Habrainterview with Maxim Mosul (Russian Wikipedia)

Maxim Mozul, one of the most active authors of Russian Wikipedia ( Wind member), who also holds the post of administrator and bureaucrat of Russian Wikipedia, and also represents the press service, answers the questions of the habraauditoria.

What servers and Internet channels are used by Wikipedia, how much is one medium standard server and channel maintenance for it, how much is there such a server (how many percent of the current capacity and power is provided by one such server)?

Unfortunately, I was not able to find accurate information, but at least approximately I will try to answer. In total, about 300 servers are used for the Foundation's projects, about 100 of them work in the caching mode, Squid is running on them. About 100 more are web servers running Apache. About 20 are used for MySQL databases, the rest are used for searching, working with images and the like. Available scheme of the servers of the fund. The total cost of hosting as of 2009, in accordance with the annual report , is 822,000 dollars.

What's your education?
')
In Kiev, he taught chemical engineering and computer chemistry at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, in Germany he attended lectures on political science, psychology and sociology at Erlangen University for a year, then he taught computer science at the Technical University of Munich, moved to the department of computer linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, where he teaches Güntner, in whose company I work, is now completing a master's degree there in parallel with work.

Tell us a little about yourself: when did you come to Germany which programming languages ​​do you use daily?

Two different questions in one. First, a little about yourself. I was born in Ukraine in the town of Volchansk, whence I was taken away when I was one and a half years old, to the suburb of Kiev Brovary, where I lived before coming to Germany in 1996, I lived in Germany in several cities, but since 2001 I live in Munich, which for the last nine years really loved. From childhood I was interested in various kinds of general knowledge, I play “What? Where? When? ”, Captain of the Munich team“ Dark Forest ”.

Now about programming languages: At work, I mainly use Perl and PHP, as well as databases: MySQL and MatchMaker .

What motivates you to spend so much time on Wikipedia? As far as I understand, work is free?

Probably, first of all, the feeling that you are doing something useful for people (Wikipedia has been for many people the main source of information for several years now). Besides, it's just interesting. Being engaged in Wikipedia, you always learn something new.

Wikipedia is a rapidly growing project that lives on donations, but has no income. To all this, Wikipedia has noticed an increase in media diversity (video, graphics, etc.). How will all this be financed further? Will Wikipedia have its limit?

At the moment, the Wikimedia Foundation manages to support Wikipedia and other projects through donations. Within the framework of the strategic planning of the future Fund, there are proposals for financing, for example, through advertising , however, no one has yet decided to switch to this kind of financing. It seems to me that, at least in the near future, there will be enough private and corporate sponsors for Wikipedia to remain free from advertising.

How closely do the authors of articles from different countries collaborate with each other? And do they cooperate at all?

There are two aspects to it. On the one hand, there is cooperation between different language projects, when the authors, for example, of Russian Wikipedia, help in working on Ukrainian Wikipedia and vice versa, on the other hand, there is cooperation between people from different countries working in the same language project. Both types of cooperation are quite developed, a significant number of participants work not only in their native language section, but also in others. This is especially noticeable on the example of Wikipedia in international languages, such as English or Russian. In the Russian section of Wikipedia, for example, there are people who live all over the world , including those for whom Russian is not native. One of the most active participants and administrators of Russian Wikipedia is a resident of Saxony who learned Russian during his studies in Russia.

You should know several languages, at least German and Russian, and almost certainly English. So you see the difference between Russian articles from German and English. Actually the question: what is the difference between Russian articles? Is there some kind of national Russian trait that can be traced through articles?

The articles of the English and German Wikipedias have long served as an example for the Russian, so in many ways they resemble each other. Recently, by the way, it may well happen that Russian Wikipedia articles on certain topics may be even more complete than in English, because Russian Wikipedia, by analogy with German, has quite strict rules regarding the minimum amount of articles. Of course, in the Russian section it is possible to find articles written on the basis of Russian or Soviet realities or reflecting the Russian or Soviet point of view. Similar phenomena, however, can also be found in German or English Wikipedia. In accordance with the principle of a neutral point of view , which is one of the main principles of Wikipedia , such deviations from a neutral position should be eradicated everywhere. Unfortunately, the work of bringing all the articles of Wikipedia to a neutral point of view is still far from complete and is very difficult.

In German Wikipedia, unlike Russian or English, there are practically no articles created by robots.

Is it planned to organize interaction with academic organizations of Russia (Academy of Sciences, Universities) to replenish highly specialized articles?

We have repeatedly spoken about this, but there are no specific plans yet.

Do you plan to attract as experts, researchers of relevant academies and institutes?

No, as long as there are no specific plans in this area.

Is there a client part for typing and editing articles that works without a permanent connection to the Internet?

