It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling. Nupedia’s innovation was delivering content exclusively via the web, not by CD-ROM or print, and it gave its content away for free. This is then connected, on both a conceptual level and a measurement level, with the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that we may observe in those configurations, thereby yielding a new approach … The majority of Nupedia’s advisory board did not approve of the plan, not wanting to mix amateur and professional input. If Wikipedia's basic policy was settled upon in the first nine months, its culture was solidified into something closer to its present form in the next nine. 12 articles? Someone didn't say that your contribution was worthless, they just flagged it in need of editting so that one of the many people who do know how to wikify stuff can come by and do it. The project continued to grow. As a child I was diagnosed as border-line autistic and now I have a doctorate and lead a reasonably normal life. 10. First, there are many subjects that dilettantes cannot write about credibly; I, for example, could not write very credibly about astronomy or speleology, but I have a passing interest in both. You have to be interested in more than editing a wiki to do serious research, you have to be interested in the subject beyond just the desire to make wiki edits.". Recruiting for Nupedia was very easy by comparison, and caused me no such pangs of conscience. So much for the very early history of Wikipedia; the next phase involved rapid growth and some serious internal controversies over policy and authority. We are not responsible for them in any way. Based on the Wikipedia model, the project aims to achieve higher credibility by strictly moderating the content for increased reliability. Think of it as editorial marks. However, "There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's … The more specific principles that Wikipedia wound up with was a matter of historical accident. It's been a good cliff-hanger for a lot of us Catholics out here. Both daughter cells from the division do not necessarily survive. Could you rewrite this in standard English? Any attempt to create and enforce rules for Internet projects, when that small army is ready to cry "censorship," will seem daring or even outrageous in many contexts online. All rights reserved. deciding what is a fact can be hard and sometimes on fringe issues or if a person is sufficiantly hardline they will see bias but mostly we manage to get reasonable cooperation. So why was there no such unified community ethos and no uncontroversial "moral high ground"? "A Nupedia wiki would instruct users to try to make their entries resemble encyclopedia articles, but the usual wiki sort of banter would be permitted. The self-healing model is an incredibly optimistic one that depends on a civil society of the web to work. I do not know whether this policy has been changed as a result of the operation of the much-later installed Arbitration Committee. As an initially very enthusiastic Wikipedia editor spending his wikivacation I can testify that he is absolutely right saying that trolls scare good people away. The foundation was … Many Internet forums, chatrooms, and blogs are populated by people who are identified by only a "handle," and any suggestion that communication should be restricted or in any way altered in accordance with "expertise" or "authority" is likely to be met with outrage, in most forums. Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. I cannot express how honored I am that there's an entire Slashdot post moderated at +2 devoted purely to lies and false insinuations about me. The encyclopedia you will find at the State U will be very different than the encyclopedias you find at Universities in Iran. After 3.5 years, Nupedia had only completed 24 Articles, with 74 more articles as work in progress. I obviously cannot speak for Jimmy, but I will say that, if he was worried that Nupedia would essentially fork Wikipedia--again, I don't claim that he had that concern--then it seems to me that such a concern would not have justified letting Nupedia wither untended. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies, the ultimate upshot of which was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors. I then considered: could I in good conscience really ask academics, who are very busy, to engage in this activity that would probably annoy most of them and do nothing to contribute to their academic careers? We had 6000 articles by July 8; 8000 by August 7; 11,200 by September 9; and 13,000 by October 4. It is impossible to explain why one is removing some partisan screeds from the wiki without, in some way, identifying it as a partisan screed, and pointing out that such productions are inconsistent with the neutrality policy. (Score: 1) by Erebus. Circles are important to nearly every decentralized organization previously mentioned. Just click a links and type away. Keeping Steak and Blowjob Day in Wikipedia is "making a difference"?! The Future of Free Encyclopedias (July 25, 2001) and Wikipedia is wide open. But Nupedia had a central team that reviewed articles using a seven-step approval process. Bomis ( / ˈbɒmɪs / to rhyme with "promise") was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. Dictionaries, even more than encyclopedias, must be extremely reliable to be even minimally usable; without direct oversight by linguists, a public dictionary project seems pointless. I suggested that Nupedia be redesigned to release "approved" versions of Wikipedia articles; Wikipedia itself was not to be touched. My salary was reduced in December and then halved in January. Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. This and the discussion that ensued tended to ossify positions with regard to the authority issue: I and a few others agreed that Jimmy and I should have special authority within the system, to settle policy issues that needed settling. Contributors spontaneously organized to build content and by the end of its first year, the new service called Wikipedia had grown to approximately 20,000 articles in 18 languages. What happened was that project policy discussions moved almost exclusively to the project mailing lists. The organization was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects through non-profit means. Personal attacks against the author rather than any attempt to dispute actual points....yup...that looks like a Wikipedian response if ever I read one. For example, the fact that the wiki format works for encyclopedia development hardly means that it is appropriate for the hosting of public domain books. Jimmy was relatively quiet about this issue; this, I think, was probably because his authority was generally not in question, but mine was, because I was "in the trenches" and continuing to encourage good habits and solidify policy positions. I'm probably the only one fascinated by this kind of situation. In fall of 2002, I had started teaching at a local community college, and with some extra time on my hands, I started editing Wikipedia a little and engaging in mailing list discussions. Wikipedia's co-founder eyes a Digital Universe. It is surely very ironic that it was I personally who (initially) so strongly supported the lack any enforceable rules in the community. After all, any forthright declaration that a user is doing something that is clearly against established conventions--posting screeds, falsehoods, nonsense, personal opinion, etc.--is nearly always going to appear disrespectful, because such a declaration involves a moral accusation. I don't think so. So there was a growing problem: persistent and difficult contributors tend to drive away many better, more valuable contributors; Kemp and Tinkler were only two examples. Trolls would certainly find ripe targets in expert reviewers, I thought. You did better than I -- I was modded Funny yesterday, Offtopic today... Sheesh... at least you could provide an unbiased source! And there was often an audience of sympathizers: contributors who philosophically were opposed to nearly any exercise of authority, but who were not trolls themselves. In 2003, Jimmy set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit … [6] [7] As of 2013, the foundation employs more than 142 people, with revenues of US$48.6 million and cash equivalents of $22.2 million. In addition, people had taken to putting their own essays on Wikipedia, as subpages of their user pages. Consequently, Wikipedia's environment was not cooperative but instead competitive, and the competition often concerned what sort of community Wikipedia should be: radically anarchical and uncontrolled, or instead more singlemindedly devoted to building an encyclopedia. Collaboration helped move work forward quickly and efficiently, and posting unedited drafts made collaboration possible. As you point out, my example articles are not about political issues (well, not strictly true, if you look at the Strathfield article... but let's forget this for this argument). Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. Sanger learned of the new wiki model and proposed it to Wales as a means to expedite content approval for Nupedia. Bureaucratic authority resting in various offices or positions, not in individuals. To do deep research takes time and people do not really do research just because they want to edit a wiki. But, by my own design, I had very early on rejected the label "editor-in-chief" and much real enforcement authority; a year into the game, it would have been difficult if not impossible to claim enforcement authority over active but problem users. ‘Wikipedia’ is a non-profit organization whereas his other company ‘Wikia’ is a for-profit web hosting organisation. Larry Sanger Sanger in July 2006 Born Lawrence … However, if the number surviving exceeds unity on average, the bacterial population undergoes exponential growth . By donating, you agree to share your personal information with the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and its service providers pursuant to our donor policy. Ever heard the English expression, "comparing apples with oranges"? But Jimmy's first reaction was properly skeptical regarding the use of wikis and Ruth Ifcher made a stronger criticism very nicely. Well, part of the brilliance of Wikipedia is that you yourself don't necessarily need to edit it or wikify it- others who come across the article or who are looking to edit pages to help out will contribute and edit. Sanger has worked on other online educational websites such as Nupedia , Citizendium , and Everipedia . But Jimmy had told me the previous December that Bomis would start trying to sell ads on Wikipedia in order to pay for my job. He would have known that it is not possible to make a comparison with the likes of Webster's and the OED because wiktionary is not like these pillars of wisdom. It can be unnerving at first when someone does something to an article you wrote. This seemed inevitable because Wikipedia was not bringing in any money at all for Bomis, even if Wikipedia was becoming even more of a publicly-recognized, if still modest success. In Sanger’s Wikipedia page, it is written , “Sanger proposed using a wiki to solicit and receive articles to put through Nupedia… If you know you can't handle the Wiki code, just mark it for cleanup yourself and let one of the many Wiki editors clean it up for you. