Sunday, July 20, 2008

Back from vacation - not much to say

"I think it's pretty well established now that Jimbo is an evil person. I'm starting to wonder the benefit to continuing to find evidence of this view." That was what I wrote to Gregory Kohs in an email about a month ago. Lately I've been thinking the same might be true of the WMF itself.

I recently went on vacation and didn't follow many things Wikipedia while I was away. Now I'm back and find myself bored by these things.

I've also discovered that blogging is a lot harder than ranting on a mailing list. But I'm going to keep trying.

In the mean time, if anyone has a plan to rescue Wikipedia from the evil clutches of the Wikimedia Foundation, please let me know, publicly or privately.

1 comments:

Gregory Kohs said...

I've determined that the only way to rescue Wikipedia (the content) is not to try changing it from within (the WMF and the "community"); but rather, to organize an intelligent, well-funded, credentialed team of publishing professionals, add a good mix of wiki coders, then scrape Wikipedia to a new site. The new team would do everything "right" that was done "wrong" with Wikipedia.

Namely, protected versions of defamation-free articles, real-name-confirmed users only, paid content-administrators (what are called "editors" in the publishing world), and waiver of the Section 230 protections within a three-year window. Only an organization willing to take legal responsibility for the content will give the planet what it deserves -- an ethical, trustworthy, encyclopedic record of human knowledge.

Did you play any poker, Anthony?