Engines of Collaboration: A Look Under the Hood of Wikimedia

November 25th, 2007

What's Inside The Black Box?For many people, Wikipedia is a black box. You put in a query and get out information. Those who understand Wikipedia as a volunteer-driven project might put it differently: You put in a bunch of smart people, and you get an encyclopedia. ;-) But what’s the black box, and how does it work?

A large part of Wikipedia’s success can be attributed to its social policies and principles, and perhaps we’ll explore those in a future post. Today, I’d like to take a look at the key technical mechanisms underlying the encyclopedia and its sister projects. Wikipedia is a wiki, a database open to revision by anyone. The “edit” link gives you instant write access to the contents of almost any article. How can this fundamental openness result in anything useful? I’d say the following technical mechanisms are critical:

  • Wiki syntax. This is the code wikis are written in. It’s simpler than HTML, but more complex than plain text. If you wanted to substantially contribute to Wikipedia, you’d have to learn at least the basics of wiki syntax, but there’s plenty of help and tutorials to get you started.
  • Eternal memory. Wikipedia preserves a record of every change to an article ever made, allowing editors to instantly revert changes if they want. (Jon Udell’s Heavy Metal Umlaut video is a good visual explanation of this principle.) Beyond content changes, even administrative actions like deletions or user blocks can always be undone and are fully logged.
  • Total surveillance. OK, I’m exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect - we take privacy very seriously. But all changes to Wikipedia can be directly linked to the user account or IP address who made them, and we have tons of tools that help us in the day-to-day patrolling of the content that goes into Wikimedia projects.
  • Discussion pages. A social tool, the discussion page associated with every article is of critical importance to develop consensus in decision making.
  • Users as toolmakers. One of the cool things about wikis is that users can create their own processes. For example, one of our key quality assurance processes, “Featured article candidates”, is nothing but a wiki page where users nominate articles as high quality, and discuss these nominations. More on empowering users below.

It’s instructive to compare Wikipedia to its predecessor. Nupedia was Jimmy Wales’ first encyclopedia project, and it failed dramatically. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia implemented a rigorous, top down peer review process — and when the project was quietly discontinued in 2003, it had produced a mere 24 articles. Wikipedia’s openness is the key to its success, and it is counterbalanced by the tools and policies regulating all changes to the content. But who controls the engine that makes it all work?

Code is Law

I’ve always found the word “software” to be somewhat ridiculous: there’s nothing particular soft about it, nor is it any kind of “ware”. Computer programs dominate so many aspects of our daily life today, yet we hide them in artificial obscurity. They are tools, sure, but they also have a regulatory function, especially in social spaces. The possible interactions of any online community are deeply affected by the computer code that underpins it. I prefer the word “code” to “software”. As scholar Larry Lessig observed, computer code is comparable to legal code in its effects on (networked) society.

That makes it doubly important that code can be inspected, looked at. This is the core code that runs Wikipedia today. It is known as “MediaWiki”, a deeply misguided play on the word “Wikimedia”. The code is available under a free software / open source license, known as the GNU General Public License which, once again, allows anyone to share and modify it, provided they make all their own changes freely available.

The code is written in a programming language called PHP, which is also free and open. It’s also free to learn how to use it. This means anyone with the time and inclination can contribute to making the Wikipedia code better — browse around the MediaWiki website for more information.

And this is exactly what’s happened. For most of its history, Wikipedia has had no paid employees. Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation hired its two most prolific volunteer programmers, Brion Vibber and Tim Starling. Their contributions are immense; and there are countless other individuals and companies working on the code as well. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I often say that the MediaWiki software is as important to the future of free knowledge and open learning as the Linux kernel is to the future of computing.

Donating to the Wikimedia Foundation will allow us to hire more developers to systematically improve the MediaWiki codebase in key areas which, in turn, will improve the encyclopedia and its sister projects. But before I elaborate on some of the things we could do in the future, it might help to explain how a few key technological changes shaped our projects in the past.

Milestones of MediaWiki

Wikipedia, today, has plenty of multimedia. Images in particular adorn hundreds of thousands of pages — some of them of truly brilliant quality. This wasn’t always the case, and there were a few key improvements to our codebase that led to an explosion in the use of images on the site. For example, in March 2004, it became possible to automatically generate small and large versions of images, and features for galleries as well as vector graphics support followed.

In September 2004, we created a multimedia repository called Wikimedia Commons, which now hosts more than 2 million freely usable pictures, sound files, and videos. Technically, one of the keys to its success was the ability to instantly embed any image from Commons on any Wikimedia project in any language. Very recently, Tim Starling implemented an embedded video and audio player, and the number of videos and sounds embedded into articles has grown substantially since.

