along the lines of what is being discussed here." Unfortunately, this never happened.
By November or December, I think, I proposed, and Magnus Manske very helpfully coded, an expert-controlled approval process for Wikipedia that was in fact to be independent of both Nupedia and Wikipedia. It would not have affected the Wikipedia editorial process. It would have lived in a separate namespace or domain, as an independent add-on project for Wikipedia. Without explaining the details, expert reviewers, the recruitment of which I would organize, would examine Wikipedia articles and approve or disapprove of particular versions of those articles. We set up a mailing list, Sifter-L (archives no longer online, apparently), which for several weeks discussed policy issues.
There was not a great deal of support for the proposal on Wikipedia-L. There was little or no excitement that the new project might bring into Wikipedia a fresh crop of subject area specialists. But that was fine as far as I was concerned, since the project was to operate independently of Wikipedia. Still, I had the very distinct sense that any specialists arriving on the scene would not necessarily be met with open arms--particularly if before approving an article they wished to make whatever changes to articles that they felt necessary. There were even a few Wikipedians who made it clear that experts should not expect to be treated any differently than anyone else, even when writing about their areas of expertise.
I then considered whether the interaction between Wikipedians and the new reviewers might be a problem after all. Surely, I thought, most specialists would want to edit even very good articles before approving them (in the independent system). This would require that the reviewers interact with Wikipedians. Wikipedia's culture had become such that disrespect of expertise was tolerated, and, again, trolls were merely warned, but very politely (in keeping with the policy of WikiLove), that they please ought to stop their inflammatory behavior. Trolls would certainly find ripe targets in expert reviewers, I thought. I recalled that patient, well-educated Wikipedians like J. Hoffmann Kemp and Michael Tinkler had been driven off the project not only by trolls but by some of the more abrasive and disrespectful regulars. I then considered: could I in good conscience really ask academics, who are very busy, to engage in this activity that would probably annoy most of them and do nothing to contribute to their academic careers? Recruiting for Nupedia was very easy by comparison, and caused me no such pangs of conscience.
I believe it was this problem that finally prompted me, in I believe January of 2003, to inform Jimmy as follows (by private e-mail): I was breaking with the project altogether; the only way he could prevent this, I told him, was that he personally crack down on problem users, and make the project more officially welcoming to experts. I also told him that I did not expect this information to change his mind, and that I did not mean to issue an ultimatum. And in fact our exchange did not change his mind. I concluded that we had a fundamental philosophical disagreement about how the project should be run. I respected and still respect his view. That is where matters ended, and it was then that I broke with Wikipedia altogether.
Some final attempts to save Nupedia
Nevertheless, I was interested in pursuing Nupedia's development. It still seemed rescuable to me.
I recall two incidents in which I tried to have Nupedia revived, in 2002 or 2003, but I don't recall exactly. First, I approached Jimmy with the offer to try to find a buyer/managing organization for Nupedia. The suggestion was that, since Bomis did not have enough money to support it, and since Jimmy did not appear to have any specific intentions with the project other than to let it run on the system set up in 2000-1, I might be able to find a university or other organization that would take on the responsibility. I do not recall the details, but we did not pursue this possibility. Second, and later, I offered to buy Nupedia myself--that is, the domain name, the membership list, and whatever other proprietary material Bomis might have controlled. I wanted to start it up again as a simpler, more streamlined, but still fully peer-reviewed project; I thought, moreover, that if I owned it I might be able to give it to a suitable sponsoring educational or nonprofit institution. Jimmy seemed cool to the idea, and did not ask for any specific offers.
Perhaps it is, therefore, not entirely accurate to say that Nupedia died due to the inefficiency of its system. To some extent it was also allowed to die, even after it was clear that its former editor-in-chief expressed an interest in continuing the project under an entirely different system. The result was that, without a leader or organization that could support its mission, Nupedia died a slow death. The server it lived on had some trouble in 2003, and as a result the website went offline. For whatever reason, the website was never brought up again after that.
I obviously cannot speak for Jimmy, but I will say that, if he was worried that Nupedia would essentially fork Wikipedia--again, I don't claim that he had that concern--then it seems to me that such a concern would not have justified letting Nupedia wither untended. The projects, Wikipedia and Nupedia, were naturally complementary parts of a single, symbiotic whole. That at least is how I always regarded them, indeed, from the very founding of Wikipedia. From the founding of Wikipedia, I always thought Wikipedia without Nupedia would have been unreliable, and that Nupedia without Wikipedia would have been unproductive. Together they were to be an "unstoppable high-quality article-creation juggernaut."
It is still disappointing to me, that we made plans and promises to thousands of Nupedians, including hundreds of extremely well-qualified people, some of them leaders in their fields. We spent many thousands of person-hours, all told, on the project. I apologize to those people, and I can only hope that they will find some future open content encyclopedia project worthy of their participation, one that will show the world the potential that Nupedia had.
Conclusions
I have some advice for anyone who would like to start new projects on the model of Wikipedia.
You can learn from Wikipedia's success; so, first and most importantly, see above for considerations about why Wikipedia works.
But you can also learn from our mistakes. The following primarily concerns project governance, because governance issues are, in my opinion, the primary failing of Wikipedia. Bear in mind, also, that these are only rough guidelines, for those who are starting projects that have enough resemblance to Wikipedia. These are not perfectly general rules:
- If you intend to create a very large, complex project, establish early on that there will be some non-negotiable policy. Wikis and collaborative projects necessarily build communities, and once a community becomes large enough, it absolutely must have rules to keep order and to keep people at work on the mission of the project. "Force of personality" might be enough to make a small group of people hang together; for better or worse, however, clearly enunciated rules are needed to make larger groups of people hang together.
- There is some policy that, with forethought, can be easily predicted will be necessary. Articulate this policy as soon as possible. Indeed, consider making a project charter to make it clear from the beginning what the basic principles governing the project will be. This will help the community to run more smoothly and allow participants to self-select correctly.
