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 [原创]高处不胜寒之七: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Interview |
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积极生活态度
头衔: 海归中校
声望: 学员
性别:  年龄: -1356
加入时间: 2009/05/30
文章: 525
来自: 3rd World
海归分: 56593
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作者：积极生活态度 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Frontier Real-time Search
Frontier Journal (FJ): Thanks for joining me. Today our special guest is Jimmy Wales; he's the founder of Wikipedia Project, also director of Wikimedia Foundation. Jimmy, my first question would be, Wikipedia is now well-known worldwide. How did Wikipedia conduct marketing? I know all sorts of publicity right now, your journalists are so far free.
Jimmy Wales (JW): In terms of marketing, we didn't do any marketing at all. Basically Wikipedia grew by word of mouth, and by people finding us, you know, naturally, as they're searching the Internet.
FJ: So, it's a sort of viral marketing?
JW: Well, no, not really, I would think that viral marketing is a specific technique. This is no marketing at all.
FJ: But when I conducted research for this interview, in Google, I found lots of interviews you took during the past several years, and also you gave lots of speeches at various conferences and trade shows, is that correct?
JW: That's true, yes.
FJ: My second question would be, inside Wikipedia is an ultra large, open source, knowledge engineering project - do you guys develop and adopt in-house software tools for tasks like writing style enforcement, content validation, or those sort of jobs - try to automate them?
JW: Not very much, no, certainly not for the in-house style; there's no software that really can manage that, it's just people doing it. In terms of content validation, there are some software tools which are looking for vandalism on the site, but they're very primitive and very limited and only cover the most basic. It's mostly about human beings writing and thinking.
FJ: So most of the writing jobs are conducted manually, and those are all frontier-based workers, worldwide.
JW: Yeah.
FJ: Is there anything to try coordination under your supervision, or do you have a kind of army-like organization, or is it purely open source project, like any other open source project, like the GNU project?
JW: It's very highly decentralized. In terms of central control there's just a few basic principles that have been set down from the beginning. The neutrality policy and things like that, some of the social policies. But by and large it's all very highly distributed and not centralized at all.
FJ: That brings up some sequence questions, which is how do you guys enforce quality control, composition management, and all those kinds of things, how do you do this?
JW: It's all done by the distributed community. The community of really active volunteers takes care to ensure that the quality standards are enforced.
FJ: Now, how do you differentiate Wikipedia from other community-based, Web 2.0 things, like MySpace.com, Blogger.com - those are all community-based and also distributed - and also how do you differentiate Wikipedia from centralized-based knowledge sources like Google.com search engines? Because MySpace.com, Blogger.com, Google.com - those are all sources of knowledge - human knowledge, different kinds of knowledge. But Wikipedia of course is much more, I should say, a much more tailored or classified form of knowledge.
JW: Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. MySpace is more of a personal homepage-type space; Google of course searches through everything to help you find what you're looking for. Of course one of the most important differences is that Wikipedia is a Wiki, and therefore like all Wikis - the Wikia Wiki, for example, and many other Wikis around the Web - Wikis tend to produce clearly written documents rather than personal statements.
FJ: Now let's talk about open source. From Wikipedia's perspective, what is open source's impact on Wikipedia projects, and how do you get benefits from open source?
JW: Everything that we do is under a copy our work, modify it, redistribute it, which is the same set of ideas that applies to open source software. It's been of enormous importance because it's the social context that empowers a community to trust each other and be able to work together in a positive framework. I think it would be impossible to do what I've done without the ideas of free software.
FJ: Now, generally speaking, what do you think about Web 2.0. Is it just a buzzword, or a real thing, from a Wikipedia point of view?
JW: I think it's really both. It is definitely a buzzword that's come up, but I think it does identify some real trends that we've seen in the last few years, in terms of increasing these online new types of software, things like Ajax, with really good use of javascript. All of those things are very much changing the way we think about the Web, so I think there is something very real going on.
