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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Some notes on Wikipedia

I’ve been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it’s always good to have something to take your mind off things I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautiful Wikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:

  • It’s not just Wikipedia any more; there’s also Wiktionary (a multi-lingual dictionary), Wikibooks (developing open content books on various topics), Wikiquote (quotations), Wikisource (a repository of public domain source texts), Wikispecies (a biological species database), Wikicommons (free images and other media) and Wikinews (a new Wikipedia-style news site). Not to mention the huge numbers of projects in other languages.
  • You can view live stat graphs of the Wikipedia squid cache servers and see an overview of the status of all Wikipedia servers.
  • Last year’s drive for donations was mostly spent on new hardware, and a detailed list of hardware orders is available.
  • Wikipedia’s awesome TeX engine for presenting mathematical formulae may soon be expanded to support rendering of musical scores, SVG graphics, chemical formulae and more, thanks to the brilliant Wikitex module for MediaWiki.
  • Wikisource has a bunch of stories by H. P. Lovecraft!
  • Wikipedia’s Periodic table links to detailed descriptions of every single element.
  • Live recent changes feed is a page that shows edits to Wikipedia in real time. It works by keeping the HTTP connection to your browser open and sending updates packaged as JavaScript calls (I think this is the same trick used by CGI:IRC).
  • The channel #enrc.wikipedia on irc.freenode.net carries a bot-produced live feed of recent changes to Wikipedia. Edits occur so frequently that the bot had to be split in to five to avoid being flooded off the channel!
  • Wikipedia has a huge vandalism problem, but malicious edits are cleared up so fast that you’d be hard pressed to spot it.
  • The Wikimedia foundation has an attractive quarterly newsletter, the Wikimedia Quarto. September’s issue includes an interview with Ward Cunningham.
  • Wikipedia provides a great way to sharpen your language skills; not only does Wikibooks have guides to teaching yourself French and German (among others) but the multi-lingual versions of Wikipedia provide excellent practise in reading comprehension. Compare the English and French entries on Bath, for example.
  • The Wikimedia foundation recently received a small grant to develop a series of children’s books.

The deeper I dig in to Wikipedia, the more amazed I become. I see it as more than just a collaborative encyclopaedia; it’s a testament to humanity’s ability to work together for the greater good. I guess you could say I’m in WikiLove :)

Update: Fixed links, thanks to corrections posted in the comments. If this entry had been a wiki page, people could have fixed them themselves...

Posted 23rd December 2004 at 12:57 am

This is Some notes on Wikipedia by Simon Willison, posted on 23rd December 2004.

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16 comments

  1. I agree, the Wikipedia is an awesome resource. It's amazing to watch articles grow from stubs to definitive authorities in the space of months.

    My own addiction is to the Internet Explorer page, which I have been attempting to NPOV for the last six months. It's probably one of the most critical and highly-discussed pages out there and great fun to edit.

    Chris Beach - 23rd December 2004 12:59 - #

  2. Hi, Theres just so much there! BTW both Bath links point to the english version at the moment.

    Ben Meadowroft - 23rd December 2004 13:24 - #

  3. Nice write-up, Simon. Note how the Wikipedia favicon looks an awful lot like the WordPress one, it's scary.

    Mathias Bynens - 23rd December 2004 16:12 - #

  4. Thanks Simon. I was already a big fan of Wikipedia, though your review revealed to me that I've that I've only scratched the surface of this resource. Cheers

    scott - 23rd December 2004 18:17 - #

  5. I think it would be a great idea to homeschool kids using Wikipedia. It has articles about EVERYTHING!

    Dante Evans - 24th December 2004 00:08 - #

  6. It's all about the big W.

    Matt - 24th December 2004 06:42 - #

  7. The President?

    Jeremy Dunck - 24th December 2004 17:23 - #

  8. Your wikispecies link goes to wikisource

    Robb - 25th December 2004 05:40 - #

  9. Thanks for the write-up, Simon. You saved me the trouble of a long Wikipedia write-up.

    Here's the link from my blog referencing this page. Take care!

    tom sherman - 26th December 2004 19:18 - #

  10. That Homeschooling comment is a good one. I have a 2yr old, that I plan on homeschooling. I am confident that I could do so with 100% open source/free content. Thanks to RMS for the GPL, and wikimedia. Very cool post.

    bjay - 30th December 2004 21:51 - #

  11. While I'm a huge believer in wikis and Free Software, I'm somewhat dubious of both homeschooling and the idea that Wikipedia could be a primary basis for education.

    I have not been convinced that homeschooling is overall a better proposition for an education (including the kind you won't find in texts) than the social environment of schools.

    Not that I'm a fan of the American public education system; I think it fails in many ways.

    Do people who homeschool do so in order to make their child's education suck less?

    Please don't take the populist position that if Wikipedia works, then homeschooling must. Wikipedia is peer-reviewed (albeit in an informal manner) and has a scale that no homeschooling cooperative could achieve.

    As for Wikipedia being a primary source, I find it compelling and useful, but I wouldn't trust it on the less-popular entries. There are definite problems of both grammar and fact. (Yes, I know, these things get fixed.) The point I'm trying to make is that in order to use Wikipedia well, you have to understand how to just the accuracy of what you're reading; more so than usual educational texts, I'd say.

    Of course there's the position that mainstream educational texts distort the truth, but shouldn't that position also espouse open discussions that homeschooling seems to pointedly avoid?

    Sorry if this seems like a flame. It's not my intent.

    Jeremy Dunck - 31st December 2004 06:09 - #

  12. If you are going to write about homeschooling and wikipedia maybe it would help if you actually read the Wikipedia entry first? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschool

    It's a fairly well balanced high level overview.

    Interestingly, "An education that sucks less" isn't listed as one of the primary reasons to homeschool.

    The whole concept of homeschooling is open source. Homeschooling is free as in speech, not as in beer. I don't think it's possible to craft a well rounded curriculum completely from open source sources. The reality is you only have so much time in a day, and often it is more productive to buy a math curriculum that has been proven to work by millions and millions of kids. However, by combining free sources of info on the Web, traditional curriculum elements, and the public library, you can definitely get an education that far, far surpasses what they get in the schools, and you can do far quicker and far less expensively too.

    Chris ODonnell - 31st December 2004 14:56 - #

  13. Thanks for the flame-retardent response, Chris. :)

    Jeremy Dunck - 1st January 2005 15:37 - #

  14. It's a fairy extensive set of resources and I have found it extremely useful in the past.

    Robert - 4th January 2005 13:22 - #

  15. The "recent changes" IRC dump has moved to irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia - and similar addresses for other languages.

    Ole - 29th May 2005 16:48 - #

  16. Wikipedia is wicked, i've used it to quickly find all sorts of information and regularly recommend it to new surfing buddies. Your article just serves to hilight how little I knew about wikipedia tho' so now there's a whole wikifolder on my favourites! Thanks for that.

    Millie Andrews - 25th October 2006 12:58 - #

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