Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, came to speak. Amazingly, someone seems to have transcribed his talk and put it on Wikipedia. An excerpt:
[W]e haven’t seen any really formal tests yet in English, and I’m really hoping we’ll see some soon, [but] there was a test done by C’t, which is a big German computer magazine, where they went out and they got experts from different subject domains. And they did a comparison between Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta the German edition, and Brockhouse Multimedia DVD. ([] Brockhouse is basically the Britannica in German)… [T]hey had experts actually compare the content just for comprehensiveness and things like that, and Wikipedia won hands down.
Some things seem to be missing from the transcript, though, such as Wales’s boast that “we’re big enough now that I could call the New York Times and get on the front page” if someone like Microsoft ever went after them.
After the talk, I follow Wales to his car and chat with him a little. He’s very friendly and nice, he seems like just an average moderately-intelligent guy. He says he’s going off to have dinner with Sergey Brin of Google. I think about suggesting that he ask Brin to host Wikipedia, since Google’s mission is universal access to all the world’s information and Wikipedia is constantly having hosting problems. The next day I find that Google did indeed offer to host Wikipedia.
posted February 27, 2005 02:18 AM (Education) (1 comments) #