This ten year appraisal written by Drake Bennett for Business Week also features wiki-style collaborative editing by a small number of invited external contributors. It's not perfect but overall I think it does a good job.
There are some obvious errors which will be obvious to us all and may mislead readers less familiar with the inner politics. For instance the response to the Siegenthaler affair includes Jimmy Wales' decision to stop anonymous creation of new articles (correct but out of date as it was a temporary measure) but doesn't seem to cover the much more important policy shift.
The article overall is however somewhat more positive about Wikipedia than I would have expected as recently as last year. The press and blog response to the recent fundraiser was also overwhelmingly positive. I think we've finally broken the barrier and acquired an exulted status hitherto shared only by such institutions as the BBC and the NHS.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_03/b4211057979684.htm
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
There are some obvious errors which will be obvious to us all and may mislead readers less familiar with the inner politics. For instance the response to the Siegenthaler affair includes Jimmy Wales' decision to stop anonymous creation of new articles (correct but out of date as it was a temporary measure) but doesn't seem to cover the much more important policy shift.
What was temporary about it? I haven't tried recently to create an article as an anonymous, but judging from the continued existence of WP:AFC, Wales's decision still stands (despite broken faith as to a study of the effects).
And policy? The writer focused on the right thing - code is law.
You're right, Gwern. It is not possible at present to create an article without registering and logging in. My mistake, thanks for the correction.
It was a "temporary experiment" that was transparently neither temporary nor an experiment. I think I got chewed out for pointing that out at the time. I sometimes wonder what Wikipedia could have become if it truly stayed experimental, instead of aspiring to the lesser goal of a better Encarta.
C'est la vie!
On 1/10/11, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
You're right, Gwern. It is not possible at present to create an article without registering and logging in. My mistake, thanks for the correction.
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On 10 January 2011 14:46, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
I think we've finally broken the barrier and acquired an exulted status hitherto shared only by such institutions as the BBC and the NHS.
I saw an ad in Kings Cross tube station headlining something as "The Wikipedia of ..." I forget. Wish I'd had a camera to hand.
We're more than famous, we're part of the framework. How the hell did that happen?
By making the Internet not suck, presumably. This is also the secret of Google's success (I remember the feeling of using Cuil: "this allows us to show the kids what search engines were like before Google, and why they get all that money"), but is a "large and important company" rather than "an institution". Useful, that nonprofit charity thing.
- d.
On 10/01/2011 15:09, David Gerard wrote
We're more than famous, we're part of the framework. How the hell did that happen?
Do good by stealth technology. We're invisible to 17 kinds of radar. And we flew in under the rest. Jimbo may get recognised in the street, but who else?
Without taking a step outdoors You know the whole world;
<snip>
The sage wanders without knowing, Looks without seeing, Accomplishes without acting.
That was known long ago.
Charles
On Monday, January 10, 2011, Tony Sidaway wrote:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_03/b4211057979684.htm
I'm curious about Wales calling Wikipedia a "temple of the mind"; that's some high-falutin verbiage! The earliest instance I can find is this Forbes article: http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2010/10/15/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-on-the...