Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-03/From the editor

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From the editor

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By Ral315

I'm proud to announce that the Signpost will be interviewing Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales this weekend. This is our second interview with Jimbo; the first interview was published in February 2006.

The interview will happen on Sunday, September 9, sometime around 22:00-23:00 UTC. The interview will be open for readers to watch, in the moderated #wikipedia-signpost channel on freenode. The interview will run in next week's Signpost.

We're currently soliciting questions for the interview on this article's talk page; your input is welcome. We will also accept anonymous questions, if desired, via e-mail.

One thing I'd like to note is that while I've been considering another interview of Jimbo for a while, a request by Raul654 for such an interview really helped get the wheels going on it. If you have any ideas for interviews or stories, please leave a note on our tip line.

Thanks for reading the Signpost.

— Ral315


Also this week: From the editor — WikiScanner — WikiWorld — News and notes — In the news — Features and admins — Technology — Arbitration

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Questions

Please post questions for our interview with Jimbo Wales. Be advised that to allow the interview to be re-used on Wikinews if desired, all edits to this page are considered dual-licensed under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

  • We haven't heard any news recently about the FY2007 audit. When do you anticipate the audit to be completed? Ral315 » 04:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • How is the Foundation planning to run the fall fundraiser? Will the emphasis be more on personal donations, or larger, corporate and grant contributions? Ral315 » 04:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • In your opinion, what topic or subject on Wikipedia needs the most work? --Hemlock Martinis 04:41, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • There has recently been a discussion about the inclusion of fair use images on the main page, in which you said such images should be "strongly avoided." Many in that discussion thought otherwise. Could you explain your opinion? --Zvika 10:30, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you think Citizendium will end up rivaling or replacing Wikipedia as Larry Sanger believes, or will it be consigned to the dustbin of internet history? Nondistinguished 14:57, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • With the eventual, expected rollout of the FlaggedRevs extension for sighted and reviewed page versions, the nature of what many of Wikipedia's readers will see changes. How do you expect this to affect Wikipedia's internal culture? Nihiltres(t.l) 16:04, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • With the call for the Fairness Doctrine being applied to talk radio, do you think it could be exapnded to include Wikipedia if given the right political circumstances? Chris 01:52, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What does the Wikipedia logo mean, in your mind? Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 03:11, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you could describe vandals in one word, what would you say? Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 03:11, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • A number of attempts at setting up a way of marking stable versions have been proposed, including Wikipedia:Baseline revision (my proposal made yonks ago), Wikipedia:Static version, Wikipedia:Stable versions, Wikipedia:Flagged revisions and Meta:Reviewed article version, as well as at least one MediaWiki extension, Meta:Article validation feature. None of these proposals has taken off, and it looks like the extension has stagnated. My question is whether you believe such things are a good idea? If so, some people believe that if a revision is made "good" or "verified" that anonymous editors should see this by default. My personal view is that this is a terrible idea (though I like the basic idea of a stable revision) and it would reduce the incentive to edit articles. What is your take on this? If you don't believe that they are a good idea, what reasons do you have? I'm sure that others have asked you this, so your take would be interesting. - Ta bu shi da yu 09:32, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you think WikiScanner would have a positive, a negative or no effect at all on how Wikipedia works? - FayssalF - Wiki me up® 21:14, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Essentially answered at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-03/WikiScanner. AxelBoldt 03:50, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you consider Bureaucratship, like Adminship, to be no big deal? Acalamari 23:06, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What sort of consensus would you like to see regarding Wikipedia: No open proxies? Acalamari 23:06, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • During a recent discussion, an administrator expressed his desire to have all of our Featured Articles protected automatically once they reach said quality "so that they don't require constant effort to keep them from slipping back into mediocrity," and to "implement some form of approved versions" of articles, similar to Citizendium's article approval system. What do you think about this? --Boricuæddie 03:59, 6 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia's success is remarkable, and something I think you must be very proud of. Are there any of your initial hopes or expectations which Wikipedia has failed to meet up to? And given its success, what is your medium- and long-term vision for Wikipedia now? --RobertG ♬ talk 10:23, 6 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • How can we make Wikipedia better? We are nearing 2M articles. Should we now strive for more articles, or should we strive to make our existing articles better? -Arch dude 01:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What parts of Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects) will be loaded on the OLPC? AxelBoldt 03:50, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • How is the board's transition to democracy going? Since your position on the Board of Trustees now has a fixed term, do you plan to run for election when it expires? Would you propose or accept being re-appointed instead of elected?