Sip from the what?

In When it comes to Wikipedia, love trumps selfishness, a blog entry written today by Paul C. Campos, there’s a claim that Wikipedia doesn’t suffer the tragedy of the commons because building it is an “act of love”. This is in reference to what Clay Shirky had to say in his recently published new book Here comes everybody (if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you get a copy). In it, Shirky likened Wikipedia to the Ise Shrine in Japan which each generation of Shinto priests has torn down and rebuilt for a total of 61 times in the past 1,300 years. Now, I love Shirky’s writings and I think he’s dead-on in many aspects in his book but I think he’s missing some subtleties of how Wikipedia works that are essential to understanding why it works. The flaw in Campos’ statement, built on top of Shirky’s analysis, is that he pre-supposes that Wikipedia is a public resource, that is, everyone has the right to use it and no one has the right to exclude anyone else from doing so. That’s not really a good way to characterize Wikipedia though. (more…)

Frank Schulenburg, vice chair of Wikimedia Deutschland, has made a video of the new Wikimedia Deutschland office. I gave a short interview in it trying to answer the question “What was the most significant event for Wikimedia this year?” Watch me look at everything but the camera and shaking my head for no apparant reason…