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Wikipedia - Press Coverage/2006mag-ago

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Press Coverage
Press Coverage

Unsorted: · 2001-2003 · 2004: gen-apr/mag-ago/set-dic · 2005: gen-apr/mag-ago/set-dic · 2006: gen-apr/mag-ago/set-dic ·
2007: gen-apr/mag-ago/set-dic · 2008: gen-apr/mag-ago/set-dic · 2009 · Scientific articles
Sorted: The Register

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Indice

2006 May

"Fewer than 100 Great War veterans are still alive worldwide. Information about surviving vets as well as those recently deceased can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org."
A full reference would be to Veterans of the First World War who died in 2005, Veterans of the First World War who died in 2006, and Surviving veterans of World War I
'Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" seemed like such a good idea. Indeed, it still is a good idea – and a hugely valuable resource for countless kinds of information. I use it nearly every day. But rumblings from both inside and outside the project suggest that the encyclopedia that aimed to capture "the sum of human knowledge" may be past its peak.'
Editorial's closing paragraph: "If we can harness our collective wisdom the way Wikipedia has, the potential for unleashing human creativity is enormous. Instead of a camel, we just might create a unicorn."
Relating to an edit war at Toronto Port Authority: "The editors of Wikipedia need to take a hard look at their standards of 'verifiability' in the face of such an outlandish falsehood."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation bestows a Pioneer award upon Jimbo Wales for founding Wikipedia.
Dibbell berates "the Wikipedian hive-mind" for the treatment of the Wikitruth article. In his piece, posted online on May 2, he doesn't disclose that the AfD ended on April 20 with a decision to keep the Wikitruth article. (In the printed Village Voice: issue of May 3-9, 2006, page 26.)
Letter responding to Dibbell's piece.
Wikipedia's liquid crystal display article is the content which is displayed on an LCD monitor under product review.
"Online encyclopedia Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. It's a wealth of knowledge on a broad range of topics. Did we mention that anyone can edit it? As Victorian Liberal leader Robert Doyle was resigning in favour of Ted Baillieu, his online entry was being updated in a manner that would have stretched Encyclopedia Britannica's standards of objectivity. Until he "nobly" resigned, he served Victoria with "aplomb, charisma and energy", the page said. "More leaders like Mr Doyle are required to rail against the spin and economic mismanagement of the Bracks Government." Hey, they make a point. Then again, the person writing it is spinning an online encyclopedia entry. The effusiveness has since been deleted, but the mind whirls."
  • Weiner, Tim. "Langley, We Have a Problem", New York Times, Sunday, May 14, 2006; Section 4, 'Week in Review', p. 1. -- An article on the decline of the CIA.
"The big picture has been bumped by spot news. ... Drowned by demands from the White House and the Pentagon for instant information, 'intelligence analysts wind up being the Wikipedia of Washington,' John McLaughlin, the deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, said in a interview."
  • Kidman, Angus. "The Wikipedia phenomenon", Australian Netguide issue 97 (June 2006), pub. 17 May 2006.
(No copy of the text online, but info-en got an email telling us it was quite a good article...)
KL Stout: "Over the years, Linux has spawned other open technologies and even an open source spirit or open source philosophy. It has engendered stuff like Wikipedia, the online open source encyclopedia or even, some could argue, citizen journalism."
He's in control of the world's largest encyclopedia, with 3.8 million articles. Does Wikipedia's uncontested ruler have too much power? In 2001 Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, an encyclopedia where all content is written and edited by the users themselves. The web site now contains millions of articles in about 200 different languages, among them Norwegian. (translation)
As an object lesson in how not to do quest documentaries, look no further than the archly titled Richard Hammond and the Holy Grail (BBC1). Who is Richard Hammond? A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that he is a presenter of Top Gear. Another quick look on Wikipedia tells me that the legend of the Holy Grail was largely founded by Chrétien de Troyes in his 12th-century Perceval, le Conte du Graal. That a more modern myth has grown up around the misconstruction of "san greal" and "sang real". That Dan Brown has written a book called The Da Vinci Code, and that there are some harmless buffoons who believe that it's all something to do with Glastonbury. It took Richard Hammond two weeks of licence-funded travel, and an hour of screen time, to come to much the same conclusion.
Referring to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: "Both are more pleasant to use than Google or Wikipedia": Notable because this mention is made in passing and in a very conservative literary journal. The editor clearly felt no need to explain Wikipedia.

