jimmy’s talks at the wikicamp.in Chennai

February 25, 2007 at 4:21 am (wikicamp)

 

Objective of wiki – every single person having access to the sum of all human knowledge

first open source software and then open ‘content’

initially dismissed as ‘unworkable’, wiki now has hundreds and thousands of contributors and in the number of unique articles about half million and growing exponentially.

1999, Jimmy had the idea for a freely licensed encyclopedia (Nupedia) by 1000s of volunteers in many languages but became a failure (12 articles after 2 years of work and $250000 was the output) because it was in a controlled environment.

Learnings : most people are basically good but we didn’t trust them and hence it was very rigid, A simple vision is a great thing to guide the movement.

muppet wiki (sesame street) has 13000+ articles !!!!

the number of wikia (topic encylopedia like muppet wiki, magazines like armchair gm, social communities like fanon or furry and hybrids relating to campaigns) that have 1000 articles : 88

Jimmy concluded his speech saying ‘i am working on a search engine project which would be transparent (algorithims that would be published) , participatory (rankings clearly known) and free(change the competitive landscape that would enable anybody with a modest investment by starting a search engine ‘