A while back I mused about a new basic category of non-profit, something like "macro archives". A couple of weeks ago a spectacular new example of that impulse was made public, called the Encyclopedia of Life.
Funded by several large foundations and led by a veritable who's who of conservation and ecology heavyweights, the EOL aims to bring together all knowledge about the world's 1.8 million known species of plants, animals and fungi (a list which continues, of course, to grow). The wiki-based model they are using seems ideal for the purpose, though unlike Wikipedia this one's content will be professionally moderated -- so one interesting question will be just what the qualifications are to contribute information. (In the U.S., U.K. and a few other places they will have to figure out how to deal with information from legions of serious amateur restorationists and ecologists.)
As the project's newly-named executive director puts it: “I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life.”
The news coverage has all focused on what I just summarized, and it's pretty cool. But I bet professionals in the nature-conservation sector will end up even more excited by something else buried at the end of the press release: "To provide depth behind the portal page for each species, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, will scan and digitize tens of millions of pages of the scientific literature that will offer open access to detailed knowledge. In fact, the BHL now has scanning centers operating in London, Boston, and Washington DC, and has scanned the first 1.25 million pages for the Encyclopedia."
That part is, for me, even more mind-boggling than the big wiki. Ecology is just one of many fields in which more knowledge has been rigorously collected during the last century or two than in the previous history of humanity combined, but so much of that understanding remains captive in printed pages in scattered archives. Scanning such vast piles into modern digital technology is a huge step forward towards that "Star Trek shipboard computer" fantasy: letting machines carry out the gruntwork of collecting and sorting information so that human ingenuity can be devoted entirely to the analysis and critical thinking which makes us unique in our world.
Coooool!
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Wikipedia gaining steam
At this recent symposium in Chicago I took notes from an onstage interview of Jimmy Wales, founder and leader of Wikipedia. He covered many issues but most germane to this audience were some interesting aspects of Wikipedia's history and evolution as a not-for-profit enterprise.
I was interested to learn that Wales' mission is not actually the "wiki" information model per se, rather it is creating a free universal high-quality information source. That is, the Firefox of encyclopedias. His first attempt was called "Newpedia" and it was to be a freely-licensed analogue to Encyclopedia Britannica assembled in the same manner: experts writing and editing the articles, as volunteers. It stalled because, as Wales put it, "a good well-sourced encyclopedia article is a lot of work for an individual to write start to finish," and identifying and recruiting them was also a huge difficult job. "We weren't getting anywhere, so we scrapped that and decided to try the wiki concept instead." That experience has made him an evangelist of the wiki model, which is now reflected in the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wales is defensive about recent uncomplimentary media coverage (three links there) and would benefit from the wise counsel of someone like this; he modestly declined the interviewer's invitation to crow about the Nature article that found no more errors in Encyclopedia Britannica articles than in Wikipedia ones. He did note that contrary to media reports, "We are not locking articles on Wikipedia. In fact we are locking fewer articles now than we used to. What we are doing is locking out articles from editing by anonymous users and users who have just joined the wikipedia community within one week."
That last has become a core part of their operating concept now, the existence of a wiki community of regular contributors/editors. It numbers somewhere around 1,000 regulars now, and Wales has come to see it as central to the effectiveness of the wiki model, how
accountability happens in real-life practice.
Wales dropped one other nugget which was quite impressive to me: Wikipedia's total operating costs only just recently passed $1 million/year. (Their 2004 Form 990 on Guidestar shows total expenses well under half that so that checks out.) Talk about leverage -- that's quite impressive compared to what the organization has accomplished, regardless of whether you find their theories compelling or not.
P.S. Wikipedia was in the news last week regarding China: in contrast to Google and Yahoo, Wikipedia has bluntly refused to censor its content for that country. Hence Wikipedia has been blocked in China...until October when it was suddenly unblocked, and then last week it was suddenly re-blocked. Wales has no idea why: "We never heard anything from the Chinese government about those decisions, I have no idea what they're thinking now." He seems confident that in the big picture the Chinese government is pissing into the wind, that in the wireless-network era they can't keep that sort of top-down control of Internet access in their country.
I was interested to learn that Wales' mission is not actually the "wiki" information model per se, rather it is creating a free universal high-quality information source. That is, the Firefox of encyclopedias. His first attempt was called "Newpedia" and it was to be a freely-licensed analogue to Encyclopedia Britannica assembled in the same manner: experts writing and editing the articles, as volunteers. It stalled because, as Wales put it, "a good well-sourced encyclopedia article is a lot of work for an individual to write start to finish," and identifying and recruiting them was also a huge difficult job. "We weren't getting anywhere, so we scrapped that and decided to try the wiki concept instead." That experience has made him an evangelist of the wiki model, which is now reflected in the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wales is defensive about recent uncomplimentary media coverage (three links there) and would benefit from the wise counsel of someone like this; he modestly declined the interviewer's invitation to crow about the Nature article that found no more errors in Encyclopedia Britannica articles than in Wikipedia ones. He did note that contrary to media reports, "We are not locking articles on Wikipedia. In fact we are locking fewer articles now than we used to. What we are doing is locking out articles from editing by anonymous users and users who have just joined the wikipedia community within one week."
That last has become a core part of their operating concept now, the existence of a wiki community of regular contributors/editors. It numbers somewhere around 1,000 regulars now, and Wales has come to see it as central to the effectiveness of the wiki model, how
accountability happens in real-life practice.
Wales dropped one other nugget which was quite impressive to me: Wikipedia's total operating costs only just recently passed $1 million/year. (Their 2004 Form 990 on Guidestar shows total expenses well under half that so that checks out.) Talk about leverage -- that's quite impressive compared to what the organization has accomplished, regardless of whether you find their theories compelling or not.
P.S. Wikipedia was in the news last week regarding China: in contrast to Google and Yahoo, Wikipedia has bluntly refused to censor its content for that country. Hence Wikipedia has been blocked in China...until October when it was suddenly unblocked, and then last week it was suddenly re-blocked. Wales has no idea why: "We never heard anything from the Chinese government about those decisions, I have no idea what they're thinking now." He seems confident that in the big picture the Chinese government is pissing into the wind, that in the wireless-network era they can't keep that sort of top-down control of Internet access in their country.
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