Q&A with Jimmy Wales

Q&A with Jimmy Wales Sep 12, 2005 [1]

00:00:22 This week on Q & A, our guest is Jimmy Wales, the founder of an encyclopedia in many languages that anyone can edit.

What is Wikipedia

00:00:35 Jimmy Wales, what is Wikipedia?

00:00:38 Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia, written by thousands of volunteers on the internet in over a hundred languages. And it's one of the fastest growing websites.

00:00:50 Where did you get the idea?

00:00:53 I had the idea basically from watching the growth of the free software movement. All the software that runs the internet, Gnu-Linux, Apache, web-serving software. It's all written by volunteers collaboratively, using free licenses and it's really good-quality stuff. I realized in watching that, that the principle of collaboration on the internet which started with software could be expanded to other types of areas.

00:01:22 What does Wikipedia stand for?

00:01:30 So, 'wiki' is a hawaiian word meaning quick. It's a software that's really easy to edit and that technology has actually been around since 1995. I just invented a use for it. So, Wiki -- pedia. So wiki-encyclopedia. It started in January of 2001.

00:01:50 Where?

00:01:53 On the internet. So, at the time I was living California. We started in English and then within a couple months, we had French and German and Japanese and since then, we just keep adding languages. So now there are 62 languages that have at least a thousand articles. So we're starting to grow in a lot of fairly small languages which is really interesting to see.

How information gets into Wikipedia

00:02:19 How does -- well, let's just take our own network here, c-span. How does c-span get its - make its - way into your Wikipedia?

00:02:32 I'm sure c-span has more than one article about it. Anyone who sees -- if someone mentions c-span and realises there should be an article, they'll put brackets around the text they're writing. If the article doesn't exist it shows up as a red link and they know there's no article yet and they click there and they can start writing. As people are writing the article and saving it, every change goes to the recent changes page, so that the community can monitor what's going on. One of the big misconceptions about Wikipedia, is people imagine it's something like one million people, each adding one sentence each and somehow miraculously, it becomes something useful. But in fact what actually makes it work is the community. There's a really strong community of people behind the site and they're in constant communication by e-mail and IRC chat rooms and so they're monitoring every change that goes through the site monitoring it and trying to see if it's good or not.

Support from Google

00:03:32 As I was using Wikipedia to do the research for this interview I kept thinking: when will Google or Yahoo put Jimmy Wales out of business. And then when as I read further - you're in business with them.

00:03:44 Um, um, yeah, er, in some way. We're a nonprofit organization that I founded and we've gotten support from Yahoo already and Google's very interested in supporting us. We're still talking to them about what to do and Yahoo's donated some servers and I think what's interesting about that if you, er, it's almost a joke but it's completely true. If you think about why do Yahoo and Google want to do this. Well, their business model depends on the internet not sucking and we hope the internet doesn't suck. So wikipedia, for a lot of people, harkens back to what we all thought the internet was for in the first place, which is, er, when most people first heard of the internet they thought oh, this is fantastic. People can communicate from all over the world and build knowledge and share information and then we went through the whole dotcom boom and bust and the internet seemed to be about, er, pop up ads, spam and porn, and selling dog food over the internet. Now, Wikipedia hearkens back to the original vision of the internet so it's important for the whole business of the entire internet that there be quality resources that people can turn to and want to turn to. So it's important to these companies to support us.

00:05:06 I think other than the fact that you pop up all the time on Google when I looked for things, the first time I really wanted to know more about it exactly is when I saw some article at that moment, rated you as the 57th busiest website in the world. I tried to find it yesterday and you can't get into Alexa to do this. You have to pay for it now?

00:05:32 Oh, no. You can can check. I think we're around 40th in the world. If you look at reach, meaning the number of unique visitors we see in a day, in comparison to the Washington Post, U.S.A. today and the New York Times, and we're larger than all of those combined. That's the number of people we're reaching globally every day. It's substantial.

Only one person works for Wikipedia

00:06:03 How many people work Wikipedia.

00:06:03 Er, one.

00:06:05 Who is that?

00:06:08 Our lead software developer who coordinates the releases of the software. The software's mostly written by volunteers. But he's our C.T.O. and he organizes the people who manages the servers.

00:06:21 Where does he live?

00:06:22 Los Angeles.

00:06:23 Where are the servers and how many are there?

00:06:26 Right now, 90 servers. The bulk are in Florida at a big co-location facility there. Around 20 in Amsterdam, and six in Paris and coming on line, very soon are -- there's 20 servers in South Korea that were provided by Yahoo and there's twenty more on order. So within the next few months, we'll be at 150 servers and they're really overloaded at the moment. So it's really a challenge growing the technical infrastructure. We've got a lot of good people working on it.

How wealthy is Jimbo?

00:07:04 How old are you?

00:07:07 I'm 39. I think that's right.

00:07:10 How can you afford to do this nonprofit at this stage in your life?

