These are my raw notes from Jimmy Wales’ talk at NYU.
Pictures are here.

Right before Jimmy starts speaking, John Perry Barlow walked in.

First few slides – general overview of Wikipedia, open source, the creative commons license process.

Wikipedia is under the GNU licence.

This is Jimmy’s first very open talk about Wikia.

Wikia - all the algorithms will be open source. Free search – as in transparent, testable, researchable. All the good research has been behind the walls of commercial companies (like Google, Microsoft, etc.) No place for computer scientists to go to do such research.

Want it to be:
Participatory – bring best elements of Wikipedia to the problem of search
Open
Democratic

Question about search privacy;
If you’re searching for Paris Hilton do you want the celeb or a hotel?
If we keep your search history, we might guess, but how do

“I love google but I have this increasing feeling that they’re watching everything I’m doing…[he has the] same feeling about Yahoo making everyone use their ID for Flickr.”

I really like Google. They’re free as in beer, not releasing all software into the open, not transparent though. Blackhat SEO folks try to reverse engineer Google, to put their results higher, but average webmasters have no shot at it.
Not fully participatory, but they do watch user behavior and modify user search results accordingly.

We won’t make the system locked down to keep out spammers. We’ll figure out ways to make it a little more costly for spammers and a little easier for users to use it [and report/demote spam].

Question on the open corpus of search info from Wikia – even though it will be somewhat anonymized, even some sets of data that were supposedly anonymous have been shown to be able to be analyzed (implying the AOL leak).

They want to be careful on this – very tough question for Jimmy.

Question about censorship: Jimmy and Wikipedia have not cooperated with China, for example, in censoring. Support projects that allow people to get around firewalls, etc.

The One Laptop Per Child” $165 computer was on the desk. It is a ’setup question’ so that people can learn more about them and so they could show it off. Pretty interesting - had not seen it before - the screen does a 180 degree turn from the position showed in the photo so it can be folded back flat and used in a ‘book mode.’ The ‘ears’ are antennas to make a mesh network.

Jimmy will spend all of March in Tokyo learning more about the people using Wikipedia - Japanese is the 4th largest language represented in Wikipedia.

BestBuy is using wiki software for all 100k employees - employees can share information about products, procedures, etc for all employees. This is improving customer service in the company.

Several questions about international languages, translations, and how to improve search for other langugages. Kind of technical.

Wrapping up now.

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