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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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Jimmy Wales: Challenging How Knowledge is Created.

By Nick Hodge | April 27, 2007

Flickr Group for all images.

del.icio.us search for all blog posts from Jimmy’s Trip

The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of Jimmy Wales in Mel­bourne on the 27th April 2007. This is not a ver­batim transcript.

This blog post, and Flickr images are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

This
work is licensed under a
Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Aus­tralia License.

Garry Put­land: wel­come. Apple might get Pod­cast from Adelaide up today. Didn’t they invent the tech­no­logy? Garry happy as he got a photo with the Chaser guys for his kids. Lucky! About 200 attendees.

Auntie Joy: wel­come from ori­ginal land own­ers and custodians.

Garry: educationau.edu.au Chal­len­ging How Know­ledge is cre­ated.  Ms danah boyd com­ing in Septem­ber; digital gen­er­a­tion focus. must remem­ber to come.  Microsoft must get involved with these guys, espe­cially as they map out the future of learn­ing in the r/w digital nat­ive culture.

Kat­rina Reynen: Assist­ant Gen­eral Man­ager, Innov­a­tion Branch, Vic DET. List­ing com­pan­ies here. Lots. How Vic­toria takes IT for­ward. Excit­ing chal­lenge: how young people con­nect and learn. Most wired and global of gen­er­a­tions. Teach­ers integ­rate tech­no­logy: critical/reflective think­ing. Mov­ing bey­ond textbook/blackboard roles. Teach­ers are now advisers and learners themselves.

Stu­dents: non­lin­ear; links, not nar­rat­ive. Images > text. Net­works greater than local

eg: Andrew Douch: Wan­ganui Park Sec­ond­ary School:, Vic­toria pod­cast­ing @ school. Study on the bus. Kids thinks its cool as other think they are listen­ing to music.  Kids also cre­at­ing pod­casts and are publishing.

Let­ting go as teach­ers: kids are bey­ond us.

ICT trans­formed learn­ing; con­nec­tion across the globe. enthu­si­asm for ipods, games, web2 ser­vices, enorm­ous potential

Use tech — new ways of learn­ing; col­lab­or­at­ive tech eg: wiki­pe­dia. Vic­toria ICT is integ­ral into schools, ICT helps stu­dents create.

Kahoots; pod­casts, tv+radio pro­grams today . Mashup machin­ima; Kahoots + bluescreen with kids act­ing in from of kahoots cre­ated 3D world.. Must mix media, and uses all sides of the brain.

edit­or­ial note: ICT > geeks cut­ting code Microsoft people! Get Web2 or get out.

Learn­ing in a new mode, learn­ing @ the centre. Vic Gov’t AU$130m. to ICT. Note­book to teach­ers and stu­dents. 1:1 learning?

Garry: Jiimmy’s visit: all humans have access to all know­ledge. Skills: net­worker, con­nec­tions are import­ant where know­ledge is rap­idly grow­ing in large net­works. Has attrac­ted media attention.

Jimmy Wales:

Aus­tralia is really big! Perth Adelaide Perth Sydney Melbourne.

Mel­bunn as spelling of Mel­bourne

Cost of text­books to zero, soft­ware towards zero, cost of com­puters down

Learn­ing impact has been going on from 10 years

Digital divide is going to reduce due to above (ref: Microsoft US$3)

Charles van Doren, encyc­lo­pe­dia should be rad­ical (subversive)

Wiki­pe­dia: free access to sum of all human knowledge.

Mel­bunn beat Sydney in % of people edit­ing wiki­pe­dia entry.

Greater per­cent­age of the board from out­side US

Wiki­me­dia is a tiny non-profit org. US$1m last year, US$2m last year. Tra­di­tional spend­ing on band­width and serv­ers (mostly serv­ers) Sup­por­ted by small dona­tions as it is a char­ity. Dona­tions from 50 dif­fer­ent countries.

Wikia: new organ­isa­tion (Jimmy is Chair­man), book, work or com­munity people might want to build. GPL — wiki­pe­dia model non­profit edu­ca­tion and research com­munit­ies. GFDL for doc­u­ment­a­tion. Plus (cc) licenses.

