Episode 64: Annual Report
Fuzheado, Tawker and Witty Lama team up to bring you the latest Wiki news and commentary.
Topics include:
The first ever Annual Report, the General User Survey currently underway, statistics indicating that the community on mailing lists is in decline, experiments in changing RfA, plans to censor the internet in Australia and statistics about types of Featured Articles.
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Great discussion guys. Excellent listening — it is a pleasure.
I like the “fair notice” concept a lot, Andrew.
Regarding the Technology Review article, I thought about this a bit because as with you I thought it was obviously and utterly wrong to say that Wikipedia ever purports to present the “truth”. But I think perhaps the author’s point, which was not well articulated, may have been that the problem is that people treat it as “the truth”, because of the -pedia moniker which is a kind of appeal to authority. That maybe readers think the deal is, “Trust us because we are a reference work, part of an academic tradition.” Of course we Wikimedians don’t exactly intend to offer this deal, but that is what people take from it.
And probably that is a problem, but I am not sure it is totally Wikipedia’s problem, rather than the populace at large’s.
Comment by pfctdayelise — November 4, 2008 @ 8:53 am
Hm, perhaps in a podcast in which you mock Conservapedia for their non-neutrality, you shouldn’t also be ridiculing American patriotism or referring to Australia’s left wing as “the good guys”. Or maybe those kinds of comments should just be kept out of a mass-audience, non-political podcast in the first place.
Comment by Yaron — November 4, 2008 @ 7:40 pm
Yaron:
I appreciate your concern but in response let me say –
We are not representing any official position and all opinions are the responsibility of their owners. Furthermore, we make no suggestion that we are “neutral” nor overtly non-political. When politics strays into our area of conversation then we make our opinions known.
Finally, although I don’t recall if I said “good guys” as a quote, even if I did it was not to imply that the Australian-left is always good and everyone else isn’t. Rather, that in the topic of Internet censorship (in Aust.) anyone who is fighting that is, in my books, a “good guy”.
I hope this clarifies things.
Comment by wittylama — November 6, 2008 @ 2:10 am
(Posted on the wrong podcast, so posting here now
) A great podcast, but I agree perhaps the POV stuff should be kept to a minimum (I do know that it’s often the case with these kinds of discussions that it veers off, though, and that’s what makes them fun to listen to.) I would like to see interviews with the big content contributors like Hink, hopefully he’s interesting 
Comment by DavidFuchs — November 10, 2008 @ 9:38 pm