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That was the original thinking behind Wikipedia. A free encyclopedia for everyone — a big idea and something that can really inspire people, and it seemed like something that was really useful and helpful for the world, so I just plunged in and started working on it.
Why do you think it’s so successful?
I think one of the reasons it’s been so successful is that Wikipedia harkens back to one of the original dreams of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee has said that his original concept of the web was that people could read it and write to it. Wikipedia really embodies that, and wikis in general embody that. It’s the idea of broad democratic participation.
When you first saw the internet, people thought, “Wow, this is a great tool to share information about the world.” Then we had the dotcom era when it seemed the internet was about spam, pop-up ads and selling dog food, whereas now we see, “Gee, we do have this global tool for sharing knowledge — so let’s do that.”
I have a question from Doug who posted a question on my blog, wanting to know if you see Wikipedia replacing traditional encyclopedias such as the Britannica?
Yes, I do — not yet, necessarily. They are different in certain respects, but certainly for many people [who] 10 years ago decided their only source was to read an article in Britannica … most of the people who used to do that are now turning to Wikipedia: it’s free, it’s online, and it’s efficient. So, yes, I think so.
Do you think Wikipedia signals a fundamental shift in the publishing model, and perhaps even in society itself? Is that why people are getting so excited about it?
I think there is an element of that, although I try to not be too over-hyping about it. Those are really big thoughts. Certainly I think Wikipedia is the first major example of good-quality, consumer-generated content that is really a radically different production model.
We are starting to see the same kind of thing going on at Wikia (a collection of wiki communities), not in the education and research field, but in things like Uncyclopedia. It’s generated in the same way as Wikipedia, and it’s really funny and really different and not like anything that’s come before it.
So, I do think in that sense we are still at the beginning of a broader shift in how media are produced. And I do call it a shift — I don’t think it’s replacing the old media. It’s changing and impacting the old media, no question, but I still think a lot of the traditional stuff will survive.
Anyone who said that with the invention with the light bulb we’d no longer have candles, well, that might have seemed plausible for a while, but clearly we still have candles because they serve a different purpose and do some things better than the electric light.
In terms in a fundamental shift in society — I don’t know, that’s a really bigger thing. I hope that if people can, in their own language, learn more about other parts of the world and other people and get their information from a source that really prides itself on trying really hard to be neutral, and if we, trying very hard to be neutral, push some other organisations to try very hard to be neutral in order to retain credibility, that’s got to be healthy for the world.
In many parts of the world there are state-controlled media that are incredibly biased and trying to push certain agendas, which is unhealthy. Having this more diverse, democratic and fairly neutral source might change people’s ideas, to be a little more moderated in their thinking and to realise we can’t just trust what our leaders say, but we have to think things through more. But we’re just tiny piece of a bigger revolution, which is all about what the internet is doing.
You’ve come under a fair bit of criticism from a well-known tech site, The Register. The site is a well-known and often acerbic critic of yours, calling Wikipedia a “multiplayer shoot-’em-up game”. How do you respond to that?
[Laughs] The Register is completely ridiculous. I wouldn’t even consider it a serious website. It’s more of a humour site or something, I think. I read some of their things and I think that’s, like, really bizarre. In term of (Wikipedia) being a shoot-’em-up game, I don’t even know what that means.
The only thing that is close to that, I suppose, is that people do try to vandalise Wikipedia and there are people whose job it is to fight the vandals, so they go around reverting and blocking IP addresses. That activity is sort of analogous to a video game, I suppose.
I’ve got a question from Vincent. You say that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and behind that is a noteworthy egalitarian ideal. However, in truth there is an editorial hierarchy on Wikipedia, all the way up to yourself. Doesn’t this really just reinforce the notion of control that it supposedly challenges?
Yes, so I think that there is a fundamental misconception in the way people think about Wikipedia. If the idea people have is that Wikipedia is, or should be, 10-million people each adding one sentence and everyone has an equal say, well, that just has never been factually the way it works.
What does it mean to have mass democratic participation? I think it doesn’t mean you have to be a sceptic about knowledge. It doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and say that whatever ranting people put up is just as good as anything else.