Another critical change was the implementation of a new categorization system in summer 2004, led by Magnus Manske and Brion Vibber. Today, we have a gigantic categorical index. When the category system was first implemented, it was fascinating how a single feature change led to an explosion in content: in just a few days, thousands of categories were created out of nothing.

In order to make Wikipedia available in many languages, and to improve its usability, an undeniably critical feature was the ability to edit all user interface texts (like the links in the left-hand sidebar on Wikipedia) through the wiki itself. But we take this principle of openness to revision even further: Our software can be reprogrammed by anyone, directly through the wiki! :-) Don’t believe me? Take a look at Lupin’s navigation popups tool, which fundamentally changes the way you browse Wikipedia.

How is it done? Essentially, our software allows you to tell your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, or whatever) to execute a little script whenever you visit a Wikipedia page. These programs can be enormously complex, and make Wikipedia much friendlier to use. Of course, for security reasons, none of these scripts will be run unless you follow the explicit instructions to activate them.

Once again, code is law: If we had not given our users the ability to write these scripts, they would never have been created — and consequently, Wikipedia would be a different place than it is today. These are just a few examples, and you can read more about the evolution of MediaWiki in its Wikipedia article. Now imagine what we could do if we employed not two, but 10 software developers. I’ll help. :-)

The Future of Collaboration

Mind you, I’m not suggesting that our codebase should not continue to be improved through massive volunteer collaboration. In fact, I believe much of our effort should be focused on integrating and improving the work of others. After reading the above, it should not come as a surprise that MediaWiki can be heavily customized with plug-ins that add additional functionality. They are different from the browser-side scripts I referenced above, and potentially much more powerful still.

Take a look at the vast number of extensions out there. Some have enormous potential: The Semantic MediaWiki extension, for example, alters the way wikis handle structured data like the numerical information in infoboxes you find in Wikipedia articles. Imagine if you could use Wikipedia not just as an encyclopedia, but as a giant database, searchable in every conceivable way: “Show me countries with a population smaller than 10,000.” — “Show me the latest albums by punk rock bands.” — “Generate a graphical timeline of all Roman emperors.”

Or, if that doesn’t excite you, how about making Wikipedia more user-friendly? LiquidThreads, a project I am involved in, reinvents discussion pages to make them much simpler to use. There have also been many attempts to build rich-text editors for Wikipedia. Personally, I think (due to the complexity of everything that we can do with our current wiki syntax) it will take a very substantial investment of resources to really push usability a large step forward, but there are always incremental improvements we can make with less effort.

There are other cool extensions which have been lingering, sadly, unused for years. For security reasons, we have never deployed WikiTeX, which would make it easier for our editors to add musical scores, graphs and plots, chemical formulae, and similar content to Wikipedia articles.

In many of these cases, what is needed is a final push: security and scalability work, integration, testing, documentation. In other words, the parts of the work that are least exciting. Frequently, authors of MediaWiki plug-ins only seek to satisfy their own personal needs, by getting the extension to run in an independent wiki environment they have created. That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation needs to be able to put some money into adapting and implementing the best and most significant tools.

There are also internal strategic priorities, projects that are so important we can’t necessarily depend on volunteers to make them happen. Here are a few:

  • Flagged Revisions. This toolset will allow us to empower contributors to identify the versions of Wikipedia articles that are known to be of high quality. Readers can then choose whether they want to see the very latest version of an article (which might contain vandalism), or only the most recently reviewed one. Finalizing the implementation of FlaggedRevs is part of our quality initiative. But to give you an idea how limited our resources are, we had to pull our developers off this project just to make sure that we could get the technical work for this fundraiser done! Truly, every donation would help us in our ability to execute key initiatives like this, making Wikipedia more useful and better for you.
  • Cross-project integration. Right now, every single Wikimedia project has a separate user account database. Want to fix an article from the German Wikipedia? If you only have an account in the English one, you’ll have to create a new one! This is not an easy problem to solve: thousands of account names exist in multiple projects, so we need to merge identical accounts and split non-identical ones. Fortunately, much work on this has already been done, but more remains. And once the account databases are integrated, there is potential for many more exciting features — like the ability to change content in Wikinews from Wikipedia, to upload pictures to Commons directly from Wikibooks, etc. In this way, we can bring the family of Wikimedia projects much closer together.
  • Wiki-to-print and export technology. Right now, we’re not offering a lot of tools to make it easy for you to print or download collections of articles. This will soon change, through an exciting collaboration that will be announced within the next few weeks. It will make it easy to download high quality PDFs of selected articles. We’re aiming to also support export to word processor formats. But even this is only the beginning — there’s a whole bunch of tools that would make it easier for the Wikibooks project to create high quality, open access textbooks. This technology is key for the developing world, so that we can distribute free knowledge in whatever formats are most helpful.
  • Mix & Burn Wikipedia. Related to the above, we want to make it possible to easily create your own Wikipedia/Wikimedia DVD or USB stick — either including all articles, or a selection. This would require a reader application that runs without Internet access. Fortunately, there are already many projects in this space that, once again, just need a final push. Now, imagine that such an application would not only make it possible to read articles, but also to change them and to synchronize the changes back once you have an Internet connection — this would enable us to make participatory Wikipedia terminals anywhere in the world.

