Archive for the ‘Jimbo Wales’ Category
Sympathy for the Sanger
I was thinking of posting this directly to Larry Sanger’s blog on Citizendium.org, but it’s too long, and Dr. Sanger would probably object. Also, it’s a bit personal, and I don’t like to be seen as a grudge-bearer, but sometimes you just have to speak out… So, just to follow up on my post from yesterday, I’d like to ask our highly appreciated and valued readers to indulge me, just this once.
Calm down, fellas.
In 2001, I was working for a small Midwestern (USA) IT company, a VAR actually, and one day we were told that the owner was moving to the West Coast and had sold the company to another guy, who we’ll just call “New Owner.” Well, it turned out that New Owner was an Ayn Rand fanatic who would wax ebullient over her “objectivist philosophy” whenever he got the chance, and even kept extra copies of Ayn’s literary masterworks in his desk drawer to hand out to people. (This is how I got my copy of The Fountainhead, which I ultimately threw away after being utterly appalled by the first 80 pages or so). Read the rest of this entry »
Co-Floundering in a Sea of M.U.D.
The whole debate over whether or not Wikia’s Jimmy Wales should be referred to as the “co-founder” of Wikipedia, along with Dr. Larry Sanger, has always been more than a little amusing. Mr. Wales was the CEO of Bomis, Inc., the pornographic link-farm site/company that employed Sanger to develop an online encyclopedia project from January 2000 to March 2002. As such, Mr. Wales now assumes - perhaps rightly - that he can legally declare anything produced by Sanger during that time to be a “work for hire,” and therefore take sole credit for it. After all, money talks; employees simply get laid off.
Meanwhile, since speaker’s fees evidently make up a large portion of Mr. Wales’ personal income, the reduction in status he could suffer by being commonly referred to as merely the “co-founder” of Wikipedia might make him a less marketable commodity on the lecture circuit. Yikes! Without these fees, Mr. Wales might have to rely on his income as CEO of Wikia, Inc. just to survive - clearly not an attractive prospect, given the nature of Wikia’s business model.
But why all the fuss over one word, “co-founder,” when that word isn’t even accurate in referring to either of these two giants of unpaid-volunteer online content aggregation? Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned to use a term that’s more descriptive of what these two men actually did, like “co-instigator,” “co-conspirator,” or “co-defiler of Western educational traditions”? At least that way, there wouldn’t be all this petty sniping, since presumably there would be less objection to sharing such a title in the first place.
Then again, if people would just use accurate terminology to describe Wikipedia itself (i.e., Multi-User Dungeon, rather than “encyclopedia”), maybe this entire dispute would be unnecessary. Read the rest of this entry »
“Benign,” he says
And we’re just supposed to take his word for it
Every once in a while, Jimbo Wales will mistakenly schedule an interview with a reporter or talk-show host who is actually willing to broach the subject of how Wikipedia might cause problems for society overall, or have negative effects on individuals or social institutions. In most such situations, his response is to point out that Wikipedia is “benign,” as if this is somehow self-evident, and that he fails to understand how or why anyone could possibly think otherwise.
Unfortunately, many highly successful technological innovations, no matter how seemingly “benign” they might be when considered at face value, can actually have devastating unintended consequences. One example of this is the modern toilet. Like Wikipedia, the toilet is a receptacle for human effluvia and other waste products. Unlike Wikipedia, it’s a fairly simple mechanical device that provides a seemingly clean and efficient means of disposing of that waste, minimizing its unpleasant stench and effectively eliminating the equally-unpleasant task of manual removing it from people’s homes. Nearly 200 years after its invention, it is difficult to imagine a modern, “civilized” society without toilets. But when they were first introduced, the story was rather different - indeed, a case study of disastrous unintended consequences.
Read the rest of this entry »
Rachel Marsden: Entering the Wikimatrix (aka Jimboworld)
On 23 March 2008, Canadian journalist Rachel Marsden posted the below to her user space on Wikipedia, she posted the same thing to Jimbo Wales’s talk page. Marsden had conducted a brief affair with the Wiki God-King, who then ordered changes to her biography on her behalf. In early March, Wales posted a long personal message on Wikipedia detailing the end of their relationship. Marsden’s response some three weeks later, posted to the same place, was hastily deleted by Wales’s Wiki-minions and Marsden was unceremoniously blocked from the site.
Rachel Marsden : As anyone who has ever cared about Jimbo here knows, the only way to have any sort of rational or caring discussion with him is in the Wikimatrix here. Alright, fine. Game on, sweetheart. Newsflash: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia; it is a cult. I wouldn’t even be included in a real encyclopedia. I want the Wikipedia entry about me deleted. I don’t know why this is such a difficult concept to accept.
Roger McNamee and Wikipedia: Here’s how it will unfold
This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Wikipedia Watcher Daniel Brandt. The post was in response to a piece in The Register by Cade Metz researching Roger McNamee, the major donor to the WikiMedia Foundation.
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Daniel Brandt: The New York Times yesterday quoted Florence:
Florence Nibart-Devouard, the chairwoman of the Wikimedia board, who has never met Mr. McNamee, did not sound enthusiastic.