The idea of having quality dialogue, the idea of having a very openness to newcomers, but an openness that is conditional — it says, come and join our community and help us build something, but you need to be calm, you need to be rational, you need to be thoughtful. You don’t have to agree with us about politics, because we don’t agree with each other about politics and a lot of other things.
But when you disagree, there are good ways and bad ways to disagree … you can say, “An article is biased because it doesn’t mention the viewpoint of these people and I have references here to published materials that contradict the article and we need to acknowledge that there is a debate here.” That kind of stuff is always welcome. That is what it means to be open, democratic and participatory.
Where people sometimes get frustrated is when they come to Wikipedia and they have this idea that they are going to take over and push an agenda. The community will basically reject them and then they get mad. There is not a [hierarchy] so much, but there are standards. There are administrators that are elected by the community. It’s a more complicated social system than people may understand.
A major difference between Wikipedia and publications like Britannica is that publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood and reputations depend on it. With Wikipedia’s largely anonymous reader base, it appears that there isn’t that same pressure. How do you respond?
You might imagine that if you open up a website for anyone to edit, it’s going to be complete rubbish. Well, if you look at Wikipedia and you look at the quality of the articles, it’s clearly much better than anyone would have ever expected. This argument that says that because people are anonymous they won’t do anything good is just false.
The bulk of the community are not anonymous — we know who they are and things about them. In some cases they have some personal reason to stay anonymous, but even there they have an identity that’s stable over time; they have a reputation within the community. It is unthinkable to imagine any major Wikipedian suddenly deciding to insert malicious, false facts. They would be caught and really embarrassed. Those kind of social ties within the community and the idea of doing good seem to be quite powerful in ensuring quality.
What about the Los Angeles Times editorial-wiki experiment that ended up as complete rubbish in the end?
There’s a few things they did wrong. The first thing that they did, they opened the wiki up, but they hid the link to the history of recent changes, and for a wiki community to be able to see the history of every article is crucial. If you can’t see the history, then as soon as someone makes a change the old version is lost forever. You can’t roll things back to the pervious version.
A group of Wikipedians tried to help them that day, including me, but it was really difficult because they had really bunched up the interface. The second thing that they did was that they didn’t make anyone an administrator other than LA Times staff, and the story I heard was that they closed it at around 4am in the morning because the staff were so exhausted and had to go home.
Another thing … what they should have done was buy some pizza and beer, and invite certain people from the newspaper’s existing community to have their participation in the project. They didn’t do anything like that. It’s as if they thought the software would do all the magic for them in community building.
Finally, after botching all those things, they chose to do what has got to be one of the most difficult things to do collaboratively, which is write opinion pieces. They posted their editorial on the Iraq war … I don’t even know if I would even attempt an open editorial sort of thing.
So what do you think the future holds for traditional encyclopedias like the Britannica?
I used to predict that Britannica wouldn’t be able to survive. Now I’ve seen that, in Germany, Brockhaus is the equivalent of Britannica, and Brockhaus‘s sales were up 30% last year over the year before — that’s really surprising because Wikipedia is huge in Germany.
Somebody has said that maybe Wikipedia has made encyclopedias really cool again. There was a time where encyclopedias were hurting because people were saying, “Why do I need an encyclopedia when I can just get on to Google and get whatever I want?” But on Google you’ll find all kinds of things, some of it good, some of it bad, some of it complete rubbish. An encyclopedia serves a specific purpose: it’s a quick summary of what you need to know on a given topic.
Just getting on Google and randomly surfing pages can take a long time to get what you need to know. So that may be driving people to say, “I want a traditional encyclopedia as well.” But at the price they charge, I don’t know, though … it’s quite difficult.
Do you think the roles of readers and publishers are blurring with the advent of the internet? Where is it all going?
Definitely we are seeing some blurring there, even via letters to the editor, but also via web forums that some newspapers have. And the forums tend to be unmoderated or very lightly moderated, so people can express an opinion much easier than in the old days of the newspaper only. The way I think this is going is hybrid models where traditional news organisations start to see community participation as a huge positive thing for them … to say there is all sorts of stuff out there and we just cannot afford to cover everything, and there is a community that would be happy to help us with that.