FJ: I see. The understanding now is that Wikipedia is a non-profit project; Wikipedia.org is a non-profit organization. Suppose your company or your organization was a couple years ago, and right now, it's a for-profit company or corporation. What do you think would be different today for the Wikipedia project? For example, Wikipedia goes public or was acquired - suppose in the early years, Wikipedia got funded?
JW: I have no idea. I would either have a jet or maybe the project wouldn't have been successful. I don't think there's any way for us to know that now.
FJ: Okay, I see. Now, my next question - in terms of education, especially for lifelong education, we have three levels, that's my own opinion - first level is called information acquisition, for example we can get information from search engines or from offline sources like a library. The second level is going to be knowledge acquisition, for example, Wikipedia, another is from a classroom. The third level, it's called - there are two ways: the first way is called skill acquisition. Now, in terms of skill acquisition, how can Wikipedia help people to get benefits from that level?
JW: A typical example would be in the technology field or the computer science field -
FJ: Yes, IT training.
JW: - exactly. Buzzwords, concepts, acronyms, concepts, things like this. I find that a lot of people find Wikipedia very useful when they're learning something, to get a basic summary of a field as they're beginning to dig in and learn. Sometimes what's important in technology is to figure out which technologies you should study further and which are not useful for your particular needs. A nice summary article can be very helpful for that.
FJ: I mentioned that the second level is knowledge acquisition, so Wikipedia can help a lot, and also you mentioned knowledge acquisition ascending towards skill acquisition. Now, another direction is called knowledge classification - for example, right now people all over the world are editing and writing new entries for Wikipedia projects. It's a sort of a knowledge classification. At that level, if we go from that level to knowledge creation, which means writing books - I believe right now Wikipedia has several projects on writing new books - what's your position or opinion on this knowledge creation, from knowledge classification to knowledge creation?
JW: In terms of Wikipedia in general, we have a rule against original research. We really are primarily about educational materials based on existing reference work. We're not a peer-reviewed academic journal and don't intend to be. The projects of creating books are also restricted to presenting known knowledge in an educational format. I do think, though, that Wikis can be a valuable tool for scientists and other people who are working collaboratively. But it's really a different kind of environment than what we do in the wide-open, public project.
FJ: So, during those years running the Wikipedia project, what was your biggest joy and what was your biggest sadness?
JW: I guess the biggest joy for me is when I go out and I meet Wikipedians; we have dinner together and talk about the site and things that we've done and accomplished. It's a very nice feeling to know how many good people in the world have helped. I think the biggest sadness for me right now - I think it's very unfortunate - we can be accessible to all the people in the world, because we don't intend to be political or anything like that. That's a big frustration.
FJ: Sometimes it may be a natural failure. For example, tonight, doing research for this interview, I could not access your Website. But a few days ago, when I initiated my literary work, it worked well. Now my very last question before I let you go, what's your projection for Wikipedia projects say three years from now?
JW: It's difficult to project the English Wikipedia because it's so large and it's always at the forefront of change. But, for me, one of the exciting things is to see the things that are going on in the many, many smaller language Wikipedias, languages that have always been traditionally weak in Wikipedia but which are beginning to grow quite strongly, such as for example Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Arabic - these languages are all growing quite strongly now and for me, I think we can project that in three years those will all be major versions of Wikipedia and that's pretty exciting.
FJ: So do you employ translation software or some translation -
JW: Everything is done manually, and it isn't always translation. Specifically, the articles are written independently. There is some translation that goes on, but it's all done by human beings, so they do what they like.
FJ: So you mean the Wikipedia project has no written roadmap or also there's no organization or committee governing the direction of the Wikipedia project? Is that correct?
JW: I don't know if you would say it that way, or if you would say that there are hundreds of different people who are discussing that.
FJ: I would say personally, Wikipedia is definitely indeed a huge success, but it's not a commercial success. It's a social success.
JW: Right.
FJ: My pleasure to talk to you, thanks for your time.
JW: Thank you very much.
FJ: Okay - bye-bye.
作者：积极生活态度 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [原创]高处不胜寒之七: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Interview -- 积极生活态度 - (10168 Byte) 2009-6-28 周日, 23:54 (1704 reads)
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