Conference, New Media & Technology

LIFT07: Florence Devouard – Wikipedia: a social innovation?”

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Wikipedia.org

Florence Devouard the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia spoke about “Wikipedia: a social innovation ?” at LIFT07 on February 8, 2007 she covered the basic facts of wikipedia worldwide and the comparisons between the other encyclopedia and wikipedia model, she also mentions wikipedia upcoming solutions such as delivery wikipedia entries in other formats for the countries not having access online such as freely licensed text-books that will make another revolution education in future.

Wikipedia.org invites everyone to take a part online and create articles they opened the gate for online citizens, to contribute on the website of entire humanity, letting people to create articles and make them responsible for the content they create.

But what remains the biggest challenge for Wikipedia is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) since many users today are using the biased sources from text-books who are also biased on their way as a reference to create articles. This brings controversy among many online activists who try to create articles based on facts as a primary source.

An example can be Kosovo article in Wikipedia which is still stub and closed for editing cause of vandalism by contributors, if you monitor this page u can see the history of editing is much frequented and never the truth appears on the Kosovo article. So there is a lot to do in NPOV

Apart from the Florence discussion, there was a simple mistaken discussion about that Wikipedia has money for another three months which got exploded in Blogosphere the next day after her speech and this is what makes blogging attractive. The video explains it all on what Florence Devouard and Laurent Haug really discussed.

Language is major issue on wikipedia which seems to be very English-centered way of creating articles. On wikipedia stats regarding the languages I took these facts about wikipedia articless in languages around in balkans, where Romanian language leads in there.

Romanian: 58 496 articles
Slovenian: 45 900 articles
Serbian: 43 824 articles
Bulgarian: 37 533 articles
Croatian: 29 414 articles
Bosnian: 17 259 articles
Albanian: 14 279 articles
Macedonian: 9 348 articles

Enjoy the Wikipedia story on LIFT07