TEDTalks: Jimmy Wales, Oxford, July 2005
The goal of Wikipedia/Wikimedia is to get a free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet. At the time of Wales's presentation, Wikipedia amounted to over 2 million articles in a variety of languages. Only around 1/3 of traffic to the site is directed at the English section of the encyclopedia. The foundation only has one paid employee, the lead software developer, and the rest of the work is done by volunteers. The main cost is around $5000/month in bandwidth.
"Why isn't it all rubbish?" (ie. given a completely chaotic model).
"Most people understand the need for neutrality."
"How do we manage the quality control?"
Wales states that social policies and elements of the software contribute to this.
It's a social concept of co-operation... anytime there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia should not take a stand on it, we should merely report what reputable parties have said about it.
Neutral Point of View policy:
* NPOV - Neutral Point of View
* NPOV is a social concept of co-operation, avoids some philosophical issues
* Diverse political, religious, cultural backgrounds
* Kept together by our "NPOV" policy
Real-time peer review: every time a change is made, the changes are fed into IRC and RSS feeds that peers have on their personal 'watch lists.' Therefore, someone will notice the change very quickly, and if it doesn't conform to policy then the page will be reverted.
Edits by anonymous users only account for approximately 18% of the edits on the website. The vast majority of the edits on the website are made by a fairly dedicated, close-knit community of around 600-1000 people who are in constant communication.
The software tools support close monitoring of encyclopedia entries, such as 'page history,' which highlights page modifications in red. A social method that grew up in the community is the "Votes for Deletion" page, which creates a forum for the community to dialogue on issues for clarification.
The wikipedia governance model is a very confusing but workable mix of consensus... we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral; some amount of democracy - all of the administrations - these are the people who have the ability to delete pages - that doesn't mean they have the right to delete pages - they still have to follow all of the rules - but they're elected by the community. Sometimes random trolls on the Internet accuse me of hand-picking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy... Rick Cave's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. And then there's monarchy, and that's my role in the community... I don't like the term 'benevolent dictator'... it isn't appropriate, but there's a need still for a certain amount of monarchy. Sometimes we need to make a decision quick and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision making processes... we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. So as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Because of the free licencing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave - I can't tell anyone what to do.
So the final point here is to understand that we are not fanatical web anarchists. We're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.
During a subsequent Q&A it was suggested to Wales that a lot of biased textbooks are being used in schools, and he was asked whether or not Wikipedia is being employed by teachers and schools.
There's a media storyline about Wikipedia which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers, and the storyline is that there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it, and that turns out to not be true... I think there's going to be huge impacts, and we actually have a project...the Wikibooks projects, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages... part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet... I think that we're really going to see... freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
