In Soviet Georgia, Wikipedia edit you.

[reddragdiva]

Wikimania 2006 is on in the US at present and my phone and email are going batshit, probably because everyone else is having fun in student accomodation in Boston rather than answering their phones. And for some reason people think I'm a good contact to get their article fixed ... I just answered this interview. Apparently we're news in Georgia.

On 04/08/06, kate tabatadze wrote:

Georgian Business Week(GBW), being the major Business informatory newspaper in the region would like to cover recent developments at Wikipedia, particularly Jimmy Wales's statement to the free Internet encyclopedia to put more emphasis on quality instead of quantity. Cooperation with you matters much for GBW, so could you please answer the following questions?

I'll answer them as best I can. I'm not at Wikimania, so I only know what he said from news reports, but I can give my perspective as someone heavily involved in the English-language Wikipedia.

(I've also forwarded your message to an internal mailing list for other Wikipedia/Wikimedia press contacts to help you if they can.)

My name is David Gerard. I'm 39 years old and work as a computer systems administrator. I'm originally from Australia, but now live in London, UK.

1. What's been the reason of Jimmy Wales's statement to the free Internet encyclopedia to put more emphasis on quality instead of quantity?

This relates particularly to the English-language version, which was the first and is by far the largest. We particularly admire how the German-language Wikipedia has reached sufficient quality to release three CD-ROM and DVD-ROM editions. I have put quite a lot of effort myself into seeing what can be done to get the English Wikipedia up to this standard.

The English Wikipedia covers most subjects that one would expect to be covered in an encyclopedia (though there are still a lot of gaps). Now we need to make those basic expected articles better.

This also applies to biographies of living people - our basic guidelines of Neutral Point Of View and Verifiability have to be applied very strongly in articles about living people.

We have a lot of very good articles, but we have a lot that are not good - not sufficiently informative, not well-written or not including sources or references. Wikipedia is clearly useful to people - it's no. 17 website of any sort in the world (Alexa ratings) - but those of us who work on it know its defects better than anyone.

All the Wikipedias started small - a few hundred very short "stub" articles; like a rough sketch of what an encyclopedia might look like. English still has large areas that are like this - but in many areas we've been getting a lot more depth to the individual articles, and many that are very high quality works indeed; and we should be able to use the ability to generate that level of quality to other articles.

2. How's Wikipedia going to focus on quality development?

The fundamental thing driving the typical dedicated Wikipedia volunteer editor is the urge to get it *right* and make a good and useful encyclopedia. If we keep to the fundamentals of neutrality and verifiability, this should be achievable. The example of the German Wikipedia having had not one, but three, released editions shows that the wiki model can create quality work that customers will pay money for.

There are various volunteer initiatives to organise the editorial work needed to increase quality: tagging unreferenced articles (so that people can find references for them), finding quality articles ("Featured Articles" and "Good Articles"), possibly having a link to a stable known-good version of an article at the top of the article page (so that people can see the current development version but have a known-usable version if they're not sure) - there are lots of little ways to make it better by steps.

3. In Wales's words, with more than 1.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia already has met its goal of becoming a comprehensive encyclopedia, are any other languages to be added in near future?

New languages are added all the time. The goal is not just to have a good Wikipedia in English or German, of course - covering people's native languages is important, even if it's quite a minor language. For example, everyone in Wales speaks English, but for a lot of them their *native* language is Welsh - and the Welsh-language Wikipedia (http://cy.wikipedia.org) is small (4,600 articles) but has an enthusiastic contributor base.

4. a)What's been the main target of Wikimania 2006?
b)How effective are such conferences in general?

I have no answer for this one myself, I'm afraid! I hope someone else can answer ...

5. What do you see the key to Britannica quality?

I would say: having the basic articles (say, the 50,000 most encyclopedic article titles) meet or approach the criteria for Featured Articles on the English Wikipedia. It should be well written, comprehensive, verifiably factually accurate, neutral and stable.

I must point out here that Wikipedia does not compare itself to the Britannica in quality as yet - other people have been doing that, then other people say they're wrong and so on. We see the Encyclopedia Britannica as the gold standard of quality we aspire to. I think any serious contributor to the English Wikipedia admires the Britannica greatly and dreams of Wikipedia being of that level of consistent high quality.

6. How successful has Wikipedia been so far since the very first day of its launch?

I started with Wikipedia in late 2003. At the time it was no. 500 website in the world (Alexa rating), and I thought that was spectacularly popular ... now it's no. 17. We have hundreds of server machines, with two paid technical employees and a contractor working half-time. Our budget is several hundred thousand US dollars, which is not much at all to run a top-20 website - everyone else in the top 20 has hundreds or thousands of technical staff and the money to pay for their infrastructure. It's a very interesting time ...

Although Wikipedia is very far from perfect - and we do tell people how imperfect we are, and that any page you see on the site is a perpetual working draft, not a finished product - we seem to be useful enough that we are very popular. Someone might get better information from an Encyclopedia Britannica on their desk, but Wikipedia is there and it's on the net and free. We appear to be useful to everyday people in their lives, and that's what an encyclopedia is for, so it's very pleasing. Now, of course, we feel we have to make it good enough to warrant that attention!

7. What's the overall number of the Georgia(former Soviet Union republic) information on the web?

I don't know about all information, but the Georgian-language Wikipedia (http://ka.wikipedia.org/) has over 9,000 articles so far. I can't read Georgian, so I can't say what the quality is like; but you should be able to read it and find people there to talk to.

P.S could you please meet my deadline by Wednesday or latest Thursday morning?

I hope this has been of use to you, and I hope there are others who will contact you about the conference itself!

- thanks, David.

Comments

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

i personally use Wikipedia (often) as a primary reference for personal use (rather than, say, citing it as a source in a Master's Thesis). I believe that its accuracies far outnumber its inaccuracies, and at the very least it is a repository of current popular belief about what is true. That in itself should prove useful to, say, sociologists and similar types.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Cool - Georgia the country not Georgia the state.

You did see the New Yorker article on Wikipedia last week, didn't you?

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

The funniest section was Eric Raymond complaining that he wasn't accepted as an authority on science fiction.