Proceedings มหกรรมจัดการความรู้แห่งชาติ ครั้งที่ ๒ (๓๙)_๑

ห้องเรียน KM (12)

ประเด็นนำเสนอ         รู้จัก “Wikipedia” ขุมความรู้บนอินเทอร์เน็ต
ผู้ดำเนินรายการ          อ.กรกฎ       เชาวะวณิช
วิทยากร                    Wather Van Kalken
                              ดร.วลัยภรณ์   นาคพันธุ์
                              ดร.อิสริยะ    ไพรีพ่ายฤทธิ์
วัน/เวลา                  วันศุกร์ที่  2 ธันวาคม 2548  เวลา  14.30-16.30 น.

อ.กรกฎ  เชาวะวณิช:
         ช่วงต่อไปเป็น Wikipedia ขุมความรู้ทาง internet เพราะเป็นเทคโนโลยีใหม่ เป็นคลังความรู้ใหม่เหมือนกับ blog     รอสักครู่ ให้คนภายนอกที่สนใจเข้ามาพร้อมกันก่อน
เป็นมุมมองที่บอกว่า  คนทุกคนสามารถสร้างความรู้ได้ เรามีความรู้อะไร เราเติมเต็มจาก website ตรงนี้ได้
         สวัสดี ขอต้อนรับเข้าสู่ Wikipedia ทุกท่านคงจะได้รับเอกสาร 1 แผ่นเป็นรายละเอียดโดยคร่าวๆ ในกระเป๋าลงทะเบียนแล้ว คือ Wikipedia ที่เป็นสารานุกรมเสรี ที่ใครๆ สามารถเข้าไปแก้ไขและเข้าไปเขียนและเข้าไปอ่านกันได้ ผมเป็นตัวแทน สคส. และได้เชิญชวนกลุ่มสมาชิก Wikipedia ภาษาไทยคือคนที่ได้เข้าไปเขียนเข้าไปสร้าง มาเล่าว่า Wikipedia เกิดขึ้นได้อย่างไร และใช้ประโยชน์อะไรได้บ้าง  และความสำคัญสุดท้ายคือเรื่องที่จะนำไปใช้ในวงการศึกษา
ก่อนอื่นขอแนะนำวิทยากรคนแรกก่อน คุณ Wather Van Kalken เป็นตัวแทนของมูลนิธิ Wikipedia ในภาคพื้นเอเซีย เป็นชาวดัทช์ ชาวเนเธอแลนด์ ซึ่งมาทำงานอยู่เมืองไทย  เป็นนักแสดงในคณะตลก  คงจะพูดถึงการเกิด Wikipedia และแนะนำเกี่ยวกับมูลนิธิ Wikipedia
         คนที่ 2 คุณมาร์ค อิสริยะ  ไพรีพ่ายฤทธิ์  เป็นผู้ดูแลระบบคนหนึ่งในภาษาไทย  ปัจจุบันคุณมาร์คทำงานอยู่ที่สถาบันส่งเสริมอุตสาหกรรมซอฟแวร์ไทย (fifa) มีบทบาทในการพัฒนา ซอฟแวร์ ซึ่งบางคนอาจจะเคยใช้ mosila fly frog ทำให้เป็นภาษาไทยและใช้ภาษาไทยได้ง่าย  คุณมาร์คจะมาเล่าเกี่ยวกับการเกิดขึ้นของ Wikipedia ไทยว่าเป็นอย่างไรและลักษณะเฉพาะของ Wikipedia ไทย
         คนที่ 3 ดร.วลัยภรณ์ นาคพันธุ์ ทำงานเป็นอาจารย์อยู่ที่มหาวิทยาลัยรังสิต คณะสถาปัตยกรรมศาสตร์ เป็นหัวหน้าสาขาวิทยาศาสตร์มหาบัณฑิต สาขาการออกแบบสถาปัตยกรรมด้วยคอมพิวเตอร์ ได้พาลูกศิษย์มาด้วยคนหนึ่ง ชื่อคุณศิวรักษ์ สุวรรณสาร เป็นนักศึกษาปริญญาโทซึ่งได้เขียนบทความเกี่ยวกับ Wikipedia ภาษาไทยเป็นจำนวนมากเหมือนกัน  ก่อนอื่นเนื่องจากคุณ Wather Van Kalken จะต้องไปแสดงในตอนเย็น จึงขอให้คุณ Wather Van Kalken กล่าวแนะเกี่ยวกับ Wikipedia ภาษาอังกฤษก่อน