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales as an offshoot of Nupedia… Something to be said for picking battles where you make a difference. The latter has the salutary effect of making the contributor more serious and more apt to take responsibility for his or her contributions. A few days after I arrived back from my honeymoon, I was informed that I should probably start looking for another job, because Bomis was having to lay off most of its workers; they had 10-12 workers at the end of 2000, and by the beginning of 2002 they were back to their original 4-5. I think it was a simple consequence of the fact that the community was to be largely self-organizing and to set its own policy by consensus. As to the other projects, they are mostly conducted using wikis and according to some of the basic founding principles of Wikipedia. Bomis was not successful in selling any ads for Wikipedia anyway--you might recall that early 2002 was at about the very bottom of the market for Internet advertising. If I am working only with other dilettantes, our articles are apt to remain amateurish at best; we can fill in the gaps in each other's knowledge, and do research, but the results will remain problematic until someone with more knowledge of the subject contributes. LEG 1: Circles. also if you try and wage a revert war to get your version of an article in a, I think it's more than just sour grapes. I do not mean to dismiss any such efforts. There were many more who quietly came and quietly left. © 2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. After a few months of discussion, Jimmy himself was "intending to revive Nupedia in the near future" and "thinking very much along the lines of what is being discussed here." [2] Report on Last Decade of Online Advertising. If you look at my CUPS article, you'll notice that I do inline referencing - the same with the Strathfield article. He learned about wiki. But when I go back it said this article needs to be wikified [wikipedia.org]. However, not everyone in the Nupedia organization was as enthusiastic as Sanger and Wales about this novel way to build an encyclopedia. Perhaps the root cause of the governance problem was that we did not realize well enough that a community would form, nor did we think carefully about what this entailed. Consequently, they wound up in some pretty silly disputes that would have driven less patient people away instantly. What was Nupedia? The server it lived on had some trouble in 2003, and as a result the website went offline. There may be more comments in this discussion. I also had some hope that we might, finally, set up the project's managing nonprofit, which we had discussed doing for a long time (and which eventually did come into being: Wikimedia). An example of a company that has done just this is Wikipedia! I spent a good deal of time in research on various articles, and in next to know time I was a respected editor. Man, you should add an entry for "Pathetic" with just your photo above that statement. Though the argument over who really introduced the Wiki model to Wales rages on, the Wikipedia community seems to have decided its position on the matter. So it would have required much more explanation and persuasion, and indeed, much more struggle, for us to, for example, have persuaded potential participants that some persons, even in a wiki environment, should have special rights that others do not. But it is a cult, and only in a cult can behavior like this flourish. In the spring, a controversy erupted. I recall two incidents in which I tried to have Nupedia revived, in 2002 or 2003, but I don't recall exactly. Business model, at three years and nine months after founding, three years and four months after launch: On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects through non-profit means, rather than through advertising, though Bomis still owns Wikipedia and Nupedia for the time being. However, … Sanger has also worked on other online educational websites such … Some of our earliest contributors were academics and other highly-qualified people, and it seems to me that they were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project. Second, and later, I offered to buy Nupedia myself--that is, the domain name, the membership list, and whatever other proprietary material Bomis might have controlled. So I proposed what I thought was a humorously-named "Wikipedia Militia" which would manage new (and very welcome) "invasions" by new contributors. Third, it is only the opinions of experts that will be trusted by most of the public as authoritative in determining whether an article is generally reliable or not. So don't worry about having your contribution marked in need of cleaning. According to the company, the average donation is $15 and is tax-deductible in many countries, thus more people donate through it. I have had no trouble with my submissions; many of them have been improved by editing and additions (thanks rmhermen!). Lawrence Mark Sanger/sæŋər/ (born July 16, 1968) is an American Internetproject developer and is best known as the co-founder of Wikipediaand the former Chief Information Officer for Everipedia. These are not perfectly general rules: Another point needs more in-depth development. Its certainly been helpful to me to know of the problems we. Moreover, the standards of public credibility are not likely to be changed by the widespread use of Wikipedia or by online debate about the reliability of Wikipedia. The focus on the encyclopedia provided the task and the open content license provided a natural motivation: people work hard if they believe they are teaching the world stuff. CliffsNotes study guides are written by real teachers and professors, so no matter what you're studying, CliffsNotes can ease your homework headaches and help you score high on exams. I have some advice for anyone who would like to start new projects on the model of Wikipedia. but there are a lot of people around who are diagnosed with high functioning autism or aspergers syndrome (which are both more or less the same except in minor details) which also come under the general clasification of autism. I came to the view, finally and belatedly, that it would be better to "ignore the trolls." Wales experiences a lot of discontent over the launch of Wikipedia because experts are reluctant to ‘contaminate’ their exclusive reviews with amateur content. And? Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis.Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but articles' writing was slow. Jimmy seemed cool to the idea, and did not ask for any specific offers. In contrast to the centralized management of Nupedia, Wikipedia utilized a new, more open-ended and decentralized web application known as the ‘wiki’. Indeed, consider making a project, Establish any necessary authority early and clearly. No new comments can be posted. newsmaker Larry Sanger explains his ambition to build a reliable source of freely accessible, publicly created information on the Web. The quasispecies [kwaa'-zei-spee"-seez] model is a description of the process of the Darwinian evolution of self-replicating entities within the framework of physical chemistry. And in fact our exchange did not change his mind. However, usually when someone says that the page needs to be wikified, it just means adding a few square brackets around words to link them to other articles ([[something]])... Really, unless you're doing serious overhauling, you don't need to read all of the guidelines to write a simple articl. newsmaker Larry Sanger explains his ambition to build a reliable source of freely accessible, publicly created information on the Web. This is a crucial point: if you use a tool or model from another project, think through very carefully how that tool or model should be adapted. Unfortunately, this never happened. Only 21 articles got approved in the first year. Then it's working the way it's supposed to be. I was invited to talk about the project at Stanford, Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement, intending to revive Nupedia in the near future, independent of both Nupedia and Wikipedia, unstoppable high-quality article-creation juggernaut, Trump's Twitter Ban Prompts Outcry From Germany and France. The Future of Free Encyclopedias. But there is an excellent reason why an encyclopedia project should not partake in that extremely uncontrolled nature of wiki culture, and why it should adopt actually enforceable rules: unlike traditional wikis, encyclopedia projects have a very specific aim, with very specific constraints, and efficient work toward that aim, within those constraints, practically requires the adoption of enforceable rules. \.Lpx4 @X1@y 7ipq 9DsY3 i^c 0b\Z{ J:lP &4pk 8&Gx_ #yR7 c1=C 8Wz\ ]Db[ \vlW? You know you've been spending too much time on the computer when your I did supply the name "Wiktionary" in April 2001, more or less on a whim. The mere fact that most wikis, when Wikipedia was created, did not have enforceable rules hardly meant that one could not innovate further, and create one that did have rules. Sometimes novel situations or extenuating circumstances arise that the rules do not cover. The reasons the meta-wiki became (at least temporarily) more uncontrolled are not far to seek. Robotics/Electronics Class - How Would You Do It? Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. Openness and ease of editing made it easy for new people to join in and get to work. It was launched as a for-profit venture under the Bomis group with a $100,000 … Does that mean I can edit your article? This model runs side by side to the original Nupedia model so that the site benefits from the expert reviewers and also breaks down top bottom hierarchy. There is a saying, the victors often write history. During 2000, Jimmy Wales (founder of Nupedia and co-founder of Bomis), and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to … Sadly, few among those who would love to work on Wikipedia could thrive in such a protean environment. Removing #book# Second, because many people did not care what happened on the meta-wiki, they did not do the very necessary weeding that takes place on Wikipedia; besides, as the meta-wiki was a repository of opinion, people felt less comfortable editing or deleting what was, after all, only opinion. Differe, I think his point was more that the wiki might not be the right tool for this. A decentralized organization stands on five legs. The academics were professionals, and they were adamant that a collaboration with the crowd could never meet their high quality standards. The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Personally I found that this was actually a very informative piece, And it seems to me that the Wikipedia community fell into a mistake by thinking that just one or two features--the wiki feature and the neutrality policy and a few other things--explained Wikipedia's success, and that those features can thus be applied with no significant changes to new projects. This had the … Jimmy Wales: One of the very influential essays back then was Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” where he talks about two models of software development, one being the cathedral model, which is a set of high priests working in secret and then the other was the bazaar model, like a marketplace of ideas with people. "...the Encyclopedia