- Saturday, 11 July 2009
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A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude - Oscar Wilde
Wikipedia half-baked admits Jimmy Wales
THE FOUNDER of Wackypedia has admitted that the idea of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy.
Jimmy Wales told AFP that while he was in a slum in India he met a young man on the street who told him that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th exams. He didn't say how, but we guess he didn't have to write about the Everywhere Girl, Mike Magee or how I was a Canadian boxer.
Wales thought this Indian bloke was really cool, even if he was not notable enough to remember his name. Apparently it indicated that Wikipedia had some impact even when there's "mud streets, and cows, and it's really quite a different environment from London". Dunno really there are a lot of cows in London, some of them have jobs as PR bunnies.
But Wales admits that Wikipedia was really just at the beginning of collaborative efforts and there was so much that could be done that isn't.
He said that, when it comes to video, it is all flicks of drunk women and cats falling over, but no one has made a large-scale collaborative project yet.
He told hacks that it would be really cool if someone made a 90-minute collaborative web video created by interviewing people from all around the world, giving their views on the war in Iraq.
Ok, he admitted that it would not be particularly popular but it was the sort of thing that people could do.
Wales said that collaboration has its limits, and it probably would not be possible to write a novel about loss, and redemption using Wikipedia techniques.
But, then again, it is not possible to write an online encyclopaedia when your editors are fake penis experts, or Daily Tech readers who have a chip on their shoulders and want to censor people who are cleverer or funnier than they are. µ
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Reading the last statement in your article about Daily Tech was reassuring. I thought I was alone in thinking that something strange was going on at for some time now.
So basically Jimbo admits that he had this great idea, but totally fecked up the installation and could somebody please do what it was he thought of initially ?
Well, Jimbo, why don't you start by making your site a bit more accountable for the "information" it holds ?
Because a true Encyclopedia does not censor articles on the whim of an editor with God-like rights.
And for a project like Wikipedia, I would expect any censoring to be the object of a public report, balanced and thought through, explaining why a given article should be censored, who accepted that responsibility and when was the decision taken.
You know, something OPEN, TRANSPARENT and therefor a lot more trustworthy than the back room bar dealings we are witnessing every day.
And get rid of the "truth by consensus" notion as well. Something is true or it is not. If you cannot prove it, then find proof. If no proof is to be found, then file it under "unsubstantiated".
But don't censor just because you can.
That is the most annoying, petty thing you can do.
Perish the thought!