Encyc­lo­pe­dia » Lib­rary: Wikia, travel guides vs. encyc­lo­pe­dia entries. Open­source know­ledge. Mup­pet­swiki eg: 300 wiki­pe­dia entries; Wiki site 12,000 art­icles about the Muppets.

Itzhak Per­l­man: wiki­pe­dia; fails to men­tion he was on Mup­pets show. Spin/angle. Everything in the world from a Mup­pet per­spect­ive

Mode of pro­duc­tion, new style of cul­tural work. Only way to pub­lish in this way, and this volume

2500 com­munit­ies in 66 lan­guages; Klin­gon is not a lan­guage. LOL

Explo­sion of creative.

Open serving: free soft­ware, free con­tent, people keep ad rev­enue. No clue as to busi­ness model yet; like day of OS soft­ware; skep­ti­cism. Hugh amount that can be done. Soft­ware pack­ages text, images. As cost of band­width drops.

Wiki­pe­dia bill lower in Decem­ber 2006, vs Decem­ber 2005 as band­width cost because less.

Jimmy: Google’s worst night­mare. Jimmy’s mom like Fast Company

Search engines are not demo­cratic, not trans­par­ent. Not a good state of affairs. Pro­to­cols of inter­net are open; view / time; OS com­munity to cre­ate search engine soft­ware to chal­lenge big guys. Search.wikia.com. Com­munity design on the site. Clone basic idea of search engine, get links back. Expect pub­lic launch end of CY2007. Media not at launch of wiki­pe­dia (so start wrong) — so, work in back­ground before launch. Expect low qual­ity whilst soft­ware is in development.

Wiki­pe­dia is global. 1.750m art­icles in Eng­lish, <33% of the total. 128 lan­guages = 1000 art­icles. 5–10 reg­u­lar users. Group has formed genu­ine com­munity. How to reach out to com­munit­ies out­side the wiki­pe­dia group in their language.

Free access to sum of all know­ledge. Stallman/GNU. Free as in Speech. Free­dom to copy, free­dom to modify, free­dom to dis­trib­ute, free do dis­trib­ute non-commercially. Con­trib­ut­ing into the commons.

Sum of all human know­ledge: wiki­pe­dia, encyl­o­pe­dia: not a data dump; sum­mary of human knowledge.

250,000 art­icles in every lan­guage spoken nat­ively by at least 1,000,000 people — goal.  347 lan­guages that fit this descrip­tion. Cur­rently only 6 lan­guages meet this goal.

Reusable, dis­trib­ut­able over the world: (Truth in Num­bers) visit squat­ter city in New Delhi. Illegal set­tle­ment. No schools, infra­struc­ture. (Sangam­vi­har sp?) Par­ents cre­at­ing private schools. Bet­ter edu­ca­tion for this kids (this is uni­ver­sal) — no inter­net access. 400 stu­dents. 2 com­puters. 6th grade class can touch com­puters. All the stu­dents in uni­form. Unli­censed school, can­not film, Gov’t could shut down! Some­thing broken in a policy that can shut­down schools and not provide replacement.

Wiki­pe­dia sup­plied on CD; no lib­rary; where there are few com­puters and no con­nec­tion. High chal­lenge ahead. 250,000 art­icles to eng­lish speak­ers with access: dif­fer­ent in devel­op­ing countries.

Wiki­pe­dia: only 7 full­time people; wiki­pe­dia 9th most pop­u­lar web­site (6th in Ger­many) (ref: Alexa). Like David Has­sel­hof of the inter­net in ger­many. 12th most pop­u­lar in Iran. Per­sian lan­guage editor turned into police twice. Large blog­ging pop­u­la­tion in Iran. Crazy people call the police, and the police ignore them. Free­dom of speech, wor­ried in Iran. Make a big noise if he is arres­ted oth­er­wise you might just dis­s­ap­pear in Iran.

