What-if
Wales: VC funding would have killed Wikipedia's community governance model
“And in fact, one of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically, is the lack of funding. Because if I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to give me millions of dollars to start this, then your …”
Insight
Crowdsourced review catches critical errors that structured gatekeeping often misses
“That concept does actually apply in lots of areas of life, that if you get a lot of people looking at something, people can say, hey, there's actually a problem here that maybe nobody else noticed, and then sometimes after it's been pointed out, you say, oh ye…”
What-if
Lack of venture capital forced Wikipedia to build community-driven governance
“One of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically, is the lack of funding. Because if I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to give me millions of dollars to start this, then your natural insti…”
Insight
Authoritarianism thrives by destroying belief in objective truth, not through indoctrination
“The best way to prepare people for Authoritarian rule is not to indoctrinate them into an authoritarian philosophy, but to make them believe that there's no such thing as truth.”
Insight
Wales: Wide public review exposes errors that formal processes miss
“There's an old saying in the open source software world that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
And what that means is, oftentimes when you're programming, there's some kind of bug in your code, and you just cannot find it.
And if you get another s…”
Insight
Wales: Organizations inevitably follow money, distorting missions if ad-supported
“If you think about the DNA of any organization, it's very difficult to stop an organization from following the money. So Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and as a nonprofit, we could run ads. No legal prohibition on a nonprofit running ads as a means of support.”
Insight
Wales: Authoritarians succeed by convincing people truth does not exist
“The best way to prepare people for Authoritarian rule is not to indoctrinate them into an authoritarian philosophy, but to make them believe that there's no such thing as truth.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fabricated fake news websites have had almost zero impact on Wikipedia
“And those kinds of sites have had almost zero impact at Wikipedia because while, you know, they might do well to share on Facebook something that comes from a publication called the Denver Guardian because, well, it looks like a news site, and Denver, everybod…”
Insight
Wales: Wikipedia is the place to get questions, not answers
“Wikipedia is quite good. It is definitely not perfect, and what I always say is Wikipedia is the place to go to get the questions, not the answers. It's the way to get yourself oriented in a context, and I actually always say go on the talk page of any article…”
Assertion Supported
Wales: Fake news sites have had almost zero impact on Wikipedia
“Those kinds of sites have had almost zero impact at Wikipedia because while, you know, they might do well to share on Facebook something that comes from a publication called the Denver Guardian because, well, it looks like a news site, and Denver, everybody kn…”
Opinion
Nupedia's rigid academic review process failed because it was simply not fun
“And that was really the moment when I said, okay, look, this isn't going to work. Like, this isn't fun. We really have to make this a lot easier and a lot more open.”
Insight
Organizations inevitably alter their priorities to chase revenue and financial incentives
“If you think about the DNA of any organization, it's very difficult to stop an organization from following the money.”
Insight
Jimmy Wales believes Wikipedia should provide context rather than definitive answers
“Wikipedia is the place to go to get the questions, not the answers. It's the way to get yourself oriented in a context, and I actually always say, go on the talk page of any article and see what are the Wikipedians struggling with”
Insight
Online volunteer communities inherently scale to self-police and manage moderation
“I began to understand, like, communities do inherently scale”
Insight
Wikipedia talk pages focus on improving article quality, not debating topics
“The ethos of the community is to say, look, no personal attacks. We're here to discuss the content. If you go on the discussion page for a controversial topic, you're not there to just debate that topic. You can do that lots of places on the internet. What you…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wikipedia's editorial community never considers financial donors' opinions during policy debates
“When the community gets together to debate something about what they want to have Wikipedia say or what a policy should be, there's never a question of, well, what will the funders think?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jimmy Wales predicts Wikipedia will be remembered in 500 years, not him
“So, at least in that regard, I do think that no one will remember me in 500 years, but they'll definitely remember Wikipedia.”
Disclosure
Wales: Wikipedia got a separate domain to avoid offending academics
“And I made the decision to put it up at the domain name wikipedia.com rather than keep it on Newpedia, because we weren't really sure, like, we had a lot of academics and a lot of very serious people on the mailing list, and this seemed a bit of a crazy idea, …”
Assertion Contradicted
Jimmy Wales: The first words on Wikipedia were 'hello world'
“I know the first words in Wikipedia. They were hello world, and I know because I typed them.”
Assertion Supported
Wales: Siegenthaler scandal led to Wikipedia's living persons policy
“This is when we came up with the biography of living persons policy, and really started to say, look, if it's a biography of a person, then anything negative in the article really needs to have a good quality source, because that's just not acceptable to have …”
Assertion Partly supported
Wales: Wikipedia relies on 3,000 to 5,000 core contributors
“It's something around 75,000 People every month who make at least five edits. It's probably three to 5000 is the core community of people who are making a hundred or more edits.”
Assertion Supported
Wales: Wikipedia brought in around $85M in annual revenue
“Yeah, our revenue, I should know the number exactly off the top of my head, but I don't but I think last year was around eighty-five million dollars.”
Disclosure
Wikipedia got its own domain so Nupedia academics wouldn't be offended
“And I made the decision to put it up at the domain name wikipedia.com rather than keep it on Newpedia, because we weren't really sure, like, we had a lot of academics and a lot of very serious people on the mailing list, and this seemed a bit of a crazy idea, …”
Assertion Supported
Wikipedia's first fundraising campaign raised nearly $30,000 in just two weeks
“And I remember very clearly that I had hoped to raise about 20,000 dollars in a month's time, but in about two weeks' time we had raised nearly 30,000.”
Jimmy Wales