[I am writing this as a "letter-to-the-editor," if you actually have such a feature. If not, feel free to ignore this.]
Dear editor,
I'm writing in response to your article about Wikipedia published a few days ago. I'm Wikipedia's main organizer. I simply wanted to comment on one remark reported in the article, which was as follows: "Walter Bender, executive director of MIT's Media Laboratory, believes that what makes Britannica a valuable resource is the scope and depth of its editing, and free Web-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia will probably never be able to compete with that."
Of course, right now Britannica has a greater scope and depth than Wikipedia--but that's not surprising, because Wikipedia got its start just eight months ago. But in the interim we have created over 10,000 articles--the best of which are easily comparable to Britannica's articles--and are now adding nearly 2,000 articles per month, according to one resident statistician. These articles are all constantly improving, as well. Many of our active participants have Ph.D.'s or other advanced degrees, and are college professors and graduate students or are highly-trained professionals. Significantly, Wikipedia's *rate* of growth has been steadily increasing--in terms of article numbers and quality, traffic to the website, and attracting more highly-qualified contributors. So it seems very reasonable to think that within a few years the project will surpass Britannica in both breadth and depth. There's nothing stopping us.
Best regards, Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D.
I think the relevent point is, scope and depth is where Wikipedia will easily outstrip Britannica. This is because we have a powerful method of content generation. It is the ease of use of the wiki model, and the open content license that encourages participation, that will give us more scope and depth.
One could plausibly argue that Britannica will always have an advantage in quality and reliability, but I don't think this is the case. For one thing, the Wikipedia process results in a high level of quality. And for another thing, if the free alternative is 'good enough' then the premium alternative will never generate enough revenue to pay for higher costs associated with higher quality.
Tim
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001 lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
[I am writing this as a "letter-to-the-editor," if you actually have such a feature. If not, feel free to ignore this.]
Dear editor,
I'm writing in response to your article about Wikipedia published a few days ago. I'm Wikipedia's main organizer. I simply wanted to comment on one remark reported in the article, which was as follows: "Walter Bender, executive director of MIT's Media Laboratory, believes that what makes Britannica a valuable resource is the scope and depth of its editing, and free Web-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia will probably never be able to compete with that."
Of course, right now Britannica has a greater scope and depth than Wikipedia--but that's not surprising, because Wikipedia got its start just eight months ago. But in the interim we have created over 10,000 articles--the best of which are easily comparable to Britannica's articles--and are now adding nearly 2,000 articles per month, according to one resident statistician. These articles are all constantly improving, as well. Many of our active participants have Ph.D.'s or other advanced degrees, and are college professors and graduate students or are highly-trained professionals. Significantly, Wikipedia's *rate* of growth has been steadily increasing--in terms of article numbers and quality, traffic to the website, and attracting more highly-qualified contributors. So it seems very reasonable to think that within a few years the project will surpass Britannica in both breadth and depth. There's nothing stopping us.
Best regards, Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D.
[Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Timothy Shell tshell@bomis.com writes:
One could plausibly argue that Britannica will always have an advantage in quality and reliability, but I don't think this is the case. For one thing, the Wikipedia process results in a high level of quality.
With quality I agree. Reliability is another thing: sometimes I'd want to link with a resource that explains a concept, which *won't* suddenly change from under my hands. Even if we believe that changes to Wikipedia generally go to the better, more detailed, more balanced, etc. that can be detrimental sometimes.
Suppose I write a paper about something that references an Wikipedia article. Now someone broadens the article with much information that is also in my paper, i.e. the papers is rendered a bit useless. Or worse, someone puts information that refute my theory on the page. Oops.
On the other hand, as we can all see now, up-to-dateness is a virtue in which Wikipedia can beat all printed encylopedias hands down. britannica.com also has something by now; I can't judge details from here, though.
This is a very interesting discussion--the issue has been raised before, but you state it very articulately.
On 12 Sep 2001, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
Timothy Shell tshell@bomis.com writes:
One could plausibly argue that Britannica will always have an advantage in quality and reliability, but I don't think this is the case. For one thing, the Wikipedia process results in a high level of quality.
With quality I agree. Reliability is another thing: sometimes I'd want to link with a resource that explains a concept, which *won't* suddenly change from under my hands. Even if we believe that changes to Wikipedia generally go to the better, more detailed, more balanced, etc. that can be detrimental sometimes.