2006 June

"I first heard about Wikipedia while reading Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat. In the book, he describes the encyclopedia project as a positive contribution to the Web."
"Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has described Wikipedia as "a game without consequences". But as Skip begins to guide me through the arcane and often Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Wikipedia, vandalism starts to seem the least of its problems."
"The experience of Wikipedia has made it clear that having authoritative experts write this stuff is well worth doing, but I do think the Wiki concept appeals to people and there is a place for it."
"Thus was introduced into the American political lexicon the term Sister Souljah moment, defined by the by-no-means-authoritative Wikipedia.org as 'a politician's public repudiation of an allegedly extremist person, statement, or position perceived to have some association with the politician. Whether sincere or not, such an act of repudiation can appeal to centrist voters at the risk of alienating some of the politician's allies.'"
"But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web."
See also the associated list of protected and semi-protected articles: "Trouble Spots"
    • A correction was issued June 21, 2006 that the article "referred imprecisely" to Wikipedia policy. Note also that this link allows you to the view the NYT article without registering.
Details the Wikipedia articles which have a recent history of vandalisation and the means utilized to deal with this. Alison Wheeler and Jimmy Wales are quoted in the article.
"They are post-modern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts, who don't necessarily recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships."
"Wikipedia is shifting from its core policy by restricting the users' power to edit the online content."
"Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators."
"Traditional encyclopedias contain a body of knowledge dictated by a limited pool of experts. Wikipedia takes the position that the general public, as a whole, has a vaster amount of knowledge than any small group of experts, no matter how skilled they are, so the website gives Internet users an opportunity to share their own expertise, determine what knowledge gets included and contribute to the production of a new encyclopedia."
"But I believe that the new mode of text embodied by Wikipedia can teach new generations about the responsibilities of social collaboration, the act of critical reading (applied even to Reference materials), and the permanently unfinished state of human knowledge."
"Do we dismiss Wikipedia as a dubious hodgepodge of hearsay, or embrace it in a way that makes it educationally relevant? It’s far from perfect, no doubt, but does that mean it has no educational value? Can a resource that struggles with reliability serve a valid educational purpose? What do you think?"

July

  • Kruglinski, Susan (July 2006). "Map Evolution Evolving: How a controversial entry in Wikipedia has changed over time". Discover. pp. 21. 
"The entry for evolution on Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was altered 2,081 times by 68 editors between December 2001 and last October. IBM's Watson Research Center produced this image, which tracks the transformation. Each vertical line is a new version; each color is a different editor."
See also the associated www.discover.com article by Brad Lemley: "Map: Evolution Evolving"
"San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales' legal troubles have been added to his online profile on Wikipedia, the guest-edited and controversial Internet encyclopedia."
"Wikipedia doesn't like Sam Vaknin, and the feelings are mutual. Look up this narcissm aficionado on Wikipedia and you'll find he's been dutifully erased from the wiki-consciousness, a name that shall not be uttered, or "recreated without a good reason."
"Sam Vaknin wrote the article "The Six Sins of the Wikipedia" for American Chronicle on July 2, 2006. In it he decries our site with the now all too familiar catch-cry that Wikipedia must be about to implode and die because it is Just Too Unworkable. I do seem to remember people saying this about a year ago..."
"The death of former Enron Corp. chief Ken Lay on Wednesday underscored the challenges facing online encyclopedia Wikipedia..."
"Moments after news of former Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay's passing, his online biography had been updated..."
Dan Fost writes on BarCamp's AFD. "...So it's hard to fathom, but some folks want to remove the BarCamp entry from Wikipedia...(I actually found it when I was looking up BarCamp, and I weighed in, saying that I found the page useful, and if there was a competing point of view, my understanding of Wikipedia was that the page should incorporate that.)"
"..It further exposed the critical weakness of Wikipedia that prevents it from becoming the go-to source for Internet knowledge that it ought to be."

