Jimmy Wales profile BBC radio 4 March 2012

The Wales profile below aired on 17:40 Sunday, 18th March Radio 4 [1]. "Claire Bolderson profiles the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who's been recruited to advise the UK government on opening up policy making to the public".

The interviewees include Katherine Mangu-Ward, who visited Wales at his Florida home in 2007.

There is little new in the profile, except perhaps that Jimmy's school contemporaries liked the 'alternative' rock band They Might Be Giants, but it provides a nice summary of how the media view Wales in 2012. He had an unconventional primary education in the deep South, then a secondary education at the private Randolph, where he was no different from any ordinary teenager with a curiosity about the world of literature, philosophy and science. He made enough money to set up Wikipedia, then became the Pied Piper who "turned around one day and found a million people behind him, and quite innocently was just piping away. "He radiates a 'niceness' field, according to a close associates (not a view shared by everyone who knows him, but they weren't interviewed for the profile). He could have been a billionaire, but chose not to. He claims to have been inspired by Friedrich von Hayek (although he admitted later here that the inspiration may have come 'after the fact'). He is a radical fighter for freedom, who battles the Man on issues of internet censorship. And for all that, he is a simple soul who projects a naïve excitement about the big world he finds himself in, a man who had to interrupt Wikipedia business to 'pour Desmond Tutu an orange juice'.

Profile

CB: If you want a free thinker for a radio debate, there's really only one person you can call.

(Radio 3 debate) "There can be few better people to help us understand this world of perpetual change than Jimmy Wales. He's here to talk to us this evening. Jimmy Wales."

CB: Jimmy Wales is an information evangelist. His belief in the power of shared knowledge has driven the remarkable success of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. With entries on more than 20 million subjects looked at by more than 450 million people per month, Jimmy Wales' creation is one of a handful of internet successes that really have changed our lives.

Brad Patrick: I think what is really unique about Jimmy in fact is that he is driven by a real purity of spirit and a purity of vision.

CB: Brad Patrick was recruited as an executive of Wikipedia in 2005 and stayed for two years. "I think what separates him from many people is that his ideas are what guide him, purely so, wanting to share the world's knowledge with everyone in their own language, is something that he's taken from being nothing - a brand new idea - I think he's rather the Pied Piper who, you know, turned around one day and found a million people behind him, and quite innocently was just piping away. "

CB: Of course the Pied Piper was anything but innocent. His Wikipedia entry says that he caused the departure or death of a great many children. Jimmy Wales describes his goals as rather more benign. "To create a free high quality encyclopedia, for every single person on the planet in their own language, and think there's a lot of potential for these technologies to have impacts on society in some fundamental ways, where you get much more direct and flat democracy with more people involved. "

CB: So where does that passion for access to egalitarian information come from? Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville Alabama 45 years ago, one of four children who managed a grocery store. Their mother was a teacher in the tiny primary school run by their grandmother, where the Wales children were pupils. A few years ago, journalist Kathryn Mangu Ward spent a day interviewing Jimmy Wales.

KW: He describes an unconventional education on his own, I think he even says it was an Abraham Lincoln one room schoolhouse type of thing. He was left to his own devices for much of his education and he spent a lot of time reading the World Book encyclopedia ... you can tell that it was a formative experience to have this access to that seemed, I suppose at the time, like an almost unlimited amount of information, and the idea that there would be this set of books and that you could find out anything ..."

CB: When Jimmy Wales was born, Alabama was a troubled Southern State, fiercely resisting racial desegregation, but Huntsville was a long way from the redneck image of the Deep South. It was at the centre of the booming space industry, attracting academics and skilled professionals from all over the world. As Wales himself has said, growing up there gave him an optimistic view of the future and of technology as a teenager at the fee-paying Randolph High School [sic] he met a similarly-minded group of friends. Todd Chambers was one of them. He describes a fairly precocious bunch.

