Exclusive: Jimmy Wales on what's next for Wikipedia

Why Wikipedia needs geeks and why a life unplugged is unthinkable

In an exclusive interview, Wikipedia founder and silicon.com Agenda Setter Jimmy Wales talks to Natasha Lomas about what's next for Wikipedia and why the site needs geeks of all kinds.

If you've ever written something about Jimmy Wales and posted it online, chances are he's read it. He mentions a Twitter post I made, prior to our interview, asking whether people think he's a hero or villain.

With my tweet I'd been hoping to get a feel for opinion on the Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia founder. Which is he then, I ask? Hero or villain?

"Oh I would say both," he replies with a smile. "Depends on who you are."

The Wikipedia vision is one of "a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge". Launched in 2001, the online encyclopaedia Wales founded now counts some 13 million articles all written and edited collaboratively by volunteers.

But for all the knowledge it holds, Wikipedia can't answer my hero-or-villain question: the site prides itself on its unbiased content.

Articles are written in "a fairly neutral style", says Wales: "We really tend to use less inflammatory words - try to stick to basic facts and so on. And that's come about over time."

"You have people come together [on Wikipedia] with different viewpoints but in general they tend to be trying to work in good faith to collaborate and compromise with other people," he adds.

Such willing collaborators are drawn to the site, according to Wales, "because the combative types just find it frustrating. They would rather blog where no one edits what they write".

Combative types or no combative types, the site is no stranger to spats over some of its more contentious subjects.

"Sometimes what happens in certain controversial articles is the style of the article goes downhill, even as the quality of the content is improving," Wales admits.

For instance, he describes how strength of opinion for and against the actress Jane Fonda resulted in "a bizarre laundry list of facts" appearing in her entry - a paragraph that both the pro and anti-Fonda camps could agree on but which no reader could love.

"Somehow in this process the idea of a properly written style, with proper emphasis to due parts of her life, got lost."

However, such episodes are rare, according to Wales: "One of the things that's important to know about Wikipedia is that the entries that are edited by hundreds of people are really anomalies."

"There's a vast majority of Wikipedia where the entry was started by one person, really heavily edited by one more, and two or three more have added some comments or critiques and changed some spelling or something, so that it does tend to be small group collaboration," he tells silicon.com.

This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site's biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia's pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous - or "a certain type of person", in Wales' words.

"Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy," he says. "What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male - tragically 85 per cent male." In the days before Wikipedia, they were probably spending a lot of time watching Star Trek or...

Continued on page two...

...talking to each other on message boards, Wales decides. "Talking to each other but not building something."

The hope for Wikipedia is a broader pool of contributors with geeks of all stripes - not just tech - involved.

"We know there are geeks who aren't computer geeks," he adds. "We know there are people who are really knowledgeable about poetry, who might not really feel comfortable editing a template or figuring out our table syntax... but who have a tonne of knowledge that they would be happy to share with people, and they would love to meet other people from their community who are interested in discussing and putting up some knowledge and we sometimes aren't addressing their needs very well so that's one of the things we're focused on."

To this end, there will be a small grant of almost $900,000 from the US-based Stanton Foundation to improve Wikipedia's writing and editing processes for first time users to help boost usability and accessibility.

Accessibility improvements aside, Wales doesn't foresee a lot of change to the site. Instead, expect incremental improvements: a Wikipedia that's "a little cleaner, a little smoother, a little easier to use".

It's clear that Wales continues to believe in the collective power of the wiki - both as a not-for-profit mission to provide universal access to information but also as a commercial opportunity.

Wikia Inc, founded in 2004 by Wales and web entrepreneur Angela Beesley, is a wiki hosting service that doubles as a platform to sell advertising.

The five-year-old company has just turned a profit for the first time - "just barely", he adds.

Another attempt by Wales to commercially capitalise on collaboration was not so successful. Wikia Search, a user-generated approach to search that he hoped would challenge Google's dominance launched in 2008 but was shuttered the following year - with Wales blaming the tough economic climate and vowing: "I'll return to this again when the economy is good."

But isn't there a contradiction in trying to make money from content created by unpaid people giving up their free time just for the love of the thing?

Continued on page three...

"No I don't think so," Wales tells silicon.com. "I think that it's fine, I think you have to be cognisant of potential conflicts of interest of course… [At Wikia] the kind of concerns we have about conflict of interest aren't about the sort of advertising business model, they're about who's participating, things like that."

However he is hyperaware that maintaining user trust is vital when mixing profit and free. "I think that kind of firewall between editorial and advertising is super important. And so with free content that's one of the things we do have.

"Whatever problems you might find with [a Wikia-hosted] wiki, you would never think 'oh well I see there's an ad for this here so obviously that's why it says this'. No, actually - because you know it's open, the community edits it. It's transparent, you can click and see who wrote what."

But there's another side to all this free stuff that makes Wales a bit of an anti-hero for some: the way in which free content is undermining paid work. So what is his prognosis for traditional media jobs? Are these jobs going to be viable as paid employment for much longer?

"I'm optimistic about some - and pessimistic about others.

"What I would say is, everybody tells jokes but we still have professional comedians and the fact that everybody can write doesn't mean that everyone's a writer - and will get paid for it.

"At the same time I do think there's certain kinds of work that probably is not going to end up being paid for very much longer. Certainly not as well paid as it once was."

Wales is talking to silicon.com in London, where he's flown in to give a keynote at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition.

He dedicates a big part of it to Wikipedia - which he dubs "the great experiment" - talking delegates through various cultural differences between Wikipedia users around the world, including the site's relative popularity in Iran; Japanese users' big love of reading about pop culture; and the French's miniscule interest in sex. Miniscule because they're actually getting some, he jokes.

He also talks about the serious stuff. Growing Wikipedia in the developing world is a particular focus and therefore so is enabling mobile access to its content - a recognition that as the next billion people come online the great majority will get internet access via a mobile phone.

So millions of new users are joining the internet every month. But what would Jimmy Wales, the man who monitors every word written about him on the web, be doing if there was no internet? He laughs and says: "Can I cry now? Can that be my answer?"

For Wales, a life unplugged from the network is clearly unthinkable.