The Signpost

In the news

The Economist assays the encyclopaedia's challenges, Jimbo speaks on net future, and an inclusionist alternative emerges.

The Economist on the encyclopaedia's growing pains

Wikimedia Foundation staffer Brandon Harris, "a long-haired programmer wearing a full-sleeved T-shirt and a surly expression" whose successful donation plea was noted in the pages of The Economist this week.

In anticipation of the imminent resumption of the Wikipedia Foundation's fundraising efforts this month, The Economist profiled the unusual donation drive of what it said had "a good claim to be the world’s most important provider of non-entertainment content". Acknowledging the Jimbo-centricity of previous years' efforts, the newspaper was keen to recognise the success of banners featuring other Wikimedians which had outperformed Mr. Wales', notably that of WMF software designer Brandon Harris. Greater attention was reserved however for the comparably less successful efforts at attracting contributors of time and effort rather than money; the article highlighted WMF chief of global development Barry Newstead's plaintive remarks that 90% of non-editing readers weren't even aware they could edit, and that as an editor he felt like "furniture in the room".

It went on to chronicle the Foundation's efforts at combating editorial decline, emphasising the particular set of skills and circumstances it takes to make a worthy contributor ("a scarce and hardy breed") – a working knowledge of the project's policies, respect from one's peers, the ability to navigate the MediaWiki's sometimes daunting syntax, and the resilience to resist the machinations of special interests and bad faith editors. WMF executive director Sue Gardner's ambition to eradicate the "psychological barrier" dividing reading from editing was noted, as was the Foundation's specific initiatives to tone down warning messages and reform of the editing interface. The articles also lauded as a sensible choice the Foundation's decision to concentrate its global ambitions initially on India, as a stepping stone to the opening of offices in Brazil and in the Arab world. The article characterised the Foundation's greatest ongoing challenges its mobile development, and – ten years on – the constant struggle to articulate its projects' "anyone can edit" ethos. University outreach in the Global South, as exemplified by the Indian Education Program, was singled out as an example of one solution to such problems (although this initiative has not been without its travails – as our "Special report" this week outlines). The article finished on an upbeat note

Wikipedia has suffered in the past from ill-informed criticism from outside, and complacency on the inside. Signs now are that both are diminishing. The idea that an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit can provide high-quality content is increasingly established. Wikipedia entries are rarely perfect, but their flaws are always open to instant remedy; that is a big plus. The outfit also seems to be moving away from its dependence on the charismatic Mr Wales, and from its over-reliance on a narrow caste of Anglophone enthusiasts. Wikipedia’s survival and expansion are also encouraging signs for those that worry the internet is in danger of becoming too commercial and closed off. Wikipedia is not just collating knowledge: it is making news too.

— The Economist, November 5, 2011

Wales outspoken on the future of the net

Right now there are about two billion people online and that’s essentially the bulk of the developed world. In five to 10 years the next billion people are going to come online. Last summer they dropped a cable from Europe into Nigeria that overnight increased the bandwidth to Nigeria by a factor of 10.

Suddenly people’s access to information explodes. And the possibilities for political change are enormous. It means they’re connected, that they can organise revolutions, they can learn what’s going on in other countries.

I think we are going to see in some of these perpetual basket-case countries with one tyrant after another that people are finally going to have the ability to demand change. It’s very exciting.

Jimmy Wales, as quoted by The Telegraph, November 3, 2011.

Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales this week addressed the Free Thinking conference on the topic of "How the internet will keep changing the world", attracting widespread media coverage, from The Guardian, Computer Weekly, Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, BBC News and The Independent. The typically reserved and diplomatic Wales was strident on the topic of Internet freedom and censorship, condemning UK Prime Minister David Cameron's suggestion during the 2011 England riots that the government ought to shut down microblogging service Twitter in times of emergency as a comment that could have come from a Chinese general (a remark that drew spontaneous applause from the crowd).


Wales, who is known for his libertarian political leanings, declared that the chief threat facing the Internet was not cybercrime but repressive governments, and proposed that governments could learn from the social model of Wikipedia, whose administrators "could be seen as the most powerful media barons that have ever lived" and yet are in effect constrained by community-determined rules and scrutiny. He criticised the United States' mooted Stop Online Piracy Act as poorly designed and dangerous legislation which could adversely affect Internet users like Wikipedia volunteers, and went on to pronounce the inevitability of a Chinese Spring to match the Arab Spring of 2011.

Thunkpedia: an inclusionist alternative

At the recent "Books in Browsers" conference held by the Internet Archive and O'Reilly Media, Gordon Mohr (User:Gojomo, former Chief Technologist at the Internet Archive's web archive projects), gave a talk titled "Infinithree: Beyond the Wiki Encyclopedias", where he presented a soon-to-be-launched collaborative website called "Thunkpedia", making good on an announcement from January where he had proposed such a project under the code name "Infinithree" ("∞³") (see Signpost coverage). While acknowledging Wikipedia's success, Mohr cited concern about deletionism and wikilawyering as a motivation for his endeavour. (The talk also contained a small jab at Wikipedia's Article Feedback Tool, calling a Wikipedia article "really the wrong unit for review", being too long.)

Inspired by Richard Feynman's famous 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Mohr asked "what is the smallest thing that we could collaborate on" in terms of reference knowledge, dubbing it "thunk", short for "the thing unknown". These are to be collected in "a big pile of disaggregated knowledge" under the tagline "Thunkpedia - the sum of all human knowledge ... that fits", and released under a free license. A demo featured several such entries, some drawn from lead sections of Wikipedia articles. One listener called the concept "a Google-Wikipedia-Twitter hybrid". It bears some resemblance (but also differences) to Twick.it, a user-generated online glossary limiting article lengths to 140 characters, often seen as a mixture between Wikipedia and Twitter, which has received some indirect financial support from the German Wikimedia chapter.

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