Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site.
I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and social networking for mediawiki, I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting.
Daniel F. Gass, who signs his emails “15 year old conquering the web” already conquered a part of it since last night, creating a Wikia search plugin for Firefox! Awesome! Thanks, Daniel!
Now I wonder what open source toolbars out there might support more functionality…
I am participating in this fabulous and hopefully historic meeting and realized that I have now met Melissa Hagemann on 5 different continents. I think we both travel too much.
So, I notified Britannica about what my birth certificate and driver’s license says, but they refused to change their article unless I was willing to send them copies of the actual documentation! Naturally, I refused to do so.
Fortunately, an enterpising reporter did his homework and so now for the first time the world has a proper source.
I will, nevertheless, still continue to celebrate my birthday as I please. :)
Director Nic Hill is making what looks to be a fabulous film about Wikipedia and Wikipedians worldwide. Truth in Numbers has a wiki at Wikia, and Nic has posted his demo trailer and also his first “vodcast” from the road on his current trip.
He just finished up in China and is headed for Korea. After that he will be meeting me for a week’s travel in India, and then when I am off to Japan he is headed to… well, I forgot. But I am sure you can find out soon enough from the wiki.
Wikipedians may want to bookmark the site and check back often, because Nic and his team are very open to ideas for the film. Just edit the wiki to give ideas. :)
It is pretty easy, actually.
I advise the world to relax a notch or two. :-) We are not considering advertising on Wikipedia.
Visit World Wikia (travel), Campaigns Wikia (reforming politics), and Star Wars Wikia, a.k.a. Wookieepedia. For some types of communities, advertising to support the infrastructure is a good thing, and I fully support it. But not for Wikipedia.
As seems to be his special gift, Jason Calacanis has set off a bit of a blog storm with his report of having dinner with me a few months ago. The storm seems to mostly be of people responding with one of two viewpoints: (a) evil Jason Calacanis wanting Wikipedia to “monetize” versus virtuous Jimbo Wales nobly refusing OR (b) sensible Jason Calacanis wanting Wikipedia to do good with the money we could raise versus crazy idealist Jimbo Wales insanely refusing.
The real story, though, is much more interesting…
Two years ago I made a Wikipedia Jack O’ Lantern. It rocked. This year my daughter Kira came up with a brilliant idea: a Creative Commons Jack O’ Lantern. So we worked together and made it.
I love Halloween.
I am so excited and terrified.
Lost Wikia is shaping up to be really great this year. We’ve got Lynnette Porter, co-author of the fabulous book “Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: An Unauthorized Guide” contributing. A ton of great users from last year are coming back.
30 minutes from the Season Premiere. I am so excited and terrified. Why did I ever let myself get addicted to this show? :-)
Campaigns Wikia is something I have been dreaming about for the last few months. Today it launches. Please go read about it, and join the mailing list. And blog about it! :)
I don’t have the answers to the problems of broadcast politics, but I think we can work together to do something useful and, quite possibly, if we throw enough heartfelt energy and passion into it, something more than useful. Something astonishing.
Dana Blankenhorn interprets the New York Times story differently than I do. I have been sharply critical of the story, but I did not interpret it as trying “very hard to speak ill of Wikipedia.” It was a nice story, not a negative story. It was just wrong in the impression it gave about the trend of Wikipedia.
I did not feel that it was an attack piece. I think it does tend to show how traditional media just can’t quite accept that there is a revolution going on, and so the story line somehow has to be made to fit some preconceived notions. Obviously, Wikipedia can’t work. Obviously, the solution is to close down open editing. So, since Wikipedia is pretty good, and trying to do good, they must follow this obvious path over time.
Well, not necessarily. We actually can innovate and make changes which simultaneously improve quality and openness at the same time. That’s the interesting story here, how we are evolving new mechanisms which are both more open and better at dealing with problems. Neat.
So the New York Times story today is exactly wrong in the most important detail. The story reports on changes to policy, and in particular the introduction of the semi-protection policy.
