Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

Now I know that I had been On and Off in Arabic Wikipedia and Wikimedia in general, but I can’t just quit, it somehow runs in my blood. As soon as I heard about Wikimania 2005, The First International Wikimedia Conference, I rushed in, and registered in it. Now putting aside all the great things about this conference, the name my itself GREAT :) Wikimania, sure I got it to some degree.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with what Wikimedia/Wikipedia/Wiki is allow me to explain for a second. Wikimedia is basically a project that sponsors and encourages the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content.. Sounds Scary, right :) well it is not, as the the method it uses for the development and growth of the content, which is called Wiki, allows anyone to edit anything. Now first thing that comes to the evil minds of ours is that this means vandalists and “Bad” people can make a mess, put lies, and “do bad”. Well, as “anyone” can edit, it means that “anyone” can correct and rollback any vadalists. This basically relies on the fact that the good people in this world are larger than the “bad” people .. so far this fact had proved right, and all Wiki project had more overwhelming growth than initially expected.

Now Wikimedia have many projects under it’s umbrella, most significantly Wikipedia the free encyclopedia with over 500,000 article for English version, and 1 million over all languages, as well there is Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary; Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks; Wikiquote, a rich repository of famous quotes (including those of Homer Simpson, Ghandi, and Kramer of Seinfeld :). As well there is the new project of Wikinews, which is a free news source; and Wikisource, a repository for primary source material; and last but not least Wikimedia Commons, a repository for images and sound data.

What really made me love all this is the fact that you “CAN” and probably “SHOULD” make a difference. Many Wikipedian (Wikipedia editors) can tell you stories about how one small couple of lines that he edited or made ended up as a rich and comprehensive articles. I guess that the Wikipedia could be the most successful attempt so far to document the human knowledge.

If you hadn’t already tried it, give it a shot, make a fix, and help make a difference.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 at 10:35 am and is filed under , . You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.