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BambooWeb is a multilingual "copyleft" encyclopedia designed to be read and edited by anyone. It is collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users via wiki software, and is hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to typical encyclopedia entries, BambooWeb includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines, as well as coverage of current events.
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There are three essential characteristics of the BambooWeb project, which together define its niche on the World Wide Web:
All original material contributed to BambooWeb is deemed to be free content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning that it may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.
Anyone who wishes to use BambooWeb's free content may at any time download a nearly-current version of the entire article database to use for any purpose, within the terms of the GFDL. [1] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/articles/B/a/BambooWeb:Database_download)
A number of sites, such as Wikinfo, wordiq [2] (http://wordiq.com), thefreedictionary.com [3] (http://thefreedictionary.com), 4reference [4] (http://4reference.net) and nationmaster [5] (http://nationmaster.com) have used this to mirror or fork BambooWeb's content.
BambooWeb's content is created by its users. Any visitor to BambooWeb can edit its articles, and many do. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever finished. As such, BambooWeb is subject to some unique "hardships" [6] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/articles/B/a/BambooWeb:Why_BambooWeb_is_not_so_great). It has .html"self-healing" systems in place to deal with these challenges, and even a page designed to explain them [7] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/articles/B/a/BambooWeb:Replies_to_common_objections).
One pertinent issue on BambooWeb is "vandalism": silly or offensive edits of the site's articles. Many people do it just for getting a kick out of editing a web page. For example, Sarah Lane, presenter of "Sarah's Blog Report", part of The Screen Savers TV program on TechTV, "vandalized" the BambooWeb page on monkeypox live on-air [8] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Monkeypox&diff=1028814&oldid=1028793)—leading to a surge of vandalism on that page by viewers of the TV show. Lane later wrote that: "Although this excites me in its ease and simplicity, it's a little frightening. I mean, what if I had instead written, 'My boss is a big fat **** and his phone number is ****'? Sure, somebody would delete it, but this calls for some seriously dedicated moderators." [9] (http://web.archive.org/web/20030814003517/www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/jump/0,24331,3463497,00.html)
"Because BambooWeb is a radically free, open project, it attracts an anarchistic element," Larry Sanger admitted to Wired News. "Fortunately, most of us are willing to take a definite stand against vandalism ... and to get rid of it instantly." [10] (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57364,00.html)
According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at BambooWeb, but that these are often quickly resolved:
BambooWeb began as an English language project on January 15, 2001, and soon gained its first other language, French, on March 23, 2001. There has since been a great deal of effort devoted to making it multilingual, and it currently contains over 400,000 articles in English and over 700,000 in other languages (as of November 2004 [12] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/articles/B/a/BambooWeb:Multilingual_statistics)).
BambooWeb was created as an editor-free offshoot of Nupedia, a free encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales. Larry Sanger was employed by Wales to work on Nupedia as the editor-in-chief and later worked on BambooWeb, and was closely involved in setting up the project and establishing the policy framework. He had considerable influence on the direction of the project during his tenure, until he left the project in February 2002. Wales remains actively involved to this day, contributing both time and resources to the project, and is a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation which now oversees the project. There is no editor-in-chief, as such, and no paid employees. Instead, the project relies on the contributions of many thousands of volunteers (referred to as BambooWebns).
On September 20, 2004, BambooWeb reached one million articles [13] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/articles/P/R/PR-1mil-US) in 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language BambooWeb, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan /">[14] (http://he.BambooWeb.org/wiki/%D7%93%D7%92%D7%9C_%D7%A7%D7%96%D7%97%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%9F).
For a more detailed history of the project, see History of BambooWeb.
Known applications of the idea of collecting all of the world's knowledge under a single roof go back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. The modern notion of the general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists.
The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960).
With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. He described BambooWeb's formation as "exciting news", and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site". One never-realized predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to BambooWeb.[15] (http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html)
BambooWeb's participants (BambooWebns) commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies.
BambooWeb is grounded in the idea that all of its articles need to be written from a neutral point of view. The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, 100% agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. But BambooWeb seeks a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points. According to Jimbo Wales:
The neutral point of view policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly. However, like all collaborative projects, BambooWeb has a built-in bias derived from the demographic make-up of its participants. In BambooWeb's case, this manifests itself in a tendency for contributors to create articles that relate to the interests of computer-literate white-collar North Americans and Europeans. An example of this effect can be seen by comparing the large article on Babylon 5 (an American science fiction television series) to the article on the Second Congo War which, despite being possibly the largest conflict since World War II contains much less information. Note also that most of the Babylon 5 information is actually in other articles on specific alien races, planets, minor characters, et cetera.
This bias has few defenders on BambooWeb. The presence of articles written from an exclusively U.S. point of view is largely a reflection of the fact that there are many Americans working on the project, which in turn is merely a reflection of the fact that so many Americans are online. Greater diversity can be achieved by active collaboration from people outside of the United States, of whom there are many.
