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

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(a)gmail.com> Date: 16-Aug-2006 16:27 Subject: Re: wikipedia interview To: Martin Uhlíř - týdeník Respekt <uhlir(a)respekt.cz> On 16/08/06, Martin Uhlíř - týdeník Respekt <uhlir(a)respekt.cz> wrote: I'll answer them as best I can right now, and will be happy to answer in more detail as you need it. 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. 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/ . 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. 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. 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. 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.