- Establish any necessary authority early and clearly. Managers should not be afraid to enforce the project charter by removing people from the project; as soon as it becomes necessary, it should be done. Standards that are not enforced in any way do not exist in any robust sense. Do not tolerate deliberate disruption from those who oppose your aims; tell them to start their own project; there's a potentially infinite amount of cyberspace.
- As any disagreements among project managers are apt to be publicly visible in a collaborative project, and as this is apt to undermine the (very important) moral authority of at least one manager, make sure management is on the same page from the beginning--preferably before launch. This requires a great deal of thinking through issues together.
- In knowledge-creation projects, and perhaps many other kinds of projects, make special roles for experts from the very beginning; do not attempt to add those roles later, as an afterthought. Specialists are one of your most important resources, and it is irrational not to use them as much as you can. Preferably, design the charter so that they are included and encouraged. Moreover, make the volunteer project management a meritocracy, and not based on longevity but based on the ability to lead and contribute to the project; that is the only condition under which very many of the best qualified people will want to participate.
Another point needs more in-depth development.
Radical and untried new ideas require constant refinement and adaptation in order to succeed; the first proposal is very rarely the best, and project designers must learn from their mistakes and constantly redesign better projects. Nupedia's Advisory Board failed to admit to inherent flaws in its system, and its delay in admission shut the window of opportunity to its improvement. And it seems to me that the Wikipedia community fell into a mistake by thinking that just one or two features--the wiki feature and the neutrality policy and a few other things--explained Wikipedia's success, and that those features can thus be applied with no significant changes to new projects. But there is no substitute for constant creativity and problem-solving--nor for honesty about what problems need solving. The honesty to recognize problems and creativity in solving them are, after all, what made Wikipedia succeed in the first place.
This is a crucial point: if you use a tool or model from another project, think through very carefully how that tool or model should be adapted. Do not assume that you need to use every feature, or every aspect of the surrounding culture, that you are borrowing. Wikipedia borrowed rather too much from (1) the culture of wikis, (2) unmoderated online discussions, and (3) free-wheeling online culture generally. To be sure, Wikipedia is also a product of those cultures, and works as well as it does largely because of what it borrowed from those cultures. But it also shares some of its more serious current flaws with such cultures. Those planning new projects, or wanting to overhaul old ones, might well bear in mind that a certain cultural context, including the context that has grown up around a tool, just might not be right for that project. Let me elaborate.
(1) Consider first the culture of wikis. On the one hand, I said we wanted to determine the best rules, and experience would help us determine that; so we had no rules to begin with. On the other hand, one might add that another reason we began without rules was that we were partaking in the extremely uncontrolled, free-wheeling nature of "traditional" wikis. I think that's right. But there is an excellent reason why an encyclopedia project should not partake in that extremely uncontrolled nature of wiki culture, and why it should adopt actually enforceable rules: unlike traditional wikis, encyclopedia projects have a very specific aim, with very specific constraints, and efficient work toward that aim, within those constraints, practically requires the adoption of enforceable rules. The mere fact that most wikis, when Wikipedia was created, did not have enforceable rules hardly meant that one could not innovate further, and create one that did have rules.
(2) Moreover, Jimmy and I and most of the first participants on Wikipedia were veterans of unmoderated Internet discussion groups, and hence, naturally, we could appreciate the advantages of letting a virtual community develop in the absence of any real (enforcement) authority. In unmoderated forums there is often found a sense, among some participants, that any attempt to oust a particularly troublesome user amounts to unjustifiable censorship. The result is that the existence of many unmoderated forums online has created a small army of people militantly opposed to the slightest restriction on speech, who feel that they do and should have a right to say whatever they like, wherever they like, online. Any attempt to create and enforce rules for Internet projects, when that small army is ready to cry "censorship," will seem daring or even outrageous in many contexts online. But there is an excellent reason why such anarchy is inappropriate for many projects, including encyclopedia projects, even one that is self-policing like a wiki: there simply must be a way to enforce rules in order for rules to be effective. Given that encyclopedia project development happens almost entirely using words, nearly any rules will also be restrictions on speech. Anyone who advocates many enforceable rules on a collaborative project, in the cultural context of an Internet filled with so many unmoderated discussion groups, can be made to seem reactionary. But this is only a result of that cultural context; in any other context, the existence of rules would be perfectly natural and unobjectionable.
(3) Finally, and generally speaking, the Internet is a great leveller. Since social interaction can proceed among complete strangers who cannot so much as see each other, things that seem to matter in many "meatspace" discussions, such as age, social status, and level of education, are often dismissed as unimportant online. Many Internet forums, chatrooms, and blogs are populated by people who are identified by only a "handle," and any suggestion that communication should be restricted or in any way altered in accordance with "expertise" or "authority" is likely to be met with outrage, in most forums. But there are several excellent and obvious reasons why expertise does need special consideration in an encyclopedia project, and in other collaborative projects. First, there are many subjects that dilettantes cannot write about credibly; I, for example, could not write very credibly about astronomy or speleology, but I have a passing interest in both. If I am working only with other dilettantes, our articles are apt to remain amateurish at best; we can fill in the gaps in each other's knowledge, and do research, but the results will remain problematic until someone with more knowledge of the subject contributes. Second, there are very many specialized subjects about which no one but experts has any significant knowledge at all. Third, it is only the opinions of experts that will be trusted by most of the public as authoritative in determining whether an article is generally reliable or not. Moreover, the standards of public credibility are not likely to be changed by the widespread use of Wikipedia or by online debate about the reliability of Wikipedia. Like them or hate them, those are the facts. But if one points these facts out online, culturally "levelled" as it is, particularly in forums or projects like Wikipedia which go out of their way to ignore individual differences among people, one finds a frosty reception at best.