The headline and first paragraph of the story give the impression that today at Wikipedia, articles are protected and semi-protected, whereas in the past “anyone can edit”. This completely ignores the facts, which I explained to them in great detail.
The facts are that protection as a policy has existed for years. Semi-protection was devised as a softer, more open approach. Rather than full protection, which means that no one can edit, we now increasingly use semi-protection, which allows people to continue to edit the article.
Let me rewrite the headline and first paragraph for them:
Wikipedia Becomes More Open
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that ‘anyone can edit,’ and this has become more true in recent months. In past years, Wikipedia was sometimes forced to protect some articles from editing, but recent software and policy development has allowed for articles which would have formerly been protected to be open for editing.
Ah, well. I keep looking at the New York Times site, looking for the “edit this page” button to correct the errors, but of course, that’s impossible.
Wikipedia is soon to enter our 5th year online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Wikipedia is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities, and both are going to require major funds.
Wikipedia is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us have always had for what the Internet can and should become. Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information… a simple and pure desire to make the world a better place.
This is a radical strike at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture. It is a radical strike at the assumption that the Internet has to be a place of hostile debate and flame wars. It is an appeal to the best within all of us.
The result so far has been wild success. Thanks to the wonderful volunteers who have created and managed this vast resource, we are now one of the top 30 websites in the world… and traffic growth continues. The pressures on us increase daily, pressures of organization, of servers and server management. In order for Wikipedia to move forward, we need the help of ordinary people like you, people who share in our dream of a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet.
In 2005, we achieved 6-fold growth in pageviews with spending of less than $750,000. We will need a lot more this year just to keep the site on the air and performing well. But the wonderful thing about our growth is that it gives us a real opportunity to extend our fundraising beyond just what we need to stay on the air.
Reporters are always asking me why I’m doing this, why Wikipedians do this? I think you know why.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I’m doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him. But for this child, a website on the Internet is not enough; we need to find ways to get our work to people in a form they can actually use.
And I’m doing this for my own daughter, who I hope will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere, with basic works they can adopt, modify, and share freely without asking permission from anyone.
We’re already taking back the Internet. With your help, we can take back the world.
Please consider a generous donation to the Wikimedia Foundation.
I’m so excited about meeting the [[WordPress]] founder that I’m actually going to blog it while I’m on stage. :-)
Here is a simple solution to the problem of Tor users being unable to edit Wikipedia
trusted user -> tor cloud -> authentication server -> trusted tor cloud -> wikipedia
untrusted user -> tor cloud -> authentication server -> untrusted tor cloud -> no wikipedia
Simple.
Microsoft is trying out a wiki-ish editing process.
Hmm, now people have a choice. They can donate their time and energy to a nonprofit effort to make the world a better place by giving away an encyclopedia under a free license. Or they can go to work for free, enriching Microsoft.
I wonder what the most talented and dedicated people will choose. :-)
In this New York Times story, former Britannica editor Robert McHenry said of Wikinews “The naïveté is stunning.”
Indeed. The same could be said of everything that we do around here. “Edit this page” and all that good stuff.
I accept the compliment. :-)
Wikinews is our collaborative writing project to report the news on a wide variety of subjects using a wiki. On Saturday, February 5, 2005, 22:00 UTC (timezone conversion), we are having an open IRC chat on how Wikinews can interact with weblogs. If you’re a blogger, and you’d like to know more about how Wikinews works, how you can use Wikinews stories in your blog, and how you can contribute, this is an event you should attend. The chat will take place on irc.freenode.net in the #wikinews channel. Agenda and more information on how to connect: [[m:Wikinews_Chat]] .
Spread the word!
So I was due to give a talk locally, but the organizer let me know that it has to be
“Canceled due to lack of involvement from the local area user groups.”
Like the great artists [[:en:Jerry Lewis|Jerry Lewis]] and [[:en:David Hasselhoff|David Hasselhoff]], I’m only appreciated overseas.
My blog is back after I had to shut it down temporarily for some security issues. Maybe I’ll write something soon. :-)