wikipedia




JW’s WIkia session

Originally uploaded by Ilya Eric Lee.

Wikimania 2007 Taipei 第二天 Jimmy 給了 wikia 的演講。裡面除了熱血沸騰的中國問題表態(大約是這樣的話):

「以後中國人們會記得,在 Microsoft,Yahoo! 跟 Google 背叛他們的時候, wikipedia 曾經跟他們站在一起,不離不棄…(後面沒有了)」

還有 eBay 歐洲的 Gil Penchina(wikia 的內場總管)與各式各樣的 wikia 內容產品。他有提到 wikia 買下 grub 的未來方向,以及一張 Fast Company 雜誌封面故事照片:「Google 最大的惡夢!」。

Fast Company 超級精彩的報導 Why is this man smiling?(「這個男人在笑什麼?」) 引人入勝地從 Virgin 集團背後金主 Sir Richard Branson 私人假期中,Larry Page 與 Jimmy Wales 的各項比賽開始說起。Jimbo 划船贏了 Page,而 Page 在風箏衝浪(kite surfing)上讓 Jimbo 輸得很難看。

話鋒一轉,話題就回到了 Google 跟 Wikipedia 的競逐上。令人印象最深的就是這段話:

“the search engine that changes everything…. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.”

Wikia 的演講中,Jimmy 大約也是講這樣的意思。沒有 Apache、Mysql 之前,我們需要 IBM 跟 Microsoft 才能夠夠架設網站走向世界。沒有其他的搜尋可能出現之前,我們需要 Google。現在因為有 Grub、有 Jabber 作者 Jeremie Miller 加入開放搜尋平台,Wikia Search 即將帶領大家走向後 Google 的搜尋時代。

你可以在這篇字字珠璣的報導中看到 Jimmy 的際遇、野心與矛盾。(不過,我們那一個人沒有矛盾呢?笑)他的私人好友稱呼他是網路世界的大使,充分地放手(這實在不容易)讓維基人打造不同的世界。成功與失敗的關鍵都決定於他如何激勵社群發揮多少的能量。你可以說他根本還不知道到底要怎麼打敗 Google,你也可以說他早已掌握最重要的精神,開放一切可能,讓所有的各種族群的生物們自在地加入魔多遠征軍,摩拳擦掌向那不可知的終點邁進。

Ecademy 的 Thomas Power 寫了一篇 Is Search Wikia going to become Google’s worst nightmare? 整理了 Fast Company 的報導跟他自己的看法:

…His vision for Search Wikia includes a desire to make its inner workings transparent in order to engender trust in its results. “I trust Google reasonably well,” he says, “but that’s like saying you have a favorite politician. I trust this politician, but I still want the city council to meet publicly.” Wales a man with principles too - he has never cooperated with China’s efforts to censor Wikipedia, whereas Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all acquiesced.

…Wales thinks that search should focusing on what people click on, and the content of web pages - in other words, search that acts in a human way - must give better results than a machine (and insiders say this is what Google is focusing on now). But how are you going to do it better and bigger than Google? Dave Winer, who pioneered RSS feeds for media distribution over the Internet, says “Even if there are reasons to believe that Wales’s effort will fail, I’m glad he’s trying.”

幾乎所有人都不知道最後會如何 :) 但是大家都很期待 Jimmy 的即興(as long as it’s fun)演出,能夠帶給網路社群下一波的成長力量。距離上次幫他翻譯迄今已經一年多了;我對他的印象還是那位住在佛羅里達的平凡有錢長輩,坐飛機抱著最新的 MacBookPro 對群眾作很實際的演說。但是他的神奇之處就是這種平凡的魔力,讓一群來自四面八方、才華洋溢、卓凡出眾的能人異士,在這個 wikipedia 的大雨傘下聚集、碰撞想法與實踐的可能。

所以即便是充滿著疑慮,我們還是一起捍衛著這些理念,摩肩擦踵地往 Web 2.0 的前方走去。

Charles Leadbeater on Jimmy Wales in “We Think: Why Massive Creativity is the Next Big Thing”. Thank Charles for his open draft online.