Consider, if you will, that it was because Wikipedia was started in the context of the ingrained cultures of wikis, of unmoderated discussion forums, and of the levelling, anti-elitist influence of the Internet at large, that it was very difficult for us to exercise the maximal amount of creativity that a maximally successful project would require. In establishing a new cultural context, we were deeply constrained by the old. Now, to be sure, I have said above and many times elsewhere that Wikipedia did not have to adopt the particular conjunction of policies that it did. But it is not surprising that it did adopt its particular conjunction of policies, considering the conjunction of influences on its development. So it would have required much more explanation and persuasion, and indeed, much more struggle, for us to, for example, have persuaded potential participants that some persons, even in a wiki environment, should have special rights that others do not. So powerful is the influence of cultural context that there are quite a few people whose lack of imagination is such that they believe I simply must not understand "why Wikipedia works" if I am willing to suggest that it does not have to work in precisely the way it does work. Constantly-reinforced cultural habits die very hard indeed, and place very strong constraints upon what can be imagined, and what bare possibilities seem even worth thinking about.
But it was our willingness to exercise our creativity and follow our imagination, and create what is, to some extent, a new kind of culture, that led to Wikipedia's success. For the overall project of creating open content encyclopedias--and indeed, for the fantastic collaborative Internet that has yet to be created--to reach its full potential, the process of identifying mistakes honestly and creatively seeking solutions must be ramped up and continued unabated.
Many thanks to Larry Sanger and to O'Reilly for this memoir.
Obligatory recursion (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Obligatory recursion (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory recursion (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory recursion (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory recursion (Score:2)
That would have been indirect recursion at best.
There's irony. (Score:2)
That's not recursion (Score:2)
Everything you always wanted to know about Wikipedia here [slashdot.org].
Re:Cliff-hanger! (Score:1, Offtopic)
I don't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
well.. I don't think so. I have contributed a single article till date. And it was very very easy to contribute. Just click a links and type away. But when I go back it said this article needs to be wikified [wikipedia.org]. I followed the link only to be overvhelmed by the stuff I have to do to get it wikified.
Please dont get me wrong. I'm just intend to provide some constructive feedback. "Please make it simpler for Joe Sixpack"
Re:I don't think so (Score:1)
Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
Then it's working the way it's supposed to be. That's part of it being open. Someone didn't say that your contribution was worthless, they just flagged it in need of editting so that one of the many people who do know how to wikify stuff can come by and do it.
It can be unnerving at first when someone does something to an article you wrote. It seems like a personal offense, like an indication that what you did was worthless. But it's just part of the Wiki process. Think of it as editorial marks.
So go ahead - contribute! If you know you can't handle the Wiki code, just mark it for cleanup yourself and let one of the many Wiki editors clean it up for you. (Assuming, of course, that your contribution is actual valuable. :))
Some contributions will need to be editted, and generally, people will actually edit them and correct grammar and spelling mistakes as well as formatting mistakes. So don't worry about having your contribution marked in need of cleaning. It's just part of the Wiki process.
Who decides the truth? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a saying, the victors often write history. With most encyclopedia's there is an editorial board that decides what gets in. It is often culture specific. The encyclopedia you will find at the State U will be very different than the encyclopedias you find at Universities in Iran. With this project, it says people write articles, and edit other peoples work. Does that mean I can edit your article? It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling.
For example, if someone wanted to write about the war in Iraq, and the first article was submitted by Osama Bin Laden, I am sure others would come be at the polar opposite.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:1)
AFAIK. A friend (no, really...) edited someones Wiki entry because they had made a spelling mistake. The original poster was miffed and insisted it was the correct spelling (it wasn't...) and changed it back. Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
"The original poster was miffed and insisted it was the correct spelling (it wasn't...) and changed it back. Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me."
Actually, with Wikipedia, some people write the encyclopedia, but it's those who don't do the writing who run Wikipedia.
For example, right now, one "admin" does little else but to run off the project people he dislikes. He's currently trying to run off an editor who make
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
See history of Ashlee Simpson [wikipedia.org] for the kind of crap Everyking inflicts upon Wikipedia.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
Well, ok, we're all listening. What is the other side of the story?
(Unlike some Wikipedia admins,) I'm not so convinced that I'm always right that I feel a need to silence other opinions; to the contrary, I'd very much like to hear what you think the other side of the story is. So tell us. If you're right -- and I'm sure some of your points will be right -- I'll gladly admit that in a follow-up post.
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:1)
Guy #1 "Good for the Wiki"
This guy is being promoted as hard-working honest person working toward a common social good. The stereotypical "honest working man."
Guy #2 "Good for Guy #2"
This guy is portrayed as a status seeker whose sole purpose is to extend his control of the wiki world. That's a kind of selfish good with the sole purpose of seeking praise. Stereotypical executive manager maybe?
I'm fascinated at how #2's drive away a few and
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:2)
Well, in defense of admin ("#2"), he climbed to power based on going after unpopular editors.
Basically, there's a lot of groupthink at Wikipedia, and a tremendous amount of defensiveness too. Why, I'm not quite sure, but there's a cadre there that takes any criticism very personally, and, bel
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:1)
While we're clarifying the record, let's note that you fled Wikipedia just as an arbcom case was accepted against you in which you no doubt would have finally been sanctioned for the unending stream of personal attacks and trolling that you were submitting me to.
As for the apparently valid information, Peter Yarrow's conviction had nothing to do with the dissolution
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:2)
Fled? You really do think you're running a police-state, don't you? Yes, I was shaking in fear, one step ahead of your thought-policing.
Actually I did "flee" -- to Ohio. I gave up my apartment lease, moved out, and moved to Ohio for a month to volunteer at the Ohio headquarters for Kerry-Edwards.
After weeks of 18 hour days seven days a week, I created from scratch (and local Boards of Election data) a distributable offli
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:1)
And strangely, I haven't seen you back since the election. Wonder why.
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:2)
Keeping Steak and Blowjob Day in Wikipedia is "making a difference"?! Man, you should add an entry for "Pathetic" with just your photo above that statement.
TWW
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:1)
Re:Who decides the truth? OT (Score:1)
Maybe I got it all wrong describing Wikipedia as a religious cult [slashdot.org]. It's only really a religious crusade for techno utopian supporters in the media, and marketing consultants who blog. But it is a cult, and only in a cult can behavior like this flourish. Someday Wikipedia is going to be a sociological case study.
I'm bookmarking this part of the thread. It's as good an introduction to Wikipedia for outsiders as any article I've read about it. Thanks again, Orthogonal.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
(Hey, no one's going to see that when you post as anonymous coward, so let me give you the benefit of quoting you at my "Karma Bonus" +2.)