Suppose I write a paper about something that references an Wikipedia article. Now someone broadens the article with much information that is also in my paper, i.e. the papers is rendered a bit useless. Or worse, someone puts information that refute my theory on the page. Oops.
On the other hand, as we can all see now, up-to-dateness is a virtue in which Wikipedia can beat all printed encylopedias hands down. britannica.com also has something by now; I can't judge details from here, though.
This raises issues about the future that I think are very interesting to think about (even if they are in the somewhat distant future).
Basically, I think the occasional temporary degradation of articles is an acceptable disadvantage of our present system, given that the what causes that disadvantage, namely our completely open system, creates huge (and ever more rapidly increasing) amounts of generally reliable content.
The other disadvantage mentioned, that references might lead to personal embarrassment, doesn't strike me as a terribly huge disadvantage. Who, after all, is going to *cite* a Wikipedia article? Nobody, or at least, nobody before we have "stable versions" of articles (if we *ever* do) that are given a stamp of approval (perhaps by Nupedia review groups).
But I think we probably will, in the distant (how distant, who knows) future, have an official approval process (that is kept carefully separate from the article-generation process). It would make sense to save copies of the exact article that was approved, for citation purposes, or to populate a database of "approved articles."
The way I see it, pretty soon, Wikipedia is going to have 100,000 articles, and Wikipedia will be a household name. Even those who have scoffed at the idea of a wiki-based collaborative project will see value in the result, and a natural movement will be afoot to certify or approve certain articles, so that the public can trust that the information in those articles is reliable. I think at that time we probably won't have any trouble at all getting suitable experts interested in serving on approval committees. Again, we might try to tap Nupedia for this purpose--if they're willing, which they might not be, but who knows.
Anyway, Wikipedia can't be *completely* up-to-date unless we've got a *lot* of people working on it in many different areas. And, at this stage anyway, the best way to keep a lot of people working on it is by keeping it completely free.
Larry
lsanger@nupedia.com writes:
The other disadvantage mentioned, that references might lead to personal embarrassment, doesn't strike me as a terribly huge disadvantage. Who, after all, is going to *cite* a Wikipedia article? Nobody, or at least, nobody before we have "stable versions" of articles (if we *ever* do) that are given a stamp of approval (perhaps by Nupedia review groups).
That's what I meant.
But the reliability problem, if it is one, can creep up inside Wikipedia as well. Just now, I wrote on [[i386]]:
See [[Intel]] for a comprehensive list of all CPUs produced by that company.
This is correct now, but actually I find the big list on [[Intel]] a bit too much information without proper presentation. I'll not do anything about that yet, but other Wikipedians may have the same feeling, and, say, put the list on one or more other pages.
One feature missing is finding all reference to a page. I don't think the new search supports that yet.
But I think we probably will, in the distant (how distant, who knows) future, have an official approval process (that is kept carefully separate from the article-generation process). It would make sense to save copies of the exact article that was approved, for citation purposes, or to populate a database of "approved articles."
I don't know whether you imply that, but I am against keeping the approved pages separate from the "main" Wikipedia.
One can already link to stable version like URL:http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Pentagon&revision=3 the only problem being that older revisions are cleaned out. The easiest solution is keeping all revisions, or keeping them longer. But I don't know how this would influence disk space requirements, and, more important, I'm not the one shelling out $$ for it ...
Approval comes to the rescue: Why not a few weeks worth of revisions, as we do now, AND approved revisions going back 5 years?
I.e. what I'm proposing is that when some approval authority decides that revision X is good, nothing more than a "approved" bit is flipped. All approved revisions are marked in the "View other revisions" page of an article, they have a longer expire period, and one is able to instruct the wiki.cgi to hand out the latest approved version. Nothing more changes.
It should also be possible to get a diff between the last approved and any newer revision. That makes re-approval easier as well.
That is largely similar to the "stable" and "development" branches used in many software products.
And, at this stage anyway, the best way to keep a lot of people working on it is by keeping it completely free.
If you meant free-from-restrictions, "at this stage anyway" is misleading. I don't know of a feasible legal way to change the Wikipedia license apart from starting from scratch.
If you meant for-free, that can certainly change. But I suspect that there will always be parties willing to sponsor the costs for hosting Wikipedia.
