Dave Lemen

Wiki Rock Star

So I'm sitting here, listening to Jimmy Wales give a talk on Wikipedia to techies and managers for a rather large enterprise. I'm sure he's given this talk thousands of times before, but he's amazingly calm and collected, considering that Wikipedia was completely down this morning and is barely limping along right now.

He's covered some interesting inner-workings type stuff, and gave a great illustration for the philosophy behind wikis. He said giving steak knives to diners at a restaurant is dangerous, because one of the diners could kill another diner with his steak knife. But we reject one possible solution: putting each diner behind bars so he can't get at the other patrons. Such a "gatekeeper" approach is inappropriate for social software too, when an "accountability" model makes better sense.

From his MediaWiki Roadmap slide:

• Wysiwyg (Wikiwyg) - Ingy
• Client API
• Ajax features
• Multi-tier architecture (db layer ok, UI and domain layer intertwined) -- The wiki text parser in particular is a monster, and everyone's afraid to touch it.
• Heuristics for vandalism -- Most "vandalism" is actually "sandboxing," where people who don't believe they can actually edit the page unintentionally break a page.
• WAP/wireless output -- Wikipedia sucks on your cell phone now, but could be a killer app if it worked.

Update: Jimmy will be talking to NPR later this afternoon. I'm guessing that means he'll be on All Things Considered today.

Another update: I see Jimmy's steak knife story has already been posted.