Jimmy Wales - Wisdom from the crowds

Jimmy Wales is the creator of Wikipedia, which since it started in 2001, has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the internet, fans claim that it is better than Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is a report on the speech he gave recently in Bangalore in a conference organized by CII. This is followed with some thoughts that Jimmy Wales shared with Balaji Pasumarthy of Businessgyan.

The content of Wikipedia is free and is written collaboratively by people from all over the world. This website is a ‘Wiki,' which means that anyone with access to an internet- connected computer can edit, connect or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, by simply clicking on the "edit this page" link, except for the protected articles and main page.

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder, board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates the Wikipedia project, that has created an entire family of Wiki projects such as Wikitionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiversity, and more.

He is also the founder of the for-profit company called Wikia Inc. In 2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a St. Petersburg based non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its younger sibling projects.

It differs from an ordinary library and encyclopedia for people to collaborate and extract information about various topics. Most people who visit Wikipedia are scientists and technicians. Wikipedia is even referred to by the news channels like CNN. It also poses as a reliable source for topics related to history and art. Besides, everyone has free access to Wikipedia. Wiki software is used to create information and is very easy to install on one's server. One can use it commercially or non-commercially and all the software that is used and available is free software. They have over a billion articles written in English, the language is being used in 1/3 of the world. They have 48 other languages that have over 10,000 articles, among which Japanese is used, more widely.

In terms of economy and culture, this is actually a very small organization. Last year Wikipedia had a budget of $7,50,000 which was mainly for server space and the like. This was supported solely by grants and donations from people all over the world who donate small sums in the range of 150 to 200 dollars. Jimmy adds that last year Wikipedia had only 2 employees and this year they are growing the team to 5. All the work for Wikipedia is done by volunteers. More people see Wikipedia than CNN and BBC combined. The result of all this is that when people ask today about mainstream media Jimmy replies with "Are you talking about Wikipedia?"

In the Indian languages, like Bengolli, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada we have between 3000 and 10,000 articles which is quite good, surprisingly Hindi has just over1000 articles. As awareness about the site grows, more action will happen. Every community, in this regard has, nevertheless has been represented by Wikipedia. There are 107 languages with over 1000 articles, this is a important number to watch because the momentum generally picks up once 1000 articles happens in a language. Initially there might by just one to two people writing articles and the process is slow, but as soon as around 20 people start writing the momentum really picks up.

The neutrality and moderation is the greatest strength of Wikipedia. Calm measured debates happen here. If you want to see outlandish opinions you could see it in Blogs. However the process of Collaborative Editing really pushes people to a mode of compromise and collaboration. The reason is very simple because Wikipedia is open to editing to anyone - if you write something inflammatory it will immediately be edited. So the best way to ensure that what you write survives is to write in a way that we call 'writing for the enemy'. So when you write you need to acknowledge that you have a certain point of view that others disagree with but will accept what you have written. As long as both sides are writing in this fashion, it can lead to very high quality work which is basically saying that we still disagree on what the other side is saying but at least we present it in a way that both sides agree.

When it comes to designing software for social collaboration Jimmy Wales take the analogy of designing a restaurant which serves steak. So you need to provide knifes, now since people have knives, for safety reasons do you put them in cages? However this is the mindset that people start with when designing social collaboration software. They start with all the bad things that are likely to happen and they write the software to prevent these bad things. This is a big mistake. I think a large majority of people in this world want to do good and by having tight controls over every thing we actually prevent far more good people from doing good rather than prevent bad people from doing bad. Having open and transparent systems instead of trying to fix issues of accountability and control we actually get a huge amount of good quality work from people. Of-course sometimes things go wrong and sometimes people stab people in restaurants, and when that happens we call the police and we accept that as a risk because it is far more important for human society to live in peace and harmony and not assume that we are going to kill each other.