So far, we haven’t seen anything from citizen journalism, broadly construed, that would replace a traditional newspaper.
Do you think we’ll get there?
I don’t think so, no. There are some parts of it where I find it really hard to imagine how you would do it. The pieces of the newspaper that I think are the most vulnerable are the commentary, the editorial page — simply because, with some rare exceptions, for the most part this is a purely intellectual activity.
Anybody who has good writing skills, access to information and who can come up with an opinion about the world, investigate it, have an interesting idea … can just post it on their blog. This is what the best bloggers are doing. They don’t need the infrastructure of a news organisation to do their job; it’s all about that one solitary individual who has something interesting to say.
This is why the New York Times selling access to their columnists makes no sense to me. I cannot imagine who would pay to read Maureen Dowd, and that’s not a slam on her; it’s just to say there are lots of interesting people in the world that I can read and nothing that she’s doing is unique in the sense that it has to come from the New York Times.
The other one that I think is interesting and perhaps vulnerable is sports coverage … It’s difficult for a citizen journalist to cover a car accident or some kind of disaster because you’re at work in the day, and how do you know this even happened? But everyone knows when a cricket match is, and it’s actually arranged so that people can be there at defined times. So it seems quite plausible to me that you can have citizen coverage that is essentially identical to what professional journalists do in the sports field.
There is criticism that Wikipedia is generally strong on the big, popular topics, but weak when it comes to niche or specialist subjects where there isn’t a big community around those entries to correct and check them. How would you respond to that?
OK, I will agree that Wikipedia is quite weak on certain types of subjects, but I’m not sure that describing the difference between “popular” and “niche” is exactly right … We do have certain systemic biases within our community that are a product of where we come from. We come from the free software movement, we come from geeky internet people, and we use technology which is unfortunately a little more complicated than it should be to accomplish our work, which puts certain people off.
We have people who are absolute experts in their field and can write about these really arcane details with great precision — and these aren’t necessarily popular subjects; these are very obscure topics in the computer sciences or the hard sciences.
We also do very obscure things in some aspects of pop culture. The English-language Wikipedia has unbelievable coverage of Japanese comic books because there is a fanatical community around that, so it’s niche content that isn’t necessarily that popular, but which people really care about.
Where we are weak is when we haven’t clicked with a certain community. I think we’re fairly weak on topics having to do with parenting and child psychology. The reason is not that they’re niche topics, but that they are not the topics that our core demographic of users know about.
I think there are problems around that and that they are solvable … but they are really big structural problems that have to do with who uses Wikipedia and how we get more people involved.
I’ve got a question from Tyler. He thinks Africa is behind in terms of understanding and using the wiki concept. Are you part of (or would you like to take part in) an initiative to help educate Africans about wikis? And how they can be used for economical growth?
Yes and yes. In terms of my personal participation I always like to emphasise to people that I am basically completely useless, except as somebody who comes and gives talks and publicises things. But I can also try to help connect people. So if people who read this interview want to get involved and have something specific, they can by all means email us.
Also, I am always willing to travel. I’ve been to India three times in the last nine months … and in part that’s because there has been this sudden boom in India of participation in Wikipedia. And me being there gets us in the newspapers and helps educate people. So you’ll write this story and some people who read this or listen to this podcast will say, “OK, you know I’m really going to try get involved in Wikipedia now.”
Let’s go back to Doug, who wants to know if you plan any projects beyond Wikipedia.
Yes, I have a completely new project and a completely new organisation. It’s a completely separate company: Wikia. And the project that I am spending the most time on personally working on is the search-engine project.
The idea here is to take some of the lessons we’ve learned from Wikipedia, even some of the lessons we’ve learned from a lot of the social networking sites, the idea of free culture … to have freely licensed software, everything is open-sourced, publish all the algorithms and have a search engine to try to compete directly with Google and Yahoo! in a radically different, public, transparent way.
So you are going to try to take on Google and Yahoo!?
Well, yeah. It will be fun, anyway. So that’s what I am working on … a lot. And we expect to launch something by the end of this year. It won’t be a fully functioning search engine by then, but it’ll be the openings of the community project — the software to start building the search engine — and it should be fun to see if it works.