Dan Gillmor
Jimmy Wales, founder of the important Wikipedia project, has been in the San Francisco Bay Area the past couple of days. Looks like he's gotten Google to help out with bandwidth and hosting for Wikipedia, which deserves such support.
At a dinner last night he was circumspect about the Google deal, but was his usual thoughtful self on a variety of other topics. I am increasingly impressed by his depth and vision.
Wikipedia and its latest offshoot, Wikinews, are getting more and more press. (The NY Times ran a story on Wikinews yesterday.) I'm skeptical of Wikinews in some ways, but am watching it carefully to learn from it. In fact, I hope we'll be able to collaborate on citizen journalism in some way.
The almost hysterical anti-Wikipedia comments I see from some folks (see the quote about "stunning" naivete in the NYT piece, for example) doesn't mean the critics are entirely wrong. But they are missing the point in so many ways.
One critic is a Big University professor -- a former professional journalist with significant online experience -- whose class I visited recently as a guest lecturer. I was talking about Wikipedia, and he launched into a rant about its failings. In particular, he complained about the several inaccuracies in an article about a topic with which he was deeply familiar.
"So," I asked, "did you fix them?"
"No," he responded, "I don't have time for that kind of thing."
Talk about not getting it. No, we can't make Wikipedia perfect. But we can improve it, which is the point.
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