So I'm a total dick, and you're -- you're too much of an Anonymous Coward to post under your own account?
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:5, Interesting)
With the wiki model, whoever has the most time to spend editing the work of others writes history.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:5, Funny)
With the wiki model, whoever has the most time to spend editing the work of others writes history.
So basically, it's the losers that write history these days.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, articles on schools and universities tend to be appallingly self-aggrandizing; Columbia University [wikipedia.org] is a particularly egregious example, though there are many others.
Perhaps there's nothing factually incorrect about these articles, but the authors have an agenda, and it shows in the writing. There are many, many articles where a casual reader might be misled into thinking Wikipedia offers an unbiased perspective when it's actually anything but.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2)
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:1)
> unbiased perspective
This is not unique to Wikipedia. There is fundamentally no such thing as an unbiased perspective -- the mere phrase is inherently contradictory. *All* encyclopedia articles (all articles, period) contain bias, and many contain rather appalling bias. There is nothing that can be done about this.
For all that, though, encyclopedias are darned useful. Obviously, you have to read them the same way you ought to re
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:2, Interesting)
Discussion (Score:2)
It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling.
Seem? You obviously haven't read many of the Discussion pages for some of the more controversial (and even some of the mundane) topics.
Re:Who decides the truth? (Score:1)
Re:Dupe! (Score:1)
until tomorrow.
enough of this (Score:3, Insightful)
Now would be an excellent time to stop all the self-serving "I helped start all this" publicity. You've had your say, several times over now. The sour grapes thing is getting really old now.
Re:enough of this (Score:4, Interesting)
My $0.02
depends on the elitism (Score:2)
That's the sort of elitism Wikipedia doesn't have time for.
Re:enough of this (Score:1, Insightful)
I must admit that I have a particular interest in these issues working on a similar project permaculture.info [permaculture.info] myself. Its certainly been helpful to me to know of the problems we
Re:enough of this (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you disagree with the validity of his points (I myself disagree with many of his conclusions), you have to admit that many people (perhaps even future historians) will be interested to read the point of view of someone so pivotally involved in the formation of such a monumental
Re:Typical Wikipedian response (Score:1)
>Yup, Classic Wikipedian response.
Hmm... Classic anti-wikipedian response? Ditto to the above?
Sanger does have a point to make. Encyclopedias traditionally have a double role - one, they act as an indexed collation of information, and two, they act as a calibration point for points of views. In short, they act as a reference, and then they act as an authority.
Wikipedia is brilliant at the former, and in the traditional sense, non-existent at the la
This oughta be worth 80 karma! (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else catch this? (Score:2, Funny)
Wikipedia is a huge success (Score:3, Insightful)
Critical Views of Wikipedia (GFDL) (Score:4, Interesting)
Specific Criticisms
Various readers and editors of Wikipedia, and administrators of rival encyclopedias, see several valid bases on which to criticize Wikipedia. Readers and editors often have different concerns, but chief among them are:
Lack of Authenticity
Wikipedia's utility as a reference work has been questioned by many diverse sources. The lack of credentials and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by most people. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea", but that he would not use it in practice and is:
"not aware of a single librarian who would [use it]. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
However, Wikipedians commonly encounter this argument. Wikipedia, they say, is a more of an independent source than most traditional encyclopedias, and the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately. Yet, this is only a potential strength, as in reality, Wikipedia cannot be relied upon for accuracy, except on a limited range of topics. Wikipedians say one should not solely rely on any one source in their research. Yet, critics must counter that relying on a trusted source is the fundamental use of an encyclopedia.
Systemic Biases
Wikipedia's systemic bias of covering some topics in much greater depth than others is also considered significant, something that even the site's proponents admit. In an interview with The Guardian, the executive team of Encyclopædia Britannica noted that:
"people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."
One user on a Wikipedia discussion board noted that the Wikipedia entry on Tony Blair was still several times longer than the corresponding entry in Encyclopædia Britannica, but this is a non sequitur. One should note that a vast number of Wikipedias articles cover topics which would not be included in print encyclopedias.
A common Wikipedia maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence." The site founder admits that the variation in quality between different articles and topics is certainly not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be "pretty good", getting better by the day. The "competing" Encyclopædia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian.
It should be noted, however, that Wikipedia articles have been referenced in enhanced perspectives provided online in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious (and unmercifully selective) scientific publications in the world. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", by Hartmut Linden, in the August, 2002 issue. Since then, dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided hyperlinks to Wikipedia. A search on "Wikipedia" in Science's web site * [sciencemag.org] turns up 43 instances as of December, 2004, with the perspective "Turning on a Dime", by Ulrike K. Müller and David Lentink, as the latest in that date range.
Unecessary Editing of Original Authors
"I don't want my text edited by any passer-by! It's mine!"
All wikis benefit greatly from this practice. It is difficult to single-handedly write the perfect article, but it becomes easier when working together, at least, in theory. In fact, many editors experience a strong "team" effect on Wikipedia, but just as many experience unecessary edits and heartless reverting of their work, and this pushes would-be contributors away.
Such unecessary editing results in "edit wars" and "flame wars", in which two or more contributors revert each other's edits, contributing nothing to the community. Wikipedia, unlike Usenet, has the possibility and power of enforcing its community-agreed standards on new users, even when its own democratic, "wiki way" principles are in conflict with such enforcement.
Those familiar with interactions between individuals on Usenet, for example, are accustomed to such wars, and can easily tune them out. When these tendencies to academic conflict are combined with Wikipedia's powerful community activism, such wars are defended as "encouraging creative and collegial collaboration". Wikipedians believe there is no such thing as "other people's work", because there's no ownership of information, however, original authors will quickly counter that while information is free, expression is not, and so strong egos can and do easily collide over the control of their expressions. The community always wins, though, regardless of the truth of that free information.
