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Wikipedia
and Beyond
Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision
Katherine Mangu-Ward
| June 2007 Print Edition
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, lives in a house fit for a grandmother. The
progenitor and public face of one of the 10 most popular websites in the
world beds down in a one-story bungalow on a cul-de-sac near
St. Petersburg,
Florida.
The neighborhood, with its scrubby vegetation and
plastic lawn furniture, screams "Bingo Night." Inside the house, the
décor is minimal, and the stucco and cool tile floors make the place echo. A
few potted plants bravely attempt domesticity. Out front sits a cherry red
Hyundai.
I arrive at Wales' house on a gray, humid day in
December. It's 11
a.m., and after wrapping up some emails on
his white Mac iBook, Wales proposes lunch. We hit the mean streets of
Gulf Coast
Florida in
the Hyundai, in search of "this really great Indian place that's part of
a motel," and wind up cruising for hours-stopping at Starbucks, hitting the
mall, and generally duplicating the average day of millions of suburban
teenagers. Wal-Marts and
Olive
Gardens
slip past as Wales, often taciturn and abrupt in public statements, lets loose a flood of words about his past, his politics,
the future of the Internet, and why he's optimistic about pretty much
everything.
Despite his modest digs, Wales is an Internet rock star. He was included on Time's list of
the 100 most influential people of 2006. Pages from Wikipedia
dominate Google search results, making the operation, which dubs itself
"the free encyclopedia that anyone can
edit," a primary source of information for millions of people. (Do a
Google search for "monkeys," "Azerbaijan," "mass spectrometry," or "Jesus,"
and the first hit will be from Wikipedia.) Although
he insists he isn't a "rich guy" and doesn't have "rich guy
hobbies," when pressed Wales admits to hobnobbing with other geek elites, such as Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos, and hanging out on Virgin CEO
Richard Branson's private island. (The only available estimate of Wales' net worth comes from a now-removed section of his own Wikipedia entry, pinning his fortune at less than $1
million.) Scruffy in a gray mock turtleneck and a
closely cropped beard, the 40-year-old Wales plays it low key. But he is well aware that he is a strangely
powerful man: He has
utterly changed the way people extract information from the chaos of the
World Wide Web, and he
is the master of a huge, robust online community of writers, editors, and
users. Asked about the secret to Wikipedia's
success, Wales says simply, "We make the Internet not suck."
On other occasions, Wales has offered a more erudite account of the site's origins and
purpose. In 1945, in his
famous essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," the libertarian
economist F.A. Hayek argued that
market mechanisms serve "to share and synchronize local and personal
knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse, complicated ends
through a principle of spontaneous self-organization." (These are
the words not of the Nobel Prize winner himself but of Wikipedia's
entry on him.) "Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own
thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia
project," Wales wrote on the blog of the Internet
law guru Lawrence Lessig. "One can't understand my ideas
about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek."
Long before socialism crumbled, Hayek saw the perils of centralization. When information is dispersed
(as it always is), decisions are best left to those with the most local
knowledge. This insight, which undergirds
contemporary libertarianism, earned Hayek plaudits from fellow libertarian
economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman as the "most important
social thinker of the 20th century." The question: Will traditional
reference works like Encyclopedia Britannica, that great centralizer of
knowledge, fall before Wikipedia the way the Soviet Union
fell before the West?
When Wales founded the site in 2001, his plan was simple yet seemingly
insane: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is
given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're
doing." In case that plan didn't sound nutty enough on its own, he went
on to let every Tom, Dick, and Friedrich write and edit articles for that
mystical encyclopedia. "Now it's obvious that
it works," says Wales, "but then most people couldn't get it." And not
everyone gets it yet. Wales has his share of enemies, detractors, and doubters. But he
also has a growing fan club. Wikipedia, which is
run by Wales' nonprofit Wikimedia
Foundation, is now almost fully supported by small donations (in addition to
a few grants and gifts of servers and hosting), and many of its savviest
users consider it the search of first resort, bypassing Google entirely.
Wikipedia was born as an experiment in aggregating information. But the
reason it works isn't that the world was clamoring
for a new kind of encyclopedia. It took off because of the
robust, self-policing community it created. Despite its critics, it is
transforming our everyday lives; as with Amazon, Google, and eBay, it is
almost impossible to remember how much more circumscribed our world was
before it existed.
Hayek's arguments inspired Wales to take on traditional encyclopedias,
and now they're inspiring Wales' next big project: Wikia, a
for-profit venture that hopes to expand the idea beyond encyclopedias
into all kinds of Internet-based communities and collaborative projects. If Wikia
succeeds, it will open up this spontaneously ordered, self-governing world to
millions more people. Encyclopedias aren't the only
places to gather knowledge, and by making tools available to create other
kinds of collaborative communities, Wales is fleshing out and bringing to life Hayek's insights about
the power of decentralized knowledge gathering, the surprising strength of
communities bound only by reputation, and the fluidity of self-governance.
Jimbo
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1966, the son of a grocery store manager. He was educated
at a tiny private school run by his mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma. His
education, which he has described as "a one-room schoolhouse or Abe
Lincoln type of thing," was fairly unstructured: He "spent many,
many hours just pouring over the World Book Encyclopedia."
Wales received his B.A. in finance from
Auburn
University, a hotbed of free market economists, and got his master's
degree in finance from the University of Alabama. He did coursework and taught at
Indiana
University, but he failed to complete a Ph.D. dissertation-largely, he
says, because he "got bored."