CNN.com 2.3% of the inter­net. wikipedia.com 6.2%.  Journos call Jimmy and ask “what does the inter­net think?” old skool media

cnn.com is not grow­ing, wiki­pe­dia is grow­ing. people are get­ting their inform­a­tion from dif­fer­ent sources. Press cov­er­age (error in Wiki­pe­dia, who know?) — old­me­dia got wind of it (John Seg­anthaler) in one para. Cor­rec­ted in wiki­pe­dia within 10 minutes. USToday a month later: wiki­pe­dia is a dan­ger­i­ous thing. Almost killed wiki­pe­dia (LOL: boost ratings)

How good is wiki­pe­dia. Only aca­demic look, Dec06. Nature magazine. Sci­entific Journal. cf: Wiki­pe­dia, Brit­an­nica. Peer review from Nature. Look for major/minor errors. 50 art­icles. Avg 3/article in Brit­an­nica. 4/article in Wiki­pe­dia. Not that bad, but doesn’t show improve­ment in qual­ity over time. Pick 10–100, look at his­tory and see the changes over time. Self-correcting beha­vior of the con­tent. Wiki­pe­dia striv­ing to be bet­ter. Its a shock that Brit­an­nica is so bad , and not self correcting.

Per­fec­tion is not pos­sible as an abso­lute; it will take time. It’s a goal.

Good job of Neut­ral­ity, bed­rock prin­ciple. Widely diver­gent view points can col­lab­or­ate. Even present­ing the dis­agree­ment. Thought­ful tol­er­a­tion are import­ant, where we can dis­agree safely. Mono-cultures are dan­ger­ous. Healthy dis­cus­sion, all have same goal. Keep the cent­ral goal in mind. Entire pro­ject is one of love.

How do we foster these styles of com­munit­ies. Prin­ciples of soft­ware design. Thought exer­cise. Ima­gine a res­taur­ant design.  Steak/knives/killers/cages — bad design, bad soci­ety. Soft­ware for social inter­ac­tion, same in edu­ca­tion. Think about the bad things first (then design so they don’t do the bad things)

In real world, don’t assume bad­ness. Design, think about clean­ing up after­wards. Mostly, accept trade off of open soci­ety — believe in good­ness of other people. Assume do bad, top-down approach, bad. Hos­tile mind­set, not trust­ing. Nuture com­munit­ies, not top down. Bring people together, not tech­no­logy. Suc­cess­ful online com­munity same as off­line. Respect for indi­vidu­als, respect for oth­ers, love. Tech con­fer­ences, its about love. Fun­da­mental bene­vol­ence. Strangers are people you haven’t met yet.

How should teach­ers use Wikipedia?

Use wiki­pe­dia as ini­tial source, but not he only source! Just like an encyc­lo­pe­dia. Don’t cite wiki­pe­dia. Go deeper into the inform­a­tion. wiki­pe­dia is edited live.

danah boyd: “encyc­lo­pe­dia cita­tions are rearely my prob­lem, but wiki­pe­dia as cliff­notes is.”

cliff­notes: read the sum­mary rather going to the real sources.

Always fol­low the second sources at the bot­tom of the wiki­pe­dia page.

cf: Battle of Iwo Jima: wiki­pe­dia to get con­text, then movie, then read novel. Con­text, sum­mary. Not as the final source.

teacher: I told the kids not to look at wiki­pe­dia: jimmy: I can tell you not to listen to rock and roll, too.  They are doing it.

All source mater­i­als have flaws; wiki­pe­dia has policy that by no means per­fect, but nor are anywhere.

Free cul­ture: groundswell. CC licens­ing. Jimmy on board of CC. Mil­lions of objects on the inter­net with CC licensing.

Tak­ing the OS soft­ware cul­ture to con­tent. You­tube: get off your butt and add CC licensing !

Go CC licens­ing. yeah. base layer of rich cul­tural mater­i­als. Base exchange of cul­tural experience.

Power of decent­ral­isa­tion. let’s do it. (cc)

Q&A

Charles Sturt Uni­ver­sity: strengths, group import­ant in know­ledge. aca­demic exer­cise: closer to the truth. What is the edit­ing process.

