Wales on Wikipedia

Friday night I hitched a ride down to the city with Mark and Linda to see Jimmy Wales give a Long Now talk on Wikipedia. I jotted down a few notes of interest:

Afterwards we went out to Osha Thai Restaurant on 2nd Street, where Stephanie met up with us for some mind blowing green curry. The service not so. Afterwards: drinks and music at 111 Minna.

Update: Stewart Brand’s summary of Wales’ talk via the O’Reilly Radar.

3 Comments

Mmm. Mind-blowing green curry.

Mark

It was a great talk indeed. I still continue to refer to it. The “social, not technological” is such a critical point. Along those lines, I just read about the struggles of Building Wikipedia in African languages. Imagine an English Wikipedia with only 1000 articles or one in which non-native speakers were the primary authors.

Heh, leaving comments on old posts is so awesome. It’s one reason I don’t automatically close posts after a while.

I wonder if the Peace Corps will help bridge that divide in the future. What a fun assignment to boot: help native speakers of an African language write encyclopedia articles in their native tongue.

Might be interesting to hear Vernor Vinge speaking on Feb 15, 2007. His name was dropped a few times in a seminar I took on Virtual Communities, re: his book, A Fire Upon the Deep.

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