Bonnie and I went to the Jimbo Wales talk at UNC yesterday. Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and now president of Wikimedia. We both thought it was an interesting talk. iBiblio should have the video up on their speakers page by next week. The talk covered the Wikimedia family and Wales’s Ten Things That Will Be Free (PDF). Tidbits:
- Wikimedia is almost completely volunteer; only two employees: a programmer and secretary.
- Most edits are done by a small percentage of the contributors. 2% of contributors make 75% of the edits.
- Decision process is by consensus. Failing that, it’s by democracy. If the minority still objects, the process becomes an aristocracy where respected voices can overrule the majority. Finally, decisions can fall to the president, essentially Monarchy.
- He focused on the value of the community of editors. Most of the high-volume editors know each other. That was contrasted with other sites like eBay that have to provide user ratings because they lack a real community where people know each other as more than just a one-dimensional number from 1 to 5.
- Though Wikimedia is non-profit, he has started a commercial site called Wikicities. It’s meant to provide a home for communites who have a body of shared knowledge but it’s not suitable for a general knowledge encyclopedia. Most of them are pretty small, but one of the larger ones is Memory Alpha covering the Star Trek universe.
- Wiki technology has been a great fit for an encyclopedia where the content is text, but it hasn’t been as good for a dictionary, where some regular structure would be helpful.
This Daily Tar Heel article on the talk is interesting only in how much it highlights how poor student writing can be.
It’s a good thing we got there early. The room was packed, with attendees standing along the sides and back of the room and even in the hallway. We were in the second row, and almost everyone in the front row had laptops in use. Surprisingly, they were all Macs (PowerBooks and iBooks). “Surprising” because the university’s minimum requirements for student laptops stipulates Windows XP.