Link: edit this page, wiki-code is a little geeky. Any change you like. its live imme­di­ately. Keep his­tory of art­icle. Truly delete in legal/privacy issue. See the revisions/history and see what’s gone before. One click and it reverts to pre­vi­ous ver­sion. Another thing, His­tory — all past revi­sions and com­pare any two revi­sions. Para­graphs changes, words changed (yellow/red respectively).

Can also see who so can be blocked, many schools (par­lia­ments LOL) get blocked for QA.

Art­icles on watch list for editing.

Can see full his­tory of con­tri­bu­tion for a per­son, can see account­ab­il­ity (rather than gate­keep­ing). Assume good work, once you start doing bad things, we’ll notice. Com­munity self-polices

State Lib­rary Vic­toria: cost of text books, learn­ing to zero

Same reason as for encyc­lo­pe­dia, Brit­an­nica is expens­ive in book form. Brit­an­nica is fur­niture. Expense crafts­man­ship of the books. Gen­eral, cost go to zero (or close to)

Inter­net, pro­jects freely licensed text books. Wiki­books (text­books).  Wild and wooly wiki

Org called Con­nec­tions from Rice Uni­ver­sity for freely licensed; tra­di­tional author­ship model.

Text­book @ Eco­nomic 101 (US speak) ; 2–3 text books that are pop­u­lar; authors make a hit. Samuel­son text as eg; super­star eco­nom­ist. Hand­ful of authors make a pure liv­ing out of books. New method of pro­duc­tions, 1000 eco­nom­ics pro­fess­ors can cre­ate text. OS release early and often. Profs test­ing in classroom to improve quality.

Free soft­ware dom­in­ate in Unix world (cf; Apache) mode of pro­duc­tion vs. Microsoft spend­ing bil­lions on serv­ers like IIS. Why? Open source model. Fire­fox > 50%, wants to avoid Microsoft as much as pos­sible (edit­or­ial: there goes my chance for a photo with Jimmy)

Gen­eral pub­lic, tax­payer money — avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic. Research res­ults aca­demic journ­als and soft­ware gen­er­ated by Gov’t open source. Trends are strong and inevitable.

(edit­or­ial note: Nick feels like he is going to be shunned and stoned by those around him, as I am wear­ing a Microsoft shirt)

Qual­ity of Know­ledge, vs. Volume of Know­ledge. Most great theo­lo­gians have born and died.

Jimmy 5 years ago a guy in PJs on the inter­net. Ain’t no guru. LOL

Volume of info is great: wiki­pe­dia is about the assist­ance of assist­ing with know­ledge over­load. cf. search for sydney in google vs. go to wikipedia.

PRC China: no wiki­pe­dia access. Banned? Con­nec­tion issue?

Main­land China, all lan­guages of wiki­pe­dia is blocked. (editor: so much for free access)

Jimmy will not cen­sor, and work­ing with cen­sors is mor­ally wrong. Jimmy to go to China at high level as pos­sible to open up.

Pos­i­tion of wiki­pe­dia: block of wiki­pe­dia is an error. Vast major­ity of know­ledge in wiki­pe­dia is not sub­vers­ive. Con­trolling is not assist­ing the IT industry and depriving the Chinese people of a voice.

Using Skype to get around the fire­wall of China

Nor­way: drum­ming com­pet­i­tion, old tra­di­tional 150 years. Big deal loc­ally, known out­side Nor­way. Put art­icle into Nor­way; also trans­lated into Eng­lish. Sim­ilar fest­ival some­where in China, we’ve never heard of — can­not con­trib­ute this out­side. China gov’t thinks they are mis­un­der­stood — makes no sense to block con­tent as wiki­pe­dia is import­ant to get their own voice out to the world.

Engin­eer­ing Com­pany: 5000 people, online com­munity, young people within from older people. Setup own wiki. Chal­lenges, get­ting people to con­trib­ute as its voluntary.