Tedious Battles of Persistence
Numerous contributors complain that editing on Wikipedia is a very tedious excersise in futility in cases of conflict. They frequently note that "fanatic", even "kooky" contributors with idiosyncractic, out-of-mainstream, non-scientific belief systems can easily push their point of view, because nobody has the time and energy to fight them, and because they may be higly-placed in the Wikipedian beauracracy. Such wars can be highly academic, but nevertheless draining for all involved.
Partly in response to his battles with followers of Lyndon LaRouche, one prolific, high profile contributor, Adam Carr Ph.D., [adam-carr.net] stated in October 2004 that he would scale down his contributions to Wikipedia considerably because of, what he considers, the too open nature of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger, a Nupedia and Wikipedia founder and early key contributor, sees this too-open nature as "anti-elitism", and calls for widespread changes to Wikipedia so that contributers who have credentials can pierce through the walls of the community.
Such sentiments are hardly isolated to a few of what the remaining Wikipedians call "problem users". The problem, though, is not to allow credentials to overcome facts, and so the Wikipedians have a point by being so open. The edit battles rage on behind the scenes, and the most persistent editors usually win, often those who are entrenched within the Wikipedian community.
Conform or you're Reverted
A common type of post on the User talk pages of newer users is often something along the lines of:
You'll have to conform to the style already present if you want to contribute, or it will just be reverted as "nonsense" by those of us without your background. (English Wikipedia User Omegatron)
While this is just one example, it is not isolated, and brilliantly serves to illustrate that Wikipedia functions more like a community, one demanding conformity of thinking, than an encyclopedia, where knowledge and truth are paramount. Though many new users do indeed push the boundaries of what is acceptable to any wiki community, the sad fact is that new contributors to Wikipedia will be expected to keep closely to the party line on many issues, if they are to survive their edit wars. This feeds the problem of lacking authenticity, as well as the other criticisms, when such a user, now considered a "problem user" by Wikipedians, has true knowledge in an area in which the community has taken a false approach. The users' edits will be reverted, and the article(s) in question will remain hopelessly wrong or "slanted", solely due to the strength of the community, rather than the burden of facts.
Multiplied Search Results (Google Bombs)
Since Wikipedia, as all wikis, contains a large number of internally linked pages, it receives high rankings from Google for particular searches. This can result in confusing research, because often identical Wikipedia mirror articles can overpopulate results. This makes it more likely that one's web searches will return identical and superfluous articles, a problem complicated by the fact that many, many pages on Wikipedia are wrong, biased, plagarized, or just poorly written. So, a Google bomb from Wikipedia on a subject of a reader's research can become a compounded research effort which does not benefit the reader.
Reliance on poorly designed Wiki Software
Wikipedia's software MediaWiki has been criticized on many levels. It is less than elegant in many ways, both for end users and for developers, even since being updated with new "monobook" and other skins. MediaWiki development is a classic case of design by committee, with multiple overlapping extension solutions to problems, none of which may work as advertised. Instead of simplicity of form, MediaWiki seems programmed to be as messy and slow as possible, and for developers, is overly complex and buggy, leading to problematic installations on non-Wikimedia servers.
The main criticism is very much related to that against Wikipedia. Due to Wikipedia's relative popularity in the Wikisphere, its software, MediaWiki, has received undue exposure and may be installed for wikis which cannot afford to surmount its many problems, such as the need to constantly police the wiki because of security holes, Wikipedian assumptions of how wikis look and read, and generally poor or ugly design. More than any other wiki software, MediaWiki-run wikis can easily be overrun with wikispam and vandalism, and hog server resources more than any other wiki engine can. The exposure of Wikipedia has also allowed MediaWiki developers to become MediaWiki fanatics, pushing their own disorganized code and sloppy, Wikipedia-biased pseudo-"standards" on independent wiki installations and administrators.
The main fork of MediaWiki, XML standards-based GetWiki, as well as its developer M. R. M. Parrott, have been subject to propaganda attacks from Wikipedians since GetWiki's inception on Wikinfo in January, 2004. But MediaWiki also steals mindshare from installations which might better be served by UseModWiki, PhpWiki, or some other elegant wiki engine. The groupthink effect on Wikipedia works just as strongly with MediaWiki development, where often byzantine code extensions are favoured over simplicity, only because the poor solutions come by way of a Wikipedian way of working, to solve Wikipedian demands.
Critical Background
"Wikipedians say one should not solely rely on any one source in their research. Yet, critics must counter that relying on a trusted source is the fundamental use of an encyclopedia."
Wikipedia was the first large scale test of wiki technology for general purpose, public, knowledgebase gathering and distribution. As of early 2005 the English Wikipedia has several hundred-thousand articles and tens of thousands of contributors, by far the largest wiki system. The second largest wiki is the German Wikipedia. This volume reinforces the Wikipedian community, and so Wikipedia has spread as an umbrella over many international wiki systems as the owner (until late 2003), Bomis, provided servers and bandwidth for any language of wiki for which contributors were willing to set up a version.
After experimenting with Nupedia, which relied on approved editors for quality control, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales concluded that a top-down "cathedral" development model would not allow the project to be successful. Wales sought a method whereby a larger group of users could asynchronously or simultaneously review content. Wiki software, which allows casual users easier access to editing tools, offered Wales an alternative to the problems he saw in the Nupedia model.
Wales operated the project with volunteer assistance for several years on Bomis equipment, and for a year paid an employee to get the project going. Until the establishment of a foundation in 2003, Wales declared himself "God King" of Wikipedia policy. In late 2003, the entire project was transferred from Bomis to the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded by Wales.
The foundations three original trustees were partners in ownership of Bomis.com. In May, 2003, Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors, announced that he is resigning as CEO of Bomis to more fully reflect that he spends most of his time working for the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales also announced in May, 2004 that he envisions himself as eventually being paid to run Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia soon developed a large group of regular users who controlled content by reviewing recent changes and individual watch-lists of users they did not trust. In a contrast to the Nupedia model, in which edit privileges were difficult to come by, Wikipedia offered edit privileges by default. Administrators revoke edit privileges at their discretion based on policies, and on their opinion of content or contributors.