“It’s not a huge concern right now, but I am not comfortable with the concept,” she said, of venture capitalists consistently making donations to the foundation. “I would much prefer a varied diverse base of donors, some could be large, some could be long-term friends, who help in finding new friends. I hope the foundation won’t rely on these relationships.”
She said that she had proposed a resolution, passed recently, to require that any donation larger than 2 percent of revenues be approved by the board. And she said she would “make some noise” if a venture capitalist were to try to become a board member.
In the same NYT piece, Jimbo very strongly stated that Wikipedia will always remain nonprofit, and he will continue to show the door to greedy venture capitalists.
I think there’s a conspiracy going on, and Florence’s reaction is reasonable, but too little and too late. She’s in over her head. Jimbo is pushing bullshit to distract from the conspiracy. It’s sort of hard to tell, because Jimbo is almost always unbelievable. Maybe that’s by design!
Mr. Wales goes to Washington
Thanks goes out to The Review’s resident business brain, thekohser for highlighting Jimmy Wales’s appearance before a US Senate committee in December to discuss the potential of the New Internet Technology for the US government. The committee sat through a session of the usual Mimbo-Jimbo, including Wales’s announcement that Wikipedia was “a carrier of traditional American values”. An enthusiastic Senator Joe Lieberman (pictured), who chaired the committee, introduced the irksome God-King with these words:
“We’re very glad to have as a witness Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, one of the most thrilling examples of what collaborative technology can produce. And we’ve asked Mr Wales to take us through some of the ideas behind Wikipedia.”
Due to the ideas behind Wikipedia, articles are constantly being reshaped by Wikipedians with information appearing and disappearing all the time. At any given moment, an article could carry new information never before seen, or it could be lacking in information that had been present in the article for years. The reader must learn to understand this new dynamic collaborative technology - which offers great potential for us all!
Jimmy Wales, who in contrast has his article permanently locked and fully protected from damaging mistruths at all times (see that little lock symbol in the corner), was kind enough to extend the same protection to Senator Lieberman’s biography — for six hours while the hearing took place. After Jimmy had left the building, Joe’s biography was unlocked and the dynamic collaborative process resumed in earnest. The article subsequently stated that Lieberman was a “flaming homo” and a crossdresser for the rest of the day.
Attacking the source : Wikipedia vs The Internet
If 2006 was the year when unaccountable Wikipedia cliques consolidated their hold on the site, then 2007 was the year they started to bully the rest of the Internet into submitting to their cultish practices. Having watched them spend the year trashing critics foul or fair and removing links to dissenting voices to hit google rankings where they hurt, most of us had seen enough.
Much to our encouragement, 2007 was also the year the rest of the Internet began to fight back. And so successful has this been that we end 2007 on a festive high. Not only have Google arrived like the Naval Officer at the close of Lord Of The Flies to promise an escape from the spiraling barbarism on Jimbo’s fantasist island, the media have stepped off the boat to tell the world what really happens when the parents aren’t around.
Yet a couple of weeks into a series of devastating revelations about the site’s corrupt core, rather than engage in soul searching reassessments, floundering Wikipediots continue to respond in the only way they know how — by attacking the source.
Time to change public opinion of Wikipedia
Something monumentally offensive has happened this week on Wikipedia, and the powers that be are trying to sweep it under the rug. All Wikipedia critics should take this excellent opportunity to write letters to the Editors of their local and regional newspapers, and to contact their elected officials. The public opinion of Wikipedia can and should be changed by these six simple points:
Wikipedia’s Fundamental Flaw
Truth and fact are at the core of an encyclopedia, be it “user-edited” or otherwise. Wikipedia is hollow at the core, because it subordinates truth to consensus and a passive compliance that it calls “civility.” This flaw has crippled its credibility, and will continue to do so as time marches on.
A thicket of Wikipedia “pillars,” “policies,” and guidelines give lip service to the truth, but the reality is different: Wikipedia’s users routinely remove verified facts from articles, and their actions are routinely upheld by administrators. As a result, no Wikipedia article can be considered reliable by its reader.
This is increasingly apparent in colleges, which have begun to forbid students from citing Wikipedia in their research. The general public is catching on as well, as a consequence of a series of revelations including a senior Wikipedia administrator’s fabrication of academic credentials (with the knowledge of Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales) and the revision of encyclopedia entries by corporations and government entities… Read the rest of this entry »
The true history of Wikipedia
How can you trust the truth of Wikipedia’s articles if you can’t even trust the truth about their own history?
If you are like most people, you aren’t quite sure about how Wikipedia started. So you start off by checking out Wikipedia’s own entry on History of Wikipedia. You would assume that it would be correct, because they should know their own history. Then we get the question of trust. Do we trust that Wikipedia is accurate about itself? They have a policy on Neutral Point of View, so in theory we should be able to trust them. But at the same time, would we trust anyone when talking about themselves? A little research will uncover that Larry Sanger considers himself to be co-founder with Jimbo Wales, while Jimbo Wales considers himself to be the sole founder. Wikitruth, who seems to know a lot about such things, highlights how important that issue is. So you might be led to believe that that is the only issue, and that, thankfully, it is now listed in some form at least, in the article about the history of Wikipedia.
The problem is that there is more to it than that.