Once again, these are just a few examples. I believe that the future of collaboration is much greater still: there will be real-time collaboration on articles, even on images and video. Wikipedians will talk to each other via Voice over IP while editing articles, and Wikiversity could become a global free institution of learning using the same tools for global teacher/learner interaction, connecting people who have knowledge with those who seek it. Wikinews could turn into a global virtual newsroom, making it possible to instantly record any event as a “citizen journalist”, and to collaborate with others to tell the full story.

Our donation banner proclaims: “You can help Wikimedia to change the world”. Indeed, by supporting us in this fundraising drive, you will allow us to do more than just keeping Wikipedia running. A donation to the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is a donation for the future of learning. Every donation helps, and if you want to make a major gift, please contact us at: majordonors AT wikimedia DOT org

Erik Möller has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2001, and was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in 2006. This post is a personal opinion, and does not represent an official statement from the Wikimedia Foundation.

63 Responses to “Engines of Collaboration: A Look Under the Hood of Wikimedia”

  1. A.Ou Says:

    What I find so remarkable about Wikipedia is its almost limitless possibilities. As a high-school student, it is exciting to be part of something that is already changing the world.

  2. Hector Lombardi Says:

    The passage about “Eternal memory” should be edited to reflect the reality. Revisions can and are permanently deleted by the few people possessing the “Oversight” ability. The controversy about J. Wales’ birthday proved at least that.

  3. Pritchard Says:

    Right now, Wikimedia can’t do everything though O.O;; I’m very excited about Wikimedia as a whole. I feel it’s the future of information sharing. Because of its nature though, I think something like Wiki Resource would help people to find information from external sources. Especially in the area of Wikibooks, where it’s very hard to compete or offer information the quality of other already free and published information, a resource gallery would be very helpful.

    I’ll do my best to help Wikimedia grow, but I can’t do enough right now D: I really wish more people took to donating to you guys.

  4. Comedy Blog Says:

    I salute Wikipedia and everything it stands for. Regardless of the final target, open source is the way of the future. Information is no exception.

  5. Shavian phonetics Says:

    I truely believe that Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. It is clearly the best source of information, so much so that I treat it as a deity. All hail the Wiki-God.

  6. Rob Church Says:

    [Quick point of order regarding Hector Lombardi’s post]

    “Permanent deletion” doesn’t occur, even with the Oversight tool - which moves revision metadata around in the database so the regular MediaWiki software can’t see it. In theory, if a user supposedly trusted with the tool abused it, the system administration team would be able to restore the data. I know of cases in the past, prior to the introduction of the utility, where revision metadata has been completely deleted by that same team, however.

    “Oversight” is a tool which was a conceptual stand-in for the still-not-with-us revision deletion system, but which developed into something that a large number of those “trustworthy users” could abuse, and which they have abused in the past; far from the useful ability to hide personally identifying information which would open the Foundation up to lawsuits, as well as permanently expunging libel; it’s become something of a joke, given those cases of abusers hiding anything and everything which embarassed them or their friends.

  7. Pauline Harvey Says:

    I have heard some detractors going about wikipaedia “as a toy”. I disagree. would love to be able to present a great argument back to them though. Fantastic job. Pauline

  8. P.S. Says:

    “You put in a bunch of smart people, and you get an encyclopedia.”
    :And you put in a bunch of just everyone, and you only get Wikipedia.

  9. Puchiko Says:

    P.S.,you have a good point. The question is, is “an encyclopedia” better than “Wikipedia”. I think Wikipedia is better, but that depends on what you want and need.

  10. pfctdayelise Says:

    Erik, nice post. Imagine, indeed, what we could do with 10 developers instead of 2. 5 times as many cool and useful features to make reading and editing Wikimedia sites easier than ever.