00:07:14 Well, I made enough money. I used to be a futures and options trader and I'm not a wealthy person but I'm a person who lives within my means. I have enough money to live and I can't think of anything cooler to be doing so this is what I do. We get -- to run the website, obviously, to buy all the servers … we get donations from the general public. In the u.s. we're a 501 c3, so people can deduct it on their taxes and in europe, we have a French and German chapter and they're in the process of becoming tax exempt there because we get a lot of donations from Europe and Japan and all over the world. So far, we've had very good success raising money. The fundraisers that we've had, we ended up going over what we ask for. We just finished a fundraiser where our base goal was $200,000 and I think we raised around $240,000. So the outpouring from the general public has been quite good.

Budget

00:08:25 And it doesn't cost -- $240,000 a year?

00:08:33 Basically, it's our budget for the next few months.

00:08:35 What does it cost you a year do you think?

00:08:37 I think the total budget for the coming year will be about a million dollars. That's my estimate. The budget for the past year was a lot less but we were a lot smaller. I think as it keeps growing, there's more costs. To double in size from four to eight isn't as expensive as doubling from 80 to 160. The audience goes up and the costs goes up. So there's a large of base of people who are touched by our work and think it's important.

00:09:10 A couple things. How many unique viewers a day right now?

00:09:15 I'm not actually sure about that because since we don't have any advertising on the site, we don't have any immediate need to know that number. Brion, the one employee I said to him, I really need this number. Everyone's asking me. So he's going to get with me with that number soon.

00:09:36 Give me a ballpark.

00:09:41 In the millions. The number that I do know, is that we're doing 2 billion page views per month, pages served every month. So that's a lot of encyclopedia articles being delivered.

Education

00:09:54 Were your parents home schoolers? Your mother?

00:09:56 No. Actually …

00:09:57 Somebody wrote that somewhere.

00:09:59 No. Yeah. That was in Time Magazine. That was a misunderstanding. But the story is actually interesting. They got it a little bit wrong but my mother and my grand mother had a small private school-- it's actually more in the tradition of a one-room school house, the Abe Lincoln type of thing.

00:10:09 Where?

00:10:24 this was in Huntsville, Alabama. So not home schooling but similar. A very unique educational upbringing and in the school we had -- there were four children in my grade most of the time and we grouped together first through fourth grade and fifth through eighth grade and what's nice about it and the tie-in into my current work is that we had a fair amount of freedom to study whatever we liked. It was a Montessori philosophy of education and so I spent many, many hours just pouring over the World Book Encyclopedia. I called my Mom recently and said do you have my old world book and she said oh sorry I think we got rid of those years ago, and I said ah, I could have sold those on Ebay. I'd like to have those as a memento now. But I spent lots of hours over the World Book Encyclopedia.

00:11:18 How many years were you schooled? Did your mother actually teach you?

00:11:21 Yeah, yeah, some significant portion of those years. There are also other teachers and whenever there was another teacher available, they tried to have me under the other teacher. Having your mom as your mom and your teacher is difficult at times but it was an interesting balance, I think, with home schooling you do get the personal attention of a parent which is wonderful but you also have all these questions about social interactions. So this was a very nice balance. You've got a very attentive environment but you also have other kids there and other teachers.

00:12:05 How many years were you in that school?

00:12:07 Up to the eighth grade and after that went to a traditional college prep high school. It was quite a sacrifice for my parents to pay to go there. The one-room school house business doesn't pay very well but they felt that education was important. That was always a passion in my household, a very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life.

00:12:38 Another thing I read about you is that you are a follower or have been at some point, a follower of Ayn Rand.

00:12:40 That's right, yes.

00:12:49 Er, who was she and do you still follow her and what is it about her that you like?

00:13:00 Ayn Rand, she wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and is viewed by many as something of -- the founder of the libertarian strain of thought in the U.S. she would have rejected quite rightly, the libertarian label but I think for me, one of the core things that is very applicable to my life today is the virtue of independence. The vision, you know, if you know the idea of Howard Rourke, who's the architect in the Fountainhead had who has a vision for when he wants to accomplish and there's some time in the book when he'd frustrated in his career because people don't want to build the type of buildings he wants to build and he's given a difficult choice to compromise his integrity or to go out of business and he has to go and take a job and for me, that model has a lot of resonance for me. When I think about what I'm doing, the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that. It's my artistic work.

00:14:14 What year did you read Atlas Shrugged and The FountainHead?

00:14:23 I was about twenty.

00:14:24 Where were you?

00:14:24 I was at Auburn University.

00:14:25 Auburn and Indiana University are in your past. Any others?

00:14:28 University of Alabama.

00:14:30 What did you do at all three of those places?

00:14:35 So, at Auburn University, I was an undergraduate in finance and at the University of Alabama I was in the PhD program in finance, but I left there with a master's degree in finance. At Indiana, I wa also in the PhD program there. So I did two different Ph.D. programs in finance, [and did] all the course work, but I never finished the Phd. I left to go to Chicago to be a futures and options trader. I've published an academic paper on option price theory. If I go back and look at it now, I realize I used to be pretty smart. But it's very intensely mathematical.

