User:TimShell

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picture TimShell TimShell 12:10, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I currently serve on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. I live in the Las Vegas but I can't stand the sun. I know Larry Sanger personally.

I am kind of an absolutist, but not really. I've grown more conservative as liberals have gotten older. I always have a good reason for what I do, and a better reason for what I don't do. I believe in every god I've ever seen.

I believe good enough is better than best.

I like Epicurus, Ayn Rand, Eric Hoffer, Julian Simon, and Friedrich Hayek. I think Mark Twain wrote better English than just about anyone else.

I am pro-cheeseburger.

Random things I like:

*cannoli
*Thomas Sowell
*baseball
*beer
*James Clavell
*Robert A. Heinlein
*capitalism
*turkey
*technology
*mountains
*Verdi
*Firefly
*Gary Becker
*dividends

Wikipedia moves asymptotically towards perfection. At any given moment, there is stuff we don't cover, factual errors, etc. As Wikipedia grows, and moves closer to perfection, errors and shortcomings grow smaller. Wikipedia is thus a process, rather than an end state. Criticizing Wikipedia for errors and shortcomings that exist now misses this point entirely.

What is preferable: An authoritative encyclopedia that is 99.9% accurate, but which costs $10 million a year to maintain? Or an encyclopedia that is 95% accurate, but which costs maybe $100,000 a year to maintain? And that, on this much smaller budget, will grow more accurate every year? And that, because it does not demand perfect accuracy, is able to cover a much broader range of topics? And that, on top of this, is free?

user:TimShell/UngoogledPhrases

Splitting the English Wikipedia into American and British English Wikipedias: This is an issue of network effects. If an article with 20 editors becomes two articles with 10 editors each, then the separate articles will each get less attention, fewer edits, and end up with less and different information and be in all ways inferior to what the article would have been without the split. Multiply this by 335,000 or however many articles the English Wikipedia has. The result will be two more or less crappy encyclopedias rather than one excellent encyclopedia. So, are we trying to create an excellent encyclopedia, or are we trying to coddle people with a language-purity fetish? If the former, then splitting is a very bad idea.

Readings to put you in the Wikipedia spirit:

also?:

Robert Wright (journalist) - Nonzero

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