    So I hope the folks who love Wikipedia take one of two actions:

    1) Learn PHP, MediaWiki and get coding ( http://www.mediawiki.org/ )
    or
    2) Donate the fundraiser.

    I know which I think is the easier option. ;)

  11. Evan R Says:

    An encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia. While wikipedia may be generally accurate, it is not 100% reliable. Personally, I never use either an encyclopedia or wikipedia for research- I prefer books and textbooks.

  12. Stompy Says:

    Wikipedia would be better for those who are looking for a straight forward path for information. Like the kind who can’t use encyclopedias because they either lose interest or can’t find where to look

  13. agèntdekarma Says:

    I see honest, idealistic Wikipedia contributors trying to be helpful while besieged by fanatics, crackpots, the terminally misinformed and revisionist historians on one side, glowering Wikipedia editors on the other — the stereotypically persnickety shushing librarians of yore — pouncing on contributors with gleeful zeal and threats of IP traces. (”I know where you live! Write in these books and I’ll tell your mother, young man!”)

    Information by committee? That any truth is able to emerge is nothing short of miraculous. Still, I’ll donate, just for the fun of seeing where this leads.

  14. Chris M. Says:

    Is any tool 100% reliable? Encyclopedias like Wikipedia are written by people. Books and textbooks are written by people. People make mistakes. Just because something is in print doesn’t make it true or reliable. The neat part of Wikipedia is if something untrue or inaccurate is produced, it can be quickly changed. I think the potential of Wikipedia is that it shows knowledge for what it is…a work in progress. I don’t know that anyone would claim Wikipedia as a final source on any research, but it sure gives anyone interested a great place to start on an increasing number of topics. I think it’s a great place to invest some funds if you have them available.

  15. Marco A Says:

    Neither are non-wiki encyclopedias 100% reliable. They’re also made by human beings, and are subject to mistakes, too.

  16. LoneStarNot Says:

    I’m guessing MediaWiki’s developers have already considered [[professional open-source]] models. I’ve seen at least one firm, Intel, built their internal, secure wiki on MediaWiki.
    Did Intel BUY help to set it up? Where might I catch up with discussions of WikiMedia’s
    possible use of [[professional open-source]] models?

  17. Evan M.M.Hickey Says:

    Wikipedia.com is truly amazing! While most of my college comrades are out enjoying the city’s night life, I would much rather surf the information wikipedia gives me! While books and textbooks are fine, A creative minds prefer the alternative, funky energy that wikipedia gives! Thank you SO much, and keep it up!

  18. Anderson Says:

    Wikipedia is great! without it, I will fail my exams!

  19. Carl L. Says:

    About Evans comment above:

    Encyclopedias are cast in concrete. I have an old (Swedish) one, Nordisk Familjebok, making statements for example about black people, that would not be included in modern encyclopedia. If looking for it, one can probably find other statements, like how many moons Saturn has and other things that have been revisited. The causes genetic laws were not known in the 1930s. In spit of this it is an excellent work in many respects and I can easily have these shortcomings in mind when using it.

    Wikipedia, on the other hand, is “self correcting”. Not self, it is of course users who will comment or change what is not right. I have often been “warned” that [Wikipedia] may not be correct. This is the alarmists, they rarely create anything, but they often find problenm with others innovatios. “Tape recordings (and CDs) will disappear in 10 (or 20) years!” I have 45 year old tape recordings that still sound just fine, thank you! Neither is it true that books are more correct, as Evans R. says. You can find books claiming that creation is the source of life on Earth. This is probably not true, and the books do not make it more true.

    So I find Wikipedia to be an accurate and reliable source, although one always must be aware of the possibility of false, or misleading, information. The contents in Wikipedia is up-to date, which is never the case in an ecyclopedia and I think Wikipedia is a better source explaining Antenna Factor that the old Swedish encyclopedia, and just as good for looking up Raleigh diffraction!

    So: keep up the very good Wiki-job!

    Carl.

  20. Constantine Says:

    As a common college student, I cannot afford all the fancy books, and encyclopedias that some, more fortunate people can. Wikipedia.com is ALWAYS there for me! I’ve already donated! Thank You Wikipedia!

  21. someone smart Says:

    I thing wikipedia is awesome and i just love it, but i wish it could be revised or something so that it could be more accurate.Sometimes the information i find is correct, but sometimes its not. When i look something up on wikipedia, i can never be 100% sure its accurate. sometimes i have to look the info up somewhere else.But… if wikipedia was no longer availiable,i would freak out. i am dependent on it for simple yet informative,quick explanations.

