Business Star: Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia’s founder tells us how he wants to control the world’s knowledge
Interview | Jehancasinader
Personal references as Wikipedia celebrates five years as the world’s mosttapped source of knowledge, Voyager asks founder Jimmy Wales whether he is losing control of the website anyone can edit
IT’S CALLED ‘DEATH BY WIKIPEDIA’. Every so often, a high profile individual is written off to the annals of history. Well, at least according to their Wikipedia profile. Victims have included Senator Edward Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs.
Even its founder, Jimmy Wales, has faced Wikipedia shortcomings. The 42-year-old businessman was startled to read a magazine article which claimed he plays chess with friends in his spare time. He traced the writer’s error to his own Wikipedia page, which had been hit by ‘vandals’.
While the site’s openness is a big selling point – and it is now the world’s largest, most current, reference website – Wales knows that it has also become a sore point. “We do face criticism. Some of it is perfectly valid, and highlights things we need to work on. In other cases it’s unfair, time-consuming and annoying. If someone defaces a page, there may be a big brouhaha, even if it got corrected one minute later. On the other hand, I also notice a lot of things wrong with Wikipedia which we get away with, which we shouldn’t. Sometimes we find a serious factual error which didn’t come to press attention, but it was found by someone in our community. It gets fixed, but we say, ‘Whoa, look what we had up there for four months.’”
Given that the site has some pages defaced, while others are incomplete, or contain facts muddied by fiction, universities have banned use of the site, and journalists have been advised to ignore it. Countless political and corporate leaders have been named, shamed and even dismissed for quietly ‘sprucing up’ their own Wikipedia biographies. But the fact that they want to do this speaks volumes.
Eight years ago, Alabama-born Wales built ‘Nupedia’, a web encyclopaedia he hoped would be gutsy enough to rival any leather-bound textbook. But the site was clunky and slow. At the end of its first year, it held just a dozen pages of original content. Wales then discovered the concept of a ‘wiki’, which allows anyone to add, change and remove content with speed and ease. This was the eureka moment that led him to set up Wikipedia, at a personal cost of $500,000. That investment has paid off. This month marks five years since Wikipedia became the world’s top reference website. It holds 12 million articles in 265 languages. That success rests on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ premise; the idea that, the more people who tweak, refine and check the site, the more accurate it will be. But its founder is philosophical.
“I reject the term ‘wisdom of crowds’. It is a nonsense phrase which doesn’t describe how we work. If 100 people look at a page and agree on it, but they’re all wrong, well, that’s just the way it is. It’s certainly better than only one person looking at it. Yes, it’s difficult to achieve neutrality, but it’s a goal to shoot for. If people are producing rubbish, then others are very quick to point out that it is rubbish. But there will always be some challenges because even people from diverse viewpoints may share some biases. That’s why we rely on diverse public participation.”
Wales, who has a master’s degree in finance, spent six years as an options trader before venturing onto the web. It was during his years as a trader that he amassed his wealth, which remains undisclosed. But he runs a site which receives seven billion page views a month, yet has no paid advertising and employs only two dozen staff. It’s a rather unique business model.
Wikipedia is effectively a charity owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, from which Wales takes no income. There is no subscription fee, and although Wikipedia’s software could be lucrative, it is not for sale; instead, it’s available for free. Wikipedia could be a cash cow for Wales. So, why does he have no desire for it to become one?
“In a sense, that is like asking the Red Cross why they don’t try to make more profit. It’s just not what we do. We could have done this project as a company but it just made more sense to do it as a non-profit. I have nothing against commercial activity, but Wikipedia is all about being nonproprietary. It’s not about being commercial rather than non-commercial. Instead, it’s about being open, not closed. That really is a core value for us, so it affects all areas of our business.”
WALES ISN’T INTERESTED IN COMPETITION. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to care if another player enters the market. In these tight economic times, Wales is glad he does not have to answer to shareholders. Wikipedia will spend $6 million this year; an increase on the $3.5 million it spent in the 2007-08 financial year. The site’s funding primarily comes from donations from supporters in over 50 countries, in an annual fundraising campaign. Charitable giving can be unreliable in tough times, but last year’s drive finished early and raised more than expected.
Wikipedia’s economic efficiency is due to its ability to harness free labour. Over 150,000 volunteer contributors, editors and moderators keep the cogs churning. Most are graduates in their 20s and 30s, and work for large companies. ‘Jimbo’, as they call him, says accountability has never been an issue. He promotes a light-touch form of self-regulation, and is reluctant to ‘lock down’ pages, even when debate gets heated. Nonetheless, the accuracy and neutrality of many pages is constantly in dispute. More than 500 users have been blocked for vandalism, threats, bad faith, spamming, racism, legal threats and vulgarity.
“I’d describe my leadership style as non-authoritarian. It’s about coaching, inspiring and letting people make decisions for themselves. By encouraging people to be thoughtful, they find much better solutions than I would have. It’s possible to let that happen without losing control completely. People know that I won’t let anything go too far, and that’s
what allows our community to be so open and free-wheeling. We have a tightly knit group of insightful, responsible people who are pushing this project forward.”
In conversation, Wales sounds like a man who is permanently on holiday. He speaks intently about Wikipedia, but without the sense of urgency one might expect from a leader who spends much of his time fighting fires and fending off critics who would love to hit the ‘delete’ button on Wikipedia. Even so, his global empire of knowledge continues to grow. Wales appears to have become fond of buzzwords like ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’
WALES DID NOT INVENT THE CONCEPT OF THE ‘WIKI’, but his website has pushed the tool into the mainstream. Now, businesses are using wikis to encourage workplace communication and to engage with customers. They are ditching suggestion boxes and canning focus groups in favour of online interaction. It’s this shift that will form part of Wikipedia’s legacy.
If anything, Wales wishes he had created Wikipedia earlier. Right now, he feels frustrated that the site isn’t as user-friendly as it could be (“It’s a little too geeky”). But there are other projects to keep him busy. He created Wikia, a for-profit consumer destination website in which users can discuss non-academic topics. Last year he launched Wikia Search, a publicly run search engine to rival Google, although he coyly claims the web-search giant need not be worried.
alt=”Jimmy Wales’s often-critical page on Wikipedia is a testament to the freedom given to the site’s users. It even critiques his claim to have been the sole founder of the site”> “My real challenge now is to think creatively about our charitable mission and how we can achieve it in the developing world. Wikipedia in English is quite large and successful – the same goes for many of the European languages. But we’re very weak in many of the African languages which I want to focus on. We’re now seeing really strong growth in some of the Indian languages, which I’m pleased about. Ultimately, we want to promote local languages and bring our services to all countries, including in the third world.”
As we’re speaking, Wales is lugging a suitcase up the stairs of the Florida apartment he shares with his daughter, after returning from one of his many speaking trips. In the early days, what would keep him awake at night was worrying about whether anyone had defaced his site. These days, he only worries about whether he will miss his next flight. Despite his public profile, he is rarely recognised outside San Francisco, which is home to many tech giants.
“I don’t know if we can become much more popular than we already are. Traffic continues to grow, but not at the pace it used to. There are new challenges on the horizon. The next billion people are coming online. We’ll see participation from people in places we are not accustomed to dealing with, and that will have interesting cultural implications. I believe Wikipedia is a tool that is potentially quite important for the world. It shows community cooperation can build something interesting and useful. But there’s a lot left to do.”