The Guardian, 13 luglio 2006

Moody, Glyn (July 13, 2006). "This time, it'll be a Wikipedia written by experts". The Guardian. http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1818630,00.html. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«"Originally it was the Nupedia Wiki - our idea was to use it as an article incubator for Nupedia. Articles could begin life on this wiki, be developed collaboratively and, when they got to a certain stage of development, be put it into the Nupedia system." Things didn't quite work out that way. "The editors and peer reviewers of Nupedia, mostly professors and other professionals, looked at the wiki tool and didn't want anything to do with it." The idea was too revolutionary. As Sanger points out: "It actually took the success of Wikipedia" - as Sanger later baptised it - to make the idea plausible to a lot of people."»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 15:53, 8 mar 2009 (CET))
Non era propriamente voluta così Wikipedia. Doveva essere d'appoggio a Nupedia. Ma i vecchi editori non erano molto d'accordo.--Christian (discussione) 15:53, 8 mar 2009 (CET)
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Although an outsider, he felt compelled to offer his thoughts in an essay, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison its Anti-elitism. As well as provoking a rebuke from Wales - who wrote "Larry's comments betray a complete ignorance of the project" - it had another, unexpected consequence: a job for Sanger on a new online encyclopedia.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 15:53, 8 mar 2009 (CET))
Insomma, se ne son dette 4. Ho scoperto gli articoli: vedi Kuro5hin, 30 dicembre 2004. --Christian (discussione) 16:21, 8 mar 2009 (CET)
Hugh Linehan writes of the recent edit war over whether to state that Ireland is part of the British Isles, or state that there are some disputes over what the term covers. ". . . there's no such thing as value-neutral information, and it can be fascinating to observe how entries [in Wikipedia] are amended, annotated, argued over and extended by different factions. Controversy is currently raging over the entry for 'The British Isles'" (url stated in the article).
Discusses Saudi Arabia's internet blocking policy with regard to Wikipedia's on-again off-again blocking from within the Kingdom.
(Title in English means: President is like mullah) Discuss English Wikipedia article on Lech Kaczyński, Polish president, mostly attention given to so called "potatoe war".
Ben generally criticises Wikipedia, and writes "The phenomenal but unreliable online encyclopedia is best used with a healthy dose of scepticism". Uses the Ken Lay story above as proof.
"PRD bases challenge on Stalin and... Wikipedia." Front-page lead story (PDF of p.1) in right-wing Mexico City daily, accuses PRD of C&P-ing text from es:wikipedia in its legal challenge to the presidential election.
Officials at Skutt Catholic High School have filed a lawsuit in Douglas County District Court in order to determine the IPs of two individuals who vandalized the school's Wikipedia article in May and June 2006.
A thorough review of the history and practice of Wikipedia. History of encyclopaedias. Quotes from Jimbo, Essjay, William Connolley, etc. Ends "Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine? "
The author describes his internal moral fight about vandalising a Wikipedia article. "As a free fount of altruistically supplied information, the ever-growing online encyclopedia is a researcher's boon and a model for aggregating the collective knowledge of the human species. So how come all I want to do is vandalize it? "
A satirical take on Wikipedia's susceptibility to falsifications and vandalism. "Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday."
"A high school in Nebraska, USA is suing over entries posted on Wikipedia - the website that "anyone can edit" that's popular with teenagers and the unemployed. Wikipedia itself isn't the target of the lawsuit from Skutt High School, nor are many of the sites that legally or illegally scrape Wikipedia's content."
The daily newspaper of Akron, Ohio looked at Wikipdia articles on regional topics and spoke with contributors from Ohio. "The lure has been irresistible for many Akron-area residents, who pour their expertise on hobbies, current events and local history into Wikipedia's growing database."
Motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson writes in his trademark flippant, hyperbolic style about the unreliability of Wikipedia as a research tool. He bases his conclusion on his reading of the article about himself, its variance from his perception of its subject, and a similar comparison regarding the Toyota Prius. He also rehearses the argument that articles may contain nonsense because anyone can edit Wikipedia.
  • CTV News and the Canadian Press both cite a Wikipedia article as "arguably a better gauge of how the race is going" then any other information available. [1]

The New Yorker, 31 luglio 2006

Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know It All". Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? (The New Yorker). http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
Molto bello. Oltre le citazioni, l'articolo è interessante per il lungo elenco di voci curiose contenute un WP inglese. --Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET)
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales is at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge gathering: he has marshalled an army of volunteers who believe that, working collaboratively, they can produce an encyclopedia that is as good as any written by experts, and with an unprecedented range.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
WP può essere visto come un altro esempio di prodotto prosumer. Non esiste più, almeno potenzialmente, una distinzione netta fra autore e lettore. Inoltre non esiste una "superiorità" basata sulla reputazione dell'autore. Chiunque, democraticamente, può guadagnare "autorità" (nell'accezione di Gadamer) facendo. --Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET)
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship. Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales’s first encyclopedia was the World Book, which his parents acquired after dinner one evening in 1969, from a door-to-door salesman. Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that a person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about the open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that software should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could modify the code. He was particularly impressed by “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond, one of the movement’s founders. “It opened my eyes to the possibility of mass collaboration,” Wales said.