Wikipedia, more so than other wiki services in early 2004, had become a main source for encyclopedic content redistributed by other sites. While this means that a much greater body of Internet content is freely available, it also means that any errors, political biases, or even subtle slander found on Wikipedia would be reproduced across multiple wiki websites. Wikipedia is often cited, then, as a bad example in discussions about the "wiki way".
Open elections were held that allowed Wikipedia contributors to elect two Foundation members to the five member board. Wikimedia Foundations bylaws do not allow open elections for the original appointees' seats on the board of trustees, but allow the board to elect replacements. Wikipedia's volunteer administration executes policy with technical interventions, with brief votes open to most users, with a volunteer mediation process and with a volunteer arbitration committee process based on public airing of evidence or opinions about various grievances. While Wikipedia offers venues for conflict resolution, participation in those venues can be intimidating. A process for criticizing administrators emerged in early 2004, but Wales later wrote that anyone he has investigated who was critical of his administrators "turned out to be a complete and total ass." But he maintains polite and thoughtful users, even those prohibited from on-line discussions, are welcome to join mailing lists to comment on policy.
Cases in Point
"Priests roamed"
"Following the devastation in Lisbon in 1755, priests roamed the streets, hanging those they believed had incurred God's wrath."
This false sentence was, until recently, within the "1755 Lisbon earthquake" article (on Wikinfo as well as Wikipedia), and caused an uproar when it was included in some "Washington Post" news coverage regarding recent Tsunami in Asia. What is striking is not that there was a false sentence on Wikipedia, for some would say falsities are as ubiquitous as hyperlinks on that "largest Wiki" in the world; what is striking is the resulting conversation about the sentence (see the talkfake news [wikipedia.org] page, and it's talk page [wikipedia.org]. Particularly telling are Theresa Carpinelli's cogent statements and arguments against Wikipedia, such as:
"I am not a contributer to Wikipedia, nor do I wish to be. But I have used it, and my son has used it quite a bit. As a user, therefore, and the primary educator of my son, I feel I have a perfect right to ask for sources, not change the article myself."
The treatment of newcomers like Carpinelli, who have the simplest suggestions, is often a growing series of personal attacks. In this case, the attacks got ugly, only because she expected that an encyclopedia was a place to go to get correct information on a subject. The Wikipedians she found, though, ridiculed her for not becoming a wiki-editor herself, if the error was so important, and eventually, created the "fake" news article about the incident, one which is heavily slanted toward Wikipedian policy and practice, as well as being an unconvincing defense of the false sentence as having come from elsewhere. This is only one of many examples, and only came to light because of Carpinelli's dilligence in trying to uncover the truth.
"Now that [the false sentence] has been published in the Post, it has been picked up by many more outlets than it would have had it remained on the less-than-credible Internet sites." - Carpenelli [catholicexchange.com]
Concordantly, had the false statement never been posted on Wikipedia, indeed one of the "less-than-credible" websites, this chain of events would never have occured. So, it is one thing to allow the posting of any point of view by internet denziens, and it is quite another to call that process an encyclopedia on par with Britannica or others. Because of cases like this, it is irresponsible for Wikipedians to promote Wikipedia as anything other than what it actually is.
Who coined 'Dynamism'?
"Dynamism", according to Wikipedia:
First version - User:Pratyeka, 15 Sept, 2004):
Second version (User:Tmh, 3 Oct, 2004):
Third version User:Polynova, 4 Oct, 2004):>
Let us consider the article "Dynamism" on Wikipedia, to demonstrate how false information can be propagated. The three Wikipedia revisions, to date, are provided avobe. Compare to M.R.M. Parrott's Wikinfo version [wikinfo.org], starting on 10 November, 2004, heavily modified from their revision of 4 October, 2004.
Now, imagine you are a young student doing research in Philosophy. You come upon the topic of Dynamism, and would like to know more. Perhaps you would try to Google it out, perhaps with 'dynamism coined'. The 22 March, 2005 result (4 months after the corrected Wikinfo version was created) from Google is evidence that the text from Wikipedia is propagated across many sites. If you didn't know any better, you would probably accept the answer as given by so many official-sounding websites. The only problem, other than the article being an advert for Postrel's book, is the answer given in the now replicated text is wrong, very wrong, and could not be more wrong unless "Dynamism" were defined as a type of cucumber.
Many of us can accept that there is false information, non-verified, inauthentic, highly questionable, false information all over Wikipedia. A wiki with so many hundreds of thousands of pages is bound to get some things wrong. The problem is, that because Wikipedia has become the "AOL" of the library and reference world, such false information and incorrect definitions of terms become multiple incompetences, propagated to millions of potential readers world-wide. There are countless articles like this on Wikipedia, many of which will never be corrected, either because of the powerful groupthink effect throughout, or because the errors will simply never be found and pointed out.
We must ask: How many young students have read or copied false text from Wikipedia? Is the fact that it's a wiki relevant to the question? Furthermore, if a non-Wikipedian student or philosopher were to try to update the Wikipedia article, the revisions would quite likely be reverted (at least, M.R.M. Parrott's would for sure), and that outsider would then become yet another "problem user".
Wikinfo, with a major portion of its content imported directly from Wikipedia, is not immune to this criticism. However, Wikinfos are committed to finding such falisity and rooting it out, and correcting or modifying Wikipedia articles before they are saved on Wikinfo, as should editors on other encyclopedic wikis importing Wikipedia content. So, in effect, Wikipedia, as a huge GFDL content provider, exports as much ignorance via XML as it does fact.
Change is Unlikely
"I think we're finally beginning to be taken seriously. We have half a million articles, and we're approaching the level of respectability which Encyclopedia Britannica labored for centuries to achieve." - Ed Poor, "Wikipedia hits the big time [wikimedia.org]" (listserv, March, 2005)
For the many who watch Wikipedia from afar and through other wikis, their mission to slowly build specific encyclopedic content, rather than verify content before publication, has incorrectly become synonomous with "wiki". MeatballWiki has an article, "Wikipedia Is Not Typical", which focuses on this problem. Others point out that the Wikipedian goal actually misses the whole point of collaborative editing technology, which is to produce quality output which represents something "more true than not". Even though goodwill among "inside" contributors is a side effect of their dedication to a common goal, editorial biases and "edit wars" continually show up in the very public wiki process and final content.
