Jimmy Wales: "Knowledge to the people"

He is overwhelmed with offers, people turn around after him, journalists follow his every move: Jimmy "Jimbo" of Wales has all the attributes of a celebrity, although in fact he is not a superstar at all. He is the founder of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is used every day by millions of people around the world. In Wikipedia, there are only five employees, and the number of articles written by users has exceeded 1.5 million. 400 volunteers help in the fight against vandals, “trolls” and other “bad boys”.

Did Wikipedia have a well-built concept since its inception?

No, not at all. I watched the growth of the “open-source movement” that used free licensing as a “social model” and gradually realized that programmers could work together not only on programs. There was a great opportunity for joint editing, so in 2000 I started by creating the Nupedia project.
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The idea was to attract thousands of volunteers to write articles for the online encyclopedia in all languages. However, we soon realized that our work was somehow organized not in a modern, academic manner. The volunteers were not very interesting, because we had many “verification committees” that constantly criticized the articles. It was like the process of writing an essay at school — and it was scary.

When did you realize that the old methods do not work?

I think it happened at that moment when I sat down to write an article about what I understand very well - trading in options - and I thought that writing it was terribly uninteresting. We knew about wiki sites where visitors themselves add and edit whatever they want. The realization that we can do the wiki encyclopedia was a big breakthrough.

So after all - when did Wikipedia appear?

This was January 15, 2001. Our idea was radical: every person on the planet will have access to free work, which is the sum of the knowledge of all mankind. After two weeks, I finally realized that it would work. By the time we received more articles than two years of existence Nupedia. Another important event happened on September 11: volunteers began to write a huge number of articles on the 9/11 topic. We immediately had articles about the World Trade Center, about airlines, and about terrorist groups. We realized that we did a good job. Now, if something important is happening in the world, all related information can be found on Wikipedia.

Quite a lot of controversy is conducted around the correctness of the data in Wikipedia. Should we be worried about reliability?

Legal question. Mistakes are always possible. When, in December 2005, our scientific and technical articles were checked by the journal Nature, we were slightly behind Britannica: there were about three errors in the article against our four. Our goal is to be as careful as Britannica, or better than her, and also to have 250 thousand articles in each language spoken by at least a million people.

What about Wikipedia finance?

Wikipedia is not expensive. Last year we spent about one and a half million dollars, in 2005 - 750 thousand. The main "revenue" is formed by voluntary contributions from 50 to 100 dollars. Most of the costs associated with spending on new equipment, servers.

You are not interested in advertising. It'll be this way forever?

I am opposed to advertising on Wikipedia pages, but we have never stated that advertising will never appear. The WikiMedia Foundation is a non-profit organization, we have goals for which we need money, just for now, I think that there are more correct ways of obtaining funds.

Will Wikipedia ever be sold to a media corporation?

Two years after the creation of Wikipedia, I handed it over to the WikiMedia Foundation — and I think it was the stupidest and most simultaneous decision I’ve ever made. Stupid - because it cost $ 3 billion, but I do not have them! True - because if I had not done this, Wikipedia would not have been such a successful project. The chances that they will buy us are extremely small.

What happened to Wikipedia and China?

As I understand it, we are completely blocked in this country. We have no idea why. We can guess, but we do not know for sure. Our position is that censorship is completely contrary to the mission of Wikipedia. Access to all knowledge is the right of every person. We will never agree to such censorship, such as, for example, the “filtered version of Wikipedia”. This became especially important after Google compromised last year by hiding web pages that criticized the Chinese government. I considered it appropriate to state then: “No, we will never accept such a compromise.” It remains unclear - we were blocked for political reasons (for example, because of articles like Falun Gong), or is the basis of the motives that prompted China to block Wikipedia, is something more fundamental? Perhaps they do not like the very idea of ​​free knowledge.

What do you remember most from your wiki experience?

Larry Lassig, founder of Creative Commons, spoke at our annual WikiMania conference last summer. He listened to 600 people. I felt just great, realizing that all these people gathered thanks to us.

You can also recall MuppetWiki . In it - more than 12,000 articles about a variety of dolls. You will not find anything like it in Britannica.

And what was unpleasant?

I am not an expert in unpleasant situations, because I am a pathological optimist. It can be difficult when, for example, a new language section of Wikipedia is launched and the community is confronted with the first blocker of a participant in its “life”. It really is hard when there are people who are exceptionally popular and professional in writing articles, but in discussions they behave in an inappropriate way, disrespect others, etc. The community needs to decide whether to allow this member to continue working. It's funny, but this process is regularly repeated in every language community. For example, now the intensively developing Arab community is passing through it.

Why are you developing a search engine ?

Transparency is what I worship. The idea is that we can see how pages are ranked. A public discussion is needed on this issue. We do not know if there is any injustice or errors in the algorithms that modern search engines use. Shortly after reports of our search engine appeared, several search engine development companies turned to us. They realized that it’s pointless to compete with Google alone: ​​there’s too much money and great guys.

What are your search plans?

It is too early to talk about something specific, although it is already quite definitely possible to declare cooperation with open-source programmers. An example of an open Apache web server shows the success of such a model. Apache is a team of volunteers, but most of the code was supplied by companies that paid people for their work. In essence, this is an industrial consortium created to compete with the commercial web server from MS. This is why second-tier search companies benefit from working with us: they cannot defeat Google, but they can create a competitive engine with us.

What else do you want to develop for Wikipedia?

I read that one company imports Wikipedia into its projects related to artificial intelligence. It turns out, when killer robots appear, you will know who to thank. But, at least, these robots will be well versed in the poetry of the era of Queen Elizabeth.

New Scientist magazine, 31 January 2007, page 44-45