  22. almyki Says:

    Evan R, that is your personal opinion and doesn’t seem to be yet proven from what I can see. Encyclopedias have been known to be inaccurate, aka not 100% reliable either, not to mention they are a lot less encompassing than Wikipedia, and they become outdated quite quickly.

    One thing I’ll never understand is why skeptics tend to point out how EVERYONE can edit Wikipedia, and how that seems to be a bad thing. Of course such a system comes up with its own crop of problems, but it seems to work fabulously so far. The thing that most irks me about that though is that they seem to assume anyone without some sort of degree or PhD, etc. can’t contribute anything good or reliable to Wikipedia without it being junk. Or that the ‘everybody’ that contributes to Wikipedia is solely the ‘idiots’ or ‘average people’ that do so, and that ’smart’ people don’t bother contributing at all. I don’t care if someone’s got a Master’s degree in Philosophy or Science or whatever it may be, but I know more about my favorite anime characters than they ever could contribute to the article on Tales of Symphonia or Ronin Warriors. And people may say, “Well, who cares about some stupid old game or show anyway? It’s unimportant.” but that’s the beauty of Wikipedia, isn’t it? With EVERYONE contributing, it’s got just about EVERYTHING.

    And where else could you possibly get something as priceless as that?

    <3 ali

  23. Connor Shearwood Says:

    A.Ou said that as a high school student, it’s exiting to be part of something that is changing the world. I agree with that, but upto a point. Wikipedia is the sum of most human knowledge, and many people I know won’t even touch a book, yet they use wikipedia with a second thought. Also, it’s kinda fun. Look up the buttered cat theory. You’ll see what I mean.

  24. Ellie Says:

    Go Wiki!

  25. ADAWi Says:

    Permanent deletion” doesn’t occur, even with the Oversight tool - which moves revision metadata around in the database so the regular MediaWiki software can’t see it. In theory, if a user supposedly trusted with the tool abused it, the system administration team would be able to restore the data. I know of cases in the past, prior to the introduction of the utility, where revision metadata has been completely deleted by that same team, however.

  26. Michael Grounds Says:

    Evan R seems to think that Encyclopedias are 100% reliable. Is he alone in that? The Enc. Brit., for instance, is bereft of anything which could be considered as a criticism of US foreign policy, current or past.

  27. HA Says:

    Thank You wikipedia for extending my knowledge base beyond regular studies. There are inaccuracies at many places but this is how an evolution happen. Even the laws of physics change over a period of time :D.

  28. Ayla Says:

    Yes, a true encyclopedia may be more accurate than Wikipedia, but there is no denying that Wikipedia is a great starting place for any research, to get a general idea and (usually) links to more accurate sites. It is also a fairly reliable and extremely useful tool for quickly looking up information when the fancy crosses your mind. (i.e. “Gee I can’t remember who directed Lord of the Rings…let me Wikipedia it.”)

  29. obo Says:

    Rob Church:
    ““Permanent deletion” doesn’t occur, even with the Oversight tool - which moves revision metadata around in the database so the regular MediaWiki software can’t see it. In theory, if a user supposedly trusted with the tool abused it, the system administration team would be able to restore the data.”

    Erik Möller:
    “Eternal memory. Wikipedia preserves a record of every change to an article ever made, allowing editors to instantly revert changes if they want. … Beyond content changes, even administrative actions like deletions or user blocks can always be undone and are fully logged.”

    This is still at odds; edits obfuscated by Oversight cannot be instantly reverted by editors, only administrators, and even then only certain administrators. And while deletions and user blocks may be logged, they can also be (and have been) obfuscated by administrators.

    While “permanent deletion” may not _actually_ occur, it may as well have in most cases that Oversight is used, especially cases administrators deem safe or protective for Wikipedia.

  30. Enric Says:

    Great post!, it really shows how there is a kind of virtuous cycle between Wikipedia and MediaWiki (I agree also with the comparison with the Linux Kernel importance). Since MW is becoming a kind of standard for many other free projects, then contributing to Wikipedia is contributing to MediaWiki is contributing to give more freedom to the Internet itself…

    I have to read it all over again, many nice examples and tips of where are some grat extensions pointing to (and why is so important to help developing the technical side of Wikipedia :)

  31. Raya Says:

    i think Wikipedia is amazing. those “smart people” may not be interested in, or be able to verify the things us normal people are curious about. i ma a strong Wiki-suporter. it’s the best thing i’ve ever used. and still use.

