Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia & Free Culture

 

‘Imagine a world where every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.' This was the vision statement with which Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia. Find out the story behind wikipedia from Jimmy Wales

Excerpts from his talk:

 

In the year 1962, Charles van Doren said, "The ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe". I totally agree with that statement. Wikipedia started off with a radical idea.

 

What is Wikipedia

 

So what is Wikipedia? It's a freely licensed encyclopedia written by 1000s of volunteers in many languages. What do I mean by "free access"? In the open source world, we mean something special when we use the word ‘free'. It's free as in free speech, not free as in free beer!  By free, we mean it in the sense of GNU, as outlined by Richard Stallman, the father of the free software movement. By becoming a Wikipedia contributor you are contributing to a body of knowledge that anyone can use for any reason. This also means that anyone can print the content of Wikipedia in a book form and even distribute it. Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in history.

 

What do I mean by the term "the sum of all human knowledge"? Remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a data dump. It's not an archive or a library or a textbook. Wikipedia is intended to give a summary of human knowledge, with the depth of the material depending on the context.

 

So does "every single person" on the planet benefit from Wikipedia? Wikipedia is inherently global in nature. We have more than 2.5 million articles in English. We have articles in more than 200 languages! We have articles in many Indian languages on Wikipedia as well, including Telugu, Hindi and Urdu as well. The Kerala government has done a remarkable job by helping us setup more than 8000 articles in Malayalam. Such kind of donation of articles gives lot of velocity to the language Malayalam on Wikipedia. We have more than 11 million articles. Alexa rates us as the 6th most popular website in Germany, 10th in India, 8th most popular in Japan, 13th most popular in Iran. We are the 5th most popular website worldwide with more than 244 million unique visitors monthly!

 

For my observations, I have realized that how much Wikipedia is used in a given country depends on 2 factors

1.       Access to the Internet

2.       Literacy rate

 

A lot of people don't realize how global we are. I was at Japan and had an interview scheduled with a news reporter. Thirty minutes after the interview started, she asked me "When do plan to start the Japanese version of Wikipedia". She was not aware that we already have more than 5 million articles in Japanese!

Wikipedia is run like an NGO. The Wikipedia foundation is a charity organization with a staff of only 22 people. Everyone else is a volunteer. Infact, we have a global volunteer community of approximately 100000 people.

 

How good is Wikipedia?

 

One of our main concerns is the level of quality of work in Wikipedia. We want to do more research into the quality of content since we have already become a part of the global knowledge infrastructure.  Sometime ago, a panel of experts did a comparison between Britannica and Wikipedia, to check sample articles to find errors. Britannica averaged about 3 errors per article whereas Wikipedia averaged about 4 errors per article. That's when we realized that doing good quality reference work is essential. The response of Britannica was to make a 22-page denunciation of the study, stating that it was flawed, and they even suggested that they would file a lawsuit. In America, our national sport is suing people! On the other hand, the reaction from Wikipedia was to ask the experts to send us the list of errors. We wanted to fix those errors! We realize that error is a natural part of the human condition and hence we are always looking at our content to see how we can improve it and make it reach the highest possible level of quality.

 

What are wikis best at?

 

Neutrality and moderation are a great strength of the wiki process. Sometime ago, people thought that online communities are hostile places. The surprising fact is that, wikis are much better than virtually any other medium at generating calm and measured discussions. One of the first things we realized is that, in order for wiki writing to survive in an open community process, it must be broadly appealing to a large number of people.

We certainly do have had a lot of edit wars on some controversial topics. When such a war ensues, we ask the editors to go to the discussion page and find a way to write the content in such a way that all parties are in agreement. It's vital that we take the other person's view into account while writing a wiki. We try to ensure that people who think radically different as well are happy with the content in question.

 

My Next Project

 

I am working on Wikia, which is a completely separate organization from Wikiepdia. Wikia is a selective free web hosting service for wikis. Wikia targets communities, both those established offline and those with a purely online following. Wikia is free of charge for readers and editors. This comes under the Creative Commons License. The vision of this project is to build information with enduring value.

For instance, consider the example of the Muppets TV show. This was more like a random pop culture phenomenon. When we studied this phenomenon, we realized that there are 15,271 articles on the Muppets alone! This means that consumer media is becoming dominant. We have to keep listening to consumer conversations. In this new world order, people are coming together and sharing knowledge like never before. This is what Wikia will help people to achieve. Have better conversations.

 

My Present Project Work

 

I am currently working on a new search engine project. If you notice carefully, a lot of the infrastructure on the Internet is open, except for search. Search engine companies are proprietary in nature. I want to build an open search engine in which the user can control how the search results show up. Any user will be allowed to create a customized rule based approach to searching. This search engine project is something I am personally working on a daily basis. Its close to my heart. The magazine "Fast Company" had me on their cover, with a rather amusing catch line, which said "Google's worst nightmare". You could check out search.wikia.com for more details on this project. This project is built using all open source software that comes with free licenses. All the APIs used here are also open sourced.

 

To conclude I would like to state that we have to trust other people when it comes to content on the Internet. Trust your volunteers and editors to do the right job. We need to keep an open society. We should be aware of the concept of social space and not design things with a "cage mentality". Keep your software as open as possible. Use less of control and you will see your project become a big success on the Internet.

 

Jimmy Wales is an American Internet Entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia launched in 2001. His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people