Jimbo Wales on ‘ten things that will be free‘:
“The ground rules are: I am talking about free in the sense of GNU, that is: free as in speech, not free as in beer. I was talking to someone about this concept recently who suggested “health care”. That’s not the sort of thing I’m talking about. Think: GNU/Linux. Think: Wikipedia.
For each of the ten, I will try to give some basic (and hopefully not too ambiguous) definitions for what it will mean for each of them to be “solved”, and we can all check back for the next 25 or 50 years to see how we are doing.”
“JIMMY WALES does not come across as the great philosopher king of the technical age. He does not utter sweeping statements about the disconnect of modern society and the salvation that the Internet offers. He does not have a catchy book on the best-seller list; he does not lay down heady projections of where society will be in 20 years.” (Emphasis mine.)
Sounds like an organization in need of a fact checker. Oops. :)
They’re right. He tries to stick to the range 25 … 50 :)
Jimbo Wales defines the problems that should be solved. A precise definition allows us to see later in the future if we have solved them or not. It has nothing to do with prediction, he’s not saying “those problems will be solved”.
Having been at the talk described at the second link, he says ‘there is very high probability these will occur.’
Regarding fact checking in the NYT, have you seen this slide from David Weinberger’s Wikimania 2006 presentation? (It was in reference to the intrinsic credibility Wikipedia has because of its self-criticism, something which isn’t done to the same extent for the NYT.)
I hadn’t seen that particular slide, Ben, but I’ve seen him talk about it before. Great image.
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