TC: We kindof had a small group of friends in high school. We used to talk about philosophy. We also used to discuss literature, particularly the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, and the ideas of Vonnegut regarding freewill versus determinism etc, that was a major topic of conversation.

CB: It's reassuring to know that the boys also played football and hung out at the shopping mall. But this was a school full of high achievers in which Jimmy Wales stood out, and not just academically. Todd Chambers remembers one particular lesson with maths teacher Mr Harshbarger.

TC: He would write something on the board and then he would turn to the class and say "Why did I do that", and one day Jimmy looked back and he said "I don't know" ... ha ha, in exactly Harshbarger's tone, so, he was never shy about blurting things out and er, ...

CB: Did he get in trouble for that?

TC: No, no, everyone found Jimmy quite delightful and amusing

[rock music]

CB: After school came a degree in finance, studying to the sound of 'They might be giants'. [rock music] Then came a Master's at the University of Alabama and plans for a PhD. He didn't see it through - instead he joined a futures and option trading firm in Chicago making enough money to see him comfortably through some years, and learning in his spare time to write computer code. It wasn't long, though, before he returned to his first love, encyclopedias, but this time online, first with a project called Nupedia. Journalist Kathryn Mangu Ward again.

KW: Nupedia was to be written by experts. It was to be written by lots of experts, it was going to be online. The notion of throwing open the doors and not worrying about credentials, and instead letting people judge each other on the usefulness of the information they would provide, came later.

CB: That notion came when Jimmy discovered wikis - websites whose users can add, delete or modify content themselves. It was the perfect tool for his dream of sharing information. He had never been completely happy with the Nupedia model where the experts held sway. With Wikipedia, anyone could come on board. Danny Wool was one of the first editors to join the Wales crusade.

DW: It was a little hectic, chaotic, I don't know if I would say anarchic, but definitely chaotic. Everyone was really trying, but we were experimenting. There was this whole new world coming into being.

CB: But there were casualties in the chaos. When they first planned an online encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales had brought in philosopher Larry Sanger to oversee the entries. But the two parted company soon afterwards, leading to a dispute about who exactly created the Wikipedia we know today. And Wales himself made that dispute much worse. He edited his own Wikipedia entry to change his description from 'co-founder' of Wikipedia to simply 'founder'. He admits now it was a mistake.

JW: "I edited my own biography and it caused a bit of a scandal when the press found out. It didn't cause any scandal within the community because I did it openly and in very publicly, but it was a very unpleasant experience.

CB: In fact the Wikipedia community, the volunteer editors and members of the charitable foundation that runs the site were furious. Editing your own entry is a no-no in Wikipedia land. Expunging the genius of Larry Sanger was almost as bad. Florence Devouard was a member of the Foundation's board at the time.

FD: The community did not agree with that so we restored the fact that Larry was the co-founder of Wikipedia. He was not happy with that of course, there was an argument, there were many many arguments, but after a while he admitted that the community was right.

CB: Jimmy Wales had to bow to his own philosophy. Openness and collaboration were the guiding principles of Wikipedia, based on the idea that, left to their own devices, human beings are essentially good, and will do good things. That's how David Gerard sums up the Wales vision. He started writing and editing Wikipedia entries in 2004, and he met Jimmy when he came to London to join wiki volunteers at the pub.

DG: He has this power of a niceness field. When you're around him, he projects niceness and everyone just acts very nicely.

CB: Is it just by being nice to people, by being ... creating a good atmosphere.

DG: Well, the whole thing about the way Wikipedia works is, that it works on the radical assumption, which is that mostly people are OK.

CB: And French volunteer Florence Devouard agrees that Jimmy Wales sets that tone. She says that's why the collaborative model has been so successful.

FD: At that time as a French person, it was tough for me to participate, because of the language issue, and it [he?] would rather push me forward so that I would feel that I had the right to participate, and my advice, my participation was valuable.

CB: That approach echoed through Wikipedia's business model. No bosses, nobody making money, because unlike other online giants, Wikipedia has no ads, which is as it should be according to former Wikipedia executive Brad Patrick.

