Jimmy Wales

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. :)

Guess whose books these are!

It is pretty easy, actually.

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. :-)

My blog is back after I had to shut it down temporarily for some security issues. Maybe I’ll write something soon. :-)

On my flight back to the U.S. from Warsaw, it turned out that on the same plane were a group of [[Somali Bantu Refugees]] on their way to the US as part of the USRP ([[United States Refugee Program]]). Sitting across the aisle from me were a mother and daughter, the little girl appearing to me to be around the same age as my own daughter, Kira, who is 3 1/2.

The Bantu people were being guided by a couple of aid workers, because less than one week prior most of them had never even seen a electric light switch, a flush toilet, or a tap for water. Everything about being on a jet crossing the ocean was like being on Mars to them, said the aid worker.

They wore mostly the same clothing, obviously given to them by USRP, i.e. gray sweatshirts reading ‘USRP’.

I had in my backpack a small gift for Kira, a small stuffed donkey. I thought it would be nice to get it out to entertain this little girl, and to give to her as a gift.

So I did, except that the little girl was frightened of it. It wasn’t that she was afraid of me, per se, but of the actual toy itself. She was fascinated and would very very cautiously reach out and touch it. When it feel off the arm of the airplane seat into her seat, she jumped away from it and made a frightened noise.

Her mother held the toy and showed it to her.

The aid worker told me that the little girl had never seen a toy like this before.

And now they are coming to America to live. This is remarkable. Imagine coming to the United States with no knowledge of English, this is hard enough. But no knowledge of indoor plumbing, electricity, stuffed animals.

I had already been watching the story of the Somali bantu refugee program, but now I feel a more personal connection, having met and briefly played with this little girl. I took a photo, but I will not publish it, because I was unable to get any kind of informed consent from the people I took the photo of (they did not speak English).

Wikipedian [[user:Joi|Joichi Ito]] ([[Joi Ito|article]]) will be joining the board of [[ICANN]] in December. Congrats, Joi! I predict this to be a thankless but extremely important task. It’s great to see one of the good guys volunteer to do this.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Angela Beesley’s blog, WikiSearch. It’s chock full of Wikipedia news from [[en:User:Angela|Angela]].

This is my new blog. I will be writing about free knowledge, free culture, free software, and related topics. I will avoid political issues outside that arena, I promise. (You may yell at me if I don’t.)