When he was making money

00:15:22 What years did you make your money?

00:15:25 You know, er I'd say, you get, 1994 to 2000, I'd say, when I was doing trading.

00:15:28 So you were literally in your late 20's, early 30's?

00:15:29 Yeah.

His father

00:15:31 You didn't tell us - you told us what you are mother and grandmother did - what about your father?

00:15:37 My father, when I was growing up, the whole time I was growing up, he was a grocery store manager and er he's retired now and the thing about my father is he wrote to me – after we had grown, he had never completed college, so he went back to school and, er finished his degree, his college degree and went back into the work force for a little while but now he's retired. That's the spirit of lifelong learning.

When did Wikipedia become well known?

00:16:16 When did you notice after starting with Wikipedia in 2001, when did people start paying attention to you in the general press?

00:16:26 Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, now when we start a new project, we started a new project called Wiki news and it's young and experimental and we got a lot of attention because of Wikipedia. With Wikipedia we had the luxury for the first couple of years that nobody cared what we were doing so we could make mistakes and experiment with the model. I'd say the first real notice we started to get was pretty early on. I remember on September 11 – so we started in January - and September 11, The New York Times called me, which seemed very strange to me but - I said why are you calling me today. And it was the technology editor. He said there's nothing. We just have to put out the paper. That was the first major news article. But even then, it was sort of trickling for a while. But now it's become really -- we get a lot of attention everywhere.

Locked down articles

00:17:31 I mentioned the Time Magazine article got it wrong on your home schooling and also got it wrong during the Kerry-Bush campaign of your computer software freezing. Explain that.

00:17:45 Right. Yeah want so one of the interesting things about Wikipedia, you naturally assume on controversial topics that the big debates within the Wikipedia community will be roughly the party of the left versus the party of the right. It turns out on those types of topics, it's actually the party of the thoughtful and reasonable people and the party of the jerks and those aren't the Left only. They come from all sides, you've got jerks. So within the community, there's never been really any controversy about the George Bush -- except the George Bush article. Of course there are editorial disputes over how to word things but there's no real fundamental question that the article should be comprehensive, factual, sourced. It shouldn't be a one-sided political rant on either side. It should discuss criticisms of the president and support of the president. And so the article is always fine in the community but there are always, vandals. And they come in and think it's funny to post disgusting pictures or something, replace Bush's picture with a picture of Hitler. We revert that within a minute.

The community

00:19:06 Who's we?

00:19:08 The community.

00:19:10 You mean you don't even know who does that?

00:19:13 Well, I mean, I could look it up. You can -- on the site, part of the reason the site works is you can be anonymous, but the people in the community have a consistent identity. And so there's accountability. So people gain reputations within the community for doing good work. You can take a look at the history of the article and see who's fixing the vandalism and things like that, and even ordinary reasonable people who intensely dislike the president will agree that an encyclopedia article shouldn't replace his picture with Hitler. So we always have to lock articles from time to time when they're under a particular attack but the …

Who does that?

00:19:59 The administrators, the people in the community. So within the community, people can be elected as administrators and they can block IP numbers. So if someone's causing trouble, we can block them from editing temporarily. And, er, we had to lock the article for less than 2% of the time. The Bush and Kerry articles were locked less than 2% of the time during 2004. So what Time had reported is that Wales had to lock the article for most of 2004. That was mistaken on two fronts. One, we did not lock the article for most of 2004, but also the article gave the impression that I personally had something to do with it.

Profit and non-profit

00:20:41 Why did you make this non-profit and not for-profit?

00:20:48 Well, from very early on when we started it, I conceived it, you know, 2001, it was still kind of the tail-end of the dotcom era and I wanted to try something and I thought at the time it could be for profit, but once we started building the community and I gave it more thought, it really made more sense. It's neutral, educational, volunteer effort. People have among the motivation, and this is what really drives me, is the idea there's huge problems in the world, of ignorance, and ignorance causes war, terrorism, poverty and so this charitable mission of saying let's give a freely licensed encyclopedia to everybody on the planet really captivates people and that really makes more sense to do in a nonprofit framework. The volunteers really wanted it that way.

00:21:47 So I just said, well, let's do that.

00:21:51 But you now have other wikis that are for-profit?

That's right, yes.

Wiki cities

00:21:54 Can you explain that and what kind of wikis are you putting together?

00:22:02 One of the most important Wikipedians is Angela and she is the board of the foundation and she and I founded a company, wiki cities. We're using the same technology but it's not about the technology really, it's about the social structure and the social model of bringing people together. How to build a community of thoughtful people who can do something good. There's lots of communities on the internet that are not healthy. They're argumentative and difficult environments, but we try to build a healthy friendly environment to say let's all work together together to do something useful. But the idea is there's lots of types of things people want to do that are perfectly valid but don't fit under the rubric of the nonprofit educational mission. So, for example, we have some of the early successful sites would be the -- we have a Star Wars site where people are documenting the entire history of the series and doing community pages to discuss the philosophy or the theories of what's going on.

