Rick- (CC to Sam Williams, the author)

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/04/27/wikipedia/index_np.html

Generally a well-written, accurate article. It would have been nice to discuss some example articles.

A few nits:

"Every few days somebody comes in and vandalizes the site," he says. "So many people are watching the page, though, that it doesn't take long before some admin comes in to fix the page."

1) It's not the "site" that is vandalized, but a particular page. 2) Every user can fix vandalism, not just admins.

Because of its encyclopedic ambitions, Wikipedia has had to adopt new levels of management and security -- log-in names, I.P. address blocks, arbitration and deletion committees -- that most wikis never have to worry about.

There is no deletion committee. Pages are deleted based on discussions on the [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] page, where consensus has to be reached by interested participants. An administrator evaluates the state of opinion after 5 days and decides whether or not to delete the page based on that. There is a separate [[Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion]] page to question admin decisions, but it is rarely used as the admin moves within a narrow, well-defined framework.

Wales says he is already talking with some of the larger search engine players about licensing specific portions of the Wikipedia knowledge base

This must be a misunderstanding. Jimbo or the Wikimedia Foundation do not have particular rights to the content, it is freely licensed to the general public under the GNU Free Documentation License by the authors. These agreements are more on the technological level -- converting our database into a format Yahoo! can use, adding a Yahoo! search link to our search form etc.

Our content is free - that is indeed one of the most important aspects of Wikipedia. Sam could have used any of our articles in his text, had he been willing to copyleft his own article (the main condition of the GNU FDL -- share and share alike). That will eventually allow us to bring Wikipedia content into schools and universities all across the planet, even into regions without Internet access.

Another side effect is that if, for some reason, Jimbo would lose interest in Wikipedia, or try to do something with it that the community does not support, we could just take the content somewhere else and continue working on it there. The project can, by virtue of its license, never die; it will always reincarnate.

Readers hoping to catch up on the history of World War I might stumble onto a porn star biography or vice versa.

While not impossible, that is very unlikely. This type of vandalism - conspicuous edits on a popular page - is almost always immediately detected and reverted. More problematic are factual mistakes, intentionally inserted or not, especially on relatively obscure subjects.

A basic peer review process already exists, namely the [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]] page, which works similarly to [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] -- a consensus has to be reached that an article is good enough to be "featured" (i.e. listed on [[Wikipedia:Featured articles]] and, at some point, become featured on the Main Page). A more sophisticated peer review process, which will also make it possible to link to the current "stable" version of an article, will develop naturally within the wiki framework.

Our next milestone will not be in the total number of articles or words -- in that department we have already beaten all other encyclopedias -- but in the number of peer reviewed ones.

Regards,

Erik