Having "stable" versions of articles requires the ability to "lock" pages, which requires new or adapted software. If the wiki software is changed anyway, I'd suggest a "namespace" mechanism. I already mentioned that somewhere, I just forgot where;). So, here again, my proposal:
- Enable article names that have a namespace at the beginning, separated by a ':' - A blank namespace, like ':HomePage', leads to the "normal", current wikipedia - If no namespace is given ('HomePage'), the link is within the current namespace. So, once you view an article with a namespace, it will link to destinations within that namespace unless stated otherwise. - The current namespace is displayed at the top of the page. - Other namespaces that have an article with the same name are displayed as links to these articles.
That would enable the following scenario: - Article "xyz" is developed as usual - Some authorized person decides that this article is great, and cpoies it to "stable:xyz" - The article "xyz" can be developed further as usual - The article "stable:xyz" is for view only, unless you have special authorization, and can be linked to or cited - Links in "stable:xyz" would, without changes, automatically go to other "stable:" articles, while the same article in the ":" namespace would link to normal wikipedia articles - A link within the "stable:" namespace that leads to a blank page could automatically lead to the normal wikipedia, or display a page "no stable version, see the normal one", or something similar.
There could also be a "talk" namespace, for example, to get rid of these ugly "/Talk" pages ;) Or a "data" namespace, to store, say, famous texts that are in the PD now.
I don't see a problem implementing such a mechanism, and it won't hinder wikipedians in any way, it just adds an option.
Magnus
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Robert Bihlmeyer Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 11:36 AM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia's scope
lsanger@nupedia.com writes:
The other disadvantage mentioned, that references might lead to personal embarrassment, doesn't strike me as a terribly huge disadvantage. Who, after all, is going to *cite* a Wikipedia article? Nobody, or at least, nobody before we have "stable versions" of articles (if we
*ever* do) that
are given a stamp of approval (perhaps by Nupedia review groups).
That's what I meant.
But the reliability problem, if it is one, can creep up inside Wikipedia as well. Just now, I wrote on [[i386]]:
See [[Intel]] for a comprehensive list of all CPUs produced by that company.
This is correct now, but actually I find the big list on [[Intel]] a bit too much information without proper presentation. I'll not do anything about that yet, but other Wikipedians may have the same feeling, and, say, put the list on one or more other pages.
One feature missing is finding all reference to a page. I don't think the new search supports that yet.
But I think we probably will, in the distant (how distant, who knows) future, have an official approval process (that is kept
carefully separate
from the article-generation process). It would make sense to
save copies
of the exact article that was approved, for citation purposes, or to populate a database of "approved articles."
I don't know whether you imply that, but I am against keeping the approved pages separate from the "main" Wikipedia.
One can already link to stable version like
URL:http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Pentagon&r evision=3 the only problem being that older revisions are cleaned out. The easiest solution is keeping all revisions, or keeping them longer. But I don't know how this would influence disk space requirements, and, more important, I'm not the one shelling out $$ for it ...
Approval comes to the rescue: Why not a few weeks worth of revisions, as we do now, AND approved revisions going back 5 years?
I.e. what I'm proposing is that when some approval authority decides that revision X is good, nothing more than a "approved" bit is flipped. All approved revisions are marked in the "View other revisions" page of an article, they have a longer expire period, and one is able to instruct the wiki.cgi to hand out the latest approved version. Nothing more changes.
It should also be possible to get a diff between the last approved and any newer revision. That makes re-approval easier as well.
That is largely similar to the "stable" and "development" branches used in many software products.
And, at this stage anyway, the best way to keep a lot of people working on it is by keeping it completely free.
If you meant free-from-restrictions, "at this stage anyway" is misleading. I don't know of a feasible legal way to change the Wikipedia license apart from starting from scratch.
If you meant for-free, that can certainly change. But I suspect that there will always be parties willing to sponsor the costs for hosting Wikipedia.
-- Robbe
On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Magnus Manske wrote:
- Enable article names that have a namespace at the beginning, separated by
a ':'
- A blank namespace, like ':HomePage', leads to the "normal", current
wikipedia
- If no namespace is given ('HomePage'), the link is within the current
namespace. So, once you view an article with a namespace, it will link to destinations within that namespace unless stated otherwise.
Sounds good to me--this is a way to make it relatively easy to distinguish user pages, talk pages, etc.
