...

Wikipedia's free and interactive encyclopedia has surpassed the New York Times online in daily visits, and is nearly one of the top fifty web sites. By word count, they are about twice the size of Britannica. Presently, it comprehensively represents twelve languages, with options on many more.

Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the GEL 2005 conference. To follow is a transcript of that talk. Some specific references to slides have been omitted to facilitate reading.

...

Jimmy Wales: A lot of you have used Wikipedia but the interesting thing about Wikipedia is that you can experience Wikipedia both as a user and a producer. In 1962, Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor at Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, it should stop being safe. But if you know the history of Britannica after that time, it never became radical and it’s still very safe and boring.

Wikipedia is a radical idea. The radical idea of Wikipedia is for us to all imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. And that’s what we’re doing at Wikipedia. That’s the core mission of everything that we’re doing. So Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many, many languages. The important thing to understand about Wikipedia more than anything else is the free license. Free license means that other people are able to copy our work. You can redistribute it, you can modify it, you can redistribute modified versions. You can do all that commercially and non-commercially. So if you’re familiar with the word free-software, some people call it open source, it’s the same idea but now we’re applying it in cultures instead of just in software.

We’ve been around since January 2001 and one of the things that has brought us together as a community is our neutral point of view. Wikipedia strives very hard to be useful. So, on controversial issues, we just try to tell you about the controversy rather than taking a side on the controversy. This is really important for Wikipedia for our community that we’ve built because it allows us to get people together from very diverse political, religious, cultural backgrounds. And it’s a social concept of cooperation. We don’t really talk a lot in the community about such contexts of objectivity, truth, lack of bias, those epistomalogical or knowledge based concepts. They just lead to endless arguments. Well what we talk about is neutral point of view meaning it’s about cooperating with other people and that’s a really, really important point of how we do things.

The Wikipedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that owns Wikipedia and all of the related things. The aim is to distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. Our activities are not just a group of people having fun building a just a website, but a really big, big project to give a free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet. So we’re talking about ways of getting information and text books and things like this out to developing countries where people barely have access to drinking water much less an encyclopedia. We’re funded by donations from the public and grants from various different kinds of institutions. And we’re essentially an all-volunteer organization.

So that basically tells you who we are and what the idea is of what we’re doing, but how successful are we? Are we actually able to do this? It sounds great. Well, at this point, the English Wikipedia is the largest. It has over a hundred thirty million words. It’s been a couple of months since I did that check. And I actually think it’s closer to two hundred million that would be growing really fast. It’s larger than Britannica and Microsoft Encarta combined. This is just the English language. Globally we’re in many, many languages. And we have in English, over a half million articles. The Germans are second with 220,000 articles. The Japanese, 110,000. The French, the French just passed 100,000 about a week ago so they’re celebrating that. Actually the French are, the French are going to pass the Japanese by the end of the year. There are a lot more French people working than Japanese people working the encyclopedia. Somehow the Japanese manage to stay ahead, so we joke that they just work harder than the French. The French are coming along very, very nicely. They’re going to pass the Japanese before the end of the year. And strange enough the Swedish Wikipedia is 5th largest. It’s kind of a surprise. Nobody is that sure why that is. Sweden’s a very wired country. They have very good English so they have very good early on start of Wikipedia, and then, it’s also it’s cold and dark so what are you going to do?

We’re had nearly one and a half million articles across two hundred languages. To say two hundred languages is a little optimistic cause most of those websites are set up waiting for volunteers to come in. By terms of actually, practically live projects, we’re got over 20 languages that have at least 10,000 articles. We have over 50 that have over 1,000 articles each. So that’s a really large international community.

So how popular is Wikipedia? Well, it seems that nearly every one in the room has actually seen it so you might be able to get it. But according to Alexa which is a sight which ranks website based on popularity, one more popular than Expedia the big travel website, Appall, Excite, Geocity, and then one that we just passed just recently, we’re very excited about it, we just passed the New York Times in popularity. I was recently at a conference speaking on a panel with the CEO of USAToday.com and he made a comment something to the effect of, you know, this is fine for you but we have a really big website with three hundred million pages a month. And I said, oh, that’s not bad. We have five hundred million pages. So, it’s gotten to be really big and popular. This is a graph showing our growth. We’re the blue line, not the collapsing red line. And we just passed the New York Times in popularity. We’re now considered to be one of the top 100 websites in the world. We’re actually getting close to being one of the top 50. So, it’s gotten to be really, really popular. Those graphs and those numbers are just for Wikipedia.

