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# Wikipedia commentary/The future of Wikipedia

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I think that we have grown a Wikipedia community. Wikipedia is a volunteer project that was made possible by Bomis. However, we have invested in our favourite project a lot of enthusiasm, time and (in some cases) money. It is quite natural that we want Wikipedia to prosper.
In my opinion it is a time to stop and discuss. Discuss the future of Wikipedia.
How does Bomis see it ?
How does Nupedia see it ?
How do we ?

The future might be or might not as bright as our imagination whispers into our ears.
Wikipedia is a great idea combined with a new, revolutionary software and it has a lot of brilliant committed authors. Her growth is explosive. But there are also weaknesses (Wikinesses ?) brought to light by some of us.

## Reliability

The other side of the free writing style in Wikipedia is quite possible lack of reliability.
This lack of reliability would in the end undermine Wikipedia's credibility and ultimately her success.
This issue must be tackled, and as soon as possible. I don't agree here with Larry Sanger and his view "self-healing". It is an example of elated wishful thinking that is misleading us.
I'd rather agree with Piotr Wozniak. His ideal of reliability is EB and he is anxious about the potential lack of it in Wikipedia.
I am very interested in other people views. To start the creative process of discussion I'll give you my (Kpjas) idea :

  Why not create two parallel Wikipedias one public Wikipedia that is almost frozen (apart from Talk pages, Feature requests pages and the like). And the working Wikipedia for contributors. Foreseeing your criticisms of the proposal that it would hamper netizen involvement - Edit this page could lead into the working Wikipedia.

## Scalability

There are two ways of Wikipedia growth - global or niche.
If we decide in favour of global growth - being slashdotted only first symptom of a serious problem.
I'll give you my (Kpjas) idea :

  Nowadays distributed software solutions are the height of fashion. Why not devise a distributed Wikipedia ? Programmers ?

## Multimedia

A picture can say more than, say, several Wikipedia articles.
It is rather trivial.
I think that Wikipedia without pictures, video, and audio is not a real encyclopedia.
I wonder if you think my propositions worthwhile :

  AudioWikipedia?, PhotoWikipedia?, VideoWikipedia? - pages that can be linked from the real Wikipedias but having only a title and Talk pages.

## Internal data format

This point is connected with <b>Software<b> issue below.
Current data format is otherwise an example of excellent software solution. But understandably the creator of it did not envision the scale of Wikipedia. It poses numerous problems like searching through Wikipedia and others.

  My (Kpjas) thoughts wander around XML data format in connection with a free database? like MySQL. And your thoughts ?

## Editorial process

Much has been said about it but not much done.
We have an excellent and hard-working editor-in-chief - Larry Sanger but I think Wikipedia in current form needs several such editors and when it reaches 100,000 pages 1000 Larrys.
My idea (Kpjas is :

  Create editor teams online that would cross national Wikipedias borders. The teams would need tools to work effectively. One, the simplest, in terms of setting it up are separate mailing-list devoted to editorial groups like Architecture, Philosophy and so on.

## Software

Like any other open software project the software behind it should be free and open to all.
The same applies to Wikipedia software. As I said above wikipedia software (usemod wiki) is a revolutionary and of very good quality but needs of Wikipedia as a global encyclopedia of unrestrained growth go beyond that kind of software. See also above Internal data format.
On the Wikipedia mailing list BryceHarrington proposed making the Wikipedia software publicly available on CVS? for further collaboration on its development.

## Commercial and organizational issues

I'm no good at it. But to me it seems to be one the most important issues, second to wide netizen involvement.
Please, share your feelings and opinions here.

MichaelTinkler's comments

I certainly wish there were a way to have pictures and maps. I would like to be able to write about art and buildings that are viewable.

Who is going to choose the 'contributor' group as opposed to the 'reader' group. Do we know that there is a reader group anyway? I have a distinct feeling that those using wikipedia are those who are contributing.

The self-healing model is an incredibly optimistic one that depends on a civil society of the web to work. I am (so far) incredibly impressed with it, sleep/learning aside. I have had no trouble with my submissions; many of them have been improved by editing and additions (thanks rmhermen!). P.Wozniak's idea that the best writers are the least tolerant of others edits may mean that I am not a very good writer. Or that humility is a virtue that all of us, however good we think our writing or contributions are, have to cultivate if we're going to participate in a Wiki-format encyclopedia. If a contributor wants to feel pride in ownership as well as craftsmanship, that contributor should, at present, find another venue - Nupedia, for one.

There is in my field (Early Medieval Europe) an excellent peer-reviewed project, the Ecole Initiative (http://www2.evansville.edu/ecoleweb/). The peer-review editing process has slowed its growth to a C-R-A-W-L. One thing I like about wikipedia is that I can dash off a fairly stupid little biographical entry and then come back and flesh it out later. I'm building up a network of 8th and 9th century entries which are starting to satisfy me. Every now and then someone else takes a stab at 'em, and I'm grateful. MichaelTinkler

For authors who want to take credit for their work (like myself, usually;), but don't want to get stuck in endless peer reviews, the [Nupedia Chalkboard]? http://chalkboard.nupedia.com is the right place. It's the "controlled wikipedia" people seem to demand. See also Chalkboard candidates.

