Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales

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Weekend Web 2.0 Special: Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Photograph: Patrick Fraser

People are always asking Jimmy Wales if he ever thought Wikipedia would get so big. They expect him to betray some sense of astonishment at the way that his website, in the space of just five years, has reshaped the terrain of human knowledge. But actually, that's pretty much what he had in mind all along. 'The fundamental idea of Wikipedia is to create and give away a freely licensed encyclopaedia in every language of the world,' he says, as if the notion were perfectly unremarkable.

His initial approach was traditional. In 2000, funding himself with the millions he'd made as a futures trader in Chicago, Wales started commissioning experts to contribute articles for an online encyclopaedia, to be known as Nupedia. It was slow work, and hardly innovative: Britannica had been doing the same, in dead-tree format, for decades. That was when he heard about wikis - websites that allowed visitors to edit the content of pages at will. 'Wiki', a Hawaiian word, means 'fast'.

In the free-for-all of Wikipedia, anyone can edit almost any article, or create one themselves, which means that anyone can also insert errors, or bias, or sheer mendacity. But for every error, there are Wikipedians ready and waiting to step forward with a correction; for every bias, there is a counter-bias. You can mistakenly attribute the invention of Velcro to Thomas Edison, but within minutes, or maybe seconds, someone will point out that it was a Frenchman, Georges de Mestral. If your take on the prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher tends towards the fawning, someone else will happily tilt things to something less partisan.

Wikipedia is founded on a faith that if you give enough people enough freedom to meddle, the knowledge that emerges may be just as good as traditional reference books, and maybe better. Wales, 40, likes to call himself an 'anti-credentialist'. 'To me, the key thing is getting it right,' he has said, 'and if a person's really smart, and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.' The English-language Wikipedia now boasts 1.4m articles - more than 10 times Britannica's count - and a recent study in Nature, fiercely disputed by Britannica, found that the two publications were roughly as accurate as each other in their coverage of natural science.

Extraordinarily, Wikipedia's contributors do it all for free. (It helps that the organisation is a non-profit, funded by donations.) 'If you hear about people who spend their weekends playing football, or watching football on television, that seems quite common. If you hear about people who write encyclopaedia articles on their weekends, that seems a little odd,' Wales says.

Wales's particular genius was to tap into the same seam of obsession that turns people into pub bores or Mastermind champions, and channel it into something more social. The site, at its heart, is a community, albeit a community founded on vigorous disagreement. Wikipedia's anarchy does sometimes erupt into the online equivalent of violence. So-called 'edit wars' flare when contributors zealously revert articles back and forth between differing versions of the truth (about Palestine, about the size of the Death Star in Star Wars). And the site can be a vehicle for personal vendettas. Last year, a former assistant to Robert Kennedy discovered that a malicious edit had accused him of involvement in the assassination of JFK. 'We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research - but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects,' he responded.

In these cases, Wales has to step in and place limits on the freedom to edit. But mostly the story of Wikipedia resembles that of the Wild West, with systems of government - committees who rule on which articles to keep or delete, for example - emerging from the bottom up.

The project's fiercest critics tend to argue that the humanity of any writing is lost when it's created by committee, and that it is self-defeating not to make academics and intellectuals more welcome. Wales, who lives with his wife and five-year-old daughter in Florida, far from the cauldron of Silicon Valley, is unworried. There's room for everyone, he says - for encyclopaedias created by experts and encyclopaedias created by the people. 'Most of the people who are drawn to Wikipedia are the kind of geeks, like me, who love poring over information,' he says. 'And reading Britannica.'

What is Web 2.0?

What we do, is it Web 2.0? I guess so. Everybody says it is, but we'd been around for five years doing the same thing before everybody knew it was called Web 2.0 ... we were one of the early sites that was really about wide-open public participation as being the right tool for the web.

What is your big idea?

To have a free encyclopaedia in every language of the world, and I have more or less defined that to be 250,000 articles in every language that has at least one million speakers. We're a long way from that goal.

What is the next big thing online?

That's a good question ... when I look to the future, I look at things like video and start thinking, well, what will the impact be of ubiquitous broadband, really fast broadband, which we don't have yet? What will people be able to do with video ... I don't know the answer, actually. People say, "Do you ever think you'll have video in Wikipedia?" and we do have some ... [but] it's really hard to do collaboratively.

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