00:23:03 How do you make money then?

00:23:05 That has advertising on it so that's advertisement supported.

Why a non-profit?

00:23:08 And how big a operation do you have on the side like these four nonprofit companies you put together?

00:23:15 That's,er, still very small so we're finishing around raising some investment to buy more servers. In a for-profit context, this is the other reason that being in a nonprofit makes sense. In the nonprofit right now, for Wikipedia right now the servers aren't running and I'm not watching them and Brian is probably not watching them but there are a couple of dozen system administrators who voluntarily have root access to log in and they monitor the site and if the server goes down, they reboot.

00:23:49 And they don't work for you.

00:23:50 Right. But they're not -- that's one of the reasons it was so important for Wikipedia to be nonprofit. We couldn't afford a staff to manage a server of 150 without having advertising on the site. So being in the nonprofit enabled us to do that because people are willing to contribute their time to a nonprofit.

00:24:11 They're not willing to volunteer to make Jimbo rich fund.

00:24:17 And what's that's what people call you, 'Jimbo'?

00:24:20 Yeah. That's my online name. Usually it doesn't end up in print, but sometimes it does.

00:24:25 Do they call you God King?

00:24:26 Not really, that's another …

00:24:27 I saw that somewhere.

00:24:29 It's a mistake that gets repeated a lot. It's such a cute phrase. In the wiki subculture that predates wikipedia, the idea of these websites that anybody can edit, so it's very open ended - if there's an administrator who uses their position as owner of the server to be kind of a tyrant, and impose their views on everyone and ban people arbitrarily, that's called a God King. It's a very negative connotation. And so people don't really call me God King within the community. But it gets -- I think they're starting to now because it gets repeated in the press so often!

00:25:13 How often are you criticized for setting up a nonprofit and having this huge following and literally people can find a way to your for-profits through your nonprofit?

00:25:24 I've never had any criticism of that. One of the things that we do is we have a very firm wall. So, for example, in the nonprofit there are no special links to the for-profit side. There's no -- and we wouldn't do that. It's -- from an ethical and legal point of view it's very important to have that wall. It wouldn't be appropriate for the nonprofit to be somehow benefiting the for-profit. Unduly so. In my role as the head of the foundation it's important that whatever relationships we have are at arm's length. So that's something I take very seriously, because the integrity of Wikipedia and the neutrality is so important.

00:26:11 How many -- I want to go back to how this all works . I found our own references on there and I must say I found everything to be accurate. But I wonder what happens when either we decide that we want to add a lot more information to that or even people want to add stuff that's not accurate, how long does it sit there not accurate?

Neutrality

00:26:33 Right, well, in most cases, the -- for certain types of vandalism there have been academic studies showing that it's repaired within a median time of under five minutes. That's sort of fairly obvious vandalism. More subtle problem are going to take longer for people to debate and edit and figure out. If you wanted to add more information about c-span that would be fine, but you would be expected to adhere to our same neutrality principle, so if -- I mean, you can imagine there must be lots of neutral information that wouldn't be controversial that you can add more about the history and things like that. But if there are criticisms of c-span and you went into the article and just deleted them, it would be very obvious, because it's easy to be able to compare an old version to a new version. So anybody who's not familiar could say, the whole section of criticism just vanished, we're going to put that back in there. On the other hand, it can be perfectly legitimate. If there's -- you know, the example they always give is a fictitious example, so I don't want to imply anything. A company like Nike, for example, who has been criticized for their labor practices. But on their web side they have a full defense of their labor practices. If they looked at the article in Wikipedia and said this is really a one-sided thing, it doesn't show our point of view, it would be perfectly appropriate for them to come in and say Nike has responded by saying so and so. That would be fine. What wouldn't be fine is they'd delete the criticism. They wouldn't be able do that because the community would react quite actively to that. So , participation bring people writing about themselves in some way is inherently problematic. I encourage people who have biographies of themselves to really try not to edit those biographies. Leave a comment on the talk page or something like that.

00:28:35 People are doing that kind of thing?

00:28:37 Yeah, on occasion. But most people who do say -- a famous author may show up and say there's information that's not here that should be here and they add it in and it's really no problem.

00:28:50 If somebody is watching and say I want to be on Wikipedia, but I'm not, could they start?

00:28:55 They could start but there is a whole community process for the deletion of articles. We have several rules that con strain the scope of the encyclopedia.

00:29:05 What are those rules?

