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Dirk Riehle: How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with A...

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Saved by 10 people (2 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-07-10


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on 2006-07-30 by nianox

interview with three wikipedians

on 2006-08-02 by nianox

interview with three wikipedians

on 2006-08-03 by edwardhenry

Excellent info about Wikipedia.

Public Sticky notes

Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing, which as a newcomer is mostly all you do.

Highlighted by alexko

In June 2003, when I was made an admin, this process was fairly easy—any trusted user would be promoted, but now people have their own expectations which influence their voting, and it's common for people to be rejected for having fewer than 3000 edits, having been involved for less than three months, or for any sort of dispute in their editing history.

Highlighted by alexko

Any user can decide to list this on the 'Articles for deletion' page.

Highlighted by alexko

It's not a vote so a minority with the stronger arguments can decide a deletion debate.

Highlighted by alexko

Like in the other Wikipedias, requests for deletion are determined by consensus, not by majority vote.

Highlighted by alexko

What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?

Highlighted by alexko

One example is reputation algorithms to measure an author's reputation and hence assigning a quality level to an article based on the participating authors' reputation. Another example is algorithms for assessing the actual quality of a page's contents. Is there any progress to report on this?

AB: We've been talking about it a lot, but nothing has been implemented [32]. One programmer, Magnus, has written code for it, but for reasons I'm not sure about, it has never gone live.

Highlighted by alexko

AB: Wikipedia exists to provide a globally available, free (as in freedom, as well as money), encyclopedic (verifiable and unbiased) resource to everyone in their own language. I subscribe to this goal and I also enjoy working with people who share it with me. The goals should be the same for all projects, though the exact implementation of all but the core policies (NPOV [5], GFDL [6], Wikiquette [7], "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia") does vary.

Highlighted by imagica

6. GROWTH CHALLENGES

DR: OK, then let's move on to growth challenges. What challenges do you see ahead coming from the continued growth of Wikipedia?

AB: The biggest challenge is to maintain what made us who and what we are: the traditional wiki model of being openly editable. There are temptations to lock things down in order to placate the media who tend to focus on the inadequacies of the site.

Highlighted by imagica

  • Legal threats, in particular libelous edits and copyright infringements. In general I'm optimistic, but still, a legal conflict can harm a project, even if in the end no real conflict before a court arises between the rights holder and the Wikimedia Foundation. The problem is that being in limbo might prevent further development of content and might be a source of human conflict on the project. But usually, it is nothing that can't be fixed.
  • Keeping integrity as a project. Some Wikipedias, like the English or German one, have many editors who are also involved with global activities like the Commons, Meta, or Foundation wikis. On other Wikipedias, much fewer volunteers like these exist, and bad communication between the local level and the global level might result. This can be a severe problem for the local projects.
  • Lack of involvement. We need a lot of people to keep a project alive! For smaller wikis, a dearth of contributors happens easily. Poor involvement of editors or even inactivity challenges the sustainability of the project. Therefore we need to go back to the first and foremost challenge: To keep the openness of the wikis that makes it easy for people to join.
  • Credibility. Young Wikipedias need to build a certain level of credibility. If they fail to establish their credibility or take too long a time, the project might falter.

    • Highlighted by imagica