Wather Van Kalken: 
          สวัสดีครับ ยินดีต้อนรับสู่เวที Wikipedia เวทีสารานุกรมเสรี ผมชื่อ Wather Van Kalken   และเป็นตัวแทน Wikipedia ในทุกๆ ภาษารวมทั้งภาษาไทย ปกติจะพบผมได้ในเวทีแสดงตลก ผมเป็นนักเล่นตลกคณะดู๋ ดอกกระโดน แต่วันนี้จะพูดเรื่องที่มีสาระมากสักหน่อย คือเรื่องสารานุกรม Wikipedia ผมจะเล่าความเป็นมาของ Wikipedia และเรื่องน่าสนใจอื่นๆ ขอโทษนะครับ  ผมพูดภาษาไทยไม่ค่อยได้มาก ผมขอพูดเป็นภาษาอังกฤษก่อนนะ

         Okay, first, what is a Wiki? Basically Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopaedia that everybody can edit by just clicking on the edit button that’s in the right-hand corner of the screen, and everybody can add to it. Wikipedia runs on a kind of software that’s called a Wiki. The Wiki software was created by Walt Cunningham. He created it because he felt there was a need for people to easily edit on webpages and easily have exchange of ideas and have exchange of comments. The word wiki is derived from the word Hawaiian for fast. It’s because on a Wiki things can change very fast. Like on Wikipedia itself, an article can change within 5 seconds 10 times, and that’s why it’s called Wiki. Because it’s very fast.

         Wikipedia itself started out in 2001 with three encyclopaedias that anyone can edit. It’s done on the GDSL license, the space under free license which means that anybody can copy the contents and use it for themselves, provided that they also put it out under free license again. So, that way you provide people free information that they can use anywhere all the time. The contributions to Wikipedia are done by volunteers, and nobody gets paid for it. People can add what they want. Some people just add one word, one sentence. Some people go crazy like myself and add a thousand articles about Thailand, about all the provinces and all the cities. Basically Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wills in America. He’s called Jimbo by the community. He started it on January 15, 2001. Soon after starting the English version he started versions in many languages like Dutch, Spanish, and later on also the Thai version emerged. At the moment Wikipedia has over 2 millions articles and about 200 languages, and there are Wikipedia with more than 100,000 languages and of those is the Japanese Wikipedia which is closest to the Thai Wikipedia, I guess, linguistically. Wikipedia basically serves multiple purposes. It provides free information to people, which is very important because knowledge is power. People might not have money to go to school, but they can look at Wikipedia and get information they need. Also Wikipedia helps people by the editors who are editing on Wikepedia. They are being helped to develop their own writing skills because if you edit articles, if you add to it, you start to learn a better way of writing, better way of wording what you want to say in an article, to make sure that everybody understands. People also learn to judge their sources, which very important in a person’s development to be able when you read something, to say, well this may be too nationalistic, this may a bit too much one point of view to another point of view. People learn to judge what they read before they use it. Wikipedia also teaches people how to participate in a group process, which is also very important. It brings people to work together, to listen to each other’s arguments, to listen to other people’s way of thought, to listen to people from other cultures, and especially on the English Wikipedia where there are people from many many countries. This is true. Also in smaller ways in other Wikipedias in other languages, even on the Dutch Wikipedia. We have language students, people who learn Dutch and/or participate in Dutch Wikipedia will also come from different cultural backgrounds. So it helps people to work together and go over cultural boundary, that there are many times.

         There are some challenges when it comes to Wikipedia. In the beginning of Wikipedia there was - would we allow commercial on the site, would we allow advertising on it? And because of the discussion about that, two communities in the beginning left Wikipedia. Those were the Swedish and Spanish language communities. They found that they couldn’t work on the website that was commercially-based. Because of these happenings, Wikipedia’s never added advertisement to its site. No one would ever advertise.