00:29:09 One rule, for example, is verifiability. So if you want to write about, you know, most people you say, I want to write about the street where I live. Well, there's really no information that other Wikipedians can verify about the street. So we would have no way of knowing if you were hoaxing us or something, so those articles can't stay. That's one way that if most viewers say -- oh, I'm going to write an article about myself. If you're notable and there's press coverage and people can verify, that would be fine - probably preferable that you don't write it yourself. There's something to me about writing about yourself that's a little tacky. Some would say, well, that's fine, I'm sure you're a wonderful information so there's no way we can confirm you're not just making things up. That's -- no original research is another rule. Well, most of these rules have really a dual purpose. They have the purpose of -- the epistemological or intellectual purpose of saying this is what an encyclopedia should be like. There's also a social purpose, somehow this helps us get our work done. No original research, the original formulation of this came about when we realized that we were getting contributions from physics crackpots of whom there are a great many on the internet, so people have their own personal theory of magnetism that they made up and they want to write about it in Wikipedia. This is obviously inappropriate because whereas an encyclopedia we're not peer reviewed academic journal. We're not qualified to review new research. This is also true in history. Somebody has a new theory of history, they need to get it published in a real place. We're not qualified to evaluate that. We're qualified to look at the sources and say this is published in the journal of history, we can talk about it but new research can't be done. So, From the point of view that it's the right thing for an encyclopedia to do, but socially it's easier to tell someone, I still think you're a lunatic and your theory of magnetism is nonsense. That's hard for people to hear. But if you can say thank you for your submission, unfortunately we can't do original research, please get it published somewhere. Then you can treat people with respect.

Appeals process

00:31:38 So somebody in the community whom you probably don't know will tell that person we're not ready for you, you're out.

00:31:44 Yeah.

00:31:45 What if the person must appeal that?

00:31:48 Well, within the community there are various social processes, so we have -- from the deletion there's a page -- it used to be called votes for deletion but they changed the name of it the other day, so that's sort of in flux, but changing the process. There's the deletion process. And then if it goes beyond that there's an arbitration committee that's partly elected, partly appointed by me within the community, which basically tries mostly to deal with behavioral issues to say, you know, you can't continue repeatedly doing the same thing over and over. That's annoying the community because eventually you just -- you have to stop. We have work to do. So -- and then ultimately beyond that they could appeal to me but that's very rare. It hasn't happened.

00:32:39 You're the ultimate authority?

00:32:40 Yeah.

00:32:42 In the end you can change things if you want?

00:32:46 Yeah, yeah and that's an interesting role because the way I like to explain it is, within the free software world, where a group of volunteers is collaboratively running software, there's a long tradition in that world of having a benevolent dictator. This isn't because programmers love tyranny or anything like this. It's just when you have a small group of volunteers trying to get work done, you don't want to get into a whole system of voting that goes into every change of the program. It just makes sense - it seems to be a viable model to have a trusted person who listens. You have to have the right person to listen to the different sides about what should be in the program and then make a decision and everybody can say, well, ok, you know, and -- in the Linux kernel, it's er Linus Torvald, and he decides ultimately. The community of programmers around him makes all the tough decisions but if there's a real conflict, he decides.

00:33:39 How many members of the community do you actually know personally?

00:33:41 Several hundred. Europe mostly. I'm in Europe about half the time and I travel all over the U.S.

00:33:49 Are there people in Europe, English speaking, who are involved in defining things that are American?

00:33:57 I'm sorry.

00:33:59 Take it back to c-span. People that would live in, say, Germany that would add information about background on our network?

00:34:10 Oh, yeah, that's very common. I people can write in the language they know, there's no national component to it.

Trading again

00:34:20 What year did you give up options trading?

00:34:25 Um, I guess 2000-ish, I guess is the last time I …

You were living where then?

00:34:29 Florida.

00:34:30 Where in Florida?

00:34:33 St. Petersburg.

You married sometime along this way?

00:34:35 Yeah.

Marriage

00:34:37 Who did you marry?

00:34:39 My wife is Christine. I see you're going to get me in trouble on national television because I have such a bad memory. We've been married for seven years, so we can do the math and subtract.

00:34:50 Where did you meet her?

00:34:52 In Chicago. She's half Japanese and was working for a Japanese steel company selling steel and we met.

00:35:02 Does she get into the computer stuff with you?

00:35:06 Not so much. She stays home and cares for Kira. We have a daughter who's 4 1/2 . Kira is really, really, really smart, so it's a very full-time job talking to her.

00:35:22 She's into this already?

00:35:24 She thinks it's fun -- she doesn't write or anything with Wikipedia, but -- she's too young for that, but she likes to talk about Wikipedia.

00:35:34 What do you want to happen with all this?

00:35:36 I actually want to go back to one thing that we were talking about.

00:35:39 Sure.

Governance

00:35:42 I was talking about the benevolent dictator model. I don't want to leave the impression that that's our model. I don't feel it's appropriate of any one person to be the dictator of all human knowledge. So we're moving from that model which was necessary when we had a small group of people, to the model - I make the comparison the British monarchy - that my power should decrease over time and become more symbolic. My job is to defend the community, not rule over the community. That is one thing I wanted to throw at it.

00:36:13 You had other rules that we didn't go over.

