Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales - the founder of Wikipedia - came into R&Mi yesterday afternoon. He gave some background on the Wikipedia project, how it works and some insights into just what you can accomplish with the help of a hundred thousand volunteer members of the public!

So, what is Wikipedia all about? Here are some of my notes and some stuff stolen from Tom Coates' summary ...

Wikipedia is a multilingual encyclopedia that's been created collaboratively by thousands of members of the public. It is powered by Media Wiki which is similar to - but much more powerful than - the slightly less famous pikesville wiki. One is a project for the good of humanity, the other contains my Christmas present wishlist!

Wikipedia contains around 400,000 English language (mix US and UK English) articles. 3,000 new articles are added each day. It has been updated over 8 million times by over a 100,000 people.
This all makes Wikipedia larger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica!

All Wikipedia content is free to use and re-use. This is there "copyleft" policy:

"The goal of Wikipedia is to create an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom."

Incidentally this policy places Wikipedia content high up in google's page rankings. This is because each site using Wikipedia content must link back to Wikipedia (the basis of google's rating system_

So, an organisation is free to use Wikipedia content rather than pay for proprietary content. Certainly a public service organisation has ideals which converge with those of Wikipedia, among them neutrality; high standards; the free dissemination of information; education; entertainment etc plus limited resources!! The main rub would be the issue of moderation. A media organisation such as the BBC has to avoid appearing responsible for violations decency, accuracy, libel, copyright etc ... how do you moderate such vast amounts of content?

There also exists:

Wiktionary (a free dictionary), Wikisource (a collection of public domain or FDL-licensed texts), Wikibooks (free textbooks for schools and universities), and Wikiquote (a collection of notable quotations).

Wednesday, December 01, 2004