Essentially, we need three namespaces, or four: the encyclopedia; talk pages; user/member pages; and perhaps "Wikipedia" pages, i.e., pages about Wikipedia. The big question is, do we really need to have links between these different namespaces? The answer seems to be "Yes, of course." We'd link from about-Wikipedia pages to encyclopedia pages to give examples; etc.
For purposes of searching and counting, this would make it easy to search *just* through the encyclopedia (or any other namespace).
Then--maybe--we want an "approved" namespace.
- The current namespace is displayed at the top of the page.
- Other namespaces that have an article with the same name are displayed as
links to these articles.
I'm not sure I understand the latter...?
That would enable the following scenario:
- Article "xyz" is developed as usual
- Some authorized person decides that this article is great, and cpoies it
to "stable:xyz"
- The article "xyz" can be developed further as usual
This part is *extremely* important. This talk of "freezing" pages is naturally interpreted as meaning that one cannot make any further edits to a page. I'm sure very few if any people intended that, though.
- The article "stable:xyz" is for view only, unless you have special
authorization, and can be linked to or cited
- Links in "stable:xyz" would, without changes, automatically go to other
"stable:" articles, while the same article in the ":" namespace would link to normal wikipedia articles
- A link within the "stable:" namespace that leads to a blank page could
automatically lead to the normal wikipedia, or display a page "no stable version, see the normal one", or something similar.
Maybe, and maybe we'd just want those to be different color links. We should cross that bridge when we come to it.
There could also be a "talk" namespace, for example, to get rid of these ugly "/Talk" pages ;) Or a "data" namespace, to store, say, famous texts that are in the PD now.
This is actually a great idea, I think. It *would* be good to have texts and other non-encyclopedic data in a different namespace from the encyclopedia.
I don't see a problem implementing such a mechanism, and it won't hinder wikipedians in any way, it just adds an option.
I agree 100%. This is an excellent compromise.
Larry
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Robert Bihlmeyer Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 11:36 AM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia's scope
lsanger@nupedia.com writes:
The other disadvantage mentioned, that references might lead to personal embarrassment, doesn't strike me as a terribly huge disadvantage. Who, after all, is going to *cite* a Wikipedia article? Nobody, or at least, nobody before we have "stable versions" of articles (if we
*ever* do) that
are given a stamp of approval (perhaps by Nupedia review groups).
That's what I meant.
But the reliability problem, if it is one, can creep up inside Wikipedia as well. Just now, I wrote on [[i386]]:
See [[Intel]] for a comprehensive list of all CPUs produced by that company.
This is correct now, but actually I find the big list on [[Intel]] a bit too much information without proper presentation. I'll not do anything about that yet, but other Wikipedians may have the same feeling, and, say, put the list on one or more other pages.
One feature missing is finding all reference to a page. I don't think the new search supports that yet.
But I think we probably will, in the distant (how distant, who knows) future, have an official approval process (that is kept
carefully separate
from the article-generation process). It would make sense to
save copies
of the exact article that was approved, for citation purposes, or to populate a database of "approved articles."
I don't know whether you imply that, but I am against keeping the approved pages separate from the "main" Wikipedia.
One can already link to stable version like
URL:http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Pentagon&r evision=3 the only problem being that older revisions are cleaned out. The easiest solution is keeping all revisions, or keeping them longer. But I don't know how this would influence disk space requirements, and, more important, I'm not the one shelling out $$ for it ...
Approval comes to the rescue: Why not a few weeks worth of revisions, as we do now, AND approved revisions going back 5 years?
I.e. what I'm proposing is that when some approval authority decides that revision X is good, nothing more than a "approved" bit is flipped. All approved revisions are marked in the "View other revisions" page of an article, they have a longer expire period, and one is able to instruct the wiki.cgi to hand out the latest approved version. Nothing more changes.
It should also be possible to get a diff between the last approved and any newer revision. That makes re-approval easier as well.
That is largely similar to the "stable" and "development" branches used in many software products.
And, at this stage anyway, the best way to keep a lot of people working on it is by keeping it completely free.
If you meant free-from-restrictions, "at this stage anyway" is misleading. I don't know of a feasible legal way to change the Wikipedia license apart from starting from scratch.
If you meant for-free, that can certainly change. But I suspect that there will always be parties willing to sponsor the costs for hosting Wikipedia.
-- Robbe
[Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
See my column for the formatted version: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Tim_Chambers/Wikipedia_configuration_managemen...
There was [a thread on the Wikipedia list] that got me thinking about configuration management for Wikipedia.
