Designing Wikipedia and the origin of page histories; brief news
Jimmy Wales on "community design" and introducing page histories
A recent book titled "Designing Media", by Bill Moggridge, contains interviews "with thirty-seven people who have made significant creative contributions to the design and development of media", among them one with Jimmy Wales. As summarized in a Guardian article last week, "Wales actually describes what he does as 'community design'. ... Wikipedia is not just an anarchic piece of crowd-sourcing: it's a carefully designed eco-system. ... It's often described as 'democratic', but Wales himself thinks of it more as a monarchy, with the writers overseen by moderators who are in turn overseen by the king – King Jimbo, as he's known." Wales also talked about how he introduced permanent page histories to Wikipedia's wiki: "In the early days, when I first set up Wikipedia, I really thought we were going to have to lock everything down very quickly", but then, after noticing that most edits were benign,
| “ | Very quickly I changed the software to keep all of the old versions because I realized that eliminates a major vulnerability. When the software was first installed, I think it kept five revisions. So people sometimes ask, 'What was the first article in Wikipedia?' and nobody knows because for the first few weeks or so we only kept the first five revisions, so the very earliest history got lost. I know what the first words were. I typed, 'Hello World,' which is an old thing programmers always do. | ” |
The interview was conducted in October 2008, before the recent rediscovery of early Wikipedia revisions. A PDF version of the book, as well as video files of the interviews, are available for free download.
Briefly
- Wikipedians Request Donation from Billionaire: A December Forbes.com blog post entitled "Wikipedia Fans Use Facebook And Twitter To Ask Billionaire Eike Batista For Help" reports that four Wikipedians have started a social networking campaign (Campaign website) urging billionaire Eike Batista, one of the ten richest men in the world, to donate to Wikipedia. According to the blog post, "the campaign has already garnered national media attention in Brazil but the social pickup seems to be lukewarm".
- Leak or donation?: The news website Brisbane Times reported on the State Library of Queensland's donation of 50,000 images (see last week's Signpost: "Christmas gift to Commons from the State Library of Queensland"). The title of the article – "State's history 'leaked' to Wikimedia" – provoked some critical reader reactions (see also Wikipedia: WikiLeaks is not part of Wikipedia).
- Are featured articles read more often?: A paper by four Spanish researchers, announced last month, looked at the articles that were awarded featured article status in the month of October 2009 on the six largest Wikipedias, and examined their pageview numbers (based on log data from the Wikimedia Foundation's Squid servers) in the months of September, October and November 2009. According to the announcement, "the results show that the featured article mechanism only increases visits to articles in the English Wikipedia, while in other top editions of Wikipedia the level of visits does not change when the articles are marked as featured" – with the exception of the Polish Wikipedia, where readership numbers rose in the month after promotion, while on the English Wikipedia they fell back to the September levels, too.
Wikipedians at the Kolkata meetup on December 11 - Bengali meetup: The first meetup of Bengali Wikipedians in Kolkata, India on December 11 was covered by the Hindustan Times ( "Making Wikipedia popular in Bengali" [1], December 15, Kolkata edition) and Oneindia.in ("Wikipedia enhances its Bong connection").
- Artists illustrate Wikipedia: At Wikipediaillustrated.org, artist/illustrator Galia Offri and designer/educator Mushon Zer-Aviv have started a blog "to share the process of creating 26 illustrations to 26 Wikipedia articles (alphabetically ordered)." The project is planned to involve a workshop and a panel discussion at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin in February 2011.
- Wikipedia lists entertain: Takepart.com, a website of US company Participant Media, has published "TakePart's List of Amazing Wikipedia Lists", highlighting several list articles with unusual topics.
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