He's inundated with offers, people turn out to see him, and journalists dog his every move: Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has all the hallmarks of a rock star. Except he isn't one. He's the man who founded Wikipedia, the vast online encyclopedia used by millions every day. Wikipedia employs just five full-timers, yet it already has 1.5 million articles written by users in a growing number of the world's languages. A diehard core of 400 online volunteers help to keep vendettas, vandals and crazies at bay. So what gave Wales his big idea? Can the open Wikipedia ethic survive in a world dominated by corporations? Paul Marks caught up with him recently after he gave a lecture to a packed hall at the London School of Economics.
reposted from: New Scientist
my highlights / emphasis / comments
Was Wikipedia a fully formed concept right from the start?
Very far from it. I'd watched the growth of the open-source software movement, with free licensing as the social model that was making it all possible, and I thought the collaborations programmers were making with each other could also work for other things. I recognised there was a big possibility for editorial collaboration online so in 2000 I started with an encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
The idea was to have thousands of volunteers writing articles for an online encyclopedia in all languages. Initially we found ourselves organising the work in a very top-down, structured, academic, old-fashioned way. It was no fun for the volunteer writers because we had a lot of academic peer review committees who would criticise articles and give feedback. It was like handing in an essay at grad school, and basically intimidating to participate in.
When did you realise the old way wouldn't work?
I guess it came when I sat down to write an article for Nupedia on something I knew about - options trading - and I was thinking, this really sucks, it just isn't any fun at all. We knew about wikis - websites where visitors add information of their own or change whatever is there. Understanding what we could do with a wiki was the big breakthrough.
So when was Wikipedia finally born?
It was 15 January 2001. Our idea was very radical: that every person on the planet would have access to an open-source, free online work that was the sum of all human knowledge. Within about two weeks I knew it was going to work. By that time we already had more articles online than we had in nearly two years with Nupedia. Another big moment came on 9/11, later the same year, when Wikipedia volunteers just began jumping in and writing background articles - from nowhere, it seemed. Very quickly, we had articles on the World Trade Center, the airlines involved, the terrorist groups mentioned in the TV news that day. I realised that what we were doing was very compelling. To this day, if there's any major world incident such as the 2005 tube bombings in London, Wikipedia is a great place to turn for instant background.
There has been a lot of controversy over the accuracy of Wikipedia. Should people be worried about its reliability?
It's a perfectly legitimate question. Errors are always possible. When Nature tested us in December 2005 with scientific and technical articles, we came out behind Encyclopaedia Britannica: they had an average of three errors per article to our four, though it was something of a relief that people were pointing out that we were not that horrible. Our goal has always been to be on the same level for accuracy as Encyclopaedia Britannica or better, and to have 250,000 articles in every language that has at least 1 million speakers.
How does Wikipedia manage financially?
It doesn't cost that much to run. Last year we spent around $1.5 million, and the year before that $750,000. The vast majority comes from public donations of between $50 to $100. Most costs go on expanding expensive physical hardware, the servers that host the site.
You don't carry advertising. Can you keep it out?
I would be opposed to introducing advertising, but we have never said we'll absolutely never run it. The WikiMedia Foundation is a not-for-profit charity and we have goals which we don't have the money for, but I think there are better ways to get revenue.
Will Wikipedia ever be sold to big media?
Two years after founding Wikipedia, I donated it to the WikiMedia foundation. I think this is both the dumbest and the smartest thing I ever did. The dumbest because it's probably worth $3 billion - and I don't have $3 billion! It's also the smartest thing I did because it wouldn't have been anywhere near so successful had I not built it this way. So the chances of it being bought are quite low.
What happened with Wikipedia and China?
My understanding is that we are completely blocked there. We have no idea why. We can guess, but we don't know. Our position is that censorship is fundamentally at odds with everything our mission is about. Access to all knowledge is a human right, period. We won't ever compromise on censorship with filtered versions. It became all the more impossible for us once Google compromised last year, with its Chinese service weeding out pages critical of the government. I felt it incumbent on me to say: "No, we will not compromise on this issue." The deeper question we can't answer is: did they block us because they objected to our pages on politically sensitive issues, such as Falun Gong, or is there something fundamental about the idea of consumer-generated, open knowledge that is threatening to the Chinese system?
What has been your best experience with Wikipedia?
It has to be last summer at WikiMania, our annual conference, when the founder of Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, was giving a talk. When I went along there were 600 people listening to him. It felt really, really good because all of these people were there because of something we started. I thought: "Wow, we've brought a lot of people together to do something really cool!" Among the best experiences is also MuppetWiki. We've got more than 12,000 articles about Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of them. You'd never get that kind of activity on Encyclopaedia Britannica.
”We want Wikipedia to be as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica
And the worst experience?
I'm not good at worst moments because I'm just a pathologically optimistic person. I guess the hardest times are when a new language is just launching and that language community has its first serious issue of banning someone. What's really hard is when you have someone who is popular in the community, and they've been writing or editing well, but they're causing a lot of trouble by being obnoxious, rude or insensitive to others in what they say in the article discussion areas. The community decides: do we allow this person to continue? It's funny how this process repeats itself over and over in each language group. Wikipedia's fast-growing Arabic community is going through this right now. Those are the toughest moments.
Why are you developing a search engine?
Transparency is what I'm really after, the idea that we can go in and see exactly how web pages are being ranked. We need to have a public debate about it. We just don't know if there is any dishonesty or strange incentives in today's algorithms that rank searches. Since news of this venture broke (see search.wikia.com) we have been contacted by more than one second-tier company that develops search engines. They recognise that acting individually they are going to have a hard time catching up with Google, because Google has so much money and so many great people.
What's your plan for search?
It's too early for specifics, but one thing that has worked is an alliance in which people contribute to a free software project. We saw this succeed with Apache, the open-source webserver. Apache was a tiny group of volunteers, yet the vast majority of its code has come from companies who paid people to work on it. It's essentially an industrial consortium that has been able to fend off Microsoft's closed-source webserver. So it makes sense for second-tier search companies who are falling behind Google to contribute to a free search software project that will make us equal to Google in terms of search quality.
What else do you want Wikipedia to develop?
I read that one company is importing all of Wikipedia into its artificial intelligence projects. This means when the killer robots come, you'll have me to thank. At least they'll have a fine knowledge of Elizabethan poetry.
Profile
After attending a tiny school run by his mother and grandmother in Huntsville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales took a degree in finance at Auburn University and completed part of a PhD in finance at the University of Alabama. From 1994 to 2000, he was a research director with a futures and options trader in Chicago. He soon noticed that computer programming was making megabucks for outfits like Netscape, and after making some money of his own he jacked his job in to work on internet ventures.
how Wikipedia works:-
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:I/A
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DENY
- Article Standards:-
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons
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