The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The idea was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory; after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he had dropped out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay and send it to two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework.”

After a year, Nupedia had only twenty-one articles, on such topics as atonality and Herodotus. In January, 2001, Sanger had dinner with a friend, who told him about the wiki, a simple software tool that allows for collaborative writing and editing. Sanger thought that a wiki might attract new contributors to Nupedia. [...] Sanger coined the term Wikipedia, and the site went live on January 15, 2001. Two days later, he sent an e-mail to the Nupedia mailing list—about two thousand people. “Wikipedia is up!” he wrote. “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.”

Wales braced himself for “complete rubbish.” He figured that if he and Sanger were lucky the wiki would generate a few rough drafts for Nupedia. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After a year, there were twenty thousand. »
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales is fond of citing a 1962 proclamation by Charles Van Doren, who later became an editor at Britannica. Van Doren believed that the traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion rather than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding convention; it looked backward. “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too,” Van Doren wrote. “It should stop being safe—in politics, in philosophy, in science.”»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information free but—in his own alma-matricidal way—to have invented a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me, the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.” At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though Sanger eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was “Ignore all the rules.” Two of the others have become central tenets: articles must reflect a neutral point of view (N.P.O.V., in Wikipedia lingo), and their content must be both verifiable and previously published. Among other things, the prohibition against original research heads off a great deal of material about people’s pets.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Perhaps Wikipedia’s greatest achievement—one that Wales did not fully anticipate—was the creation of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also predominantly male—about eighty per cent, Wales says—and compulsively social, conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I.R.C. channels and on user pages, which regular contributors often create and which serve as a sort of personalized office cooler. [...] Wikipedians have evolved a distinctive vocabulary, of which “revert,” meaning “reinstate”—as in “I reverted the edit, but the user has simply rereverted it”—may be the most commonly used word. Other terms include WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor grammar, and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who persistently violates the site’s guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding (these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of Toronto graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than seventy-two thousand articles. “Wikipediholism” and “editcountitis” are well defined on the site; both link to an article on obsessive-compulsive disorder. (There is a Britannica entry for O.C.D., but no version of it has included Felix Unger’s name in the third sentence, a comprehensive survey of “OCD in literature and film,” or a list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely for the first time in history, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone.)»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Others involve ideological disagreements and escalate into intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the English-language Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to religious issues. Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged over the entries on Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and Henry Ford. Ethnic feuds die hard: Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? (A nonbinding poll was conducted earlier this year to determine whether the question merited mention in the article’s lead.) Some debates may never be resolved: Was the 1812 Battle of Borodino a victory for the Russians or for the French? What is the date of Ann Coulter’s birth? Is apple pie all-American? (The answer, at least for now, is no: “Apple trees didn’t even grow in America until the Europeans brought them over,” one user railed.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001, Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand admins on the site.) In 2004, Wales formalized the 3R rule—initially it had been merely a guideline—according to which any user who reverts the same text more than three times in a twenty-four-hour period is blocked from editing for a day.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))


(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes. Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.

Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. “There are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously,” he told me. (Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay’s labors by awarding him numerous barnstars—five-pointed stars, which the community has adopted as a symbol of praise—including several Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.)

Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,” he told me. »
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Nor has increasing surveillance of the site by admins deterred vandals, a majority of whom seem to be inserting obscenities and absurdities into Wikipedia when they should be doing their homework. Many are committing their pranks in the classroom: the abuse tends to ebb on a Friday afternoon and resume early on a Monday. Entire schools and universities have found their I.P. addresses blocked as a result. The entry on George W. Bush has been vandalized so frequently—sometimes more than twice a minute—that it is often closed to editing for days. At any given time, a couple of hundred entries are semi-protected, which means that a user must register his I.P. address and wait several days before making changes. This group recently included not only the entries on God, Galileo, and Al Gore but also those on poodles, oranges, and Frédéric Chopin. Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.”»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number. “It’s a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Britannica issued a public statement refuting the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.”»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.»
«[1]»
(--Christian (discussione) 05:35, 9 mar 2009 (CET))