00:36:21 No personal attacks, that's a rule that's served us very, very well. A lot of internet communities are quite hostile and rough. I think almost everybody's had the experience of signing up for a mailing list that sounded interesting and realizing that it's dominated by people who like to scream at each other. And er, we try to make Wikipedia a safe space for the broad middle of reasonable thoughtful people. And that's one of the reasons we're successful on controversial topics is, we really discourage people from, you know, competitive argumentative behaviours and we try to say we should be cooperating and trying to find common ground. It's very successful. I don't mean to paint it as a utopia, obviously. It's a human project with a lot of internal squabbling and so forth. But on average I think we've achieved something in the community in terms of getting together thoughtful people from a broad spectrum of political and religious and different ideological backgrounds. We're still willing to give some space for other people.

00:37:28 Who sets the rules?

00:37:29 Some of the core rules have been set by me from the very beginning. A neutrality policy that Wikipedia shouldn't take a stand on controversial issues, just report on them. that Wikipedia is a encyclopedia as opposed to a joke book or a compendium of random facts, things like that. But the day-to-day rules of the community are set by the community, through a process that no one really understands. It's quite complicated. It's a process of discussion, debate, consensus. Some voting. Some aristocracy - people who are well respected in the community can make decisions and they'll be respected. It's quite a confusing mix.

00:38:17 Let's go back. Let's say -- the c-span stuff again. Let's say there's a personal attack in there and that there's new information, new research which violates your rules and nobody sees it. Does it just sit there?

00:38:34 It could just sit there until somebody sees it.

00:38:38 Say someone on our network saw this. Can they be a part of taking it out?

00:38:43 Oh, sure. And the other thing that people can do is raise attention. Every article has an associated discussion page. So you can go to the talk page and post a notice there. Then one of the important things about the way the software works is that all changes go to the recent change page but people have their personal watch list. If somebody edits the c-span article they can add it to their personal watch list. Most of the time this happens by default. Every page gets added to the watch list. So what happens is whoever wrote the article originally would be notified. If somebody puts something in an article, typically there will be lots of people notified and come and look at it. Some things could slip through the crack. Sometimes they do. I'm always very interested in studying how it happens. If I look in an article and I see -- usually it's something very minor like hi, Mom. Somebody writes hi, Mom at the end of the article. I go in and say, gee, this hi Mom has been in there for seven days, how come nobody noticed. What happened? Why is this not on somebody's watch list or whatever. We're always looking for ways to improve.

Who edits Wikipedia?

00:39:55 A statistic I found on January, 2005. 13,000 editors edit five edits on average a month.

00:40:02 Yeah.

00:40:06 There are 3,000 editors, 3,000 people in your community have 100 edits a month.

00:40:12 Absolutely.

00:40:13 If you boil it down farther

I have been hoping to get the people who compile the statistics to get me the next narrower group, because it's really interesting. There are -- I did some research myself into who's editing Wikipedia, because there is this -- there are two models that people think about how Wikipedia works. There's the thousands of people each doing a little bit of work and then there's the core community view that says the work is being done by the core community. The statistics when you look at it show the core community is doing by far the vast majority of the work. So with

For free?

00:40:49 For free, yeah. There are people who make thousands of edits a month.

00:40:53 I want to stop you there and ask you about those people. You know them.

00:40:56 Uh-huh.

00:40:58 Why do they do it? Give us a profile of somebody you know and how much they're involved in all this.

00:41:05 Well, I think there are many different types of people. So it's hard to boil it down to any one but a typical type of person is really smart, really friendly. Because if you're not friendly you have a hard time in Wikipedia, because it's a social process. So having social skills is really important. And then, I think people really enjoy the process of engaging with other smart people and a dialogue that's productive and building something, so you may have a -- an interest in some area. Lots of people report this. I'm interested in birds. So I wrote this little article and it came back three days later and it got huge and big and interesting. There's a whole group of people who write articles about trains, the history of trains in unbelievable detail. I know nothing about trains and I was shocked to find this. There's a little subculture of people interested in trains. So that's the type of people. So there's the immediate fun of the are process but then there's a bigger picture thing. The people feel it's freely licensed, meaning anyone can copy, redistribute, modify, commercially, noncommercially, you can do anything you like with our work. People really feel that this is something that's very important. That this idea of an information commons in an era when most of the copyright debate is about kids stealing music, right, that's the way it's usually framed. But for us, the whole concept of free culture and sharing on the internet, it's not a concept of consumers trying to get something for free. In our case it's the concept of producers, people actually creating something trying to use -- to share it. That big-picture vision really motivates people.

00:43:03 Could I take a lot of material on one subject off Wikipedia and publish it in a book and not pay any copyright?

00:43:11 Yeah.

00:43:13 Is anybody doing that?