Yes, such programs exist , one of the examples is a plugin for Eclipse that allows you to create and edit articles without access to the Internet.

What do you think of Lurkmore? What is the relationship with its authors?

Personally, I think that Lurkmore perfectly fills its niche as an encyclopedia of memes and I use it myself for these purposes. In this sense, Lurkmore well complements Wikipedia, where many modern memes cannot be described due to the lack of encyclopedic significance and / or reputable sources. In Wikipedia itself, the attitude towards the project is ambiguous, it is listed on the spam list due to periodic spam in various articles, however, there have been no loud conflicts around Lurkmore recently.

How many average articles are added daily? As you know, the authors of some articles are not people, but robots, that is, articles are generated in a special way. For example, template articles about space objects are scored. Is it too early to celebrate 500,000? How much of this amount is created by people?

Recently, about 400 articles are being created per day, taking into account deletions. Articles, frankly created by bots and not modified by people, like articles on space objects, are now on Wikipedia 7610 . However, based on the content of other Wikipedia, primarily German, articles about many locations were automatically generated. For example, an article about the German town of Kochel am See . The creation of such articles involved a significant number of participants who read the names of articles, checked the results of the bot's work, and then supplemented some articles, so they cannot be called completely automatically created, although you cannot call these articles written by people either. There are at least 50,000 such articles on Wikipedia, but, unlike most articles on space objects, people still work on them, gradually improving and complementing their content. In addition, these articles are really valuable for the reader, providing him with at least minimal information about a particular locality and providing links to probably more complete articles in other languages.

Until recently, articles were written only by a special caste of “Wikipedians”, articles they disliked were deleted and blocked, and the authors were banned. But over the past six months or a year many banned articles have been restored. The question is: what, how and why has changed in Russian Wikipedia?

Virtually nothing has changed. Perhaps deleted articles were simply rewritten correctly.

Will the article editing interface ever become such that the simple reader would like to correct the inaccuracy?

In the very near future, a transition to a new design theme is planned, the editing interface in which should become somewhat more convenient. However, it must be admitted that without knowledge of the wikile markup , it will not be possible to manage there.

I understand that maybe you are not so knowledgeable, but do you have any opportunity to shed light on where the millions collected from the community go?

In accordance with the annual report of the Fund , mainly on salaries of employees supporting the technical infrastructure, and the maintenance of servers.

Why does Wikipedia feel sorry for server space for “non-essential” information? It is the presence in Wikipedia of such a thing as irrelevance discourages the desire to write something there. Not that I can’t write anything substantial, but to sit and guess how administrators will appreciate my work and if they don’t want to be interested in the topic, I want to moderately briefly presenting and formatting, put everything on the topic that you know and can draw in logical wealthy look. I would like Wikipedia to be a constantly growing centralized base of all objective knowledge of mankind, with the exception of details from the personal life of “stars”, etc. Tell us why you can not write about "irrelevant" things?

This is a really interesting problem, about which there are different points of view, including among the Wikipedian community itself. To understand why there are “irrelevant topics” in Wikipedia, you need to take into account that Wikipedia was originally created as an encyclopedia . This means that in Wikipedia there are certain restrictions on the placement of information . For example, in Wikipedia original research is not allowed, i.e. new theories that have not yet been published and recognized by the scientific community. Based on this, it is determined that what is essential is significant in the Wikipedia language. In general, what is important is that there are publications in independent of the object of authoritative sources. This is also important because any information on Wikipedia should be verifiable , i.e. should be confirmed by authoritative sources . Otherwise, because everyone will be able to write any information to Wikipedia and there will be no way to check its authenticity. And one of the stated goals of Wikipedia is to create exactly the complete and accurate (reliable) encyclopedia. Thus, the placement of information about objects that are not described in authoritative sources, contrary to this stated goal of Wikipedia. For certain topics, there are also additional criteria of significance, the purpose of which is to prevent the use of Wikipedia for purposes, with the creation of an encyclopedia unrelated to, for example, self-promotion.

Will quotes from Wikipedia ever be considered reliable sources of information? Faced with the fact that teachers consider it unacceptable to use Wikipedia materials in student papers.

We are committed to this. In the future, it is planned to introduce verified versions of articles in which all information will be checked for compliance with the indicated sources.

What would you like to change on Wikipedia?

I would like, first of all, for the Wikipedia community to be as conflict-free as possible. Most of all work on the project is hampered by conflicts between the participants.

How do you see Wikipedia in 10 years?

I hope that in ten years a significant part of Wikipedia articles will be verified and Wikipedia will be considered a legitimate authoritative source. That work in a project will be focused primarily on the quality and verifiability of the content, and not on its quantity.