         Basically all the funding for Wikipedia comes from donation and from grants by institutions like United Nations. One of the other challenges on Wikipedia is vandalism. Vandalism can be a big problem, especially in a small language community. Actually the way I got involved in the Thai language community because one day I was browsing on Thai Wikipedia and I saw all kinds of vandalism. So, of course working at Wikipedia, I immediately started deleting all the vandalism. But in the small community this can be a problem. But in general our bigger community like also Thai community that has grown now, it is not a problem because we can change it with our mouse-button click on the vandalism. We can change it to the old version.

         Another challenge for Wikipedia is that it’s not considered trustworthy by teachers, by librarians, by people from the press, by people in general. They say how can the website that is edited by everyone be trustworthy without check and balances. Our answer to that is Yes. There are mistakes. There will always be mistakes on Wikipedia. But even when you look seriously at works like the Encyclopaedia Britainica or other serious works, there’re always mistakes in there, always points of view in there. And at least in Wikipedia you have a chance to change it yourselves. You can say “I click edit now and I put in the right thing”. Also there’s a development going on in the large community now, like the English and the Dutch, that we require people. We ask from people. Okay you say Thailand has 70 millions habitants, when did you read it? Where did you get that information from? So we’re asking more and more people for qualified sources, where they got the information from, and we also add that to the articles now. That’s the development that is going on and other languages that - as Wikipedia grows it takes more criticism of the articles. At the moment there’s only one really big rule for Wikipedia and that is neutrality. In Thai  we would say moom mong tee pen klang. Our articles must be neutral and that is non-negotiable. You cannot write thing like- Oh Thailand is the most beautiful country in the world. I know you like to stay in Thailand, and that you’re proud of your country. But our articles need to be neutral. So saying Thailand is the most beautiful country is simply not allowed because it’s not neutral. This is really non-negotiable.

         The Wikipedia website is run by the Wikipedia Foundation which has its office in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we currently have servers all around the world. We have a servers cluster in Florida. We have servers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We have servers in Paris, and we currently have servers that were offered by Yahoo to us, and they are in South Korea. The Wikipedia Foundation basically runs a couple of website apart from Wikipedia. There is a Media Wiki that’s the software that is being used to run the whole website. The Media Wiki software also is freely edited by anybody who can suggest changes the web to make the software better usable also for other applications. And people can use the Wiki software on their own website, which is being done. The BBC journal has its own internal Wiki - to name just a very famous, are very well-known broadcaster. They use internal Wiki. They use Wiki because it’s easy for everybody to add comments on documents to the Wiki. It’s easy for everybody to change things on documents, and many organisations now use internal Wiki because it’s a lot faster than sending emails out to everybody and having to recollect different versions of word-documents from people that are adding things and subtracting things.

         After Media Wiki there’re also a Wiktionary which is a dictionary. Basically we are now working on a new kind of software which is called the Ulitmate Wiktionary which will basically be a database software which will still be a freely editable database. There’re some very interested people that are growing around the world collecting databases that are free of license and put them in there. There’re also more than 200 languages now in there, and some languages have got like a ready database over 100,000 words.

         The next one that we have in the WikiMedia family is WikiBooks which is basically a free textbook source for students textbooks. You could imagine that a textbook without license you can put on there. And like you put it on the Thai version of WikiBooks and somebody in Sakolnakorn could print it out and provide it to their students. There’s also WikiQuote which is a collection of quotes by politicians, artists, and other people. Then there’s WikiSource. WikiSource basically consists of documents that are also without license, like the constitution of the country, the laws of the country, can be put in there. Then we have WikiMedia Commons which is a free repository for all kinds of media like pictures, sounds, a pronunciation of words, which is something that happening a lot now. Basically you have like a Thai person say the word Farang and you put it on there, and with article with the subject Farang you could put it on there and people can listen how the word can actually be pronounced. And last but not least in the WikiMedia family we’ve got WikiNews. WikiNews is a very fast growing site which basically provides a free news source which is also neutral. Basically it’s being run by citizen journalists, and especially the English site is growing very fast, basically faster than most other projects. You have a need for it, for neutral source that doesn’t has a bias you’ve seen in many medias are influenced by advertising companies, by politicians in different countries. So WikiNews basically provides the free editable news source for everybody.

         That’s it from me for now. I want to apologise that I have to run out in a few minutes because I’ve got to perform later tonight at Snarm Luang with Doo Dokgradone. I hope you have a good time tonight. The next one will be Mark.