[WikiEN-l] Fwd: wikipedia interview (Respekt, Czech Republic)

[David Gerard]

For your interest - answers I just gave a journalist. Corrections welcomed.

Do we have a Czech Wikipedia press contact? If so, they should get in
touch with the journalist too - something about these questions leads
me to think the writer is thinking of Wikipedia is just the English
Wikipedia.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
Date: 16-Aug-2006 16:27
Subject: Re: wikipedia interview
To: Martin Uhlíř - týdeník Respekt <uhlir at respekt.cz>


On 16/08/06, Martin Uhlíř - týdeník Respekt <uhlir at respekt.cz> wrote:

> I am a journalist working for the Czech political magazine Respect Weekly
> (www.respekt.cz), based in Prague, Czech Republic. I am working on a story
> about Wikipedia now and I would like to ask you few questions. Do you think
> you would have time to respond? Or should I rather call you? My deadline is
> Friday. The questions are:


I'll answer them as best I can right now, and will be happy to answer
in more detail as you need it.


> - The Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia has 5 paid employees. Is it
> true that all other participants of the Foundation's projects, e.g. all
> contributors to Wikipedia, work for free?


Yes, almost all Wikipedia contributors and administrators are
volunteers - including Jimmy Wales, who founded the project and still
leads it. I think some are paid by other companies (e.g. some of the
system administrators). But Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are
built almost entirely on the work of volunteers.


> - Who created all the software which is needed to run Wikipedia? Were it
> paid programmers?


The Foundation employs Brion Vibber and Tim Starling as software
developers and Wikimedia system administrators. The Mediawiki software
itself is open source and is developed by a pool of mostly volunteer
contributors. The Foundation also has several volunteer system
administrators.

The wiki software is called MediaWiki. A page about its history is
here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_history

When Wikipedia started in January 2001, it ran on UseMod, a program
that already existed and was in use on many other wikis. (This is now
known as the "Phase I" software.)

In January 2002, a new version of the software (using PHP and with
data stored in a MySQL database) was written by Magnus Manske
specifically for Wikipedia, for greater scalability and functionality
(the "Phase II" software). This was used until late 2002 or early
2003, I think.

Around this time, Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the software again, for
even more scalability and functionality (the "Phase III software").
Over 2003, Brion Vibber gradually became the lead developer. This
third version of the software was named MediaWiki in July 2003. The
software has been developed from this codebase since then.

The Mediawiki software is open source and free software, free for
anyone to use; and many websites use it, and many organisations and
companies use it internally. Its page is http://www.mediawiki.org/ .


> - What are the main incentives which drive so many contributors of Wikipedia
> to work for free? Some people say that for example admins and other
> high-ranking editors do it because they can exert control over others.


Most volunteers work on Wikipedia because they like the mission of the
project: to provide good free encyclopedias and other related
information sources, that others can freely reuse.

I do it because I like contributing to a collection of knowledge which
will be of use to others. I'm particularly pleased when something I've
written is used by others. Any project this size will also need
administration, an organisational structure, public relations and so
on.

An old Wikipedia page on why people edit it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who,_Why%3F

Sometimes people attribute an admin's actions against them to a sheer
wish for control over others, but I think this is largely erroneous in
assuming bad faith of the admins in question, who pretty much all
believe sincerely in the mission of the project. Of course, some
people are less good at working with others than other people might
be, and working with thousands of volunteers effectively is
intrinsically very difficult! Volunteer motivation is powerful but
very difficult to manage, because ultimately one doesn't have control
over a volunteer's actions - they have to want to do what you want
them to do. That is, you have to be convincing and motivating.


> - Do you consider having advertising on Wikipedia pages?


This is not expected ever to happen. The idea has been strongly
rejected by the community every time it is raised. In fact, a few
years ago, a lot of contributors to the Spanish Wikipedia left
Wikipedia.org to form another free encyclopedia project, Enciclopedia
Libre - because advertising on Wikipedia was even discussed!

Arguments for advertising are that we would make tremendous amounts of
money, and it would pretty much solve Wikipedia's funding problems.
Arguments against are that introducing advertising would lead to a lot
of the volunteers leaving immediately (I think this is the strongest
argument against) and that we want to keep ourselves completely
editorially independent of advertising.

The cost of no advertising for us is that we have trouble keeping up
with the server hardware demands of being the no. 17 website (Alexa
rating) in the world. All other organisations in the top 20 have
proper funding and a large technical staff! So instead of
inconveniencing the readers and editors with advertising, we end up
inconveniencing them with occasional server slowness, overload or
unavailability. The readers and editors seem to consider this a lesser
evil than advertising.


> - To improve the editorial control, Wikipedia has been thinking recently
> about having stable versions of articles that are considered to be finished,
> while further discussions about the content may happen elsewhere. Is it
> working this way now? I know that some articles are locked, but I am not
> sure if it is the same thing.


Locking is different from stable versions. Articles are locked to
prevent vandalism or other problematic editing. Although we prefer
semi-protecting articles rather than locking completely - this means
that people can only edit the article if they are logged in and have
had the account a few days. But we prefer to avoid even this where
possible.

It's possible for the Wikipedia model (free for all to edit, neutral
point of view) to produce a good finished product - the German
Wikipedia has done three released versions, on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM.
This proves that the Wikipedia model can produce a real encyclopedia
in product form that people will pay money for.

So the problem is then to get the other language Wikipedias to
releasable quality, or a subset of a given encyclopedia - for example,
not all of the English Wikipedia might be of release quality, but
perhaps a subset with good coverage of topics can be brought to
release quality.

Many models have been proposed for this, but I think it's unlikely the
volunteer community will want to have articles be locked for stability
- it's far too useful having the website be the live working draft
version of all articles.

Possibilities that have been proposed include having a separate
website for stable versions, or a link at the top of the article to an
agreed stable version - so that people wanting a good version can go
to that, or they can see the very latest version on the page itself.

I know that on the English Wikipedia it's still the subject of much
debate; I don't know what the state of debate is on other language
Wikipedias.


> Thanks a lot for your help.


I hope this has been of use to you! If you have any more questions,
please email me, or if necessary my phone number is +44 (7733) 223
584.


- thanks, David.