For those of you who are looking to keep up on the excited world of user generated content, social news, search and Wikipedia; Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikipedia Foundation, was interviewed on the BBC’s Radio Five Live.
Phil Bradley writes that the interview is available for a couple of days, and then will be archived. He has however put together a basic transcription of the interview’s key points.
Here are some excerpts:
SM: How many trouble makers are there?
JW: A lot of the kinds of trouble are pretty easy to spot and we have stringent rules on biographies of living people, and negative comments are properly sourced. People constantly vandalizing and others fixing… goes on all the time and is background noise.
SM: The printing press dramatically affected our lives – can you assess any political/cultural implications of the availability of data that we’re experiencing now?
JW: People are producers and consumers, and people want their information made available and most people want to share their data. [Goes on to explain the Creative Commons] The free culture movement is huge, and he thinks it’s a new economy of sharing.
SM:Does it change how we live?
JW: Some of our laws, such as intellectural property laws are strained and a one size fits all copyright doesn’t help – eg text books that are out of date by about 15 years – we could have them in the Wikipedia in weeks if we were allowed to.
