The Wiki way of doing things
The Wiki way of doing things
Adele Shevel Business Times
Information junkies can look forward to the launch this month of local versions of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was in South Africa in November to present a seminar to students at Cida City Campus on how to administer the website.
He is in the process of launching different language versions of the encyclopedia in developing countries.
All South Africa’s 11 official languages are Wiki projects — although most are modestly represented at this stage. Venda Wiki has 33 articles and Zulu has just passed 100. The intention is to get more people involved in the development and to raise awareness of the facility.
The Afrikaans website has 8000 articles.
Elsewhere, all the European languages are “going strong”, while Japanese is in the top five and Chinese is the 11th-biggest site.
The problems and challenges of Wiki include helping languages of the developing world, said Wales. In terms of people having access, in some places literacy is a big problem.
Wikipedia is available in more than 200 languages, and more than 150 of them have at least 1000 articles each.
Wales uses 1000 articles as a benchmark for a functioning active language website.
The English Wikipedia site has two million articles.
“There you’re dealing with a very large community trying to maintain the polite and kind and loving nature of the Wiki community.”
He described the Wikipedia process of inviting submissions and editing from the public as “somewhere between random anarchy and top-down hierarchy”.
The English site has more than 1000 administrators, who are elected by “the community”.
“If you are doing good work and people respect you and you are following the Wiki way of doing things, people will notice and you’ll eventually be nominated. We discourage people from self-nominating.”
Originally from the southern state of Alabama, Wales explained that southern US culture has an emphasis on friendliness and politeness.
Wales now lives in San Franc isco, though he travels frequently around the world.
It might be his “home-grown” attitude that drives his view that most people are basically decent. “Very few people are actually troublemakers and it’s not difficult to exclude them.”
Those who do follow the “Wiki way of doing things”, and are committed to the service, can get noticed and nominated to help administer it.
“The Wiki way is about quality writing, paying attention to sources, neutrality, mediating conflict and trying to find a middle ground.”
There’s a Wiki rule, for example, about assuming good faith. If you disagree with something someone has written, don’t jump to the worst conclusion. Assume they were trying to do good but misunderstood something.
“A lot of that makes for a good Wiki,” said Wales.
Wales is a great advocate of the Internet, which he sees as a very social environment .
The best Internet technology gets out of your way so you can talk to people, he said. In the beginning, however, the worst elements tended to dominate.
Imagine a bar where the owner has no ability to throw people out — it’s likely to become an ugly, raucous environment and “nice people” will leave, Wales explained.
There came the realisation that communities needed tools to police themselves, to remove inflammatory comments.
Wikipedia has its critics, and some professors and teachers warn against using it as a source. As do encyclopedia companies, many of which have been suffering declining sales for years.
While there might be those who reject the Wikipedia notion, Wales counters by saying that people once told others not to listen to rock ’n roll — to little effect.
Wikipedia gets its funding from donations — mainly from the US, but also from 50 other countries around the world.
Wales, who used to be a futures and options trader, has more projects on the agenda. The next is nothing less than a search engine to compete with Google.
Wikipedia has, like Google, become part of the vernacular.
Wales was recently in a slum in Delhi, where he ran into a young man who said he had used Wikipedia to help him pass his 11th grade exams. Another had used it to find good lines for picking up girls.
Where would you find that in an average encyclopedia?
A current headache is that Wikipedia has not freely been accessible in China for the past two years. Wales is planning talks with officials in China about the situation, but no meeting has yet been set.
“We won’t compromise on the censorship, and can’t. I’ve been very critical of Google for having accepted the censorship. I think it’s very similar to the arguments we had about what responsible companies needed to do about apartheid South Africa.
“I think reasonable people can differ. If a company says it will engage and be a positive force for change, that’s reasonable. But if a company says that, then we’ll put their feet to the fire and say: what are you doing to change things?”
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