Future of wikipedia
“One of the most important lessons I learned from Wikipedia is that there are a huge number of people eager to do something.”
- Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia
Interview 2014
Question: What inspired you to create Wikipedia?
')
A: I have watched the rise of free software and open source software. I saw how programmers from all over the world collaborate with each other to build great software that keeps the Internet: GNU / Linux, Apache, Perl, MySQL, PHP.
The fundamental tools that people used to create the network were open source projects and, for the most part, written by volunteers .
It made me think about what else you can create in this way.
We had a great opportunity. Thanks to the internet we can easily communicate with each other. So what can you create?
I thought of the idea of an encyclopedia. I decided that we can put all people together and provide a free encyclopedia to absolutely every person on this planet in his own language.
I fired up with this idea, and this is what we have now.
Q: When was it?
A: In fact, in 1999 I had an original concept. I created a site called Newpedia. The idea was the same, but with a very primitive management structure, very formal and old-fashioned.
The site was not successful and we radically redesigned it. We used a wiki model, and “opened” it. In two weeks we have done more work than in two years, and we realized that something serious was planned.
Q: The project from the very beginning was non-commercial?
A: I made this site non-commercial in 2003, when the project was already about a couple of years old.
It was just a project, not necessarily commercial or non-commercial, I did not know if I could recover costs in the long run. And during the development of the project it became clear that all the volunteers wanted the project to be non-commercial .
I did not want to get money from advertising, because there was another way. Donations turned out to be a viable model, the fundraising was quite successful and this led us to what we have now.
Q: Are you still collecting funds in the same way?
A: Yes, yes, everything is based solely on donations. Most of the money comes from small donations, when people give 30 pounds or something like that. Of course, we also have larger donations and there are also various grants from charitable organizations. But the basis is money with small donations.
Q: How does self-management happen in your community?
A: Some people think that we have anarchy and chaos without rules, and only thanks to the “magic” does the encyclopedia develop. In fact, we have rules and we have administrative structures with elective posts and so on.
Q: What can you say about the motivation of people who "make" Wikipedia? Why do they do this?
A: I think there are two reasons.
First, imagine a world in which every person on the planet gets free access to all the knowledge of mankind. This is what we do. This is our vision, and it is very exciting. This is something big. It has historical significance, it makes sense. This is important for people, but it is not enough. There are very important things, but they are not very exciting and therefore people do not want to do this. In our case, this is fun.
People enjoy the process of editing Wikipedia. They meet other smart people with whom they agree or disagree, with whom they constructively argue, giving arguments.
This is an intellectual hobby that people really like, they have a passion for it. So I think these two things motivate people - it's fun and purpose. This is how the community works. I think the other values that Wikipedia carries are widespread.
Values like good quality information can be found everywhere. The value of kindness and thoughtfulness in the community is not even discussed. Sometimes there are local characteristics that vary slightly. For example, the Japanese are much more formal.
Several years ago I formulated our goal more precisely. I want at least 250,000 entries in each language that has at least a million native speakers.
People always ask: “What about a language spoken by only three people?”
We may not be able to write an encyclopedia for them, but for a million native speakers we will be able to do it. We already had experience with such languages, quite successful. And this is about 330 languages, depending on how you think. We are still very far from this figure. In fact, in a world in which languages are constantly evolving, there is always something to strive for, especially with regard to small languages, especially African languages. There is still a lot of work. But with big languages, European languages, Chinese and Japanese, we have made significant progress towards our goal.
Q: And what do you think will happen next? Do you need more or is it just a matter of time?
A: Both. One of the biggest problems is access to the Internet, of course. If you have a million people and only 20,000 of them have the Internet, and they all speak different languages, etc., then it’s difficult to work with.
In perspective, we will work with the next billion people who will join the network.
It will happen faster than you think. We see a growing demand for very inexpensive tablets and smartphones. This fact also significantly affects the achievement of a new level in terms of economic access to the Internet. We also have to work on the technical part to make sure that we support different languages. It is not even about Africa, because most of the population there uses the English alphabet. But, for example, in India there are a lot of problems with the keyboard layout. There is still a lot of work around the world.
Q: What will change in technical terms?
A: Yes, there are things that need to be changed. We need to work on the editing environment to make it easier for people to participate in the editing process. This is quite critical and will affect all languages.
There are always questions like server response times. We know that in some parts of the world it takes too long to save a page, because the servers are too far away. Therefore, we need to move them somewhere closer, but this includes a number of difficulties, not all of which are legal.
We cannot really locate services in China, because the only way to do this is to agree to Chinese censorship laws, and we refused to do this a long time ago. So with many questions you should be extremely careful.
