[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

[Lee Pilich]

Rick wrote:
 >An interview with Jimmy Wales and info about Wikipedia:
 >http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=504287

Page 11 of the review section, for those taking notes. Accompanying 
pictures: a pile of dusty-looking books, and a photo of some kids gathered 
round a computer monitor, apparently in thrall of the knowledge presented 
before their eyeballs.

Ec wrote:
 >Too bad they don't realize that it's wikipedia.org rather than
 >wikipedia.com.

They also say "Any self-styled expert in a subject can write or edit an 
article about anything to join the 200,000 others in the Wikipedia, *as 
long as they give the intellectual property to the project*" (my asterisks) 
which is a bit wide of the mark.

I also wonder if the article talks up Jimbo's role in the whole thing a bit 
- I mean, he's our spiritual leader, benevolent dictator and sugar daddy, I 
know, but things like "To manage the editing process, Wales uses the 
Wiki..." make him sound a bit like editor-in-cheif as well.

I'm sort of picking fault, really. It's not a bad article on the whole.

Fred wrote:
 >Remember we are talking about a
 >multi-volume work, or are we?

As I understand it, that's not what is being talked about at the moment 
(though it's something many would aspire to for the future). The talk has 
been of a single-volume concise work, along the lines of the Columbia or 
Britannica Concise encyclopedias. Comparisons with the full EB made in the 
article are somewhat premature, methinks.

I refer you to Jimbo's original post on the subject: 
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-February/011045.html

---

I'm interested in how these things get in papers by the way. Most previous 
coverage, I think, has come from press releases, but this article is mainly 
about a paper version, about which there have been no offical 
pronouncements that I'm aware of. So what happened here - did somebody go 
to the paper about this, or did the paper go to Jimbo out of the blue? Just 
curious. If it's the latter, it's surely a sign that we're being taken 
really quite seriously (something which probably shouldn't surprise me, but 
which nontheless regularly does).

Lee (Camembert)