Project is a sham, and has always been!" After the September Slashdotting, I composed a page originally called "Our Replies to Our Critics" (and now called "Replies to Common Objections"), in which I addressed the problem that "cranks and partisans" might abuse the system: This reflects very well the conception I had in September 2001 of Wikipedia's culture; the reply above was as much hopeful and prescriptive as descriptive. I felt at the time that the prevalence of the second school entailed rejection of both objective standards and rules-based authority. Why isn't it full of nonsense? Indeed. An article approval process could have been adopted without threatening the principle of posting unedited content for collaboration. Those who work in bureaucratic settings are called bureaucrats. I wanted to start it up again as a simpler, more streamlined, but still fully peer-reviewed project; I thought, moreover, that if I owned it I might be able to give it to a suitable sponsoring educational or nonprofit institution. So go ahead - contribute! I've got better things to do than be insulted by an AC on slashdot! • Can games inform design of better mechanisms? At about the same time that we decided to start the meta-wiki, and soon after the vandalism archive affair, I was thinking a great deal about Wikipedia's apparent anarchy, and I wrote an essay titled, "Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy?" It is often culture specific. If you reread what I said, actually, I said that I made a difference in whether Steak and Blowjob day was kept. But indeed, in January 2001, we were in both "uncharted" and "unchartered" territory. Some legal theorists would maintain that a community that lacks enforceable rules lacks any law at all. Hence naming and shaming. I think that's right. Together they were to be an "unstoppable high-quality article-creation juggernaut.". The project could have officially encouraged and deferred to experts. For the overall project of creating open content encyclopedias--and indeed, for the fantastic collaborative Internet that has yet to be created--to reach its full potential, the process of identifying mistakes honestly and creatively seeking solutions must be ramped up and continued unabated. It also owned the now-defunct Nupedia. The explanation involves a combination of quite a few factors, some borrowed from the open source movement, some borrowed from wiki software and culture, and some more idiosyncratic: That's pretty much it. 12 articles? It would seem to be a breeding ground of fighting, flaming, and trolling. Apparently Larry did not have one look at the current wiktionary. Standards that are not enforced in any way do not exist in any robust sense. Within any bureaucracy, informal relationships invariably form, which can increase worker satisfaction, but only to a point. There were even a few Wikipedians who made it clear that experts should not expect to be treated any differently than anyone else, even when writing about their areas of expertise. He also taught in two universities and later worked as a finance trader. These too were occasioning debate. There was little or no excitement that the new project might bring into Wikipedia a fresh crop of subject area specialists. As with the starfish, it can lose a leg or two and still survive. (1) Consider first the culture of wikis. Information flows up, authority and decisions flow down, and people remain in their organizational silos. Let me elaborate. A bureaucracy can only formulate rules based on what it knows or expects. By November or December of 2001, Wikipedia was growing so fast and the subject of regular news reporting, even by the likes of The New York Times and MIT's Technology Review; after the two major Slashdottings earlier in the year, we knew that large influxes of members could have a tendency to change the nature of the project, and not necessarily for the better. Informal groups can become disruptive to the efficiency of the bureaucracy. My view now is that Webster's and the OED are quite good enough as far as English dictionaries go, and there will always be excellent free dictionaries in every language online. Nupedia was not an open wiki like Wikipedia and adopted an extensive process of peer review before final publication of an article. Nupedia was a free online encyclopedia for scholarly peer-reviewed articles on a variety of topics, a reflection of Wales's love for the Britannica Encyclopedia during his childhood days. Given that encyclopedia project development happens almost entirely using words, nearly any rules will also be restrictions on speech. Attempts to delete or radically edit such contributions were often met by reposting the earlier, problem version: the ability to do that is a necessary feature of collaboration. It was a perfect coup for the resident wiki-anarchists. It is another thing altogether to lack a community ethos that is unified in its commitment to its basic ideals, so that the community's champions could claim a moral high ground. But this is only a result of that cultural context; in any other context, the existence of rules would be perfectly natural and unobjectionable. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia, Part II, Britannica or Nupedia? We spent many thousands of person-hours, all told, on the project. As difficult users began to have more of a "run of the place," in late 2001 and 2002, opprobrium was in fact meted out only piecemeal and inconsistently. The dawn of the new millennium meant that the encyclopedia—originally published in Edinburgh in 1768—had survived across four different centuries, building its reputation through a successful business model that used a peer review process to …