--Yannick 04:46, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sooner or later, the corporations, governments, PR firms and moneyed interests of the world will realize that the right spin on Wikipedia is extremely important and valuable; after all Wikipedia has become the top informational real estate in the most important medium of our time. How can Wikipedia, with a couple thousand part-time volunteers, possibly withstand? AxelBoldt 05:13, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What do you think the ideal size of Wikipedia would be, in numbers of articles of course, but also active contributors and media coverage? -- lucasbfr talk 08:24, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some concerns were raised last fundaiser about the Virgin Unite logo appearing as a site notice at some point. Do you plan on doing the same kind of operation next fundraiser? -- lucasbfr talk 08:24, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • You gave us a lead a few years ago to start working on "Wikipedia 1.0". It seems likely that version management and static copy publication will put WP back into an untouchable position. But since then you seem to be a bit silent/distant on the issue. Have you changed your mind? --BozMo talk 09:05, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you think that we should work on stub articles, which the majority will probably never read, or FA, GA, and A-class, which are usually read by the majority? Laleena 12:34, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • How do you feel about the considerable amounts of pages experiencing database lock messages, and other error messages when the servers are experiencing considerable load, generally outside of North America. Would you consider the proposal of advertisements in some kind of way to support the growth of Wikipedia without damaging it's NPOV? --Borgardetalk 15:23, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Greetings, two retro questions kind of off the wall. Would four bytes be sufficient space for all of Unicode? Are computer viruses written in Java[TM] theoretically possible? Unless memory fails me which is often the case, a Google executive Eric Schmidt while at Sun Microsystems answered those and many more questions during an interview like this he granted once on AOL during the mid-1990s. I wonder what your answers would be now. Thank you. -Susanlesch 16:49, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Your recent observation that your ability to govern here is possible only with the "support of the most thoughtful and powerful admins"[1] could be interpreted as being somewhat inconsistent with your famous decree that adminship is "not a big deal". Do you still stand by that original assessment of adminship,[2] or has the role of administrators grown beyond what you envisioned four years ago? -- Satori Son 19:28, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • There is a petition asking for the Wikipedia logo to be fixed. There is a NY times article about it. User:Thue has corrected the errors. I would like to know what will it take to correct the logo everywhere and your thoughts on the issue. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 20:18, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What are your opinions on the current version of Wikipedia:Non-free content and Foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy? Specifically, what do you think about copyrighted international symbols such as the International Symbol for Deafness, whose use in templates appears to be prohibited by the foundation? —Remember the dot (talk) 16:37, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What will Wikipedia look like in 2010? 2030? Raul654 05:30, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have heard on the grapvewine that the 2006 audit excoriated the Foundation for having very little by way of data backups or recovery plans. Has this situation improved? If so, how? On a related note, can we expect to see SQL dumps of en-wikipedia more often? Raul654 05:33, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • How long until we get single-user login? Is it still Brion's top priority? Raul654 05:43, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have also heard on the grapevine that the Free Software Foundation is working on a the next version of the GFDL to correct some of its uglier bits. What is the status of this? Raul654 05:45, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Apart from Wikipedia, which user-created internet project (not necessarily run by Wikimedia) do you like the most, and why? Mike Peel 08:13, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • A lot of Wikipedia's articles are unreferenced (see Category:All articles lacking sources and Category:All articles with unsourced statements for the known examples). What do you think are the best ways to encourage contributors to reference their additions? Mike Peel 08:38, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why is WP:NOT not policy on all Wikipedias? For example, fr:WP:NOT, the French translation of the page, is an essay, not a policy or guideline. --Boricuæddie 19:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello. To what extent do external organizations use data mining and link analysis on free Wikipedia and Wikimedia resources, for example on free edit histories? Those organizations could for example be government, military, academic, commercial or private or individuals, or students of social networks. Thanks to a New York Times article by Eric Lichtblau about the United States FBI today (Gannett syndication via The Arizona Republic) for a couple terms used here. -Susanlesch 20:02, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • When anonymous page creation was forbidden, it was said there would be a study of its effects. That was a very long time ago. Was this study ever done? If it was, when will it be released? For that matter, is it ever going to be possible for page creation to be allowed again? --Gwern (contribs) 21:26 9 September 2007 (GMT)
  • Related to the question before Gwern's, who has access to the Wikipedia and Wikimedia server logs and the results of their Web log analysis software? Sorry if this is a FAQ. The privacy policy at Wikimedia may have answered this question. Thank you. -Susanlesch 21:56, 9 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]


The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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