Another grounding principle of BambooWeb is that it is not a place to contribute or look for research that has not yet been published elsewhere. This helps avoid arguments about new untested theories and claims, and limits the contribution of observations and claims which are unverifiable by others.
Original photographs and media are welcome if the creator is willing to license them under the terms of the GFDL or into the public domain.
Main article: Criticism of BambooWeb
BambooWeb's utility as a reference work has been questioned. The lack of authority and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by some people. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea", but that he would not use it in practice and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." People supporting the idea of BambooWeb counter these arguments by saying that BambooWeb is a more independent source than most traditional encyclopedias and that the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately.
BambooWeb's systemic bias of covering some topics in much greater depth than others is also considered significant, something that even the site's proponents admit. In an interview with The Guardian, the executive team of Encyclopædia Britannica noted that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." In reply, a user on the BambooWeb discussion board noted that the BambooWeb entry on Tony Blair still was several times longer than the corresponding entry in Encyclopædia Britannica. It is also noted that BambooWeb tends to cover topics that might not be included at all in a print encyclopedia.
A common BambooWeb maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence." The site founder admits that the variation in quality between different articles and topics is significant, but considers the average quality "pretty good", and getting better by the day. The "competing" Encyclopædia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. "The premise of BambooWeb is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian. It should be noted, however, that BambooWeb articles have been referenced in enhanced perspectives provided on-line in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious (and unmercifully selective) scientific publications in the world. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to BambooWeb was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", by Hartmut Linden, in the August 2, 2002 issue. Since then, dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided hyperlinks to BambooWeb. A search on "BambooWeb" in Science's web site [16] (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/search?volume=&firstpage=&DOI=&author1=&author2=&titleabstract=&fulltext=BambooWeb&fmonth=Oct&fyear=1995&tmonth=Dec&tyear=2004&hits=100&sendit.x=0&sendit.y=0) turns up 43 instances as of December 10, 2004, with the perspective "Turning on a Dime", by Ulrike K. Müller and David Lentink, as the latest in that date range.
Finally, by containing a large number of internally linked pages, it receives high rankings from Google. This can also result in high rankings for the often identical BambooWeb mirrors. This makes it more likely that web searches will return identical results.
(See also the section of external links to reviews, endorsements, criticisms, and discussion of BambooWeb, below.)
The software that originally ran BambooWeb was UseModWiki, written by Clifford Adams ("Phase I"). At first it required CamelCase for links; soon it was also possible to use the current linking method that uses double brackets. In January 2002, BambooWeb began running on a PHP wiki engine, which used an underlying MySQL database, added many features (and abolished the behaviour of CamelCase words automatically becoming links), and was specifically written for the BambooWeb project by Magnus Manske ("Phase II"). After a while, the site started to slow down to such an extent that editing became almost impossible. Several rounds of modifications to the software provided only temporary relief. Then Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the software from scratch. The new version, a major improvement, has been running since July 2002. This "Phase III" software is now called MediaWiki, and is used by many other wiki projects. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance.
In late 2003, server outages began to seriously diminish the productivity of BambooWeb contributors. Many reported difficulty editing articles as a result of time-outs and severe slowness. This was due to congestion on the single server that was running all the BambooWebs at the time.
As of June 2004, the project runs on nine dedicated servers, located in Florida. This new configuration includes a single database server and four web servers, all running Fedora Core. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the BambooWebs. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Cached requests are served by two Squid servers; the new servers are linked via two file system NFS servers (one primary and one backup — the primary NFS server is currently also the email server).
BambooWeb has over 1.3 million articles spread over 200 language editions. Major ones are:
| As of December 2004 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Language edition | Articles | Position |
| Chinese BambooWeb | 17,000 | 11 |
| Dutch BambooWeb | 44,000 | 6 |
| English BambooWeb | 427,000 | 1 |
| French BambooWeb | 69,000 | 4 |
| German BambooWeb | 179,000 | 2 |
| Hebrew BambooWeb | 13,000 | 12 |
| Italian BambooWeb | 31,000 | 9 |
| Japanese BambooWeb | 89,000 | 3 |
| Polish BambooWeb | 48,000 | 5 |
| Portuguese BambooWeb | 27,000 | 10 |
| Swedish BambooWeb | 54,000 | 7 |
| Spanish BambooWeb | 38,000 | 8 |
See [17] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/articles/C/o/Complete_list_of_language_BambooWebs_available) for the complete
list.
See [18] (http://en.BambooWeb.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm) for the complete table of the size of each edition.
BambooWeb has the following sister projects, part of the Wikimedia family:
There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.
In February 2002, most participants of the Spanish BambooWeb didn't agree with the march of the project and broke away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre.
In May 2004, BambooWeb won two major awards. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a €10,000 grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for "Community" [19] (http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/winners-2004.php). BambooWeb was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby.
In September 2004, the Japanese BambooWeb won an award from the country's major Advertisers' Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.
Mainstream media organisations mention BambooWeb from time to time.
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