{"id":293,"date":"2006-11-11T16:01:11","date_gmt":"2006-11-11T20:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2006\/11\/11\/financial-times-on-wikipedia-and-its"},"modified":"2006-11-12T20:43:49","modified_gmt":"2006-11-13T00:43:49","slug":"financial-times-on-wikipedia-and-its-alter-ego","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2006\/11\/11\/financial-times-on-wikipedia-and-its-alter-ego\/","title":{"rendered":"Financial Times on Wikipedia and its alter ego."},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia stand-off in search for online truth*<\/a><\/h2>\n

The British business newspaper Financial Times<\/a> reports on the competition between “Jimbo” Wales , who cofounded and still leads Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia cofounder, who is soon to launch Citizendium<\/a>. The collectivist\/anarchist discussion gets more overt near the end. The online and print editions are largely the same. There is one difference in ‘nuance’:<\/p>\n

Print ediition:<\/p>\n

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia<\/a>. Sanger also admits to having edited his own entry in Wikipedia<\/a> \u201cin the early days, along with a lot of other people\u201d, though he adds he stopped when, \u201cat a certain point, it became clear that it was against the policy of Wikipedia\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Online:<\/p>\n

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia, even after a rule was adopted against this practice in 2002.<\/p>\n

Sanger also admits …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Citizendium will not be the first such effort. Berkoblogger j<\/strong> points out that Scholarpedia is already online<\/a>. It has yet another sociological\/epistemological model, but it appears closer to Citizendium than Wikipedia. To justify their model, Scholarpedia links to pages by experts Benoit Mandelbrot<\/a>, Lotfi Zadeh<\/a>, Edward Lorenz<\/a>, John Conway<\/a>, Richard Karp<\/a>. Unfortunately those pages are all ‘stubs’**. However, there are quite a few pages that are complete. ‘Controlling Chaos<\/a>‘ is fully developed, while the more general ‘Chaos’ page is a green link – it points to a “ballot” to elect a “curator” for the page.<\/p>\n

*There were mulitple links to the article when I looked and the one above was free.
\n**in Wikiworld a ‘stub’ is a placeholder for a future page – a Wiki I.O.U.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Somewhat underplayed in the FT piece:<\/p>\n

1) Wikipedia is only partially Beyond Economics or Beyond Capitalism. Jim Wales gathered the necessary capital through<\/a> his for profit venture Bomis.com<\/a>. This provided the infrastructure for the legions of volunteers to do the lions share of the work e.g. 1.4 Million articles in the English version. On the other hand, FT, having a business\/capitalist slant, focussed on the CEO and COO -scant mention of the volunteers.
\n2) Wikipedia does have some hierachical structure. There are levels of adjudication of disputes with “Jimbo” being the final arbiter in most cases. Not in all cases because:
\n3) Jim regards Nupedia<\/a>, of which Larry Sanger was editor-in-chief, as a failure. In one interview he said, “It just wasn’t fun for the volunteers.” Jim is definitely “first among equals”, but he understands that that could disappear and take Wikipedia with it if he stops listening to people*.<\/p>\n

*He did ask me to lead the group to dinner. I wanted to take everybody through the Yard. [Hey! The ruling class can hire people to make nice stuff!] But Erica and j, had already conditioned people to go on Mass Ave. So Jim “forked” the group. As for Chicago style vs. authenic North End style pizza? Well, it seems the Regina closed years ago shortly after I went on my low carb diet. Still, the guy by the door feels somewhat scorned.<\/p>\n

Not mentioned at all in the FT piece:<\/p>\n

According to the History section of the Nupedia entry on Wikipedia<\/a>, mentions:<\/p>\n

Due to the collapse of the internet economy at that time, Jimbo Wales decided to discontinue funding for a salaried editor-in-chief in February 2002, and Sanger resigned from both projects soon thereafter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To it’s credit, FT nowhere mentions “irrational exuberance”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia stand-off in search for online truth* The British business newspaper Financial Times reports on the competition between “Jimbo” Wales , who cofounded and still leads Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia cofounder, who is soon to launch Citizendium. The collectivist\/anarchist discussion gets more overt near the end. The online and print editions are largely the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}