Wiki World

Wiki World

How Wikipedia impacts buying and selling.

With the help of thousands of unpaid volunteers, Jimmy Wales created a bona fide global phenomenon with Wikipedia.org. The nonprofit site is used by 36 percent of adults in America alone. Now Wales has his sights set on for-profit ventures that include more online communities and a search engine to rival Google. The question is: Will users follow him?

By Lisa Gschwandtner

When he was a child, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales could often be found in his parents’ living room, obsessively reading their 22-volume set of World Book Encyclopedias. To stay current, World Book periodically mailed updates to its customers. Each time one arrived, Wales would mark new entries with stickers.

If Wales was growing up today, of course, he wouldn’t have to bother with stickers or the postal service to get current information. He’d simply log onto Wikipedia.org to find information on just about any topic under the sun. Wikipedia has just seven full-time employees, but its 75,000 active volunteer contributors around the world are constantly monitoring and updating 1.8 million entries in more than 200 languages, including Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Afrikaans, and Yiddish.

Thanks to the incredible success of Wikipedia, Wales has acquired a sort of celebrity status, and he has had the heady and surreal experiences that come with fame. He’s kite-surfed at Sir Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island. Actor and director Forest Whitaker and former President Carter have both confessed to Wales personally that they love his site and use it every day. He gets emails from Bono.

It would be a mistake to pin Wales as a jet-setting fame-seeker, however. Sure, he takes the occasional limo to the occasional high-powered meeting in cities around the world. But his home is a one-story house in St. Petersburg, Fl, and he flies coach class. He did, at one point, own a Ferrari, but he said in a C-SPAN interview that it wasn’t running and “cost less than most people’s SUVs.” In interviews he jokes that making Wikipedia a free venture was “either the dumbest thing or the smartest thing I ever did.” But he also says he never intended to make money with Wikipedia. “It’s a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet,” he told goodexperience.com. “That’s what drives my entire life. I have enough money and I don’t need money.

“Sometimes people think I’m this crazy anti-business person and that I’m giving everything away to charity,” Wales says. “But money for me is not a primary goal compared to being intellectually stimulated. Lots of people have more money than I do, but they don’t hang out with Bono.”

Clearly Wales has a competitive streak, but he tends to downplay it, saying only, “I don’t even think in terms of competition. I think in terms of what would be neat to do, and let’s do that.” But it’s hard to believe that the man who built a global online encyclopedia lacks the will to win. In a 2004 interview, for example, Wales said he viewed traditional print encyclopedias as competitors, adding that he believed they would be “crushed out of existence within five years.” This year he admitted that his statement might have been overblown. “It’s sort of come back to haunt me because Britannica is hardly gone,” he told Slashdot.com.

Shared Knowledge

Even if he hasn’t annihilated the competition, the rapid rise of Wikipedia shows that Wales has tapped into a need users didn’t even know they had. One clear advantage is that the site’s wiki software can produce information in real time (in Hawaiian, “wiki” means “quick”). On 9/11, for example, volunteer contributors logged onto the site that same day and used news reports to compile background articles on the tragedy, including information about the World Trade Center, the terrorists, and the airlines involved. Not only can Wikipedia keep pace with current events, errors can be edited in a flash – no waiting for the next print run to correct mistakes. And because Wikipedia is housed entirely online, it’s not forced to limit entries to how much it can afford to print.

And unlike the old World Books Wales used to read, Wikipedia is entirely free. The site runs entirely on donations from individuals (mostly between $50 and $100), which bring in between $1 to $2 million annually. Wikipedia has never run advertisements or staged publicity campaigns. This is precisely the vision Wales had when he founded Wikipedia in January 2001.

“Our big-picture vision is to share knowledge with all of humanity,” Wales said in a 2005 interview with goodexperience.com. “That was the original dream of the Internet, before the era of pop-ups and spam, and it’s now being realized. It’s exciting. We’re learning huge lessons about harnessing community, treating communities well, and seeing the results.”

Naturally, Wikipedia has its flaws and detractors. Many skeptics remain wary of a site that relies on communal authorship, and wonder if it can possibly guarantee a reasonable degree of accuracy. Anyone with a computer and time on his hands can log on and edit an entry o­r create a new one from scratch. As Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Britannica, sniffed to the Wall Street Journal, “Britannica draws from a community, just as Wikipedia does. Ours consists of more than 4,000 scholars and experts around the world. While Wikipedia may welcome scholars, all the reports I’ve seen suggest that most of the work is done by individuals who, though very dedicated, have little or no scholarly background.”

Wikipedia 1.0

In fact, Wales’ first pass at an online encyclopedia followed the traditional model. Nupedia, as the site was then known, operated as a conventional, chain-of-command enterprise. But the multi-step review procedure made the site a sluggish animal. After two years and considerable expense, Nupedia had fewer than 30 entries to its name. “It just didn’t work,” Wales told Business 2.0 magazine. “It wasn’t much fun for people.”

Wales has said his goal is for the site to be at least as accurate as Britannica. Even so, Wikipedia has been plagued by a few high-profile incidents of vandalism. There was the Essjay incident, in which a 24-year old community college dropout, Ryan Jordan, under the name “Essjay,” edited thousands of Wikipedia articles posing as a tenured religion professor at a private university.

Wikipedia has since posted a code of conduct, and over the years it has issued 42 official policies on such topics as dispute resolution and etiquette. The site also posts the following disclaimer: “Older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed.”

