wiki policy: protecting the commons

Wikipedia, the community-authored " free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," changed its rules earlier this month to require creators of new content to register. Some recent high profile errors have caused Wikipedia to re-evaluate its anonymous posting policy, such as running a biography of John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Now, the Financial Times reports from San Francisco that Wikipedia will begin instituting a tape delay-like effect. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, said a new “stable” version of the reference would be added to the site and audited to ensure its accuracy.

BBC News also confirmed that the Wikimedia Foundation could not be sued for libel in the US because it is a hosting company and not a publisher, and US laws protect online publishers from legal action.

Wikipedia thrives because people are basically good. it will be interesting to see how these new policies impact the community dynamic of the site.

john battelle at eBay

John Battelle came to eBay yesterday afternoon as part of the eBay Developers Program speaker series that Mike Fox is heading up for the eBay Developers Program.

My remote connection into the meeting was so bad that, unfortunately, the only clear sounds were occasional and unmistakable eruptions of laughter coming from the audience. Sounded fun. Luckily for me, Alan did a great write-up of the Q&A session.

Wired. Industry Standard. Boing Boing. FMP. These all started as great experiments. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us at eBay yesterday, John. And from where this blogger is standing, you also have a good eye for hiring exceptional talent. :)

open source projects and the cool developers behind them

i've had the pleasure of getting to interview some interesting developers as part of my Codebase Spotlight beat lately, working with AJAX, PHP, XUI, Java and Perl between them.

Luan O'Carroll, CEO and project owner of the XUI-eBay rich-client, a Java and XML framework for rapid development of eBay applications using the XUI platform.

Thomas Deliduka, CTO and project owner of AJAXCategories, a simple set of code programmed in PHP that pulls eBay category-cached data from a MySQL database and will display it using AJAX.

Igor Chudov, developer and project owner of Net::eBay Perl Module, a tool for any Perl developer working with eBay Web Services - make an instance of Net::eBay and then call submitRequest to send requests to eBay.