There is an image of Wikipedia that a million users are actually editing the content. I first thought that there might be an 80/20 rule in this and that maybe 20 % of the users do 80% of the editing. It turns out however that actually that there is a tight set of volunteers around 650 people who do nearly half of all the editing work which happens. It is this core group that completely keeps away all the rubbish. They monitor everything that comes in they check for style, grammar, spelling and all those kind of things. This core group is very conscious of the quality; these are the people who really make Wikipedia work. There are huge number of people who come make an edit or two and never come back, these might be good quality text  but it may not be not be in the right format or place and what happens is the core group of users pick these up give it the right shape. All of these things makes Wikipedia what it is. It is important that the process is open because it allows lot of people to come and do the edits.

Future of Open Source

What we see is that the creative commons license is becoming hugely popular with the general public. I think in the free culture world we are at that basic raw material stage, what we are seeing is just the beginnings, and we are going to see an explosion of creativity in the future. We have a new culture emerging which is not based on market exchange but intellectual exchange. The idea of sharing knowledge and doing it for fun. 

Why is Wikipedia so popular?

It offers information on almost every subject in a consistent easy-to-read style. If a topic does not exist it is only a matter of time before someone creates it. The more popular the topic, the more heavily edited it will be. People derive pleasure and validation on seeing their edits remain in place. Never before has the boundary between participant and observer been blurred on such a large scale. In contrast with many web resources, information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes", and is never "lost" or deleted.

The information found here is relatively fresh as opposed to normal encyclopedic articles which may take months or years before they are updated.

Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses and differences arise because it is open to anyone, has a large contributor base and articles are written by consensus according to the guidelines and policies.

Quality of information:

Studies show, that Wikipedia is broadly as reliable as Encyclopedia Brittanica, with similar error rates on established articles for both major and minor omissions and errors. There is a tentative consensus, backed by a gradual increase in academic citation as a source. It provides a good starting point for research and articles in general have proven to be reasonably sound. Articles and subject areas sometimes suffer from significant omissions and whilst misinformation and vandalism are usually corrected quickly, this does not always happen.

Jimmy Wales responded to a few questions in a brief interaction with Balaji Pasumarthy of Businessgyan. Excerpts: 

Q: How did you convince people to start contributing to Wikipedia initially?

I had another project called Nupedia before Wikipedia which had a top down, hierarchical structure. It did not work but it had a small community of around 100 or so people in the mailing list, some of whom were already discussing how to take this project forward. The other thing is that once we realized that the old philosophy was not working, we decided to make everything very easy and welcoming as possible, if we keep the barriers to participation as low as possible then we get a lot more participation.

Q:Why are people fascinated with contributing to Wikipedia?

A: The process of writing collaboratively is fun for a lot of people. It turns out to be productive and an exciting experience as well. If you'd tell people that you're doing it as a hobby, it will sound as a rather dull hobby! Since it's a social process, meeting up with people always makes it a little more interesting.

User experience made Wikipedia very popular; also the idea that the user could generate and contribute to it by editing or uploading information.

Q: Wikipedia has been created with a very small team with few expenses, any learnings from this?

A: We have been able to really tap into the open source community of software developers and this is really the reason why we were able to create Wikipedia with such a small team and expenses.

Q: What is your take on the sustainability of Wikipedia?

A: That doesn't seem to be a problem at all. We are receiving donations and grants that are more than sufficient for our organization, the servers and services. As we grow, we expect our expenditures to drop per unit because of economies of scale. In fact we have initiated a contract that will cut costs and enable it to become less expensive. So ironically, as we are growing bigger, the economy becomes a lot cheaper, while we reach out to a larger section of people, the donations multiply in size.

Q: What is the impact of this organization on all the other mediums?

A: We finally arrive at the big question! One of the things that we are witnessing in today's world is a trend. Most of the media have realized that internet is now an opportunity to participate. It's not as though the newspapers are going to die, but I do think that we are going to see more hybrids. Citizen participation and so on will certainly make an impact. We are still in the initial stages I thing the social innovations that will work are still to emerge.

People talk about the democratization of knowledge so lets do it!  

Compiled by Prerna Nandalal Dusija. 

Issue BG68 Nov06