As the co-founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where almost anyone can post articles on any subject, Jimmy Wales serves as a globetrotting pitchman espousing the idyllic notion of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
Wales champions a borderless, frictionless, open exchange of information. Time magazine anointed him as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people. Forbes magazine listed him among the top 25 “Web celebs.”
Yet Wales may not be the best poster boy for collaboration.
He has in the past failed to give credit to Larry Sanger, the other founder of Wikipedia. Indeed, Sanger at times has found himself airbrushed out of the Wikipedia narrative.
Although the site now credits him as its co-founder, previous omissions of Sanger underscore an ongoing problem with Wikipedia – it’s not always a credible source of information.
“Many don’t know that Wales’ story is incorrect and self-serving,” says Sanger, who has a competing Wiki site, citizendium.org.
Wales denies there’s any bad blood. “We just went our separate ways,” Wales says.
Wales is more comfortable talking about his vision of collaboration and new ways of defining copyright law and intellectual property protection.
The Web is providing greater avenues for corporations to interact with customers, whose feedback is a mouse-click away. Moreover, corporations are using the Web to outsource research and development – a boon for inventors across the planet.
Staples Inc., The Sharper Image, Kraco Enterprises and IBM are just some of the companies using the Web to augment R&D and bolster their product lines from outside. Recently, the United Inventors Association partnered with Faultless Starch/Bon Ami Co. to encourage inventors to submit product ideas through its Web site.
Netflix is offering $1 million to whoever develops the best movie-recommendation algorithm. Contestants retain ownership of the code they write. But the winning team must license it nonexclusively to Netflix. The data set, notes Wired magazine, is 100 times larger than any of its kind previously made public. And because the code is shared openly, it’s like a new free library for specialists in data mining.
Through global collaboration, Wales has helped build a massive online community in Wikipedia. Yes, it’s not always reliable. Someone anonymously posted an article for 132 days, stating John Seigenthaler Sr., a former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s, was “directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby.” Wikipedia eventually removed the inaccurate entry.
More recently, Wales had to intervene when one of Wikipedia’s administrators blacklisted a regular contributor, only to reinstate him a short time later. The affair triggered fiery accusations that the administrator acted capriciously.
“I advise the world to relax a notch or two,” Wales responded in a Wikipedia forum. “Let’s please love each other, love the project, and remember what we are here for.”
For all its faults, Wikipedia remains one of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the planet. Users contribute for free, making Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia of user-generated content in history. Inventors Digest corralled Wales for this exclusive interview. We hope you’re interested in what he has to share.
You’ve said Wikipedia can offer ‘free access to the sum of all human knowledge.’ How do you make money when all knowledge is free?
I don’t think all knowledge can be free. And I don’t think that’s anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon. But at the same time, people who have the idea that they can profit by hoarding knowledge is not going to work out. It costs to create knowledge, and there’s a narrow window of time to exploit that. A friend of mine says, ‘If you have a business model and people are not copying you, you have a problem.’
And you don’t have a problem with all of those copycat Wikipedia sites?
We don’t have any problem with knockoffs. Under a free license, people can copy. We use open-source software. We want people to copy us.
How has free knowledge made you and your collaborators money?
The Wikipedia Foundation is a nonprofit. At Wikia (an online hub for various communities), we make money from advertising. That works quite well for us. If we want to look broader, just look at what’s happening with open-source software. There are a number of business models out there. Red Hat comes to mind.
And there are more new projects developing where people come to share knowledge. The benefit comes in reductions on the cost side. Rather than doing everything from scratch, you can work outside and get further along faster. One of the things that’s going on a lot, there’s a much more radical view of customer participation in the design process. Open knowledge allows this to happen. Get your customers involved in support of the product, and you get much more active feedback.
Talk about some of the limitations of collaboration.
Some people collaborate in good faith, and others are goofing around and you have to deal with that issue. It’s hard to collaborate if people don’t have the same goals.
Where do you see the open-source movement heading?
TaxAlmanac.org, run by Intuit, is a good example of where things are heading. They realized they’re a software company, and their customers know how to use their product better than they do. (Intuit) set up a Wiki site to give feedback on the product.
Where has Wikipedia been banned and what have you done about it?
We’re only banned in one place. That is China. We have been for a couple of years. We don’t agree with that, obviously. We’re trying to reach out and get high-level meetings. But it’s a bit of a black box. In order to file a legal complaint, we have to have legal standing there. To do that, we have to sign an agreement saying we agree to be censored, which we can’t do. It’s a Catch-22.
Critics call Wikipedia an irresponsible research tool. Major newspapers forbid using it as a definitive source of information. How do you better ensure accuracy when nearly anyone can post information?
Are we improving? Yes. I’m very happy with what’s going on. In general, I don’t think an encyclopedia should be cited anyway in the research process.