Even some insiders have criticized Wikipedia's culture as "destructive" and "abusive". For instance, "The Cunctator" refers to its "vile mailing list", "R. K." called it the "Nazipedia", because he believes there is viciously anti-semitic bias, and there are debates which seem to focus on whether a "GodKing" or sysop pronouncement regarding "the truth" can or must be accepted as truth within Wikipedia itself. All such criticisms point to the reality of Wikipedia being a commmunity first, a cult even, and an encyclopedia second. In discussions, it is the loudest of voices attracting the most supporters whom often dominate the direction.
Interestingly, Wikipedia founder, Jim Wales, worked under the title "God King" for several years, and encouraged new Wikipedia contributors and leaders to use his cult-like language and terms on the wiki, discouraging any opposition to his views and proposed wiki policies. "Jimbo" is also an unabashed Objectivist, one school of thought frequently recognized [std.com] as a cult of pseudo-philosophers requiring strict conformity of thinking and uncritical support of Ayn Rand and her followers. Casual conversations with Wales can quickly become challenges for his beliefs and he will abruptly end them, using ad hominem suggestions throughout. Not surprisingly, Wales has become a cult figure within Wikipedia, supporting his community's primary function as a cult-like social network. Jimbo's biases are noteworthy only because Wikipedia has become the largest and most widely known "wiki".
Any casual review of edit-histories at Wikipedia suggests that power users, who spend several hours a day making small edits to numerous pages, often dominate discussions, and comprise the most active elements of the administrative ranks. Yet, people who are qualified and interested in administrative functions can hold quite different interests from these power users. Thus, outsiders, new users, and those constructively critical are often blocked from discussions under vague allegations, such as "trolling", or being a known "problem user". Such disputes are not limited to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia's administrators regularly invoke the power of their community, reasoning that such people are excluded for "behavioral reasons", not for critical policy arguments, when the truth was quite the opposite. Some administrators might not be adept at the personal or editorial skills which can best resolve conflicts among contributors. An inability or unwillingness among such untrained administrators to consistently articulate what they find problematic contributes to a less productive collaborative environment, and exacerbates conflicts.
The quick deletion or reversion of particular views and whole articles without discussion or refutation, eliminating the contributions of several authors on grounds that a suspect author contributed a "kink in the chain". Such actions can be a disregard of their own simple rules for deletion, as well as the conservatism reagarding elimination of text. Due to the limitations of their views and resulting software, the labeling of a suspect author's IP address, pseudonyms and "sock puppets", as a banned author is quite common as well, and justifies for some administrators an extension of blocking tactics and invasions of privacy, based on ad hominem reasoning. Many other wikis, such as Wikinfo, have long moved to a model requiring logins, which prevents most casual vandalism, spam, and (barring the infamous "UseRealNames" wiki worst practice) provides true anonymous editing. Wikipedia will likely never address this major tension between the "wiki way" and the way of the internet.
Yet another flaw in the management of Wikipedia is the lack of a common understanding on adding external links to resources into articles. Wikipedia (like many Wikis) has problems with wikispam, however, many users at Wikipedia feel obliged to remove most or all external website links added to articles, whether they are useful or not. This includes legitimate links to websites directly related to the article at hand, perhaps because that external site has advertisments. Further, those who regularly add external links will find themselves being labeled as spammers or self-promoters and warned to cease their efforts or face being banned. This external link paranoia has driven many good editors away from Wikipedia, while Wikipedia itself is becoming more and more commercialized and marketed as a product.
Lastly, the popular selections of adminstrators and merely casual verification of selected content is employed, instead of a more formal fact-checking process. Correction of inaccuracies or misinformation is never assured, or even common, and when corrections are eventually made, it can be weeks, months, or years after the misinformation has been served and forked to readers and to other web services. Justifying this effective dissemination of ignorance by clinging to the "wiky way" is no longer reasonable, due to the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, and its goal of representing the canon of human knowledge.
As a result, Wikipedia has distinct and well-known limitations as an encyclopedia, and functions primarily as a cult-like community. There is no special process or mechanism to deal with a political disputes, with factions that can't or won't reconcile their terms to each other, even when disputes arise over matters of fact. The community explicitly has refused to work out any useful policy for terminology disputes, identity disputes, even factual disputes, and prefers to allow itself, the community, to decide such matters. There are no designated "Editors" to make final content decisions, even in matters of fact, in any language. Instead, all of these editorial problems result in clear power struggles, forcing contributors, even those of strong qualifications, to answer to a mob of pro-Wikipedia zealots and hype-pushers, even when there is abuse of those contributors from others of no particular qualifications. Disputes are therefore never really settled, though they many be endlessly discussed [wikimedia.org], while actions are taken within obvious groupthink parameters.
en:Wikipedia User Stirling Newberry has said [bopnews.com] Wikipedia is in serious danger of "capsizing", over the issues of credibility and authenticity, but some critics suggest that this is already happening, that it is unavoidable. Wikipedia is an interesting social experiment, but it is certainly not immune to the dark side of its own success, with vandalism, spam, frequent internet attacks and huge bandwidth needs. The many valid criticisms offered of Wikipedia must be taken to heart, rather than explained away, if Wikipedia is to survive as a source of anything but "problem users" and false statements.
External Links
Critical/Independent
* http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Wik
* http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wikipe
* Wikipedia Watch: http://www.geocities.com/progressivepix/wikiwatch
* Spring 2005]], The Messiness of WikiDemocracy [rimric.com], M.R.M. Parrott on Wikipedia and Wikinfo
* Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project
* October 2004 http://theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4045&
* http://www.kapitalism.net/thoughts/wikipedia.htm [kapitalism.net] Criticism on Kapitalism.net
* November 2004] http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html [techcentralstation.com] The Faith-Based Encyclopedia - Robert McHenry, a former Britannica editor, reviews Wikipedia at Tech Central Station
* December 2004, January 2005 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/2
* January 2005, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/14420
* January 2005, "http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000067.html [textfiles.com] A Criticism of Wikipedia Now Exceeding a Scream", Jason Scott
* February 2005, "http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art
* February 2005, "http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009528.phpNotE
Neutral/Introductory
* January 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,884
* August 2003 http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikip
* June 2004 http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=27
* October 2004 http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=10909&he
* October 2004
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,133
Hype/Groupthink
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikiped
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipe
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criticisms [wikipedia.org]
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_Sugge
* 1999 http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html [gnu.org] FSF endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia - note that no other GFDL corpus access providers are included!)