Q: It sounds like it will be a slow but steady progress, not a dramatic change.
A: Most likely it is, but there will be some dramatic significant changes that are happening faster than people have time to realize them within the framework of Internet access. You can find predictions that were published several years ago, such as an assumption about when smartphones will become common in Africa. And today we understand that five years ago, three years ago, even two years ago we were too conservative and, in fact, many things happen much faster than people have time to realize them.
If you look at the percentage of people who have access to the Internet in various countries, you will understand that many cities and countries in the developing world go through everything that we went through in the late 90s in terms of rapidly developing Internet access, rapidly developing participation. They now realize that this is a very exciting period of time, of course.
Q: Who is in priority: content consumers or its creators?
A: Both are very important, but I would say that we focus more on creation, because if we do not create anything, there will be nothing to consume , that's the whole point.
But we pay attention to people who consume content. We think about the technical infrastructure, trying to make sure that the pages load quickly and so on, we also try to make sure that people can access the site. But we need more software, more work on community support.
Q: Wikipedia format is text, but what about video or audio, are you moving in that direction?
A: This will not change. Well, when there is some video, audio and we always encourage people who upload good quality photos and illustrations to the site, this is important.
But not so important to change the very essence of the product. Encyclopedia is primarily a text.
Many require video, but it’s very difficult to co-edit a video. So when someone publishes saw and I think “oh, there is a mistake” or “they should have done it differently,” I understand that I can do little about it. In the case of the text, you can write to someone and say “oh, I saw a mistake there” or “it seems to me, it can be said differently here,” and we can start a dialogue.
The text is very variable and therefore easy to continually improve. For many encyclopedia topics, the text is perfect. The audio format within the limits of availability is not very convenient. You need to make sure that the software is compatible, which is very problematic.
Q: What can be compared with Wikipedia? There is Mozilla - this is also a non-commercial, technological, global project. Can you give such examples?
A: I never really thought about it. We are so absorbed in what we do, that we have never really compared ourselves to anyone.
I think if you think globally, then there are no other organizations like us or Mozilla.
But there is an interesting trend on the Internet. The true "spirit of the Internet" is manifested. While YouTube is a commercial platform, a huge amount of material on YouTube is non-commercial, people just share their knowledge.
I recently read about music editing software and there are hundreds of videos on YouTube explaining the details of how to do this. If you want to learn how to create music on a computer, then you can find just a huge amount of material that people publish, because this is their hobby and they like it.
Q: You advised the government of the United Kingdom. How to use technology for the benefit of society? How can Wikipedia help?
A: One of the most important lessons I learned from Wikipedia is that there are a huge number of people eager to do something.
When we think about developing projects for the benefit of society, we should focus on good and friendly people, and not on the minority that causes problems.
I see how many people make this big mistake, thinking first of all what bad people can do and create a project based on this, so as not to let bad people do what they can do.
But thus they do not give good people spontaneously to do good .
This kind of approach to project development is fundamentally wrong. Build your project around good people . This is the approach we should see as often as possible.
Q: What can you advise the government (the United Kingdom in particular) about interaction with the world of technology?
A: All that they can advise is to stay as far as possible .
One of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is to decide that they know what to do in the technology world, in the world of innovative entrepreneurship.
Because in fact they do not know anything and they should not climb into it. What they need to do is make sure that the legal infrastructure is reliable, understandable and honest, so that we can allow innovations to develop, and then they better get out of our way and allow us to do our work.
Q: What will happen to Wikipedia in five years?
A: I can foresee two big changes. One you can see, and the other is not.
The visible change is that the editing environment will become much like a text editor, will become easier to use.
Now, when you press the "edit" button, you first need to figure out how to do it. We want to eliminate this barrier. This will be a visible change.
As for the invisible changes, about which I spoke, they will be invisible both for you and for me. I'm talking about the growth of Wikipedia in terms of languages. We probably won't notice when Wikipedia Zulu moves from 200 visits to 200,000, but people with a native Zulu language will definitely notice it. This is a significant change.
Thank you for the interesting interview.
Technologies that help people help other people.
Inspiration
How to build a community. Translation of the book "Social Architecture":
The wisdom of crowds
Chapter 1. Toolkit
Chapter 2. Sidebars
Chapter 3. The ZeroMQ Community
Chapter 4. The ZeroMQ Process: C4
Chapter 5. Designing for Innovation
Chapter 6. Living Systems
- Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia
Interview 2014
Question: What inspired you to create Wikipedia?