Wiki, low bar­rier to entry as pos­sible, takes time to build. Momentum; pro­cess of learn­ing how to learn the social learn­ing; edit oth­ers work, con­ver­sa­tions productive.

Inside com­pan­ies dif­fer­ent; wiki­pe­dia, new­pe­dia failed prior — but had a com­munity. Human­it­arian excitement.

Internal, fer­vour not as great. Cau­tion: cul­ture, hier­arch­ical and top-down, will have trouble as lower level don’t want to sub­vert this hier­archy. Big boss writes , all bow down on the excel­lent prose — wiki will fail. These organ­isa­tions will fail in the col­lab­or­at­ive world.

What seems to work, someone is an evan­gel­ist for the wiki, and tasked to make it go. Beloved per­son, great social skills not the unfriendly ubergeek.

Cat­egor­ies, tax­onom­ies, some are main­ten­ance func­tion. Can true cat­egor­ies extrac­ted from main­ten­ance categories.

Lot  of talk on folk­sonomy; tax­onomy cre­ated by the people. Tag­ging in an emer­gent tag­ging sys­tem. eg; Flickr tags, from the over­all com­munity — array of things appear. Tag­ging can get a lot of noise. eg: sem­inar series tagged with jimmy­wales not of jimmywales.

Com­munity mon­it­ors the qual­ity, some have hobby dis­cuss and debate the taxonomy.

Jimmy con­sult­ing @ BBC a few years ago, search engine for gen­eral search. Couple of staff mem­bers to hier­archy of con­cepts. They were gobsmacked, or dear, the wiki­pe­dia cat­egor­ies: soc­cer play­ers: Wiki­pe­dia sub­cat­egor­ies by teams, coun­try of ori­gin by the com­munity; vs. BBC do it internally.

Under freeli­cense, some have extrac­ted the tax­onomy for other uses.

Wiki­pe­dia, cat­egory via topic. Use same topic for internal func­tional reasons.

Inside/outside the Wiki for people’s own sites?

Recog­nise: two sep­ar­ate organ­isa­tion: wiki­me­dia, wikipedia.

Wikia: other areas. Wikia sup­port wiki­me­dia as much as pos­sible. Mup­pets is a wikia site. Wiki­pe­dia is neut­ral. nobias. Don’t push an agenda.

Wikia, no rule as to neut­ral­ity. Sus­tain­a­pe­dia (sp), how sus­tain­able world, cer­tainly not neutral.

So, if your site is not neut­ral (advocacy, etc) wikia.

Don’t come into wiki­pe­dia, its an encyc­lo­pe­dia: not a data dump.

Peter Jack­son, ABD RN Online: Top-down edit­or­ial pro­cess driven, how do large orgs chill out (excel­lent idea)

Went to ABC yes­ter­day to talk about this, Jimmy quote: I think the world should relax a notch or two (edit­or­ial agree!)

Con­sult­ing for the BBC, sim­ilar issue as to ABC. BBC:everyone loves the BBC, espe­cially the BBC

Mod­er­a­tion policy: looser policy now, only react when someone com­plains in their mes­sage boards.

Think about: react­ive mod­er­a­tion in forum, more open­ness — but also for the com­munity for self con­trol. Wiki, flame wars are mod­er­ated by the com­munity, and the policy is set before. If there are flames, they are self deleted. Forum soft­ware doesn’t give the com­munity an abil­ity to throw out the troublemakers.

Don’t pick the hard­est pos­sible topic to do a wiki about: some­thing easy, friendly. Suc­cess­ful experience.

Know­ledge how to do a suc­cess­ful wiki, call Jimmy at Wikia. It has noth­ing to do with the soft­ware, its about man­aging the com­munity. Don’t just block the trouble­makers: you must have a tol­er­ance for trolls and be a soft tar­get so they get tired and just go away.

Garry: says Mel­bourne was best show (woo­hoo, chose the right one. Except I missed the Chaser guys)

Press con­fer­ence, mas­ter of answer­ing questions!

Topics: eduausem2007, education, jimmywales, wikipedia | 2 Comments »