* July 2001 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/25/103136/12
* November 2001 http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2
* September 2003 Science magazine's NetWatch section gives a favourable short review [sciencemag.org] of "The People's Encyclopedia"
REFERENCES
Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Criticism of Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikiped
This article is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
It's Over, Larry. (Score:2)
Hey, Larry---why are you writing about Wikipedia when you yourself proved incapable of sticking with the project? Since your departure, it's grown tremendously, the power structure has changed (Board, Arbitration Committee), the category system has been implemented, providing a totally different kind of structural organization... it's not really the same place that you left. I take issue with the idea that your understanding of Wikipedia carries so
Re:It's Over, Larry. (Score:1)
I'll bite. (Score:2)
I think this is Larry's sour grapes over quitting in a huff and discovering that the project did just fine, nay, did even better, without him. And now he wants to feel important again, so he talks about the project without deigning to actually, you know, contribute to it.
But, hey, good personal attack against me rather than any attempt to dispute actual p
Goddamn preview button. (Score:2)
--grendel drago
Why rude? This is why. (Score:2)
Larry is not just another guy in the comments section talking smack. He's purporting to represent an organization which he's had no part of for going on three years now. It's when he gets on his high, fraudulent horse, that he needs to be taken down a peg.
Do you understand why I don't think Larry deserves "a break", as you say, so long as he continues to ride the coattails of a project he once was
judiciary (Score:2)
Larry mentions the lack of enforceable government in wikipedia. This seems like a good time to mention the website I'm working on: debatepoint.com [debatepoint.com]. It could represent the judicial branch of such a government. I would consider the source code of the website its constitution. The computer isn't going to become corrupt unless there is something wrong with the code. Administrators should vow not to bypass the code in order to modify the data.
-metric
Re:judiciary (Score:2)
it is already under the GPL:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/debatepoint [nongnu.org]
-metric
Yes, trolls do drive away valuable editors (Score:1)
Very few people will have the time to argue with aggressive cranks, especially when what they write is obviously biased, they use personal attacks and never seem to run out of free time.
Sometimes even a look at the discussion page
Re:Yes, trolls do drive away valuable editors (Score:1)
As with computer security issues the biggest threat with instability in wikipedia comes from the inside trusted users. A random troll who wants to deface articles is a niggling problem that can be fixed with blocking proxies and random sweeps to fix articles. But someone who obviously put a lot of time and effort into articles is going to have a psychological investment in the articles and a change of article in their eyes is a per
Larry's authority under question (Score:4, Interesting)
I was an admin on Wikipedia for quite a while, and I largely succeeded because I:
1. Listened to people
2. Took action against people I felt were causing problems
3. Followed the procedures as best I could, however sometimes I bypassed them - I made sure I didn't do this often
4. When I made a mistake, I acknowledged it and took action to correct it (whether this be a public apology - this was always tough - or by unblocking, or by holding firm but be willing to accept the consequences).
Larry, from what I understand, often held intractible views and did not hold towards a neutral point of view. Consequently, he seems to have been disappointed in the project, and been a pretty controversial participant in Wikipedia. The subpage deletion episode he detailed in this slashdot piece just confirms my opinion.
Foundation (Score:1)
Think wikipedia will stop the fall of galactic civilisation into a 30,000 year dark ages?
Will the wikipedia writers be sequestered on a remote planet near the edge of the galaxy? (wait, wouldn't that be all of us??)
Re:Foundation -- the parallels are uncanny (Score:1)
Armenian genocide dispute shows Wikipedia is joke (Score:1, Interesting)
There is this character Coolcat who openly admitted on 22:32, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC) [wikipedia.org]:
"Dear sir. I am not knowlegable in the Armenian Genocide article enough to comment. I am merely folowing wikipedia NPOV article."
Yet he is knowledgeable enough to edit the article and add Turkish POV, he just does not want to debate against someone who has read so many works on the subject.
On the other hand Fadix who has a vast knowledge on the subject is handi
That's crap. (Score:2)
I might also point out that many footnotes does not make a clear or well written article, though it does show a lot of effort. If you don't believe me, try reading The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, or any work by David Irvine.
I stopped reading... (Score:2)
Just for the record, my username was Ta bu shi da yu [wikipedia.org], and I wrote:
* Exploding whale [wikipedia.org]
* Btrieve [wikipedia.org]
* CUPS [wikipedia.org], and
* Muni [wikipedia.org]
Interesting. (Score:2)
P.S. (Score:2)
I don't think you've thought things out very well...
Re:Stop your vanity (Score:2)
Re:This is a religion for you defending WIkipedia (Score:2)
Oh. My. Gosh. (Score:2)
P.S. (again) (Score:2)
Yeah, that's right. (Score:2)
You seem to be trying to make this into a competition on who has the most references. More references do not necessarily make a better article (though it's a good indication of good intent to research an article). Experts can be
Oops, no more feeding trolls! (Score:2)
Uh... (Score:2)
Ever looked at an Encyclopedia lately? (Score:2)
Larry on Wiktionary (Score:2)
Re:Larry on Wiktionary (Score:1)
Re:Larry on Wiktionary (Score:2)
Re:zzzz (Score:2, Funny)
if you didn't type letter "t" by accident, I think that this comment would be moderated 'funny' and on-topic.
Re:zzzz (Score:2)
Re:cat /dev/urandom | strings | tr -d '\n' (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In case it gets slashdotted (Score:2)
It would be interesting to see ./ actually slashdot itself. Hurray for infinite recursion!