')
A: I have watched the rise of free software and open source software. I saw how programmers from all over the world collaborate with each other to build great software that keeps the Internet: GNU / Linux, Apache, Perl, MySQL, PHP.
The fundamental tools that people used to create the network were open source projects and, for the most part, written by volunteers .
It made me think about what else you can create in this way.
We had a great opportunity. Thanks to the internet we can easily communicate with each other. So what can you create?
I thought of the idea of an encyclopedia. I decided that we can put all people together and provide a free encyclopedia to absolutely every person on this planet in his own language.
I fired up with this idea, and this is what we have now.
Q: When was it?
A: In fact, in 1999 I had an original concept. I created a site called Newpedia. The idea was the same, but with a very primitive management structure, very formal and old-fashioned.
The site was not successful and we radically redesigned it. We used a wiki model, and “opened” it. In two weeks we have done more work than in two years, and we realized that something serious was planned.
Q: The project from the very beginning was non-commercial?
A: I made this site non-commercial in 2003, when the project was already about a couple of years old.
It was just a project, not necessarily commercial or non-commercial, I did not know if I could recover costs in the long run. And during the development of the project it became clear that all the volunteers wanted the project to be non-commercial .
I did not want to get money from advertising, because there was another way. Donations turned out to be a viable model, the fundraising was quite successful and this led us to what we have now.
Q: Are you still collecting funds in the same way?
A: Yes, yes, everything is based solely on donations. Most of the money comes from small donations, when people give 30 pounds or something like that. Of course, we also have larger donations and there are also various grants from charitable organizations. But the basis is money with small donations.
Q: How does self-management happen in your community?
A: Some people think that we have anarchy and chaos without rules, and only thanks to the “magic” does the encyclopedia develop. In fact, we have rules and we have administrative structures with elective posts and so on.
Q: What can you say about the motivation of people who "make" Wikipedia? Why do they do this?
A: I think there are two reasons.
First, imagine a world in which every person on the planet gets free access to all the knowledge of mankind. This is what we do. This is our vision, and it is very exciting. This is something big. It has historical significance, it makes sense. This is important for people, but it is not enough. There are very important things, but they are not very exciting and therefore people do not want to do this. In our case, this is fun.
People enjoy the process of editing Wikipedia. They meet other smart people with whom they agree or disagree, with whom they constructively argue, giving arguments.
This is an intellectual hobby that people really like, they have a passion for it. So I think these two things motivate people - it's fun and purpose. This is how the community works. I think the other values that Wikipedia carries are widespread.
Values like good quality information can be found everywhere. The value of kindness and thoughtfulness in the community is not even discussed. Sometimes there are local characteristics that vary slightly. For example, the Japanese are much more formal.
Several years ago I formulated our goal more precisely. I want at least 250,000 entries in each language that has at least a million native speakers.
People always ask: “What about a language spoken by only three people?”
We may not be able to write an encyclopedia for them, but for a million native speakers we will be able to do it. We already had experience with such languages, quite successful. And this is about 330 languages, depending on how you think. We are still very far from this figure. In fact, in a world in which languages are constantly evolving, there is always something to strive for, especially with regard to small languages, especially African languages. There is still a lot of work. But with big languages, European languages, Chinese and Japanese, we have made significant progress towards our goal.
Q: And what do you think will happen next? Do you need more or is it just a matter of time?
A: Both. One of the biggest problems is access to the Internet, of course. If you have a million people and only 20,000 of them have the Internet, and they all speak different languages, etc., then it’s difficult to work with.
In perspective, we will work with the next billion people who will join the network.
It will happen faster than you think. We see a growing demand for very inexpensive tablets and smartphones. This fact also significantly affects the achievement of a new level in terms of economic access to the Internet. We also have to work on the technical part to make sure that we support different languages. It is not even about Africa, because most of the population there uses the English alphabet. But, for example, in India there are a lot of problems with the keyboard layout. There is still a lot of work around the world.
Q: What will change in technical terms?
A: Yes, there are things that need to be changed. We need to work on the editing environment to make it easier for people to participate in the editing process. This is quite critical and will affect all languages.
There are always questions like server response times. We know that in some parts of the world it takes too long to save a page, because the servers are too far away. Therefore, we need to move them somewhere closer, but this includes a number of difficulties, not all of which are legal.
We cannot really locate services in China, because the only way to do this is to agree to Chinese censorship laws, and we refused to do this a long time ago. So with many questions you should be extremely careful.
Q: It sounds like it will be a slow but steady progress, not a dramatic change.
A: Most likely it is, but there will be some dramatic significant changes that are happening faster than people have time to realize them within the framework of Internet access. You can find predictions that were published several years ago, such as an assumption about when smartphones will become common in Africa. And today we understand that five years ago, three years ago, even two years ago we were too conservative and, in fact, many things happen much faster than people have time to realize them.
