wikimedia-projects

"We need to be super careful that we’re not passing on whatever biases are in that machine-learning system"

"The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? We'd want to complement Project Gutenberg--how, exactly?"

"[L]ike Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone -- I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be."

"A few times a week, Alastair Haines, a grad student at the Presbyterian Theological Centre in Sydney, sits down with a Greek version of the New Testament and translates a bit of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Haines doesn't speak Greek, but he can read it. When he's done, he loads his work onto a Wikipedia page as part of the Wiki Bible Project, a take-all-comers effort launched in January to create "an original, open content translation of the Bible's source texts," which by most counts includes about 30,000 manuscripts. Along with Haines, who admits to signing up for duty as a way to put off finishing his dissertation, 21 others have answered Wikipedia's call to "claim a chapter!" The eclectic group includes a liberal Christian living in the United Arab Emirates and a Methodist financial counselor in Texas. Some claim to be formally trained in Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek; others, such as user John Kloosterman, admit to being "without qualifications of any kind." The project will take a few years to complete and require constant refinement, says John Vandenberg, one of project's main administrators. But "that is part of the beauty," he writes. "It's a laissez-faire translation." But Biblical scholars see the potential for an inaccurate, bias-filled mess. "Democratization isn't necessarily good for scholarship," says Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who worked on the most recent translation of the New Revised Standard Version in 1988. "Those were the best Greek and Hebrew scholars in the country, and it took them 20 years.""

"There's no show of hands at Wiktionary. There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might be Wiktionary's motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?"

"It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to Nupedia."

"[W]e don't want to try to duplicate Project Gutenberg's efforts; rather, we want to complement them. Perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG."

"Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there's a market. And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it's best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources."

"Until Wikidata can give me a list of all movies shot in the 60s in Spain, in which a black female horse is stolen by a left-handed actor playing a Portuguese orphan, directed by a colorblind German who liked sailing, and written by a dog-owning women from Helsinki, we have more work to do."

"Wikidata is one of the best options for an open, common knowledge graph of background information for use in an application or AI system. SPARQL is the most common way to access the data and here's one resource to get help in learning how to use it effectively."

"To explain and motivate [Wikidata], we have often asked the simple question: "What are the world's largest cities with a female mayor?" … [A]n answer can now, finally, be given."

"State of Wikidata - giving more people more access to more knowledge one edit at a time"

"[It’s] a backbone of the web of data,If you are interested in data, it is better than search. It would be oversimplifying Wikidata to call it search. [There] you are matching the string, Wikidata’s web of knowledge is far more powerful than string matching"

"Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping."

"Wikipedia's version of reality has already become a monopoly. And all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators are imposed too."

"This term "democratic" gets tossed around a lot, usually in a positive, "power to the people rather than some arbitrary ruler" sense. By that meaning, Wikipedia is indeed democratic. Yet, unlike a state democracy, 51% at the polls will not necessarily trump a Wikipedia adversary. So in the sense that the word "democracy" comes loaded with a "one man, one vote" ideology, Wikipedia is not democratic at all. And it is a good thing that Wikipedia isn't a democracy."

"Wikipedia is, at least to some extent, a revenge site. People (like [Don] Murphy) who have a knack for angering and upsetting others are primary targets for that sort of treatment. This is not rocket science, folks. ... As the level of perceived “obnoxiousness” required to make someone a [Wikipedia] target continues to drop, the question becomes, how far will it drop?"

"Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. ... [O]ne can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek."

"Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in anime."

"The project's advocates imagine that the problem, if they recognise one at all, lies in the variable quality of Wikipedia's individual entries. The solution is obvious: a process in which editors work on the less successful entries and remove the obviously unmerited ones. In reality, the problem is much more fundamental to Wikipedia than that much of its content is a pile of dross. Whereas science and learning pursue truth, Wikipedia prizes consensus. Wikipedia has no means of arbitrating between different claims, other than how many people side with one position rather than another. That ethos is fatal to the advancement of learning. Ideas are refined by being tested; scientific method presupposes scrutiny, experiment and conflict."

