Communications of the ACM
When Knowledge Isn
Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner
Image credit: Wikimedia
“Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project.
And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters last week in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work.
Once routinely questioned about its reliability, the site is now used every month by more than 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mind-set similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced.
From The New York Times
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