00:43:14 There have been a few small projects. I think, you know, the one thing is the -- our name is a trademark. So you have to be careful about -- you can't just use our logo and pass off your work as ours. A proper credit -- you have to follow the rules of the license, which is pretty easy. Yeah, people are perfectly able to do that. That's something that we really encourage and we actually are very eager to see that sort of thing happening with educational materials in developing worlds. So the idea that some entrepreneurial publisher in India will realize they can publish a full encyclopedia for a fraction of the cost of Britannica, and have a market for it. If they can't afford Britannica as a traditional resource, but they can afford the price of printing. That's something I would be very excited to see.

Wikipedia like a rest room?

00:44:07 I know you're going to know this name because he's outspoken against what you're doing. Robert McHendry.

00:44:13 Uh-huh.

00:44:24 Right.

00:44:25 Last sentence -- last paragraph. The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject to confirm some matter is in a position of a visitor to a public rest room. I know you've seen that many times.

00:44:38 Yeah.

00:44:40 It may be obviously dirty so he knows to exercise great care or it may seem fairly clean so he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. He's not very happy with you, Mr. Mchendry.

00:44:58 Haha - I had dinner with Bob after he wrote this article and he's a very thoughtful, nice guy so I -- I don't actually know if he regrets this inflammatory rhetoric. If not, he's sort of gotten famous as the public toilet guy. So -- but the ultimate point - there is an interesting point but one that I feel is invalid ated by the fact that there is a community. And I suppose if you want to call it a public rest room, you can. But it's a public rest room that's kept immaculately clean for the most part and most people are more than happy to go into, you know, the Four Seasons hotel and use the public rest room because it's cared for by people. So the analogy is cute, but strained, I think. His substantive criticisms are things that -- yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things about Wikipedia is that although the average quality articles is very, very high, people use Wikipedia, you can say, this is actually -- it's a miracle that it works at all. But the fact that it's pretty darn good is really interesting. But it is true. Any article that you go to may have been edited just five minutes ago and destroyed. And so that's something that we're constantly studying within the community, is, how do we -- particularly when we think about going into cd-rom or print, which is really necessary for our goals with respect to digital divide and -- in developing countries, how do we identify particular versions of articles that we can say, well, this is the one -- this is the clean one, and this we don't know about. So that's an ongoing discussion in the community, how do we get from our always-in-progress, always-edited site to a 1.0 stable version that we can say, these are articles that have been vetted by the community and that we feel are good enough in some sense, and that's -- our goal has always been Britannica or better quality.

00:47:12 I used to think so. I don't know. But in determining -- Wikipedia is really big in Germany. The readership is about 50% higher per capita in German speaking countries than English speaking countries. Brock house is the publisher of the Britannica style traditional encyclopedia and their sales are up 30% in the last year even though Wikipedia is going through the roof. I think there's a certain -- there ends up being some complementarity to it. People say who needs an encyclopedia, you can look in Google. And when you look in Google, well, the information hasn't been vetted, and then it's some random person's web page, how do you trust it. So Wikipedia helps people to remember that, hey, there is actually something to having a group of people edit and monitor and put a level of trust to information. So that makes it more appealing, makes Wikipedia more appealing. It's hard to say.

Sanger

00:48:08 You're going to recognize this also.

00:48:10 Uh-huh.

00:48:12 "I stopped participating in wikipedia when funding for my position ran out. That does not mean I'm mercenary. I might have continued to participate were it not for a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project". Larry Sanger [December 31 2004]. Who was that?

00:48:32 Larry was an employee of mine who was editor in chief of a prior project, Nupedia, and was the first editor in chief at Wikipedia. And he was never comfortable with the very open social model. He tends to come to come from a more Britannica school of thought of vetted experts reviewing content. And that's essentially a philosophical difference between he and I [sic].

00:49:04 He calls you an anti-elitist.

00:49:06 Yes.

00:49:09 I actually feel that's wrong. I feel in my own way I'm much more elitist than Larry. But it's the difference between -- it's perhaps anti-credentialist. To me, the key thing is getting it right. If a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor. It's the work that matters. You can't coast on your credentials in wikipedia. You have to enter the marketplace with ideas and engage with people. I feel like his views on the social environment are a bit outdated. He hasn't been in the project for quite some time, so –

How long was he there?

00:49:50 I think he was there for the first year-ish, something like that.

00:50:00 Nupedia was what?

00:50:01 Nupedia was – I had the vision for a free encyclopedia. In 1999 I founded and funded Nupedia – and what we didn't understand at that time is how to build a community and how to empower a community to do good work. So a lot of people were really interested in the project because the vision of a free encyclopedia in a lot of languages is appealing to a lot of really really smart people. But our software – it was a very traditionally designed review process. There were seven stages, and you had to submit your article and then it was reviewed by professors. It was really not much fun and I knew it wasn't going to work when I personally sat down to write an article about Robert Merton, who won the Nobel prize for option pricing theory. So I said, I have a paper in the area, I know something about this and I sat down to write the article and I felt like I was back in graduate school because they were going to give my paper to professors to review. I was going to get comments on -- I might get a C or a B grade or something. It was a very different feel from Wikipedia where you just plunge in. If it isn't that great, that's fine. Somebody else will pick it up and take it on. It doesn't have to be a full article. You can just write one paragraph. You start off -- in French Wikipedia they came up with the phrase 'piranha effect'. You start an article and it's not quite good enough so people pick at it and it's a feeding frenzy and articles grow. So, Nupedia, so ultimately, we worked very hard and had a lot of good people working. And got very, very little done. So we started looking around and we found the wiki software and we said we'll put it up on the web and invite the Nupedia volunteers – in fact, the reason it's called Wikipedia is that we were afraid that the Nupedia volunteers were going to hate it, and so we didn't want to put it up on the Nupedia website, so -- we said, well, let's put it somewhere else. Wikipedia is a good name.

