Rick wrote:
An interview with Jimmy Wales and info about Wikipedia: http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=504287
Page 11 of the review section, for those taking notes. Accompanying pictures: a pile of dusty-looking books, and a photo of some kids gathered round a computer monitor, apparently in thrall of the knowledge presented before their eyeballs.
Ec wrote:
Too bad they don't realize that it's wikipedia.org rather than wikipedia.com.
They also say "Any self-styled expert in a subject can write or edit an article about anything to join the 200,000 others in the Wikipedia, *as long as they give the intellectual property to the project*" (my asterisks) which is a bit wide of the mark.
I also wonder if the article talks up Jimbo's role in the whole thing a bit - I mean, he's our spiritual leader, benevolent dictator and sugar daddy, I know, but things like "To manage the editing process, Wales uses the Wiki..." make him sound a bit like editor-in-cheif as well.
I'm sort of picking fault, really. It's not a bad article on the whole.
Fred wrote:
Remember we are talking about a multi-volume work, or are we?
As I understand it, that's not what is being talked about at the moment (though it's something many would aspire to for the future). The talk has been of a single-volume concise work, along the lines of the Columbia or Britannica Concise encyclopedias. Comparisons with the full EB made in the article are somewhat premature, methinks.
I refer you to Jimbo's original post on the subject: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-February/011045.html
---
I'm interested in how these things get in papers by the way. Most previous coverage, I think, has come from press releases, but this article is mainly about a paper version, about which there have been no offical pronouncements that I'm aware of. So what happened here - did somebody go to the paper about this, or did the paper go to Jimbo out of the blue? Just curious. If it's the latter, it's surely a sign that we're being taken really quite seriously (something which probably shouldn't surprise me, but which nontheless regularly does).
Lee (Camembert)