Jimmy Wales' open-source Wikipedia emancipated the internet as a knowledge base and helped a teen in a New Delhi slum pass 11th grade.
JIMMY WALES is a hard man to find. He shouldn’t be. Thanks to his Wikipedia, the entire Net-connected world can find just about anything it wants in a matter of seconds. And they do so 14 million times an hour.
Personally, Wales doesn’t want to be found with a mouse click. I meet him at a rental in the Tampa Bay area of Florida that he keeps to see his seven-year-old daughter Kira. It’s not the pied-à-terre of an Internet mogul. It’s in a rambling complex off a band of strip malls that could easily be mistaken for any main road in Florida. The number has fallen off the door. When I knock, Wales asks through the door, “Who is it?”I tell him.
“Can you give me five minutes?” asks Wales.
All I can imagine is that he’s looking me up in Wikipedia.
The online encyclopedia Wales created in 2001 – and opened up for anyone to add to and edit – has become the largest in human history. It has 11 million entries in 262 languages. The English encyclopedia alone has over 2.5 million entries. Google any topic, and its Wikipedia entry will be one of the first items to pop up. Recent studies have found its articles to be nearly as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and gaining.
What is amazing about Wikipedia is that it’s useful at all. It isn’t researched by a panel of experts. It isn’t overseen by a team of editors. It is written by millions of online volunteers who have never met each other yet dedicate thousands of hours to write entries, fact check each other, police vandalism and deliberate on guidelines for the content on the site. They call themselves the “Wikipedia community,” and Wales is the “WikiPope.”
Wikipedia is the eighth most visited site on the Web. It’s estimated to be worth about US$3 billion. Wales, 42, should be a billionaire. But no one owns Wikipedia – at least, not any more. In 2003, during the depths of the dotcom crash, Wales was struggling to find money to buy new servers to support the rapidly proliferating entries. By popular demand, he decided to set up a nonprofit organization to support the online encyclopedia, effectively donating the site to a Wikipedia Foundation. He’s called it “the dumbest and the smartest” thing he’s ever done.
Inside the apartment, Wales is hospitable. He pours me a cup of coffee and explains that he’s spending the weekend with his daughter. The two are editing a video for her school project, an interview with former President Jimmy Carter. “They’re buds,” says Wales. Two years ago, Kira sat next to Carter on a flight to New York and the two talked the whole trip. When they got off the plane, Kira walked up to her dad. “Jimmy,” she said, pointing to Carter, “meet Jimmy.”
Wales describes himself as “this geeky guy that types on the Internet.” And that’s about right. He talks in paragraphs with lengthy footnotes. He qualifies statements with addenda and hedges like he is about to be pounced on by an entire chat room of pedants. And, actually, he probably is.
Do I deserve a Wikipedia entry?
[Laughs]
You are the WikiPope …
Well, let me see. They just told me yesterday that someone is coming to interview. I didn’t really know who you are. So, something about you used to be at Time magazine.
Yes, I worked there for eight years in Hong Kong, Iraq and Washington. I was the bureau chief in Baghdad
Really, it’s an interesting question. We have these discussions about notability. But notability is really hard to answer. Is this person important enough? That is really kind of a useless question. What we’re really looking for is, is there verifiable information?
Like what?
I’ll give two examples. Bloggers. For a lot of bloggers, the only real information available about them is self-published information. It is what they say about themselves on their own website which, well, who knows? It wouldn’t be hard to create very quickly a plausible-sounding, completely fake biography of a routine blogger who’s not famous. So we would normally say look, that’s really not verifiable information. Another example I like to give is contestants on Philippine Idol. Someone was creating articles on every single contestant. And as it turned out, most of those contestants have no verifiable information either. So for journalists, it depends. Some journalists have risen to a level where there is a lot of independent coverage of them. Christiane Amanpour at CNN, for example, would be someone about whom a lot has been written by independent, third party sources, and so that’s what we look for.
