Completely lost in wikimedia - part 1

Completely lost in wikimedia - part 1


Who doesn't know about Wikipedia by now? It is probably the largest collaborative free-licensed project on the web. Now a wiki is basically a web page that many people write and edit. The whole idea sounds a bit dubious really, but when the distinguished journal NATURE published an article comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica online, they found that Wikipedia was pretty accurate although Britannica was more accurate overall.

Wikipedia is updated by individuals who write on subjects that interest them. Because of this Wikipedia has pretty good coverage of popular culture and rapidly changing subjects such as computing.

But why does Wikipedia work better than other collaborative projects? The mission of Wikipedia is not too much different than H2G2, a MUD formed by Douglas Adams (the author of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy) in April 1999. H2G2 was meant to be the repository of all human knowledge. But although H2G2 has a vibrant social community, its edited guide entries come nowhere near the 1,266,000 + articles of Wikipedia even though it is two years older.

Both Wikipedia and H2G2 have articles that are added by individuals interested in a topic regardless of their expertise. H2G2 has editors who review articles, and if they meet certain guidelines they elevate them to the edited guide. Almost all Wikipedia articles can be changed almost instantly by any contributor. This makes Wikipedia more succeptable to vandalism than H2G2 where edited articles are fixed in stone. However, this ability to change articles rapidly also means that a summary of the most recent Doctor Who episode can be up on the web the evening that it was first shown on TV.

Wikipedia has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Wikipedia has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years.

Is this rapid change what makes wikipedia work so well? What other factors are involved in it's success. In order to find out what makes Wikipedia tick, I decided to dive right in and become a Wikipedia contributor.

The first thing that I noticed is that the Wikipedia folks are ambitious. Wikipedia is just one project of the Wikimedia foundation. Some other projects include the Wiktionary (a free dictionary and thesaurus), Wikibooks (for textbooks and manuals), Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikimedia commons (an image and other media repository), and Wikisource (a free content library of public domain documents). They also have editions in over 150 different languages.

In the next blogs I plan to try to figure out what makes Wikipedia so successful, and to explain how to contribute to this huge free-licensed project.

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Rosalyn Hunter's picture

Biography

Rosalyn Hunter has been on the internet since before the web was created. Born into a family of instructors, she has made it her life's goal to teach others about the important things in life, such as how to type kill -9 when a process is dead. She lives in a little house on the prairie in the American West with her husband, her three beautiful children, a cat and a dog.

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Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

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Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

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If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

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Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

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Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

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Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

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