Have these episodes damaged Wikipedia’s reputation among its users? Wales points out that the site has always taken quick action when disputes and problems occur. “If you expect public participation,” he says, “you’ve got to make sure that the end user is respected. You have to think about what it is the end user wants and how you can provide that for them.” In other cases, however, he’s shown little sympathy for users who place the utmost faith in his product. When asked about the panicked students who have emailed him, brandishing failed term papers, Wales told The Guardian, “For God’s sake, you’re in college. Don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

Open and Honest

In the end, Wales hopes the Wikipedia community can police itself. Thanks to the open-source wiki software, all tinkerings on the site are transparent; thus, everyone is held accountable. Mistakes come out, solutions are suggested, and the product ultimately becomes better for it. Wales admits the operation takes the risk of alienating some users, but the community is by no means the Wild West.

“A lot of what appears in the press about Wikipedia is driven by very isolated and quirky incidents,” he says. “There are hundreds of those every day that people don’t notice. The public perception is one part, but a deeper part is how we make sure that the site pleasantly surprises people. It’s not a crazy place.”

Wales, who admits that administrative tasks are not his forte, has a decidedly hands-off management style. “I don’t think it makes sense to manage a community,” Wales told Wired News. “It’s about building a space where good people can come in and manage themselves and manage each other. They can have a distinct and clear purpose – a moral purpose – that unites people and brings them together to do something useful.”

For the most part, Wales has made his approach work, and Wikipedia volunteers have remained loyal and prolific. As a leader, Wales might be unusual, but he walks the walk. Back when he was heavily involved in disputes and so-called “edit wars,” he frequently reminded people to think about those without access to proper healthcare and education, and how the Wikipedia community might someday contribute to a way out of such problems. Perhaps what people respond to is his heartfelt belief in the essential goodness of the Wikipedia community and that, if left alone, people will do the right thing. Witness, for example, the tone of an invitation on his Wikipedia page to edit his own entry:

“This is my user page. I like to keep it a certain way. But, the thing is, I trust you. I trust that you’ll add something here that makes me smile, that informs me, or that helps to inform others. If I have things in a certain format, I trust you will respect that format. Actually scratch that. Since this page is just so simple and plain, my ultimate dream is that some person who thinks it is fun would come along and make it look perfect. See that link up there that says, ‘edit this page’? Go for it. It’s a wiki world! – Jimbo”

Unconventional? Yes. On the other hand, you could never label him a micromanager. The other element of what makes Wikipedia so incredibly popular may have to do with the frustrations associated with the Information Age. As Wales points out, we don’t necessarily need all the information in the world. We need information “that yields knowledge and that we can use in a practical way.”

Wikia: The Next Generation

Enter Wales’ latest attempt to harness information: Wikia. Much like Wikipedia, Wikia uses the same wiki software to create online communities on any topic under the sun. Wikis are also volunteer efforts. Whoever wants to start a wiki devoted to Dostoevsky or dalmatians can start one up for free. This time around, however, Wales is looking to turn a profit. Following his announcement about Wikia, Wales banked $4 million from angel investors, and in a second round secured $10 million from Amazon.com. Compare that to the Wikipedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia and several other online projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikinews, among others), which took in $1 million in 2006.

Wikis draw in dollars for Wikia (not its volunteers) through paid advertisements, sponsored by Google ads. This a somewhat odd twist, considering that Wikia’s second major initiative, Search Wikia, involves coming up with a new, improved search engine. Although rumors started flying as early as December 2006 about a Wikia-related search engine, Wales formally announced in 2007 Wikia’s plans to come up with a product to rival both Google and Yahoo!. Some have predicted an epic grudge match between Wales and Google, but Wales isn’t personally waving any red flags. “Google’s actual business, if you look at their revenues, is advertising,” Wales says. “They’re dominant in that, so we don’t anticipate them having any trouble with us as long as we’re not taking money from the ad revenue with what we’re doing.”

So far Wikia has about 3,000 wikis, with communities on everything from Star Trek to diabetes. Angela Beesley, vice president of community relations, describes wikis as “editable Websites [that] allow a community to create content that will help others within that same community.” For example, Wikia’s most popular wiki, wowwiki.com, draws players of the game World of Warcraft. They use wowwiki.com to document and discuss every aspect of the game. A wiki on diabetes features basic information about the disease, how to manage it, personal stories, and related news articles.

How is this content any different from Wikipedia? Wikia is about communal publishing, says Wales. “The idea of mass participation in the creation of knowledge is something that is very important,” he explains. “With Wikipedia there is this very inspiring idea of the free encyclopedia for everyone on the planet, in their own language, and that really appeals to a lot of people. But, for example, in the Muppets at Wikia, they have written almost 14,000 articles documenting the impact of the Muppets on culture, everything about the Muppets, the Muppet show, Muppet movies. But you can also look up Pearlman the violinist and find out about the times he came on Sesame Street, which of course is [information] that is not really encyclopedic. It is that mass participating in creating incredibly detailed knowledge that is a whole leap beyond what traditional publishing models can be.”

With Search Wikia, Wales is also hoping to go beyond the traditional search engine model. “Certainly, [Google] was a huge step forward from previous search engines,” he says, “but nowadays the quality of search results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and some of their smaller competitors are actually quite similar. We have kind of hit a plateau on quality.

“The idea is that we have learned a lot in the past several years about how to help communities, to control for spam, control for quality. We want to work on the software to allow the community with all of the controls of the search engine to try to get better quality searching going.”

For Wales, the principle at work – open communities where everyone can contribute – is just as important as its operational benefits. “We want to make it really obvious how you can participate, and how things are ranked,” Wales says. “Right now, search is a black box. You don’t really know how Yahoo! and Google rank things; you really have no idea. Using open-source software is a lot like asking, ‘How does it help me that we have jury trials?’” Wales says. “Well, directly, maybe it doesn’t necessarily help you much at all. But, as a part of running a healthy society, it’s very important. It’s very dangerous for us to have a small number of companies secretly controlling the flow of traffic and flow of information. An important part of the search engine is knowing that.”
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