  32. Excalibur Says:

    “is “an encyclopedia” better than “Wikipedia” !
    I remember my dad buying the complete Encyclopedia Brittanica back in 1968 or so to benefit our education, and it cost as much as a car. It was fun to solve family arguments, but pretty boring to read. Wikipedia is the perfect form of entertainment, one or two clicks and you are discovering things you never knew existed, a complete hitch-hikers guide to the intelligent galaxy. And whats more, you can correct errors and add you own information - its just perfect.

  33. Anonymus Says:

    Thank you wikipedia! Ill try to donate somehow, you help me with lots of my research papers whenever i need you! <3

  34. Robert Ross Says:

    I have to give a social commentary now… up on the soap box. Everything is written word; with that should come a thought, who wrote that word. Everyone takes encyclopedia entries and now magazine entries as “official” word. You cite that entry and all is well in terms of your bibliography. But every piece is written by an individual and then often times approved by a larger body whom should always be questioned. What makes a wiki author be less opting to provide fact as an encyclopedia author? What makes an editor at National Geographic more an authority than the millions reviewing Wikipedia? We should all question who wrote our cited facts no matter what the means is to circulate it. With the internet especially, we need to be able to individually question our source and determine its accuracy. Today, we do not teach or expect this, but it is inevitable with the increasing speed at which we can get current events, we will need to interpret and accredit the information we cite and determine to be fact.

  35. Thomas Amoroso Says:

    Nice conceptual post. Problem has become, however, that in well meant but (IMO) misguided attempts to ‘regularize’ or ‘encyclopedize’ Wikipedia, a small number of very active editors has alienated a large number of potential contributors (both financial and material). Wikipedia is not, and will never be, a reliable encyclopedia; it’s not consistent with its mission to be a *public* repository of knowledge. As a result, more people who are having their carefully crafted articles edited by rules lawyers (whose ‘contributions’ appear to be limited to these editorial visits) are becoming more disenchanted with Wikipedia, and are turning instead to smaller wikis which they maintain.

    This Balkanization of wikipedias does not, in my sole judgement, serve the purposes which seemed to energize Wikipedia at the beginning, which was to concentrate all sorts of knowledge in one place: Wikipedia. It detracts from the comprehensiveness of Wikipedia when controversies like the John Scalzi incident, and the too numerous to mention (a quick Google search on ‘wikipedia’ and ‘[insert your favorite expletive here] finds a large number of hits), other episodes of administrative misbehaviour leads quickly to the conclusion that it is no longer worth donating to Wikipedia, because they have, to use the common parlance, jumped the shark.

    I admit I am a disenchanted donor; I used to send money to Wikipedia, and I will no longer do so (I stopped donating some while back). I stopped because of some of the controversies listed here led me to believe that Wikipedia had departed from what I saw as its mission. Not to be a 100% reliable source of information (like a print encyclopedia would be), but to be the most timely, up to date source of more types of information than would ordinarily be found in any encyclopedia. Sorry, no more of my money for you. Good luck with the better encyclopedia; I hope it works out for you, but it doesn’t earn my dough.

  36. Ali Hammad Raza Says:

    The idea of free information is best judged by those who are not fortunate enough to buy a few hundred dollar worth expensive books, encyclopedias,etc. Nonetheless, comparing the commercial encyclopedia bound by its moral and political decorums to wikipedia,can never be justified! Wikipedia is not only deemed ‘FREE’ because it costs nothing to access rather it is usually pure facts without any chains attached! Wikipedia in my opinion is indeed a silent revolution!

  37. Karl Says:

    I am a Canadian football fan.One of the participants of The Grey Cup (the Canadian version of The Super Bowl) was the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.They lost their quarterback to injury and their back-up was a player named Ryan Dinwiddie who played his college days at Boise State.I wanted to learn more about him so i checked with Wikipedia.I was totally ‘blown away’.The information was up-to-date within minutes of the Grey Cup being completed today. WOW !!!!! WOW !!!! WOW !!!.I am totally impressed with Wikipedia.I don’t know what to say else other than …..i am a “Wikipediaite for life”.

  38. MatthewS Says:

    I LOVE wikipedia! It is such a useful tool to exploring the world of knowledge that is out there. I found it very useful while I was being trained in nursing, as Im sure I will find it useful as I am being trained in medical lab technology. I just love learning new things and Wikipedia is an excellent place to do that. I think that the creators of this site need a lot more credit. They aren’t just publishing information, they are also making it accessible. Kudos!

  39. John M. Długosz Says:

    For some time, I’ve found Wikipedia to be my first stop in finding out about anything. In Firefox, I use the configurable DictionarySearch extension which lets me select a word, right-click, and see three items added to the context list: Look up in Dictionary, Look up in Google, and Look up in Wikipedia.

