[LIS-Forum] [Fwd: [bytesforall_readers] Free to use and free to edit, Wikipedia is growing fast...]

Subbiah Arunachalam arun at mssrf.res.in
Sun Aug 21 15:32:58 IST 2005


Friends:

I received it in the mail today. Best wishes.

Arun
----

Free to use and free to edit, Wikipedia is growing fast. Now its founder
has announced a series of new projects, writes Sean Dodson

Thursday August 11, 2005

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1546162,00.html

In less than five years, what started out as a small side project with a
budget of a few thousand pounds has grown into one of the web's greatest
success stories. Wikipedia, the open, editable encyclopedia, and its
sister projects have gone from absolutely nothing to 22m entries in less
than half a decade. In doing so, Wikipedia - the centrepiece of the
Wikimedia empire - has become the most detailed encyclopedia in history.
And its breathtaking pace has yet to show any sign of slowing.

As an online knowledge database, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) has
one significant advantage over its expert, professional predecessors:
anyone is free to edit it. Equally, anybody is free to delete entries or
add new ones. The system works by using editable web pages known as wikis
(hence the name), which let ordinary users make changes as they see fit.
And, in handing this power to the people, Wikipedia has become more than
just a hobby - for some it is almost a religion.

Last Friday, the movement held its first ever international conference,
Wikimania, in a youth hostel in Frankfurt, with 400 delegates who'd flown
in from all over the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation is to knowledge what the Open University is to
academia, except it operates on an annual budget of $800,000 (£450,000)
and - perhaps most surprisingly - with a staff of just one person. It is
written and administered by a legion of volunteers who work for free. Tens
of thousands of devotees, self-confessed wikimaniacs, squirrel away at the
world's information, trying to cover "the sum of all human
knowledge" in every language spoken by humans - and a few, such as
Sanskrit and Old English, that are long dead.

As well as the encyclopedia, the foundation also offers a dictionary, a
taxonomy of the species and a nascent news service. All operate under the
same ideals of openness and public cooperation without the need of
financial incentive.

At Wikimania, Jimmy Wales, the movement's founder, identified the next
pieces of the jigsaw likely to fall into place. In his keynote address,
Wales named a list of things "that should be free". While not quite
commandments, they amount to 10 ideas about how the "Free Culture
Movement", as he termed it, could extend the wiki ethic beyond the pages
of its ever-growing encyclopedia.

Among the projects under discussion are an online atlas charted by members
of the public; a repository of classical music to be performed by student
orchestras; a file format to rival the mighty MP3; an online curriculum
stretching from kindergarten to university; and an archive of images of
paintings by the old masters. In short, Wikipedia is to spread its wings
over many more forms of culture.

What's more, there are already 10,000 book "modules" being
collaboratively written within the pages of Wikipedia. Soon, they will be
published under the foundation's banner thanks to a deal with an "on
demand" publisher. It could, says Wales, signal a whole new kind of book
publishing.

He also urged his hardcore following - the various volunteer "chapter
heads" who administer the wiki projects and police the site for
copyright violations and mindless vandalism - to go forth and multiply.
This is important to Wales because while Wikipedia is becoming a wider
movement theoretically open to anyone, only an elite of users actually
bother.

According to the movement's own statistics, there are 3,800 hardcore users
making more than 100 edits a month, and another 18,000 who make at least
five. Then there is a long tail of casual users who use Wikipedia as just
another authoritative source - as they might have once used Britannica or
Microsoft's Encarta, making the odd edit only if the urge takes them.

As the movement gets bigger, its organisation becomes more difficult.
Already there are Wikimedia "chapters" in Germany and France, who help
organise fundraising and hand out administration tasks. A UK chapter
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK) is also beginning to form,
with a small group of wikipedians meeting in central London every couple
of months.

One of its regulars, Dave Gerard, a part-time volunteer editor and
full-time computer system administrator, freely admits he is "addicted" to
Wikimedia and spends several hours every day on work related to the site.
Like most editors, his primary motivation is to do "some public good".
"I've been filling my head with information for decades," he says. "This
is a chance to get it all back out again."