聽到 Jimmy Wales 述說他的 wikipedia 誕生與成長的故事,我覺得我就像是在 1913 年亨利福特在高地公園發表他的移動式生產線構想的前夕,聆聽他的故事。(接著是福特功績的描述)

…Listening to Jimmy Wales spin his tale of Wikipedia’s birth and growth I imagined was like listening to Henry Ford on the eve of his launching his moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913. Until Ford came along car production had been an odd-ball activity.The US produced 7,000 cars a year,mainly from small workshops owned by rich people and they were then sold to other rich people.No one had dared think cars could be for the masses.They could not see how that might be done. But for most of that decade, Ford a renegade outsider and his team of engineers, had been experimenting with a fundamentally different approach to production,with the aim of creating a product for a mass market of mid-Western farmers.A bit like the encyclopaedias of today, the car workshops of 1913 used only skilled craftsmen to make bespoke products. Ford wanted to use a rag-bag army of barely literate workers to achieve the task.To most of the rest of the car industry it must have sounded crazy.Yet most of the ingredients of Ford’s mass production system were already around to be borrowed: the moving line came from the meat packing industry; the interchangeable parts came from the machine tool industry; the scheduling skills came from railroads. Ford’s genius was to understand how they could be brought together. Ford created a new way to see organisations: how to mobilise resources on a mass scale, to make standardised products for mass markets and in the process bring about far reaching social and economic changes.What Ford did for the industrial economy Jimmy Wales is doing for the knowledge economy. And like Ford he is doing it by borrowing ideas from many different sources.None of the organisational ingredients that make up Wikipedia are in themselves new: peer review comes from academia and science; the wiki was a tool developed elsewhere on the net; the encyclopedia is a well established form; the way Wikipedia settles disputes borrows from other, older communities; the barefoot philosophy of amateurs doing jobs previously reserved for professionals was pioneered by social entrepreneurs. What is new is the way that Wales and Wikipedia has put it all together. Even now most people cannot see how the mass of people could become participants in innovation rather than merely consumers. Yet just as Ford transformed the way we made products, so Wales and others of his ilk are transforming the way we create ideas, together.

Techcrunch 先生寫了一篇「維基戰場」(Battleground Wikipedia),現在大家紛紛捲起袖子、加入了維基戰場。Theage.com.au 寫了一篇報導(Microsoft ‘tried to doctor Wikipedia’ 〈微軟試圖要「教訓」維基百科〉)「忠實」地反映了這個多方混戰的情勢:

Microsoft has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse today after it offered to pay an Australian blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.

吉米金寶老大當然說,不、不、不囉。

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries.

So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.(想死啊?)
“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

更有趣的是,微軟竟然說某篇文章是 IBM 的人寫的?哇哈哈哈哈。哇哈哈。微軟的人說的話實在不是太能夠拯救這種 PR 災難。老實說,當這篇文章最後提到 Rick 自己的說法時,我還真的蠻可以認同 Rick 的想法的。

我前幾篇文章沒有說到,從我後來重新把網路上的 Rick 跟當時中研院上課的 Rick 接起來開始,我知道的他一直在網路上掛著「僱用我吧!」這樣的大型看版,尋找雇主。他一直在用自己的專業能力,努力的要找工作支持自己的生活。所以當他說:

沒有人 pay 我,我為甚麼要去改 wiki 的條目?

我完全可以體會他一致的立場與表達。如果別人(英文維基人)不能夠體會他的工作原則,而認為「每個人都應該無償、自由地在維基百科上表達意見」,那麼我覺得…這樣的網路多元民主,好像有點集體暴力的感覺。

2006 年在新加坡碰到 Andrew Lih 與 Isaac Mao,我們談論到 wikipedia 終究將與真實世界的身份相逢。當我們談論到一篇文章與相關討論的專業性時,我們無法純粹引用網路世界當中的 credit,忽略真實世界的身份、專業與歷史。不僅僅 wiki 世界當中是如此,blog 與其他的社會網路服務也是如此。該怎麼相逢,應該是我們得要認真思考的問題。

感謝 b6s 分享 link 資訊。 :)