Rick-
(CC to Sam Williams, the author)
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