Regarding the interest in your political views, I don't know if the Finnish reporter had an understanding of NPOV, but even with such an understanding there still might be interest.
There are numerous reasons for this: interest in you yourself, a belief that it may have somehow influenced the structure of the organisation, a desire to discredit or praise Wikipedia (invalidly though) by saying "See, Wikipedia must be good/bad because its founder is a______ / believes _________".
Mark
On 23/04/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I'm still reading the entire thread, but I just wanted to throw in a couple of hopefully useful comments.
First, there is always a great temptation by programmers and technologists to use points systems and ratings systems as a replacement for genuine community. Steve asks the question "Who gets to decide what is a credible view?" as if there is no possible answer to the question other than voting or ratings. But the answer is: "We do, the community, through a process of kind and thoughtful reasoned discourse to attempt to chart as neutral a summary of the issue as we can given our limitations as human beings -- we try to help the reader understand not just our own opinions, but also the full range of the subject, within the limitations of time and the medium we are using."
Ratings can't replace reasoned discourse and thoughtful compromise and it seems very very likely to me that for game theoretic reasons most ratings systems would contain incentives very very different from the "mutually assured destruction" of wiki editing.
Second, there's absolutely nothing wrong with passionate writing to prove a point. But, ahem, maybe I'm a fool and a hardass, but my promise to the community from the very beginning, and one of the things that holds us together as a passionate community of hard workers trying to help the world is precisely that NPOV is non-negotiable.
Recently in Finland a reporter started bugging Anthere at a talk she was giving to explain Jimbo's political views. Now we all know as community members why that's so funny. No one needs to care about my political views because even if I wanted to make Jimbopedia, I don't have the means to do it... NPOV is that deeply ingrained here.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l