Did you have an early childhood experience with encyclopedias that piqued your interest?
Yes, I did. When I was growing up, we had a World Book encyclopedia. My mother and grandmother had a small private school and we basically had a lot of free time and I was allowed to study whatever I wanted. And I did, in fact, spend a huge amount of time just reading the encyclopedia. Every year they would send the World Book annual update: the 1975 or 1976 volume, and with that volume they would send a set of stickers. So when the article about the moon was completely rewritten it would be included in the new version, and there would be these stickers that would say the moon article has been updated, and you would take that sticker and go to the original entry under M and put it in.
You liked putting those stickers in?
Oh yeah, my mom and I would work at putting those stickers in.
You once predicted that Encyclopaedia Britannica would be crushed out of existence within five years.
That was more than five years ago. First of all, I have to clarify that I was a bit silly when I said that, and I was showboating for the audience I was writing for, which was the Slashdot crowd. This is a tech news website that has always been open-source leaning. Linus Torvalds, who was the creator of the Linux kernel, which is one of the major free software movements: his motto, which he made up for Linux many years ago, was “World Domination – Fast.”
I see.
So there was that kind of showboatyness. So I said that, yes, but I feel embarrassed. And clearly I was wrong. But Britannica and encyclopedias do have a hard time and they have a really big challenge ahead.
Their staffs alone must be enormous compared to the Wikipedia Foundation staff. How do they compare?
I actually don’t know. But we only have 22 employees worldwide. So, I imagine they have more than that. I imagine they have a lot more than that.
And the other thing I know is that the difference in magnitudes is dramatic. Britannica has about 50 million words. English Wikipedia alone has over a billion words. I did the division the other day, and I think it is more than 30 times bigger, that’s just sheer volume of content. That doesn’t speak to quality, which is a very interesting other question. But at the same time we know that for many very important traditional encyclopedia topics, the quality is very much comparable. And we think it can be made better. One of the things that people don’t realize is that Britannica is riddled with errors. That’s not a criticism. That’s just a fact about how hard it is to do good quality reference work.
You’ve said you had a goal to distribute a free encyclopedia to every person on the planet. How is your progress?
A few years ago I decided I should get more specific, so what I said was, I want us to have 250,000 articles in every language that has more than one million native speakers. So a free encyclopedia for everyone in their own language [but] there are some languages that we have to be realistic about.
We’re not going to get every dying language out there. But if there are at least a million speakers, then we want to do it. It turns out there are something like 347 languages that fit that cut off.
Are there languages you are really behind in?
Oh yeah. We’re really strong in all the languages of Europe, in Japanese, Chinese. Beyond that it gets pretty sketchy pretty quick. For example, Hindi. Hindi has 280 million native speakers, but we only have about 22,000 articles. There are more articles than that in Catalan or Basque. They have larger Wikipedias than Hindi.
So what’s holding the Hindi Wikipedia back?
Some of it is fairly obvious. The literacy rate is fairly important and the rate of broadband Internet access. Internet access alone doesn’t really do it. Broadband always on – that’s when people really participate fully.
What kinds of things can be done to increase the number of Wikipedia entries in Hindi or these languages that are behind?
Look at the African languages. Swahili is the only one that is of any size. Afrikaans is also similar, with about 10,000 articles now. Swahili Wikipedia was basically founded by Ndesanjo Macha. He is Tanzanian and was living in the US, and basically he started writing in Swahili, and he worked every single day for months. He made a commitment to himself to write one article per day. He is also a blogger and he is blogging about it and getting people in the Swahili language blogosphere interested, and now it is a successful, small community. So one of the things we are trying to do is figure out how we can identify people like that and support them.
Chinese Wikipedia has over 200,000 articles. Are you still blocked in mainland China?
