[Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

[Erik Moeller]

Anthere:
> I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist 
> exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
> 
> It strikes me as ... being a bit "short". But well, I suppose we can 
> disagree on this.

"From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon. This is Open 
Source. Wikipedia is the new knowledge phenomenon of the Internet age. 
It's an encyclopedia written and edited by its readers, a compendium in 
more than a 150 languages from Albanian to Zulu, of 1.3 million articles .."

Jimbo: "All of the different languages ... It's a very international 
project .. progress in a lot of the smaller languages .. distributed 
world-wide to people who don't have Internet access .. available in 
many, many languages .."

Radio Open Source contacted me, and they asked me for other contacts 
with the *explicit* comment that they were looking "especially for users 
outside the US." As Puddl has pointed out, they also went out of their 
way to contact someone from the Afrikaans Wikipedia on the wiki itself.

Anyone who listened to the whole show and didn't remember the 
"multilingualism" aspect is, quite frankly, unlikely to be capable of 
understanding Wikipedia itself.

The majority of the show focused on a relatively language-neutral aspect 
of the project, namely, the quality of the content and whether you can 
trust it. Most of the criticisms were eloquently wrong (faulting 
Wikipedia for the fact that students plagiarize it is pretty funny), and 
I would have liked them to dig a little deeper into our fact checking 
processes and future peer review plans.

It's important to note that Wikipedia is a work in progress not just in 
its content, but also in its processes and technology. It reminds me of 
all those fancy predictions about blogs and their impact on journalism, 
none of them realizing that this entire sphere is subject to massive 
technological and structural changes. I wouldn't call the show biased, I 
would call it somewhat superficial in that respect.

That they didn't focus more on the aspect of multilingualism was a 
conscious editiorial decision. Rather than do an "Oh, look how great 
Wikipedia is" piece, they wanted to try to give a balanced view of the 
project and its accomplishments. I would say that it's probably the 
least biased mainstream media presentation I've come across so far 
coming from outside the community. I hope you don't expect an American 
radio show to broadcast in French -- they would be taken over by 
right-wing militia within seconds. ;-)

Erik