    My only reservation is that the NPOV policy is interpreted to allow pseudoscience and crankary to run amok in certain subject areas. If I correct a statement that claimed that π=4.5 to read π=3.14, no problem. But if I correct a statement concerning the effectiveness of ESP, I get slammed for not being “neutral”. Crank facts are supported by crank references, so that doesn’t help.

    To continue to evolve, we need a way to rate references for trustworthiness. Most casual readers won’t know, just from the title, the difference between a respected peer-reviewed journal and a journal with an impressive name that exists solely to publish on a particular “alternative” topic such as flat-earth supporters or evolution deniers. This system may need to be customized for different subject areas; e.g. a science topic should be graded as adhering to the scientific method, but that is nonsense for an art subject.

  40. David Kendall Says:

    As Mahatma Gandi suggested, “build a new society in the shell of the old”. Regarding reliability versus access, the latter seems most essential in a world where “history” has been typically written by the “winners”, heavily skewed to favor the exclusive interests of an elite minority. The modifications proposed in Mr. Moller’s article suggest infinite room for improvements in the reliable accuracy and universal access provided through the abundant wealth of knowledge that is Wikipedia. The only way to compete with this model is to become this model, further shattering the lies of antiquity.

  41. Franklin Samraj Says:

    To Wikipedia foundatin

    This is just funtastic. But I was surpursized no name at the bottom of your article and message. I am interested to know about the foundation trust members. You all deserve much gratitude and thanks for this remarkable use of humna volunteer iniatiaves in this valuable and usefull knowledge based service- “I want it, I get it” “You name it, we may have it if not go and make it” this seems to be just fantastic.

  42. Tom Anderson Says:

    Hey, if you’re looking for blurbs, here’s my take:

    Ten years ago, if you’d told me that a volunteer-written project on the internet would be history’s largest and probably most frequently-consulted reference work, i would have kicked you in the balls. Today, Wikipedia kicks me in the balls on a daily basis.

    – tom

  43. P.C.Mishra Says:

    To Wikipedia foundatin
    The efforts is turely amazing .
    Non-performer can get a thread from here to perform.
    This is truely knowledge revoluation.
    Gerat job

  44. joe blo Says:

    wikipedia is good…until you have to be smart…

    when you dont want to fail..dont use wiki, cuz it sucks

    =]

  45. Tim Says:

    I definitely agree about how useful Wikipedia is. With some of the projects that I have to do, its helped my pass them all. So I thank you, Wikipedia staff and members. So when it comes to research, Wikipedia is one of the most helpful websites known.

    -Tim

  46. Josh Woodford Says:

    Wikipedia is so yayay

    It is good for yayaying

    ! :-)

  47. Drew Says:

    As someone that has been involved in politics and business, I know how difficult it can be to get people to collaborate on projects. It amazes me every day how well the wikipedia approach works to create non-biased articles on more topics than any other encyclopedia. Despite complaints to the contrary Wikipedia remains, for me, the best source for information on any topic, with far less bias and more reliability than any other online source.

  48. Michael B. Says:

    Wikipedia gives me more knowledge than school :D

  49. Alexandru Macovei Says:

    It HAS to exist! It HAS to develop!

  50. juan carlos Says:

    estoi esperando gue me depositen un cheke de prestamo en mi bank

  51. Gerald West Says:

    I would like to download Wikipedia, but I don’t see the command ‘button.’ I had the program install until a few months ago.

  52. Filll Says:

    A casual survey of Wikipedia will turn up a large number of mistakes, and poor wording. This can be somewhat disheartening at first glance. There are many who criticize Wikipedia, and it is hard to argue with many of these complaints.

    However, I would suggest that one need only compare the present version of Wikipedia with what existed a year ago, and two years ago, and three years ago, etc. Clearly as bad as most articles on Wikipedia are at present, they are often immeasurably better than they were in the very recent past, and they continue to get better at a fairly steady rate. This might very well turn out to be the seminal achievement of our civilization; something akin to the invention of writing, or agriculture or the pyramids. In the long run, I expect the impact of Wikipedia and its bretheren to be bigger than the space program, or the printing press, or the harnessing of biotechnology. Wikipedia, as humble as it seems, is a window, or even a doorway, into the future of humankind.

    I applaud all of the contributors and supporters of Wikipedia. I see nothing but a bright future.

