Jimmy Wales: The first words on Wikipedia were 'hello world'
Jimmy Wales · Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales (2018) · Jan 27, 2020 · at 15:14
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recalls typing the very first words on the platform at launch.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I know the first words in Wikipedia. They were hello world, and I know because I typed them.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jimmy Wales
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 …”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”