We actually have a lot of other projects. They’re spin-off projects. Wikionaries a dictionary; Wikibooks – this is where we’re creating textbooks. Wikisource for public domain – old texts and things like that. Wikiquote is like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Wikispecies is for biologists who collect data about species. The commentaries where we collect all the media pilots for all the projects. Wikinews is an attempt to create a free printing like a news source. All of these projects are run in the same way as Wikipedia. So you might ask, well, how do you do all this? How does all this happen? Well, this is just a picture to show you. This is what the technical infrastructure looks like behind Wikipedia. So we have all these servers. People talk to the Internet. And then they talk to switch caches and the data base servers. The amazing thing about our organization is that all of these servers are juggled by our volunteers. We have people who are logging in 24 hours a day. I can go into online IRC chat rooms and talk to developers. There are people who are up day and night 24 hours a day running the servers, managing the servers. And that actually is the first hint to let you know what it’s like actually behind the scenes for Wikipedia.

So you know the public face, but what’s it really like? What’s the experience behind the scenes of Wikipedia? And it turns out that the idea a lot of people have of Wikipedia is that it’s some emerging phenomenon, the wisdom of mob-swarmed intelligence, that sort of thing. Thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content that add to a coherent body of work. So it’s like we’re a lot of ants working in an anthill. So that analysis is very appealing to a lot of people. It’s kind of a neat analogy but it turns out it’s not much true. When I look at the edit history of Wikipedia it turns out, there’s a core group of people – and we can see all my friends here from various meet ups - that I go all over the world and I meet people who are Wikipedians. And it’s a group of around a thousand, two thousand people who are very, very tightly integrated with each other and they’re in constant communication and take a lot of care and love for how the content is created.

And so the experience of Wikipedia, if you want to edit Wikipedia, as soon as you start to get involved, you’ll be greeted by someone in the community. And you can really join this community. It’s very intellectual, very friendly people who are trying to do this big charitable mission throughout the world.

So, how is all this managed? I mean thousands of volunteers, and basically no employees. We did just hire a software developer. We did that, though, not so he could work more for Wikipedia. He was already working more than full time but so he could quit his part-time job and go to the movies. (laughter) Umm, So how do we organize all this? Well Wikipedia governance is a confusing but workable mix of consensus – meaning we try not to vote on the contents of the articles. We try to get as many people on board. And for a lot of reasons this forces discussion: what should the article say to make it neutral? We have some amount of democracy, a little bit of democracy in terms of voting about things on the site, although we try not to vote unless we absolutely have to make a decision. A certain amount of aristocracy – this could be the very elite users – the people who are most widely respected in the community. The software doesn’t force the aristocracy but it’s more of a meritocracy – people who have gained respect in the community because they do such good work and they’re thoughtful and they really care to mediate disputes and get a lot of people on board.

And then a little bit of monarchy, and that’s my role in the community. And I try to be like the British monarch in the sense that I try to have as little power as I can within the community and not try to affect it very much. I actually gave a different version of this speech in Berlin, and there’s a newspaper the next morning – the big headline was, “I’m the Queen of England”. (laughter) It’s not exactly what I said, but . . . That’s the idea. I don’t rule over the sight with an iron fist but I am there to defend the community in case of trouble or democratic procedures seem to be going haywire. People trust that I’m there to make sure that we stay on target.

So the ultimate point of all this, that the experience of Wikipedia is very flexible. Wikipedians are very flexible about our social methodology. We’ve value the results of the work over the process. This is something that a lot of people, when they first learn about Wikipedia, they don’t realize. They think, well anyone can access the sight, it’s going to be a million random people, and it’s complete anarchy. In fact, it’s a very tight knit community of people who know each other, you know, and within the community we have people who start dating, or someone has a family tragedy and things like that. And we all know each other. Really, it’s very different from the idea of ants at work. It’s all about passion of people who really care about what they’re doing and how we’ve been able to achieve everything we’ve done so far.