Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales is the keynote speaker on the first day of the Online Information conference.
He comes across as a genuine and thoughtful person with a huge commitment to open source, transparency and community involvement in projects. Wikipedia was the first result of his enthusiasms.
His keynote is entitled "Web 2.0 in action:free culture and community on the move". This suggests that he will be forward-looking and concentrate on his current long-term Wikia or Wikia Search projects (blogged here in January) rather than backward-looking and talking about Wikipedia.
If you are used to the traditional approach to computing, you'd expect a destination to be defined and the route to that destination mapped out with checkpoints along the way. Be prepared for a shock.
The approach that Wikia Search takes is to define a set of principles and the general structure of the project. This then acts as a magnet to the sort of people who are interested. They form communities depending on their specialisations and, at some point downstream, the great mass of the general public get involved, using the tools developed by the initial community.
Where wikipedia involves the world in contributing original material, the Wikia project is concerned with clothing existing information with value. The theory is that this will help refine search results and, partly through complete transparency and partly through community influence, be very difficult to game.
Just because Jimmy Wales made a great name for himself with Wikipedia doesn't mean that he can succeed again with search. But he's taking a pragmatic approach by doing the spidering and indexing just like the other engines but then using humans to refine the results by thumbs ups, thumbs downs and other more sophisticated assessments.
The project will take time to evolve and it's possible it will challenge the existing search giants in the same way that wikipedia has become a port of call for millions more users than traditional encyclopaedias. Who knows? Even Wales doesn't. He certainly never talks that way. But his thoughtful exploration of the issues around community development and participation should make for interesting and challenging listening.
See you there?
I have taken a large chunk out of this for a story accepted by MyNews India.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mynews.in/fullstory.aspx?storyid=1351
The leading point came from his interview, the Wikipedia policy of expanding languages. My assumption is that this will involve more mobile devices. The IMS part of the show seems to assume corporate control of a network.
I will do a revised version for OhmyNews with what actually happens.
Hi Will. Feel free to take what you like from my online stuff. You give credit and that's all that matters to me. Obviously publishers will feel differently. Or maybe that's changing now.
ReplyDeleteRe: the blogger badge - I got it from an American publication, and I really ought to know who. The first person I saw at the event admitting to being a blogger was Phil Bradley. That was the trigger for me starting to blog.