Jimbo Wales at Reed College
Posted by: claire | From: April 3, 2007
Jimmy Wales -- commonly known around Wikipedian circles as "Jimbo" -- wants every person in the world to have total access to the sum of all human knowledge, in their own language, for free.
"That's free as in speech," he specifies, "not free as in beer."
During his very Web 2.0 Power Point/laser pointer talk at Reed College this Monday, Wales skipped the explanation of what Wikipedia, which he co-founded in 2001 with money he made running the erotic ("guy oriented") search engine Bomis.com, is all about. After all, every single college student in the packed-to-capacity lecture hall, by a show of hands, claimed to have edited the website at least once.
Of course, that's not just because (mostly) everyone in the room was a hellbent Free Culture Reedie. It's because Wikipedia is the 9th most popular website on the Internet. On the entire Internet. More people visit it every day than the BBC and CNN combined. The mainstream media, Wales pronounced proudly, is us.
Despite his arguably softcore-porn roots, Wales was instrumental in creating the self-replicating massive global community based on shared principles of neutrality we call Wikipedia; a culture of sharing, he explains, based on intellectual exchange, not market exchange. Of course, it isn't perfect, and Wales was remarkably open to criticism, detailing several recent scandals (there was the prominent Wikipedian claiming to be a religion professor, for example, who turned out to be an unqualified 22 year-old), and discussing how the website stacks up next to, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has one less mistake per article, on average, than Wikipedia. Not bad, Wales stressed, for an encyclopedia edited largely by laypeople -- and while it's not that surprising that Wikipedia has 4 errors per article, it is surprising to hear that Britannica has 3.
Why is Wikipedia such a decent reference when it's so open to vandalism? It's a combination of many factors, and "Jimbo" used an interesting analogy: just because you're given a knife when you order steak doesn't mean that people are always flipping out and stabbing each other in restaurants. Most of the time, people are trustworthy; "Don't design around worse-case scenarios," Wales said, adding, "let people do what they can, but include an accountability model." Giving the public free reign over ideas, while still allowing others to go back and fix their mistakes, is a lot like allowing people to eat with potentially lethal steak knives in restaurants.
Besides, if an encyclopedia entry is going to survive in an open community, it's got to be broadly appealing and inoffensive, a truism that pushes Wiki-editors towards quality and thoughtfulness. Despite the occasional squabble, Wikipedia is free from the flame wars which so define much public discourse on the Web, so something must be working.
Wales concluded his streamlined keynote with a rallying cry: "People love to talk about decentralization and the power of ordinary people," he espoused. "I say, let's do it!" It was a little weak, of course, but his point got across: a Wiki-based community is a social model, not a tech innovation, and there's no limit to where it can go.
Oh, P.S. - Maybe caption that photo to point out that it's Wales' desktop wallpaper. That makes it funnier.
Posted by: dalas v at April 3, 2007 7:28 PM
It's very interesting to read this article, since I not only attended the lecture, but also sat beside you and noticed the things Wales said that made you scribble in your notebook. Cool experience!
Posted by: dalas v at April 3, 2007 7:27 PM