For the image issue, I solved that one for myself on the chalkboard by using the space at my virtualave site. Some people at wikipedia could group together and start a tripod site or something for their corner of wikipedia. They'd have to maintain the images is the tripod account is closed, though.

[Magnus Manske]?

I'll reply a bit to this on Wikipedia-L. --LMS

I'm sorry, but this drive for increased hierarchies, control, and rules is crap. Wikipedia doesn't need anal retentive people to chain and gag it. Read Hackers by Steven Levy to get some understanding of the difference between a free, open project driven by pride and quality, and the standard fear-driven system led by administrators, bureaucrats, and incompetents. Calling the "self-healing" theory "wishful thinking", without any evidence to back up your derision, is galling. I do support the distributed Wikipedia, and maybe trying to figure out multimedia, but that's rather ugly. --The Cunctator

I agree that some manner of ensuring Reliability would be a good thing. However, my implementation would be slightly different. Rather than a Public and Working Wikipedia, I would recommend a Stable version and a Development version. This emulates the development of open source software, where a stable (hopefully bug-free) version is periodically released for users, while the latest and greatest development version is also available to anyone interested in adding to the code or who is willing to take the risk of using a possibly less reliable version.

In my implementation, the Stable version would be frozen for a period of time (perhaps a few months, up to a year) and then updated from the Development version. The difficult part is determining what should be updated. I would suggest that shortly before the update, the Development version would go into a Beta phase, where wikipedians were encouraged to compare the development version of articles to the stable version to ensure the update would really be an improvement. The advantage of this approach is that authors would not have to constantly monitor their particular subjects to make sure an error wasn't added by someone else, instead they'd only have to review their subjects periodically against the stable version (during the Beta period).

It may also be worthwhile to impose some controls during the Beta period, such as only allowing editing of the talk pages, so these articles are relatively stable. People would then get a chance to review the beta articles and perhaps vote for or against them. Articles facing significant opposition would require review by Larry or other editors prior to being incorporated into the stable version. In this case the new development version would be released at the start of the Beta phase, so those who so desired could continue making contributions.

Having a set of "Stable" versions would be useful in the event of widespread vandalism (perhaps by a malicious script), since the last "Stable" version could simply be restored instead of having to sort through each individual article to find the last non-vandalized version of that particular article. In addition the "Stable" versions would be useful for the purpose of bibliographical referencing, since an author who quoted text from Wikipedia could cite it as (Wikipedia, v1, 2001) and wouldn't have to fear that the quoted text would be changed. In other words, text may change in future stable versions (eg. Wikipedia, v2, 2001), but the text in (Wikipedia, v1, 2001) would never change.

--[[Matt Stoker]

Matt's "stable" version made me think that it could be a good idea to have periodic "snapshots" of wikipedia. Each page has its history, but I'm not sure exactly how it works, and it is clear that not all the history is saved. It might have some archival value, or could be consulted in case something is inadvertidly changed, and the version needed is not availabe on the history any more. I would not be practical have it like a "live" wikipedia, but a compressed tarball every month or so, doesn't sound too farfetched too me. All the voting stuff though... i think there has been enough talk about editorial controls, aristocratic or democratic...the system seems to be working as it is.--AN

We already have "stable" and "development" encyclopedias: Nupedia and Wikipedia, respectively. I don't see any value at all imposing a level of QC on Wiki, when its very purpose is to encourage creation of lots of content that is free enough to be useable in a quality product like Nupedia. And there's no way around having a formal QC process like Nupedia's for producing a reliable product--we can certainly tweak the details of that process, but there does have to be a process of some kind, and accountability of some kind. Let's keep both products where they are until it becomes clear that that system doesn't work. That's not at all clear now--both are still in their infancy and we can't really predict yet how the system as a whole will scale. --LDC

I agree that Nupedia might be able to act as the "stable" version It really is too early to know if Nupedia will succeed. However, by definition Nupedia requires a lot of editorial review work, that must be performed by a limited staff. This means that Nupedia will progress relatively slowly. By and large most of my proposal could be automated and could be implemented on a large scale much more rapidly. It would help improve the quality of wikipedia without interfering much with the development. Thus would ultimately benefit Nupedia as well, since they could then get higher quality articles from wikipedia.

Even if the Beta stage part of my suggestion isn't deemed worthwhile, I still think it would be a good idea to periodically (semi-annually or anually) make a frozen "stable" version for bibliographical and archival purposes (see the modifications in my comment above).

--Matt Stoker

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Last edited August 16, 2001 5:28 pm (diff)
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