Jimmy Wales

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. :)

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…

(more…)

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.

This weekend, I was visting my hometown ([[Huntsville, Alabama]]), and the local newspaper had a story about me and a photo. The fun thing is that several people from my ancient (grade school!) past contacted me.

A couple of them posted comments here, and were the first people to actually figure out that I left the options open for anyone to be able to sign up and publish an article on my blog. Yes, it was crazy set the options to let people do this, but hey, I’m the wiki guy, right? And look at the neat result.

For now, though, I am just moving their comments to be comments on this post rather than actual articles.

How I spent my day off.

Elian ([[de:User:elian|de]] and [[en:User:elian|en]]), who is organizing the big huge fantastic amazing not-to-be-missed Wikimedia conference for 2005, has posted the announcement of the 3 finalist cities: [[Dublin]], [[Frankfurt]], and [[Rotterdam]]. Here is the official announcement.

The 7 semi-finalists were narrowed to 3 finalists, see [[m:Wikimedia_meetup_2005/City_Candidate_List]] for more details.

The hardest part for the committee was the hope to not disappoint the advocates of the cities that weren’t chosen. It was a tough choice, and it will only get tougher with the next round.

For now, we’re seeking more hard facts about the venue, travel costs, distances, accomodation costs, etc. Please post to the meta page(s) with advice and information.

[[Joi Ito]] has some interesting comments about women in the wikipedia community.

I hope that wikipedia is a more welcoming community for women than most on the net. But I’m not quite sure how to analyze this. I have to admit that at Wikipedia meetups the ratio of men to women is about 8:1 overall. But that ratio does not hold in ever aspect of the community, and it is absolutely right to say that there are strong women who are in major leadership roles.

There are some cliches we could use to think about this: do women gain power because they are good at mediating conflict between warring men? So they come to be thought of as people who have authority to settle disputes? This sounds plausible to me, but I readily admit that it’s a cliche.

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]].