[piw] Slashdot Article on wikipedia

Heide Hermary heide.hermary at gaiacollege.ca
Sun Apr 24 11:08:48 EDT 2005


That's exactly what I hope will happen to this database.  For sure, the 
Wikipedia comes up frequently in my searches.  They've only been around 
for a few years, and already the information is staggering.
Heide


Richard Morris wrote:

> Slashdot had a couple of long articles on wikipedia:
> http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95
> and
> http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1746205&tid=95&tid=149&tid=9 
>
>
> Good read, particularly interesting to us is an analysis of why 
> wikipedia has taken off.
>
>    1. Open content license. We promised contributors that their work 
> would always remain free for others to read. This, as is well known, 
> motivates people to work for the good of the world--and for the many 
> people who would like to teach the whole world, that's a pretty strong 
> motivation.
>    2. Focus on the encyclopedia. We said that we were creating an 
> encyclopedia, not a dictionary, etc., and we encouraged people to 
> stick to creating the encyclopedia and not use the project as a debate 
> forum.
>    3. Openness. Anyone could contribute. Everyone was specifically 
> made to feel welcome. (E.g., we encouraged the habit of writing on new 
> contributors' user pages, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" etc.) There was no 
> sense that someone would be turned away for not being bright enough, 
> or not being a good enough writer, or whatever.
>    4. Ease of editing. Wikis are pretty easy for most people to figure 
> out. In other collaborative systems (like Nupedia), you have to learn 
> all about the system first. Wikipedia had an almost flat learning curve.
>    5. Collaborate radically; don't sign articles. Radical 
> collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of 
> anyone else's work, is one of the great innovations of the open source 
> software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it 
> possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to 
> avoid the big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish 
> articles on popular topics to a fine luster.
>    6. Offer unedited, unapproved content for further development. This 
> is required if one wishes to collaborate radically. We encouraged 
> putting up their unfinished drafts--as long as they were at least 
> roughly correct--with the idea that they can only improve if there are 
> others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source 
> software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. 
> This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were 
> basically garbage (no offense to anyone--some of my own drafts were 
> sometimes garbage), and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated 
> that many articles have turned out very well indeed.
>    7. Neutrality. A firm neutrality policy made it possible for people 
> of widely divergent opinions to work together, without constantly 
> fighting. It's a way to keep the peace.
>    8. Start with a core of good people. I think it was essential that 
> we began the project with a core group of intelligent good writers who 
> understood what an encyclopedia should look like, and who were 
> basically decent human beings.
>    9. Enjoy the Google effect. We had little to do with this, but had 
> Google not sent us an increasing amount of traffic each time they 
> spidered the growing website, we would not have grown nearly as fast 
> as we did. (See below.)
>
> We fit with some of these point, 1,2,3,8,9 and hopefully 7,
> but not quite 5 or 6.
>
> Enjoy,
>     Rich
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> piw mailing list
> piw at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw
>
>
>




More information about the piw mailing list