If you look at the percentage of people who have access to the Internet in various countries, you will understand that many cities and countries in the developing world go through everything that we went through in the late 90s in terms of rapidly developing Internet access, rapidly developing participation. They now realize that this is a very exciting period of time, of course.
Q: Who is in priority: content consumers or its creators?
A: Both are very important, but I would say that we focus more on creation, because if we do not create anything, there will be nothing to consume , that's the whole point.
But we pay attention to people who consume content. We think about the technical infrastructure, trying to make sure that the pages load quickly and so on, we also try to make sure that people can access the site. But we need more software, more work on community support.
Q: Wikipedia format is text, but what about video or audio, are you moving in that direction?
A: This will not change. Well, when there is some video, audio and we always encourage people who upload good quality photos and illustrations to the site, this is important.
But not so important to change the very essence of the product. Encyclopedia is primarily a text.
Many require video, but it’s very difficult to co-edit a video. So when someone publishes saw and I think “oh, there is a mistake” or “they should have done it differently,” I understand that I can do little about it. In the case of the text, you can write to someone and say “oh, I saw a mistake there” or “it seems to me, it can be said differently here,” and we can start a dialogue.
The text is very variable and therefore easy to continually improve. For many encyclopedia topics, the text is perfect. The audio format within the limits of availability is not very convenient. You need to make sure that the software is compatible, which is very problematic.
Q: What can be compared with Wikipedia? There is Mozilla - this is also a non-commercial, technological, global project. Can you give such examples?
A: I never really thought about it. We are so absorbed in what we do, that we have never really compared ourselves to anyone.
I think if you think globally, then there are no other organizations like us or Mozilla.
But there is an interesting trend on the Internet. The true "spirit of the Internet" is manifested. While YouTube is a commercial platform, a huge amount of material on YouTube is non-commercial, people just share their knowledge.
I recently read about music editing software and there are hundreds of videos on YouTube explaining the details of how to do this. If you want to learn how to create music on a computer, then you can find just a huge amount of material that people publish, because this is their hobby and they like it.
This is the spirit of Wikipedia: "I know something and I want to share it."
Q: You advised the government of the United Kingdom. How to use technology for the benefit of society? How can Wikipedia help?
A: One of the most important lessons I learned from Wikipedia is that there are a huge number of people eager to do something.
When we think about developing projects for the benefit of society, we should focus on good and friendly people, and not on the minority that causes problems.
I see how many people make this big mistake, thinking first of all what bad people can do and create a project based on this, so as not to let bad people do what they can do.
But thus they do not give good people spontaneously to do good .
This kind of approach to project development is fundamentally wrong. Build your project around good people . This is the approach we should see as often as possible.
Q: What can you advise the government (the United Kingdom in particular) about interaction with the world of technology?
A: All that they can advise is to stay as far as possible .
One of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is to decide that they know what to do in the technology world, in the world of innovative entrepreneurship.
Because in fact they do not know anything and they should not climb into it. What they need to do is make sure that the legal infrastructure is reliable, understandable and honest, so that we can allow innovations to develop, and then they better get out of our way and allow us to do our work.
Q: What will happen to Wikipedia in five years?
A: I can foresee two big changes. One you can see, and the other is not.
The visible change is that the editing environment will become much like a text editor, will become easier to use.
Now, when you press the "edit" button, you first need to figure out how to do it. We want to eliminate this barrier. This will be a visible change.
As for the invisible changes, about which I spoke, they will be invisible both for you and for me. I'm talking about the growth of Wikipedia in terms of languages. We probably won't notice when Wikipedia Zulu moves from 200 visits to 200,000, but people with a native Zulu language will definitely notice it. This is a significant change.
Thank you for the interesting interview.
Still
- Lecture by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in Yandex
- Patrons of Wikipedia. Who are they?
- How Wikipedia works (part 1) , (part 2) , (part 3)
- Since January 1! Happy Public Domain!
- How to become a MediaWiki hacker
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- Apply for Filtech-accelerator
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Inspiration
- Interview with Ivan Bakaidov: “I’m drooling, writing code”
- Mail for Good: how the community of programmers helps NGOs
How to build a community. Translation of the book "Social Architecture":
The wisdom of crowds
Chapter 1. Toolkit
Chapter 2. Sidebars
Chapter 3. The ZeroMQ Community
Chapter 4. The ZeroMQ Process: C4
Chapter 5. Designing for Innovation
Chapter 6. Living Systems
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342308/
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