Criticizing Wikimedia and Wikipedia

I lately stumbled upon Nicolas Negroponte’s Spotlight MIT 2008 OLPC keynote. His speech revealed some interesting One Laptop per Child facts that were new to me – the project is close to manufacturing/shipping 1 million of XO-1 devices, which have cost in average $230 a piece. OLPC foundation itself has 23 full time employees and a turnaround of $230M. Negroponte also described current OLPC situation and explained some hopes and fears of the project.

OLPC caught a lot of press at the time of its creation, which went however there faster and there slower down and one did not hear about the project in the meantime a lot. Many people were also concentrated on the “$100 laptop” buzzword only. But today, with $187 per device, the project is closer than ever to starting successfully fulfilling its mission of third world’s education.

One of the early critics was Wayan Vota in his OLPC News posts. As a former Geekcorps director and a world citizen, Wayan criticized all BUT the laptop – it was mainly the implementation what he saw underestimated. After all, Negroponte does not hide the failures of the project and admits that a lot of things went wrong or are not developing as expected. However I see these “failures” as very minor ones in such a great challenge, which OLPC without question is.