  53. T.J. Willis Says:

    While there are many issues which may face such a revolutionary enterprise such as Wikipedia and it’s sister projects, the fact that the intiative is there with the aim of developing the world to the point where open source is the only source is very significant.
    Whatever happens, Wikipedia is always going to be human operated and therefore never 100% accurate or reliable. The difference is that Wikipedia offers the opportunity to discuss and alter information so that the best possible representation of all things is available. Is this not the goal of open source anyway?? And, when all is said and done, is this not the best possible way to acess information on a myriad (eventually a complete range) of topics?
    Something to ponder, maybe. Keep up the information sharing Wikipedia, you’re doing a good job!

  54. meeero Says:

    wp has become a pretty important ressource for almost everyone, i’d ask governments to support it, seriously. wp has more information in every way than any public library and i’m sure, they are more expensive than wikipedia.

  55. Bureaux Says:

    Comparing Wikipedias accuracy to that of an encyclopedia is completely foolish. How do you know the information that comes from those ‘certified’ books is any more accurate then Wikipedia’s user-created pages? You can’t know for sure, but I say that Wikipedia has 1,000 times or more the amount of editors a standard encyclopedia does, which means that somewhere along the line, a reasonably accurate description will surface. Keep up the good work!

  56. Antono Ramirez Says:

    Congratulations
    Considering all the weaknesses, yours are still te 8th marvel of te world, and……free.
    I will give you some money. If I could I will give you millions.

  57. Martin Ultima Says:

    In theory, I like Wikipedia’s idea to create a “free” encyclopedia containing the so-called “sum of all human knowledge,” there are, as I see it, two main problems: Useless zealots, and useless zealots. I’ll explain the distinction:

    The first class of useless zealots is those who claim that a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is unreliable and will never be considered as anything otherwise. For obvious reasons they hinder progress, because not only do they refuse to aid the goal themselves, but they may prevent others from developing the interest or ability to contribute usefully or even simply make use of the existing resources themselves.

    The more dangerous class of useless zealots would have to be the majority of the wiki administrators, who spend all their time creating policy pages and deleting useful information because it fails to include a “fair use rationale,” which for images is often longer than the article the file is linked from. I am not an anarchist - I appreciate the “ideal,” but in real life it simply does not work - but neither does massive bureaucracy and red tape. I know it’s better to have a completely free encyclopedia with information and media not burdened with restrictions like most copyrighted works come with, but the GFDL-enforcing bureaucrats themselves are creating their own set of restrictions that makes it difficult to include truly useful information, particularly on works covered by copyright (just read through the article on Pink Floyd and you’ll see what I mean).

    I will admit that there is one thing that I remain thoroughly impressed with. The MediaWiki software is a very well-coded, professional program, and has worked very nicely for a site which I currently administrate. I might consider making a donation in the future specicfically to the MediaWiki developers, but honestly the rest of the Wikimedia projects simply don’t impress me as much as they did when the idea was brand new.

  58. bob Says:

    I think wikipedia is a great idea. Open source should be the way to the future. If every computer program or service was open source and free, everyone would have just as much opportunity to learn. Also, people would learn more by sharing knowledge, technique, developments, and everything that is included in open source. There would be no copys, rip-offs, or imitations and everything would build on one another. This would allow greater acheivements to be accomplished.

  59. Dermeche Waal Says:

    “While wikipedia may be generally accurate, it is not 100% reliable. Personally, I never use either an encyclopedia or wikipedia for research- I prefer books and textbooks.”

    How foolish to think that “books and textbooks” are any more reliable than Wikipedia. Books and textbooks didn’t drop out of the sky. They were written by the same humans (who are subject to the same human failings) as those individuals who contribute to encyclopedias and wikipedia. As with everything you do, you just need to check and double check your sources before taking anything in print for gospel.

  60. Why Give to Wikimedia? » Blog Archive » Support (Or Join) Wikimedia’s New Team in San Francisco Says:

    […] to you, and also to people with limited internet connectivity. See Erik Möller’s blog entry Engines of Collaboration, for example, for background on some of the technical projects we have underway, and ones we want […]

  61. Jordan Says:

    Interesting blog post. I’d love to see daily updates on the blog - there hasn’t been a post in two days. =(

  62. Notizblog » Wikipedia und die Herausforderungen Says:

    […] von vor zwei Jahren immer noch akut. Immerhin gibt es viel versprechende Lösungsansätze. Um es mit Wikimedia-Board-Mitglied Erik Möller auszudrücken: oft fehlt nur der entscheidende Push, um die entsprechenden Entwicklungen in Gang zu […]

  63. Avinash Says:

    unbelievable.it seems like “god on net”.

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