No, we’re not. Before the Olympics we were suddenly unblocked. A lot of websites became unblocked at that time. And people theorized that it had something to do with the Olympics, and PR around the Olympics. We don’t know really how long it’s going to last – no telling really. I had a meeting with the vice minister of the State Council Information Office, which is the agency involved in regulating the Internet. He then came with a delegation and visited our offices. So I visited him and he visited us.
Did he express certain concerns about Wikipedia?
No, it was very high level “get to know you” things. Actually, when he visited the office it was a really good conversation with him and a whole group of people. Different people from his delegation had questions about how Wikipedia works and how its community polices things. Some of them are big fans of Wikipedia and like it a lot. I think the key is that a lot of people just don’t know how it works. It’s just sort of bewildering. People are used to the idea of an unmoderated open message board. They’re used to the idea of a moderated message board where people are removing offensive posts and stuff like that. What they’re not used to is the idea of a community-regulated website where there are social rules and norms that are pretty strictly enforced – with human error of course. It takes people a while to process through that and understand how it could possibly work.
What keeps misinformation and propaganda out of Wikipedia?
The way it works is that there is a core community that really takes care of things, a relatively small group of people who are the active contributors. Who are on the site all the time, looking at everything that comes in, discussing and debating, writing endless policies. We are very good at writing editorial policies. [Laughs] If you have in mind a model that 10 million people or 100 million people each add one sentence each, that is the wrong model. In a model like that it would be surprising if it wasn’t just chock full of nonsense.
Organizing the Internet in the way that Wikipedia does – giving us direct access to information – is this an end to intellectual property rights?
No, no, no, no. I don’t think so. We’re very respectful of copyright, and that’s a decision we made very consciously a long time ago.
Why?
Because you don’t want to get into legal trouble, for one thing, but there’s also something else. The community takes really great pride in saying: “Here’s this amazing thing. We built it. We did it ourselves.” No one is ever going to come and say, yeah, Wikipedia is kind of okay but they basically copied everything out of Britannica and evaded the lawsuit. No one can ever claim anything like that. The community is very insistent that plagiarism is not okay.
Those heated debates that go on in the Wikipedia discussion boards, are they part of its popularity with its core users?
Oh, yeah.
Are there certain issues, say, the Palestinian territories, Armenian genocide, hot button issues that draw people in?
I would say that there are discussions and debates that are part of the appeal for the core audience, but they are not typically Armenians or Palestinians or Israelis. They are really geeky editorial questions. One of the eternal issues for Wikipedia is exactly the first question you asked: notability. When should we have an article about a person or not? And how do we make that determination? That’s really the kind of thing that keeps people engaged. I think most Wikipedians really find political debate of that kind kind of exhausting.
You’ve said you’re not anti-elitist you’re anti-credentialist. What does that mean?
What it means is that we don’t care if you are a Harvard professor or a gifted high school kid. What we care about is the quality of the work.
Do you think that was informed by the one-room schoolhouse you attended, in which fifth graders were in the same room with first graders?
Probably. [Laughs]. But it’s really philosophically correct. If someone challenges something in an article and says, “Gee I think this isn’t correct,” it’s a logical fallacy to say, “I have a PhD in Chinese studies.” That’s not an answer to anything, right? I find that really good academics view part of their role in society as the furtherance of knowledge for everyone. Yes, there are idiots who come to Wikipedia and behave themselves in annoying ways but the vast majority of the community – I mean it’s a really geeky hobby to write an encyclopedia, right? – are really smart people and really interested.
You owned Wikipedia as a business and you effectively donated it to the Wikipedia Foundation. What was your rationale?
First of all, it was still just a very small hobby site. It was growing though, growing quickly. It became obvious it was going to need some more servers. This was in the depths of the dotcom crash.
What year are we talking about?
It was 2003. The year we put it into the foundation. And in order to have it survive, we needed more servers. A lot of the volunteers had wanted it to be a nonprofit, and we had discussed it being a nonprofit even back before it was founded. What we did is we created a nonprofit organization, and we had a fundraiser and we raised enough money to buy eight servers. So, it was a big success. We were able to raise, I think, US$20,000 in that fundraiser.