I agree with the need to accommodate Wikipedia in citations. I also agree with the need to somehow "freeze" articles.
So here's an outline of my proposal:
1. Wikipedia is, first and foremost, a perpetual work in progress. I think the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack article is evidence of the value in this principle. Wikipedia contributes to the universal body of human knowledge, offering the unique benefits of Wiki technology: global participation, hypertext, up-to-date information, etc. Others may want to flesh out this mission statement. We must never compromise this key contribution of Wikipedia.
2. Wikipedia also strives to be academically relevant by enabling periodic releases of encyclopedia versions. The period may be much shorter than a conventional encyclopedia, but most information providers seem to be settling on annual updates. This also builds on the strong tradition of hardcopy almanac?s. The 2001 edition of the Wikipedia needs to get out soon if we go this route.
3. Wikipedia articles can be versioned even more often than the whole Wikipedia. We already do this thanks to UseModWiki, but the calls for "freezing" articles are begging for a baselining system where an article can, to some degree, be called "ready." They'll never be "finished," but many are "ready" for "release."
So that brings me to my overall vision. [I work] in the field of software process engineering, and from my perspective Wikipedia needs a [configuration management system]?. We have a [revision control system]? for individual articles, but the 10,000 article mark seems a good point to release our first version of the Wikipedia. Eventually (maybe very soon?), Wikipedia will need a supervised release process.
This model is analagous to other open source projects. For instance, Debian released version 2.2r3 on April 17th, 2001. To be a part of that release, developers of all parts of Linux had to "get on the release train," as it's sometimes called.
Here's a start to get discussion of Wikipedia's configuration management system going. Current URLs at www.wikipedia.com would continue to reflect the current understanding of the "wild and wooly world." Articles are "live." But some new links can be added to each article. Every "released" article could have a link to view diffs compared with older released versions of the article, not just the "older revisions." We still show visitors the live copy, but we have a link to "release 2001" or release "September 2001" and so on. These named releases are frozen for all time. So the world will know what Wikipedia in 2001 had to say about the universe. There isn't an "edit" link on released pages, but there's a "visit the live, ongoing work-in-progress version of this article," which still has the edit link.
I still have a lot of vocational work done today, so enough avocational time for today. Talk amongst yourselves...
<>< Tim
__________________________________________________ Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/
I'm omitting responses to issues that are addressed by Magnus' post...
On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Tim Chambers wrote:
- Wikipedia also strives to be academically relevant by enabling
periodic releases of encyclopedia versions. The period may be much shorter than a conventional encyclopedia, but most information providers seem to be settling on annual updates. This also builds on the strong tradition of hardcopy almanac?s. The 2001 edition of the Wikipedia needs to get out soon if we go this route.
This would be a *great* benefit of having an "approved" namespace. If we make the standard for inclusion in the "approved" namespace roughly equivalent to the standard for inclusion in Nupedia, we essentially guarantee that the articles will be of publishable quality. It's fantastic that Wikipedia is so easy to edit, too, because it means that any issues that reviewers might have can be *immediately* rectified (by the reviewers themselves). This might be a way to get a lot of the (thousands!) of idle Nupedia hands involved in Wikipedia.
Anyway, yes, it would be fantastic to have an approved body of content to be able to release in cheap newsprint editions, for places that lack computers, and in CD versions. As soon as we get enough approved content, you can bet that Jimbo will be very interested in producing such materials.
- Wikipedia articles can be versioned even more often than the whole
Wikipedia. We already do this thanks to UseModWiki, but the calls for "freezing" articles are begging for a baselining system where an article can, to some degree, be called "ready." They'll never be "finished," but many are "ready" for "release."
I agree 100%. (Actually, I think even our very best articles might be subject to some further revision by expert reviewers.)
Here's a start to get discussion of Wikipedia's configuration management system going. Current URLs at www.wikipedia.com would continue to reflect the current understanding of the "wild and wooly world." Articles are "live." But some new links can be added to each article. Every "released" article could have a link to view diffs compared with older released versions of the article, not just the "older revisions." We still show visitors the live copy, but we have a link to "release 2001" or release "September 2001" and so on. These named releases are frozen for all time. So the world will know what Wikipedia in 2001 had to say about the universe. There isn't an "edit" link on released pages, but there's a "visit the live, ongoing work-in-progress version of this article," which still has the edit link.
Sounds reasonable.
Larry
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org