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The story of Wikipedia; Wikipedia reanimated and republished; UK government social media rules; death of Italian Wikipedia administrator

The story of Wikipedia

Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson
Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger

The Daily Beast (October 19) ran a long excerpt called "You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story" from Walter Isaacson's new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Isaacson begins by describing how Apple's HyperCard inspired Ward Cunningham to create a visionary application for the Internet that he called the WikiWikiWeb, after Honolulu's Wiki Wiki airport shuttle. Cunningham had learned that wiki means quick in the Hawaiian language, and that wiki wiki thus means doubly quick. He released WikiWikiWeb as open-source software in early 1995, and it became familiar to software engineers over the next several years, although it was largely unknown to the public.

Next, Isaacson writes about the early life of Jimmy Wales, from his childhood fascination with the World Book Encyclopedia his mother had bought for him, to his post-graduate involvement with user-generated content such as Multi-User Dungeon games, electronic mailing lists, web directories, and web rings. In 1996, Wales and two partners founded a company, Bomis, to promote and make money from these ventures. In early 2000, Bomis underwrote Nupedia, a free, volunteer-written, online encyclopedia. Wales hired a philosophy graduate student, Larry Sanger, to help develop Nupedia, but the extensive peer-reviewed process that they devised proved to be "painfully slow" and "not a lot of fun." After the first year, Nupedia only had a dozen articles.


After covering the disagreements over who brought what inspiration to the project, and the philosophical differences between Nupedia and Wikipedia, Isaacson then brings us to the main event: the launch of Wikipedia in early 2001.


By then, Wales had let Sanger go. A year later, after Wikipedia had accumulated 100,000 articles and a critical mass of editors, Nupedia met its demise when Wikipedia subsumed it.

Having recounted Wikipedia's beginnings, Isaacson moves on to describe his own experience as a Wikipedia editor and being part of the crowdsourcing. He waxes enthusiastic about Wikipedia's mechanisms of collaboration and consensus as it applies to both the development of articles and the governance of the project. He particularly stresses the principle of neutral point of view in producing articles. He notes the tremendous growth ("Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu") into hundreds of languages and tens of millions of articles.

He speculates on why editors contribute, and concludes it is more than giving people free access to knowledge, that most contribute out of the sheer joy of sharing what they know.


On this last point, he gives a shout out to now-departed editor User:Lord Emsworth, whose moniker comes from the P. G. Wodehouse character. Lord Emsworth's "articles on the British aristocracy ... were so insightful about the intricacies of the peerage system that some were featured as the article of the day, and Lord Emsworth rose to become a Wikipedia administrator. It turned out that [he] was actually a 16-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you're a commoner."

Wikipedia reanimated and republished

A toggle clamp, one of the animated GIFs used by Roth in No Original Research

Wired highlights (October 8) the newest project of artist Evan Roth, called No Original Research, which was commissioned by the Alingsas Konsthallen as part of their exhibition Snel Hest. Roth took eleven animated GIF files from Wikipedia and combined them with unrelated Wikipedia audio files.

Roth writes:


Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert (right)

Widely admired Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert was a Wikipedia editor who made 22 edits from 2004 to 2009 as User:Rebert. Though there is little in the way of direct evidence that he was User:Rebert, the quality of his edits and the frequent references and links to Ebert's work in those edits have led editors to conclude that the account belonged to Ebert. The account was also used to upload a picture of Ebert with director Russ Meyer which was released into the Creative Commons and verified by OTRS. Following Ebert's death in 2013, the account's user page became an impromptu shrine dedicated to Ebert's life and work.

The Atlantic features (October 9) the newest Wikipedia tribute to Ebert. Quenton Miller created an artist's book collecting all of Ebert's Wikipedia edits in a single volume, complete with the picture of Ebert with Meyer as the author's photo on the book jacket. Miller only created a single copy of the book and it is not currently for sale. Miller told The Atlantic:


New UK government social media rules

The Liverpool Echo reports (October 20) that the UK has released updated employee rules for social media. The document, called "Social Media Guidance for Civil Servants", follows a controversy this summer that caused a government employee to be sacked for posting "slurs" on the Wikipedia article for the Hillsborough disaster and related pages. The new guidelines read


In brief

Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014

News


Former Wikimedia Italia treasurer and Italian Wikipedia administrator Cotton, second from left, has died.

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