If you kept ownership of Wikipedia you probably could have made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sure, yeah.
Do you regret handing it over?
No, not a bit.
Why not?
It’s really interesting. The way my life is so incredibly interesting.
Tell me about that.
Well, I travel all over the world. I can meet basically anyone I want to. I was just in Chile and went in for a meeting with the President of Chile. She was very interesting. Yesterday I met with President Carter in Atlanta, and so I get to do all kinds fascinating and interesting things.
Wikipedia has become the premier example of how community-generated content can help organize vast amounts of information on the Internet. What is the future?
Well, a couple of things. Let’s talk about Wikia for a moment.
This is your for-profit company. When did you start it?
In 2004. What we’re saying is: “This is where people are building the rest of the library.” If you think about a traditional library and you think about an encyclopedia, it’s a set of books about this big [stretches out his arms]. You know, 30 volumes. Now we’re building all the other books in the library. What I’m seeing is this kind of collaborative, participatory culture branching out beyond the easiest, low-hanging fruit, which was creating an encyclopedia. Everything you needed to create Wikipedia existed in 1995 including the idea of the Wiki, a website that anybody can edit. So from 1995 to 2001, all the technology was there, but the social element and the drive wasn’t here. So I say Wikipedia was a social innovation, not a technical innovation.
What is Wikipedia’s responsibility to people’s privacy?
One of the most obvious questions of personal privacy has to do with home addresses and phone numbers. It’s a routine thing that some jackass high school kid will publish someone’s home address and phone number and tell people to call them at home. So this we delete immediately. That’s just not acceptable behavior. We wouldn’t publish Britney Spears’ home address, for example. Even though it’s easily accessible on the Internet. It just doesn’t belong in an encyclopedia.
You’re a private person. Did you have any idea when you started Wikipedia that it would turn its attention on you?
It’s really kind of a weird thing because I’m this geeky guy that types on the Internet. In effect the media’s not really that bad, though things about my personal life have been in the media, and that seems stupid to me. But really more creepy is people who are digging for information about where I live and that’s like weird. Like, what is wrong with people, right? But it really gives you a bit of perspective on these things. I’m very careful about where my daughter lives because these people are scary. When people ask, “Do you regret not having hundreds of millions of dollars?” I’m like, “Yeah, but what would I do with it?” And the only thing I can think of is security for my daughter because it’s kind of weird being prominent and not having that kind of protection.
You were one of the key people to usher what has become a revolution in the way people use the Internet. What does it feel like to watch this thing you created spread across the planet? Do you feel like an Alexander Graham Bell or a Thomas Edison?
Um, it’s really cool, people ask me embarrassingly nice questions like that. Then I feel awkward. I feel very happy that my work is important. My life is very exotic and interesting but more importantly it is something that people will remember. People will look back on this era and say that was something that was really cool. That wasn’t about pop up ads and porn and spam. That actually was a change, and also it opened people’s eyes that, gee, actually most people are pretty nice, and you can actually get a large group of people together to do something helpful.
For me, I think one of the more amazing things is to see that people in very obscure places know Wikipedia. I was in New Delhi, in Sangam Vihar, which is this squatter city in New Delhi.
It’s every stereotype of poverty of India you could think of. I met this kid in the street. His family is a little more well-to-do and they have an old computer and dial-up Internet. He knew Wikipedia, and I’m like, “Wow.” He said he used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams. That’s pretty fricking cool to say we’ve actually had an impact, and we’re going to have a bigger impact over time in those kinds of places.
As we move more and more into their languages it’s going to be really powerful. You know, not too many things that you can do can match that kind of experience: people know your work, and this kid’s like super excited to meet me, and we’re in the slums of India. It’s cool. I like it.