"It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. ..."Wiki," pronounced \wee'-kee\, derives from a Polynesian word, "wikiwiki," but what it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly-editable series of web pages. ... I can start a page ... Anyone else (yes, absolutely anyone else) can come along and make absolutely any changes to it that he wants to. ... On the page I create, I can link to any other pages, and of course anyone can link to mine. The project is billed and pursued as a public resource. There are a few announced suggestions or rules. ... As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. ... [It] can be a place where additional changes and commentary can be gleaned... The content can be licensed under an open content license. On the front page of the Nupedia wiki we'd make it ABSOLUTELY clear that this is experimental..."

"At present I am overworked and the [Nupedia] project is suffering to some extent as a result... I just don't have the time to find lead reviewers for the articles listed [in "General and Other"]. The problem is that it is VERY difficult to find *specialists* on each of those topics."

"We wouldn't call it "the Nupedia wiki" though that's what it would be. ... On the "wikipedia" we would say that this is a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently."

"It was a cold Friday evening in January 2001. I was on duty in one of my uni's computer labs..."

"Hello, World!"

"...why 2 sites, or 2 encyclopedias? My impression of them is Wikipedia is the "everyman's" encyclopedia and Nupedia is for the university elite. I looked at being a writer [for Nupedia] but I really felt I wouldn't be welcome since I'm just a college graduate of a two year program for corporate communications."

"After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process. As it turns out, Wikipedia is dramatically more successful on some measures, ... The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive."

"Wikis don't work if people aren't bold. You've got to get out there and make those changes, correct that grammar, add those facts, make that language precise, etc., etc. It's OK. It's what everyone expects. So you should never ask, "Why aren't these pages copyedited?" Amazingly, it all works out. It does require some amount of politeness, but it works. You'll see."

"Larry Sanger resigned on March 1st, 2002. He won't even stay as a volunteer. The project now no longer has a leader (or, put another way, everyone is a leader now)."

"Now that Larry Sanger is gone, Wikipedia's owners will have to watch whether the project manages the transition to effective self-regulation and step in if necessary."

"The article [Martin Luther] is ample and solidly written. Someone was really occupied with Luther and read some church histories. I give extra points for quoting from sources and the pictures."

"What if we could get everyone in the world together to record what they know in one place?"

"Wikipedia's reflection of market dynamics is most easily observed in what many people view as the project's weakest areas: obscure articles that draw little traffic. In articles about third-rate garage bands and other topics of limited interest, one will often find factual and typographical errors at a much higher rate than in high-traffic articles such as those on "England" or "Barry Bonds." The much higher demand for information about the latter topics means that many more eyes will be combing those much-demanded articles for mistakes. Since Wikipedia is open to correction by anyone, it stands to reason that the articles attracting more potential editors will be of a higher quality. Rather than a failure, this is a great demonstration of Wikipedia's efficient allocation of resources."

"The Tsunami article is well researched and extensive, only at two places a little inaccurate. The scientific Wikipedia articles are, according to my judgement, almost always good."

"There is nothing to add to that entry [Marinade]. In my view it contains all important information. I use Wikipedia often for food chemistry. Sometimes you find something you didn't even think about."

"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."

"However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler."

"The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales...was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.""

"encyclopedia ... that anyone can edit"

"I take a half-full-glass view, based on a different understanding of what [Wikipedia's competition is]: not the traditional professionally produced encyclopedias, but the legions of sites that, springing up all over the Web, purport to contain answers, unverified and often unverifiable, to every topic on earth. Against that standard, Wikipedia is a resounding success."

"For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War – and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge – get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment."

"Wikipedia's promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge – both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. This is a radically popular idea."

"Shoppin' online for deals on some writable media. I edit Wikipedia."

"When I visited the offices [in St. Petersburg, Florida] in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge."

"If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia – it's also a fact."

"In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter."

"Wikipedia's openness isn't a mistake; it's the source of its success. A dedicated community solves problems that official leaders wouldn't even know were there. Meanwhile, their volunteerism largely eliminates infighting about who gets to be what. ... Wikipedia's biggest problems have come when it's strayed from this path, when it's given some people official titles and specified tasks. Whenever that happens, real work slows down and squabbling speeds up. But it's an easy mistake to make, so it gets made again and again."

"Hofstadter: The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me. Solomon: So fix it. Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back."

"Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information."

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."