Blog/HD quotes 4
Memorable quotes from Conference day #1
Jimbo Wales (during his keynote):
- "If we don't get [stable versions] done and rolled out in English Wikipedia by the time I do my keynote next year, this will be a real mistake."
- "Mission accomplished. " -about the English and German editions of Wikipedia. (He was being ironic.)
- "Is there anybody in charge of this conference?"
Alexander Halavais: (About Wikipedia's authoritativeness) "The problem is that librarians say - it's not reliable because it's on the web. Oh no wait, there are authoritative sources on the web. We don't like it because it's not peer reviewed. Oh wait, no, it is peer reviewed, but we don't like it because they're not peers we like."
Unidentified onlooker, watching attendees return to Pound after Lessig's talk in the Ames moot courtroom: "Who are all of you people?"
Unidentified Wikipedian: "We're the world's largest Easter egg hunt."
Jim Giles: (On doing a study of Wikipedia's accuracy) "And this was important because I looked around the Nature office and noticed that so many people were using Wikipedia"
Andre Engels: "I think the reactions [to the Nature study] are interesting - Britannica takes three months to criticize you, and Wikipedia takes one week to fix all the errors"
Jim Giles: (On the Nature study about Wikipedia) "I do remember quite a few reviewers saying - 'What is Wikipedia?'"
Joel West: (To Meeks) "You're a philosophy major, I'm a management professor. I actually believe there's a reality out there."
Paul Kobasa: (One librarian describing Wikipedia to another librarian) "... And he had a wonderful phrase to describe people like him and me - he said we're like the scriptorium monks who are meeting [Johann] Gutenberg for the first time"
Paul Kobasa: "Someone asked me why, as an employee of Worldbook, I was going to Wikimania. And I said that we were jealous of all the press that Encyclopedia Britannica is getting"
Alex Halavais: (On using PhDs to do article validation) "The PhD thing bothers me - I have one, so they hand them out to anybody"
A random radio journalist: "So this is like Woodstock?"