00:52:00 Wiki wiki is a hawaiian word for quick or speedy?

00:52:03 That's right.

Bomis

00:52:05 What's the story -- I'm probably not announcing it right. Bomis?

00:52:11 Uh-huh.

00:52:16 Bomis.com. Dirty pictures?

00:52:17 Ugh! That's a a much exaggerated story, so – Bomis is a search engine.

00:52:19 You started this?

00:52:21 Yeah, yeah. Years ago. I'm not involved in the company any more.

00:52:25 Well what's the dirty picture thing?

00:52:28 Well, Bomis is a search engine so there's all kind of content on it. Bomis always had a market similar to Maxim magazine [touches nose]. So, it's kind of a guy-oriented search engine. The story is much exaggerated by er -- through history. So -- so – it's something I struggle with constantly.

00:52:47 So, at some point somebody said you drove a Hyundai but there was a parentheses around it. No, he actually has a Ferrari.

00:52:53 I do actually have a Ferrari. It's -- it doesn't work at the moment and my Ferrari cost less than most peoples' SUVs.

What's the point?

00:53:02 So what are you going to do with all this? What's your real goal in this? You want to change the world?

00:53:08 Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a few things that are really important to me. One of the most important is that people -- people need to have access to fundamental neutral information to empower them to make better decisions politically, in their own personal lives, and the world is -- the amount of unreason in the world is staggering. And to me, one of the areas that I'm very, very interested in is getting information out in developing countries, growing those language Wikipedias which are now quite small. So a big focus for me moving forward - English and German and Japanese and French, these languages are doing fine - what I'm interested in is Hindi, Bengali, Arabic. These are the Wikipedia editions which exist, but they're quite small and they need promotion and growth. And we're looking at how can we help and push these things.

00:54:16 Does your foundation have to buy the servers in order to make that work?

00:54:21 Yeah, but it's not really a server issue. The internet's global, people can access the internet from anywhere. It's really a matter of finding more good people to be involved, getting people excited about it. You know, as I look into it, some of the problems are problems that are beyond the scope of our work, so, if people don't have access to the internet they can't work on Wikipedia and that's not something I can solve.

00:54:45 Do we trace the Ayn Rand connection at age 20 to today having a political philosophy that you can label?

00:54:50 Yeah. Yeah. But it's important to keep separate -- and I'm very meticulous about this -- keeping separate my personal political views separate from the project. The project is politically neutral. And one of the reasons I almost never edit Wikipedia at all, even going back to the very beginning, in the very beginning it was more important that I didn't edit, because I didn't want to give the idea that this was suppose to reflect my view of the world. I don't get involved in editing and content disputes other than at a very minimal level.

Politics

00:55:33 What's your politics?

00:55:35 The category people would fit me in that's most accessible would be libertarian but I don't like that term.

00:55:43 You don't belong to the libertarian party?

00:55:46 No, no. Yeah, I think they're lunatics.

00:55:50 You belong to the democratic or the republican party?

00:55:53 No, no.

00:55:54 They're not lunatics but I can't support many of their policies, so -

00:55:57 What do you feel most strongly about in politics?

00:56:03 Freedom, liberty. Basically individual rights. The idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them is critical to me. Dealing with people with reason rather than force is core.

Schooling again

00:56:21 At what point in your life, if you could pin it on the map, did it all start, that kind of thinking and why?

00:56:28 I have no idea.

00:56:31 I think maybe even as a child, we -- my mother and grandmother had this small private school and one of the most difficult things for them was dealing with the government, who you know, it was demonstrable that kids at the school were often two grades ahead of the public schools. We would get kids who were failing in the public schools, they a year behind, and they would come for a couple of years and be two years ahead, and yet there was constant interference and bureaucracy and very, sort of, snobby inspectors from the state who came out and didn't care for this, that, and the other and our books weren't new enough and things like this. From a very early age, I thought it's no simple answer to say the government's going to take care of something.

00:57:18 What's your Mom's name?

00:57:19 Doris.

00:57:21 What's your grand -- doris.

00:57:24 What's your grandmother's name?

00:57:26 Emma.

00:57:27 Is she alive?

00:57:28 No.

00:57:31 She passed away sometime ago.

00:57:32 We're out of time.

00:57:34 Thank you.