Colbert Nation, 31 luglio 2006

Wikiality di Stephen Colbert
Video satirico e divertente sul fatto che la realtà in wiki è generata in base al consenso: se ci mettiamo d'accordo, possiamo scrivere quello che vogliamo e cambiare la realtà ;-) --Andrea (discussione) 12:35, 16 feb 2009 (CET)

2006 August

Marshall Poe, Atlantic Unbound, agosto 2006

"Common Knowledge". Atlantic Unbound. August 2006. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200608u/poe-interview/. 
Author Marshall Poe answers interview questions from Jennie Rothenberg of the Atlantic about his impressions of Wikipedia and sources for his September article entitled The Hive.
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
« »
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«As Poe points out, Wikipedia essentially borrowed this idea from the software field and applied it to epistemology. Unlike its printed predecessors, Wikipedia is a communal encyclopedia, based on the notion that the many can gather knowledge as well as, or better than, the select few. To illustrate this philosophy, Poe cites a seminal 1997 essay by Eric S. Raymond called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The “cathedral” model, like the medieval church—and the old-fashioned encyclopedia—relied upon the authority of an elite committee. The “bazaar” model, in contrast, draws input from anywhere and everywhere. At an open market, there is no central authority assigning value to an object. Prices rise and fall as visitors move from stall to stall, comparing items and quibbling over costs. Wikipedia works in much the same way. As Poe extrapolates,

The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth…. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

In the open spirit of the Internet, Poe recently created a Web site that mimics both the appearance and approach of Wikipedia. Launched in 2005, MemoryArchive.org is a searchable “encyclopedia of memories” posted by users around the globe. Poe has written extensively on academic models old and new;»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«And then I started to read more and more about it. As a historian, I was fascinated that the whole history of the article—all of the various changes and edits—had been recorded. I realized that if I actually spent some time on the weekends, I could go back and reconstruct pretty accurately, using Wikipedia's own sources, what was going on.»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Then there’s a much larger group of people—I’d estimate it at several thousand—who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. We would call them editors. They add content and also shape content as it comes in. They monitor the site and attempt to make sure that the standards of Wikipedia are upheld. That means both standards of content and standards of discourse, because they’re related. These are people who serve on arbitration committees and things like this. It’s not a closed circle, but it’s a self-referential circle. They all know one another, and they nominate one another to become administrators. They support one another.
Can anyone come forward to be part of this group?

Well, you can. But generally speaking of Wikipedia—and this is true of many sites that rely on user-generated content—you kind of have to go on credit. You do that by making edits and adding articles. Slashdot is really the site that pioneered this. I believe they have something called “karma.” The computer can tally the number of times you’ve contributed. Then people can look at your user profile and say, “This is an active contributor.” If the program is sophisticated enough, they can look back and see the tenor of your contributions, and they can adjudge them in various ways.

This is how you develop credit in the economy of user-generated content. I say it was pioneered by Slashdot, but on a massive scale, it was really introduced by eBay.»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«Jimmy Wales is a person who puts his ethical and philosophical beliefs front and center, and objectivism is certainly one of them. But when it comes to Wikipedia, I wouldn’t call his approach objectivist. I’d call it libertarian. As it is, the consequences for bad behavior are very low online—basically zero. He realizes that there’s really no way to punish somebody. So he quite reasonably says, and many people do, that whether you like it or not, you have a kind of anarchic, stateless, authority-less universe. There’s nothing anybody can really do. One way to approach this is to simply say, “Well, we are going to try to use moral suasion to get people to behave correctly, because we can’t penalize people the way we would in the real world.”»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«The neutral point of view, as has been pointed out to me repeatedly, doesn’t require that consensus be reached on a position. If you look at the entry on evolution, I’m sure there will be a section on creationism: “Many people believe that the world was created in six days.” But you won’t find a section that says, “Marshall Poe created the world in six days.” It would be kicked off. It’s not as if they arrive at the same opinion about truth. They arrive at the same opinion about what should be in the article. That’s a very different thing. As for the issues themselves, I think the point is that they don’t ever get resolved. One way to think of Wikipedia is not as a static entity but as a continual dialogue.»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))
(Testo originale) (Traduzione)
«When I started working on this article, the early Wikipedia listserves were a great resource. That’s one of the beauties of the Web. You can’t really hide. Once it’s out there, it never disappears. Similarly with the page records of Wikipedia entries. I was able to go back and find what was, from a historian’s point of view, a remarkably complete record of what had been done.»
«[1]»
(--Andrea (discussione) 17:50, 20 feb 2009 (CET))