He is not alone. Ever since the library of Alexandria was built, the dream
of amassing vast quantities of information has inspired the world. "What
we're doing," says Wales, is building "a world in which every person on
the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge."

Just as astonishingly, he thinks it will take just a decade to achieve
this ambition. According to Wales, there are more than 22m Wikimedia
entries extending across 200 languages. The aim is to provide for "every
language in the world spoken by at least one million people" by 2015. If
this sounds like chaos, think again: it's more akin to the ideas that
fired the imaginations of 19th century political radicals such as
Matthew Arnold and Mikael Bakunin. It is anarchy representing a
self-regulating cooperative of free thinkers acting voluntarily for a
greater common good - and it works in practice, too.

There is a rumour, started by a factual error in Time Magazine, that the
Wikipedia entries for US presidential candidates George Bush and John
Kerry were "frozen" during last year's election campaign, so fierce was
invective-laden spam being slapped around by both sides. In fact, the page
was closed "less than 2% of the time," according to Wales. Even in the
heat of battle, Wikipedia can be relied upon as an impartial and
trustworthy source.

It should stay that way. Wikipedia will, says Wales, never carry a
commercial advertisement, nor rely on government funding. The Wikimedia
Foundation is paid for by contributions from charitable foundations and
its reading public. Help comes from all quarters: Yahoo recently donated
its old servers (banks of which reside in clusters in Paris, Amsterdam and
Florida) and the Foundation holds bandwidth-buying fundraising drives. In
February, wikimaniacs were so keen to stump up the cash that they overshot
their target of $75,000 (£42,000) in just a few days. The organisation's
entire budget is also online. In more ways than one, Wikimedia is an open
book.

Which is why it is easy to discover that there are 600,000 articles in the
English language volume alone - not counting another 70,000 entries on its
sister Wiktionary. More than 1,250 new articles - over 500 an hour - are
added every day, and entries are becoming ever more detailed. The average
number of edits - the inevitable revisions and corrections - in the
English encyclopedia is now more than 10, with the entries
increasing in quality as the project matures. That it achieves all this on
it's small annual budget is astounding. The fact that it only employs one
person is doubly so.

Wales started Wikipedia in January 2001, as an offshoot to a failed
commercial encyclopedia, Nupedia. He made his first fortune from his days
treading the Chicago trading floors in futures and options, and made
another with a dotcom that peddled content - including soft porn -in the
late 90s. He now describes himself as "independently wealthy".

Given that background, it's unsurprising that very little content gets
censored. And the site takes a provocative stance on the copyright of old
paintings, allowing images to be posted freely on the site. "I've told the
National Portrait Gallery I'll see them in court," says Wales.

It has so far avoided any serious trouble, though Wikipedia has twice been
blocked from China - "We don't know if this was just a mistake" - and once
from Saudi Arabia, but only for a few hours in each instance. In February
2002, most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia broke away to establish
the rival Enciclopedia Libre, but there is now talk of welcoming them
back.

It could be said that the mark of a good technology is when Microsoft
starts "borrowing" your ideas. Microsoft's Encarta announced in April that
it was adopting wiki-style open editing for its for-profit
encyclopedia. Others, such as the Free Encyclopedia, have copied the ideas
pretty much wholesale.

So can the other encyclopedias hope to match Wikipedia's pace? Maybe not,
because Wikipedia has become something else.

"Books like the Encyclopedia Britannica are nothing else than simple
knowledge compendiums without any political soul," says Jean-Baptiste
Soufron, a legal adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation. "I am convinced that
Wikipedia is the only real encyclopedia of our days because it's the only
one that relies on a real political goal: to pursue freedom over content
and information."

Links

Wiktionary
www.wiktionary.org

Jimmy's blog
http://blog.jimmywales.com

Wiki Statistics
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statistics_overview

[Thanks to Eddie Fernandes <eddie at fernandes.u-net.com> for sending this
in. -FN]







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