Category: Wikipedia
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Jimmy Wales reiterates support for Wikipedia porn filter
Over on Twitter, I’ve been having the first conversation, of sorts, I’ve had in years with Jimmy Wales. First, I wrote (pointing to my post, “What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?”): Jimbo replied: Hmm, I thought: Jimbo had a couple of replies to this, too: I found it implausible that the God King…
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What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?
I want to start a conversation. I. Problem? What problem? So, you didn’t know that Wikipedia has a porn problem? Let me say what I do not mean by “Wikipedia’s porn problem.” I do not mean simply that Wikipedia has a lot of porn. That’s part of the problem, but it’s not even the main problem.…
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Wikipedia’s porn filter DOA, and a proposal
Warning: this post has links to pages that are definitely not safe for work or school. I’ll warn you which ones those are with “NSFW.” The post has two parts. The first is about the availability of porn on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which for most people reading this is probably old news; but they’ve…
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Wikipedia’s proposed legal policies
It looks like Wikipedia might be, finally, accepting its legal obligations. Geoff Brigham, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation (which is the legal owner of Wikipedia), has posted to the Foundation-l mailing list a link to a draft document described as Office of General Counsel “staff policies.” The document is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Policies When I saw it, one…
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25 Replies to Maria Bustillos
In a recent essay, in The Awl (“Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert”), Maria Bustillos commits a whole series of fallacies or plain mistakes and, unsurprisingly, comes to some quite wrong conclusions. I don’t have time to write anything like an essay in response, but I will offer up the following clues for Ms.…
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Looong interview with me by Dan Schneider in Cosmoetica
Off and on, for the last 2.5 years, I have been answering questions from poet and critic Dan Schneider, who has conducted a series of long, interesting interviews. My interview, posted a few hours ago, is #27 in the series; Schneider himself gives the interview four stars (out of five). That should tell you something about the Schneider:…
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Wales declares Sanger arbiter of consensus on Wikipedia
While looking at the old Wikipedia-L archives, I came across the following deliciously ironic post from none other than Jimmy Wales: [Wikipedia-l] subpages Jimmy Wales jwales at bomis.com Mon Feb 25 23:33:51 UTC 2002 kband at www.llamacom.com wrote: […] > If he’s still the final arbiter of all Wikipedia > functionality, then this is a…
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Jimmy Wales on advertisement
A comment in Wired UK has Jimmy Wales saying this: Sanger was absolutely adamant that Wikipedia must have ads, and it was my refusal to do so that led to Wikipedia being as it is today. The Spanish fork did not provoke any changes of any kind. We stayed the course. I didn’t want to…
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Advice for the Wikimedia Foundation (not for Wikipedia!)
Since before I left Wikipedia, even before I proposed the old Sifter project in 2002, Wikipedians have talked about a method of using experts to rate, or approve, or review versions of Wikipedia articles (cf. this Slate interview). Similarly, some of the cooler heads both inside and outside Wikipedia have wished that Wikipedians would tag their copious…
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Wikipedia’s ancient history unearthed
Wikipedia programmer Tim Starling has discovered some ancient backup files from the earliest months of Wikipedia. The files themselves (which I haven’t downloaded yet, if I ever will) are here (8.4 MB) and cover some of the earliest history of Wikipedia. This should be very interesting indeed, if anyone decides to study what happened in those, um,…