CNET, 1 agosto 2006

CNET, Colbert speaks, America follows: All hail Wikiality!, August 1, 2006, Caroline McCarthy

Marshall Poe, A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View

Marshall Poe, A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV), August 1, 2006
Interessante analisi del NPOV attraverso l'esempio della voce "Abortion". --Christian (discussione) 18:31, 15 feb 2009 (CET)
Mostrando varie versioni dell'incipit, si può notare come progressivamente la discussioni si sposti ai particolari (termini usati, posizione delle parole). Anche se non si arriva ad un vero e proprio consenso, queste voci sono sicuramente le più "affidabili" (poichè discusse, litigate e controllate da decine di persone). --Andrea (discussione) 02:27, 16 feb 2009 (CET)
Reporter David W. Brooks writes about Wikipedia and the upcoming Wikimania 2006, quoting several New Hampshire Wikipedans including Atlant.
Reporter Heather Newman explores Wikipedia connections to Michigan.
Host Tom Ashbrook interviews Jimmy Wales and Simon Pulsifer about Wikipedia.
"The country should complain to the global information resource Wikipedia. "
"Who would have thought an encyclopaedia could be so addictive? For the fans who write and update Wikipedia, the free online research tool, it takes only hours to get hooked. Now they just need to work out how to beat the vandals."
    • Error: "The key rules include that the information should contain original research"
      • They said they had made a printed correction, and would fix the online version soon. 21:26, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Online version still has not been fixed. 02:53, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
"Quality and accuracy are respected, but breadth of selection, fast updates and free access give Wikipedia an advantage."
"Of his own role, Wales has said: "Queen of England—my power is decreasing over time. Soon, I'll just wave at parades." "
"In the last six months, the quality of the information at Wikipedia has vastly increased to the point where it is one of the best sources in the world for many topics." The author goes on to describe how he has made edits to Wikipedia's money article and encourages readers to improve other articles.
In a political weekly from the Czech Republic author Martin Uhlíř tries to cover history and principles of Wikipedia on one page of A3 format. The fact that Wikipedia did not collaps into chaos is explained by analogy with ant colony.
After a reader uses Wikipedia to point out that columnist Dan Savage has been misrepresenting his age, Savage gives an explanation, ending "damn you, Wikipedia!"
"Wikipedia, for instance, gives its editors points for making edits to entries. But one result of that is said to be editors making potentially unnecessary minor changes to articles to drive their ratings."
Sent to the Comm. Com as an error - We don't give editors "points"!
Niente di particolarmente rilevante. --Christian (discussione) 18:18, 15 feb 2009 (CET)
""Our primary goal is neutrality," said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia spokesman in Vancouver, British Columbia."
"But now there are suggestions that a new architecture of control will be introduced for Wikipedia as a whole, if it proves successful when it is applied to the German-language site next month, and this could have far wider implications."
Thompson later described the response of Wikipedians on a blog entry entitled "Speaking Truthiness to Wikiality" on 29 August 2006.
Yet another Orlowski. More or less standard. More or less content-free.
Discusses the Swahili and Bambara Wikipedias, as they came up at Wikimania 2006, in light of the goal of providing an encyclopedia in every major living language.
Discusses edit-warring regarding the articles about competing ferries in Milwaukee area.
Speed of edits (Pluto, 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict); description of motivation of Wiki contributors; interview with Montréalais and cute picture of him and his cat.
Discussing Emmalina, a YouTube star who quit after online harassment: "The chatty video blog entries recorded from her bedroom first began to appear in the "most viewed" rankings on the popular YouTube video in June and some of her more controversial posts attracted more than 300,000 views. Emmalina even has her own Wikipedia entry."
"Emmalina was in the Most Subscribed list of hit website YouTube until early this month and even has her own Wikipedia entry."
Estratto da "http://www.biasco.ch/wiki/index.php5/Wikipedia_-_Press_Coverage/2006mag-ago"
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