It’s a starting point. Having said that, we want to have the quality as high as possible. We’re always revising things.
Why not hire qualified people?
It’s all done by volunteers. I haven’t seen anything that proves that hiring people would be a useful strategy. It would be easy to hire 25 experts, but that would be nonsense and an empty gesture. We give core editors tools to protect the site. They can quickly revert to old versions of articles if one gets polluted. They’re able to kick people off. We have rules around citing sources – about what is a reliable source. We tend to be old-fashioned about those things.
What do you think of experts?
We have reverence for our experts in our community. We have a lot of experts contributing. But they’re not all writing on topics from their professions. We have a bearded math professor who has a passion for World War II history, and he’s writing about that. He’s very much an expert on that subject.
Talk to us about the Creative Commons initiative.
I’m on the board of Creative Commons, which is dedicated to the creation of licenses and legal documents that allow people to share intellectual property. The core idea was founded by (Stanford law school professor) Lawrence Lessig. It’s designed to give creative people tools to work together in cool ways. The whole IP debate is very polarized with over-simplistic views. It’s either kids stealing music or Disney trying to lock down culture. Neither perspective is very helpful.
These technology changes … are changing the environment in IP in interesting ways. We don’t want to become complete anarchists, but the law is not serving the needs of the community like it used to. We need lightweight ways to collaborate, so we can share information that suits everyone. One of the great ones is ‘copyleft.’ It’s the idea where you say, ‘I’m going to make my work available for free. You can use it, but you need to make it available to others on the same terms.’
Sort of like pay it forward?
Exactly! It is a kind of ‘pay it forward.’ People can add to it, and give back to the common. Hopefully it’s not utopian. In the software field, this sort of collaboration has been borne out. So it’s not just nonsense.
So, someone can use a picture of you for, say, the cover of a for-profit magazine. And the photographer and you are cool with that so long as the work is attributed?
That depends on the exact nature of the copyleft license. For certain Creative Commons licensing, you have to give attribution and if any modifications are made, you have to make that available as well. Some licenses say you can’t use that for commercial purposes. If you’re going to make money from it, you have to come and talk to me.
I’m hearing you advocate for a more elastic approach to copyright and intellectual property protection.
Exactly. It’s not giving everything away for free, but nor is it locking everything up. This opens options depending on the context. For some people if their objective is to sue people, they don’t find this approach useful. Standardized agreements are simple and lawyers like them – it makes reviewing IP issues that much faster and easier. But the world is changing.
What are some of the more interesting ways entrepreneurs can use social networking sites?
I think that in general everyone … can benefit from a healthy network of people. Social networking allows you to keep yourself in front of people for various reasons. There are a lot of possibilities in this area for inventors. A lot of the problems faced by inventors are not specific to them, but are broad business issues. In the end, you have to find who’s credible and trustworthy in your field.
Do you see Wikipedia as a force for social change?
That’s a really good question. I’ll reference a book, The Victorian Internet. Mark Andreessen, he founded Netscape, gave it to me. It talks about the invention of the telegraph system. The telegraph was a much more revolutionary invention than the Internet for its time. The world changed overnight. A lot of people talked a lot about the telegraph in utopian terms. Wars happen because of miscommunications and misunderstanding. Many said that will go away. Kings and governments create wars, not people. If people could communicate, you wouldn’t have wars.
We saw that the new technology didn’t prevent war. When citizens have good access to information, they make better decisions. Regimes that depend on people not knowing things, we’ve seen some fall. We’ve seen in the Ukraine mass demonstrations called by peer-to-peer text messages. Those are the kinds of things we’ll see more of. If we’re doing our job well, if we’re successful in giving people neutral information, then we’ll see healthier change. Whoa. Did that sound utopian? I try not to say too many things that people can make fun of me after I’m dead.
JIMMY AT A GLANCE
Drives a 2004 Hyundai Accent.
Is a self-avowed “objectivist to the core.” Named his daughter Kira after the heroine in Ayn Rand’s We the Living.
Wales’ role in the Wikipedia community has been described as “benevolent dictator for life.”
Wikipedia was founded with money Wales made from Bomis, a Web portal that trafficked “erotic” photographs.
The New Yorker magazine noted that Wales repeatedly has edited the Wikipedia entry on him – a no-no in the Wikipedia community. “He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal,” the magazine said.
Recently accused of misusing Wikipedia Foundation money, including racking up a $1,300 tab at a Florida steakhouse. Wales denied abusing foundation money for personal financial gain.
Wales recently dumped girlfriend Rachel Marsden – the conservative former Fox News commentator – in his blog post amid allegations he had edited her Wikipedia entry to make it more flattering. Marsden auctioned off on eBay clothing that she said Wales had left at her New York apartment. Wales acknowledged he’s divorcing his wife; denied editing Marsden’s Wikipedia entry.
