Interview: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales

Mar 10, 2005

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.org and director of the Wikimedia Foundation. I've admired his work for years. He's also speaking at Gel 2005.

(Update: See full-length video of Jimmy Wales speaking at Gel 2005.)

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia whose entries are written by a worldwide community of users. Constantly adding and refining entries, this community has created an encyclopedia that rivals any other ever written. Take a look, if you haven't already.

Now, the interview:

Q - What's one aspect of Wikipedia that excites you?

The Wikipedia community. Our big-picture vision is to share knowledge with all of humanity. That was the original dream of the Internet before the era of pop-ups and spam, and it's now being realized. It's exciting. We're learning huge lessons about harnessing community, treating communities well, and seeing the results.

Q - How does Wikipedia stack up to Britannica?

By number of entries, we're about six times as large, but that's an unfair comparison, since we slice up entries differently. The fairest comparison is by number of words, and we're twice the size of Britannica by that count.

An interesting comparison, not to Britannica but to other top sites, is traffic. We now have more traffic than Paypal, more than USAToday.com, and we're close to NYTimes.com. We're doing this all with volunteers who are managing the servers and doing everything themselves, and that's pretty astonishing.

I was recently on a panel with the head of USAToday.com. He said they have 300 million pageviews a month. I said that's good; we have 400 million. Then he said he had 180 people on staff. I said I have one part-time person who helps me with the servers. There's something new going on here. It's not about broadcast, it's about interaction.

Q - What about Wikipedia's error correction? It needs to be good, since any user out there can make a change to any page on the site.

My answer to that criticism is that the average quality of entries is high, but any given page could be broken at any moment. IBM did some research on Wikipedia, and it found that for certain types of vandalism, the median time to correction is under five minutes. That's for the typical type of change, when someone blanks out a page or puts in a curse word.

Q - Five minutes is pretty quick for such a huge site. How is that possible?

A lot of people, when they learn about Wikipedia, have this very attractive idea that it's an emergent phenomenon - the sort of thing where a million people add one sentence each to build the site.

But really, the vast majority of changes on Wikipedia are made from a hard-core group of users. It's not a Darwinian phenomenon of millions of people, but rather a community of people. That core group is in constant communication, via IRC, and on the Web itself - they're always talking, in 40 languages, about the articles. That's how the site gets corrected so fast. People notice the change and very quickly communicate it through the community. The tight-knit group of users makes all the difference.

Q - How does one join that tight-knit group?

Hopefully it's not too closed to participation. You get on the wiki and start editing, and people start noticing. People can also come to IRC. That's a hurdle for newcomers, since you have to download a chat client. There's also a mailing list. We try to be friendly and welcoming, like good neighbors, in terms of getting people involved.

Q - Do you have any plans to sell Wikipedia or make money from it?

Not Wikipedia. I do have Wikicities, a for-profit venture, on the side. But I'm pretty firm about the big-picture mission about Wikipedia: it's a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet. That's what drives my entire life. I have enough money that I don't need money. I mean, I have a Ferrari. OK, now what? Let's do something cool. It's more cool to think about totally changing the landscape - for example, by radically undercutting the market for proprietary textbooks.

Q - Textbooks?

On Wikibooks, there's a growing community of people working on textbooks: a complete K through 12 curriculum, and on through university level, for all subjects. It's just getting started, and it's a long-term project. But how cool is that?

Q - Very cool.

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This is the first of several interviews I published of Gel 2005 speakers. (See other Good Experience interviews)

See also: full-length video of Jimmy Wales speaking at Gel 2005

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