BP: People thought critically of him for years, and saying, my God you could have been a billionaire if only you had tacked on some ads. The response though is that would have killed the golden goose, it's the purity of its, you know, being ad free, it's not having a commercial bent at all. That's what gives it its force and its power.

CB: But what's all this niceness, collaboration and easily accessed information actually for? Jimmy Wales's influences include the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek. He argued that decentralised knowledge aids the free market, a notion much loved by American libertarians, though is Jimmy Wales a libertarian? Well, he home schooled his daughter, and he argues strongly against gun control. Yet, as he told Kathryn Mangu Ward, in Reason magazine, he prefers the word 'centre right'.

KW: What he seemed to mean mostly is that he wasn't too keen on the social agenda of the, er, American Right, but that the focus on free markets and on personal liberty as interpreted by the Right was important to him, and he talked about when he lived in San Diego, being a big fan of going to the shooting range, but that in California, gun laws are actually quite strict. If you move to Florida, most of those restrictions go away, Florida's a much more gun-friendly state.

CB: There's a face book campaign in Florida trying to draft Jimmy Wales to run for Senate for the Republican Party this year. It's not clear whether he even knows about it and according to former Wikipedia executive Brad Patrick, he'd be very unlikely to sign up to any party's cause.

BP: He's certainly not what you would identify as any party's striper by any stretch. I think he cares deeply about the policies that are in play. As far as Jimmy's concerned his perspective will always tilt towards freedom.

CB: It was that commitment to freedom that led Jimmy Wales to a political firestorm in the United States. In January, congress was considering SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act intended to give the authorities more powers to curb foreign online theft of intellectual property. Jimmy Wales argued furiously that it curbed free speech and Wikipedia led several thousand websites in threatening to close down for a day in protest. The motion picture association of America was just one of the groups pushing for the bill to pass.

"The so-called blackout is just another gimmick, although a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who were working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It's our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this 'blackout', to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts, and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy"

CB: But the protest went ahead and SOPA was shelved - a triumph for Jimmy Wales who, thanks to the rapid success of Wikipedia, has become another of that handful of internet rockstars. Former Wikipedia editor Danny Wool watched the transformation of the website and the man.

DW: The phone calls were incredible. The people that were calling! I remember the Thai royal family's butler calling to correct something, celebrities galore, and it's inevitable that would have an impact on anyone.

CB:In the early days, Jimmy would get stuck into the corrections himself, but as he became the public face and proselytiser for Wikipedia, he found himself travelling for up to 300 days in the year, and travelling to a whole different world.

DW: I was talking to him on the phone, and he was on Richard Branson's island. There was some business we had to deal with and he said, "Oh, I have to go now. Desmond Tutu's here and I want to pour him orange juice". All these celebrities were talking with him and were consulting with him, which is a big thing for someone from a small town in the U.S.

CB: Given how much he has committed to Wikipedia - and to travelling - it's perhaps not surprising that Jimmy Wales' marriages have ended in divorce. He's about to get married again, to Tony Blair's former diary secretary with whom he has a baby. That means he's living mostly in London now. So how will this hard-working freedom fanatic work with David Cameron's government to open up policy to the public? If his question and answer session at that Radio 3 debate last year is any indication, it might not be a completely smooth ride.

JW: (Radio 3) "I think it was just a simple misstatement but David Cameron suggested they should shut down Twitter during the riots. Ah, the Chinese minister couldn't have said it better but .. and I will say, in his defence that it was just an offhand remark that went astray, and I don't think that if he sat down for five minutes to think about it, I don't think that was an actual policy proposal. But still, things like that shouldn't even come out of the mouths of politicians, it's absurd.

CB: As the ferocity of his arguments over the online piracy law in the US showed, Jimmy Wales fights for what he believes in, and what he believes in is simple. If the government asks him about the public making policy, his answer is likely to be, "trust the people".

See also

• Jimmy Wales

Links

• Katherine Mangu-Ward Interview in Reason.