<CPOV> The World According to Jimmy Wales?

[John Erling Blad]

I was told this is a list of scientific discussions about Wikipedia, but it
seems like this is wrong?
Can someone clarify whats the purpose of the list.
John

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net> wrote:

> Maja,
>
> Maybe there's an off switch on the Jimbo Machine,
> and I really hope we find it someday, but in the
> meantime it roves the world searching for places
> where they haven't heard his line of bull before.
>
> The only thing that will save the world is that it's finite.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
> Maja van der Velden wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Until i started to prepare for my presentation at the CPOV conference, i
>> never really paid attention to Jimmy Wales. Now i do ;-) So i read this
>> interview with him in a Norwegian newspaper last Saturday. The article has
>> the title ' Jimmypedia'. Here is a section from the interview (translated
>> from the Norwegian):
>>
>> ----
>> Jimmy Wales on several occasions expressed that Wikipedia is going to save
>> the world.
>>
>> "I think Wikipedia has already saved the world. But I still think the
>> biggest impact lies ahead, "he said.
>>
>> -In developing countries, access to information has been extremely limited
>> and in many languages, we are the first encyclopedia that exists. When you
>> talk with people who try to help schools in Africa, they say that they teach
>> material from textbooks that were written 30 years ago. People in Africa may
>> know more about what happened in England in the 70th century than what
>> happened in the neighboring country until recently. The lack of information
>> is an opportunity for tyrants, and others who want to manipulate the truth.
>>
>> He thinks the first Wikipedia page in the Arabic language is important,
>> even though it still only has 125,000 articles.
>>
>> "There has never existed any traditional encyclopaedia in Arabic. Now
>> there is here. A few years ago as many books were translated into Arabic in
>> one year as there were books were translated into German in one day. So
>> there is a huge population that has not had access to information the rest
>> of us take for granted. And one of my favorite projects is the Wikipedia
>> page in the Wolof language in Senegal. So far, only 1000 articles, but it's
>> a start. I am incredibly excited at the idea that we are in Wolof. I love
>> it.
>> ----
>>
>> Where does this 'saving the world' idea come from? What does it mean in
>> the context of Wikipedia? Anyone knows?
>>
>> What he says about encyclopedias in Arabic is of course nonsense (there is
>> a rich history of encyclopedia-writing in the Arab world). Wikipedia itself
>> has some entries on Arab encyclopedias:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia#Arabic_and_Persian
>>
>> and for some examples of their authors, see:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Encyclopedists
>>
>> A quick look online and i found these Wiki-style Arabic
>> lexicons/encyclopedias:
>>
>> Global Arabic Encyclopedia: http://www.mawsoah.net
>> Dahsha: http://www.dahsha.com/
>>
>> Is it his ignorance or is Wales purposely creating a world in which
>> he/Wikipedia can be the saviour?
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Maja
>>
>
> --
>
> inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
> mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey
> knol: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/1
> oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cpov_listcultures.org mailing list
> Cpov_listcultures.org at p10.alfaservers.com
> http://p10.alfaservers.com/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/cpov_listcultures.org/attachments/20100524/cd88ab07/attachment.html>