Q&A: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

By thinksocial on May 12, 2009 | 176No Commentshttp://think-social.org/qa-jimmy-wales-founder-of-wikipedia.htmQ%26amp%3BA%3A+Jimmy+Wales%2C+Founder+of+Wikipedia2009-05-12+16%3A11%3A57thinksocial

Jimmy Wales

JIMMY WALES
Founder, Wikipedia

Twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for founding Wikipedia.org, as well as other wiki-related organizations, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

TS: How do you define the public interest of social media?

Jimmy Wales: When we think about social media and the public interest we should be interested in and concerned about quality and what roles different forms of social media play. It’s a very diverse topic.

TS: How do you at Wikipedia take the public interest into account?

JW: Wikipedia is fundamentally a charitable endeavor to create and distribute a quality free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And within our community there’s a very strong spirit that we should be concerned about quality, that we’re trying to conserve a culture that has a positive, helpful role for people and learning. Its fairly defined project as far as public interest.

TS: Are there any unexpected ways you’ve seen it used that you’re particularly proud of?

JW: It’s been interesting to see how Wikipedia responds to breaking news. It does a really great job normally at synthesising information from a wide variety of different sources. Pulling things together from all sorts of different places very fast. In some news stories it plays a crucial function.

TS: What other developments excite you?

JW: I’m very intrigued by video in the future. I think that it gets more exciting as we get to a place where people have access to the tools to create and edit video collaboratively and more people have faster internet connections that allow them to download and view it. When I see video today it looks a lot like the creation of text did in 1999. What I mean by that is that you have a lot of individuals doing individual projects just like everybody used to put up homepages and make these fabulous resources but as just one person. Maybe they’d write 20 pages of information about Thomas Jefferson with hyperlinks and pictures but they weren’t collaborating to make something bigger. And right now in video we see lots of people doing individual projects but very little so far in terms of larger groups putting together bigger projects. We’ve got a long way to go there, and I think that’s what we’ll see a lot of in five years.

TS: What do you think the greatest threats to the use of social media in the public interest are?

JW: To create good  content requires certain social norms and rules. It’s not just about software, it’s about people. Wikipedia as a community works really hard to generate social rules and norms and expectations and structures and institutions with an eye towards trying to create a very high quality. And while I’m proud at what we’ve accomplished so far we still have a lot of things to do. But the thing that seems to work is that spirit – the idea that this is a medium that we’re trying to make into something important. You can have all the new software or technology in the world and if people are just using it to be idiots then it doesn’t really help with anything. I think that’s one of the key threats – a failure to recognize that this is really a social phenomenon and that software can impede us or help us along but at the end of the day people have to get together and decide to do things in a good way.

TS: How do you build that kind of spirit?

JW: It takes a lot of work, a lot of talking, a lot of coaching, a lot of empowering good people and making it harder for bad people to participate. It’s 1001 different things but it’s no different from  what we struggle with throughout all society all the time. How do organizations deal with toxic personalities? There’s no simple magic answer to that. If you’re thinking about some solution that has to do with cyberspace you’re going down the wrong path. It’s just about building good communities like it’s always been.

TS: Where do you see it in a couple of years?

JW: In my work I’m seeing people expand beyond the encyclopedia into the rest of the library. We’ve got a half a billion pages a month and growing very quickly. We’re still seeing a consolidation of the move towards real-time working in a semi-public fashion using things like Twitter and Facebook. The other thing is the globalization of the medium. Right now less than 20 per cent of what’s in Wikipedia is in English and in five years time that will be less than 10 per cent – because all the other languages are growing so quickly. And that’s really important, the idea that this kind of communication is going on world wide, albeit unevenly distributed because of broadband access. We should remember that the impact here is global.

TS: Do governments have a responsibility to consider that?

JW: Yes, of course they do, but I’d really caution against the one-after-another fad-ism of people suggesting governments or organizations should be doing X, Y or Z. Someone was joking online the other day that companies could reassign the people they hired to be in Second Life and have them move to Twitter instead because it’s the fad of the year. It’s perfectly fine if we see people in government who are using Twitter or blogging or on Facebook but let’s not get too wound up in that. The most important thing government can do is not interfere with the marketplace and really allow these kinds of technologies to develop.