Wales moved to Chicago and became a futures and options trader. After six years of
betting on interest rates and currency fluctuations, he made enough money to
pay the mortgage for the rest of his life. In 1998 he moved to
San Diego
and started a Web portal, Bomis, which featured,
among other things, a "guy-oriented search engine" and pictures of
scantily clad women. The en déshabillé
ladies have since caused trouble for Wales, who regularly fields questions about his former life as a
"porn king." In a typically blunt move, Wales often responds to criticism of his Bomis
days by sending reporters links to Yahoo's midget porn category page. If he
was a porn king, he suggests, so is the head of the biggest Web portal in the
world.
Bomis didn't make it big-it was no Yahoo-but in March 2000 the site
hosted Nupedia, Wales' first attempt to build a free online encyclopedia.
Wales hired Larry Sanger, at the time a doctoral candidate in
philosophy at Ohio State, to edit encyclopedia articles submitted
voluntarily by scholars, and to manage a multistage peer review process.
After a slow start, Wales and Sanger decided to try something more radical. In 2001
they bracketed the Nupedia project and started a
new venture built on the same foundations. The twist: It would be an
open-source encyclopedia. Any user could exercise
editorial control, and no one person or group would have ultimate authority.
Sanger resigned from the project in 2002 and
since then has been in an ongoing low-grade war with Wales over who founded Wikipedia.
Everyone agrees that Sanger came up with the name while Wales wrote the checks and provided the underlying open-source
philosophy. But who thought of powering the site with a wiki?
Wikis are simple software that allow
anyone to create or edit a webpage. The first wikis
were developed by Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb, a collaborative software guide, in 1995.
("Wiki wiki"
means "quick" in Hawaiian.) Gradually adopted by a variety of
companies to facilitate internal collaboration (IBM and Google, for instance,
use wikis for project management and document
version control), wikis were spreading under the
radar until Wikipedia started using the software.
Wales characterizes the dispute with Sanger as a fight over the
"project's radically open nature" and the question of "whether
there was a role for an editor in chief" in the new project. Sanger says
he wanted to implement the "common-sense" rules that "experts
and specialists should be given some particular respect when writing in their
areas of expertise." (Sanger has since launched a competitor to Wikipedia called Citizendium,
with stricter rules about editors' credentials.) They also differed over
whether advertising should be permitted on the site. Not only does Wikipedia allow anyone to write or edit any article, but
the site contains no ads. Yet it allows others to use its content to make
money: The site Answers.com, for example, is composed almost entirely of Wikipedia content reposted with ads.
When Nupedia
finally shut down for good in 2003, only 24 articles had completed its
onerous scholarly review process. In contrast, Wikipedia
was flourishing, with 20,000 articles by the end of its first year. It now
has 6 million articles, 1.7 million of which are in English. It has become a
verb ("What exactly is a quark?" "I don't know. Did you Wikipedia it?"), a sure sign of Internet success.
The Troublemaker
An obvious question troubled, and continues
to trouble, many: How could an "encyclopedia
that anyone can edit" possibly be reliable? Can truth be reached by a
consensus of amateurs? Can a community of volunteers aggregate and assimilate
knowledge the way a market assimilates price information? Can it do so with
consistent accuracy? If markets fail sometimes, shouldn't the same be true of
market-based systems?
Wikipedia does fail sometimes. The most famous controversy over its
accuracy boiled over when John Seigenthaler Sr., a
former assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wrote about his own Wikipedia entry in a November 2005 USA Today op-ed. The entry on Seigenthaler included a claim that he had been involved
in both Kennedy assassinations. "We live in a universe of new
media," wrote Seigenthaler, "with
phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research-but
populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."
The false claim had been added to the entry
as a prank in May 2005. When Seigenthaler contacted
Wikipedia about the error in October, Wales personally took the unusual step of removing the false
allegations from the editing history on the page, wiping out the publicly
accessible records of the error. After the USA
Today story ran, dozens of the site's contributors (who call
themselves "Wikipedians") visited the page, vastly improving the short blurb that had been put
in place after the prank entry was removed. As in a market, when a failure
was detected, people rushed in to take advantage of the gap and, in doing so,
made things better than they were before. Print outlets couldn't hope to
compete with Wikipedians' speed in correcting,
expanding, and footnoting the new Seigenthaler
entry. At best, a traditional encyclopedia would
have pasted a correction into a little-consulted annual, mailed out to some
users many months after the fact. And even then, it would have been little
more than a correction blurb, not a dramatic rethinking and rewriting of the
whole entry.
But well-intentioned Wikipedians
weren't the only ones attracted to Seigenthaler's Wikipedia entry. Since the article appeared, Seigenthaler says, he has been a constant target for
vandals-people whose only goal is to deface an entry. He has been struck by
the "vulgarity and meanspiritedness of the
attacks," which included replacing his picture with photos of Hitler, Himmler, and "an unattractive cross dresser in a big
red wig and a short skirt," Seigenthaler
tells me. "I don't care what the hell they put up. When you're 80 years
old, there's not much they can say that hasn't been said before. But my,
they've been creative over the last months."
Seigenthaler's primary concern these days is about the history page that
accompanies each Wikipedia article. Even though
various allegations against Seigenthaler have been
removed promptly from the main encyclopedia entry,
a record of each change and reversion is stored on the site. Many of the
comments, says Seigenthaler, are things he would
not want his 9-year-old grandson to see.
Seigenthaler says he never intended to sue (surprisingly, the site has
never been sued), but he worries that Wales will eventually find himself in
legal trouble unless he takes more action to control what appears on the
site: "I said to Jimmy Wales, ‘You're going to offend enough members of
Congress that you're going to get more regulation.' I don't want more
regulation of the media, but once the Congress starts regulating they never
stop." Coverage of the scandal was largely anti-Wikipedia,
focusing on the system's lack of ethical editorial oversight. Sample
headline: "There's No Wikipedia Entry for
‘Moral Responsibility.' "
Wikipedia's flexibility allows anyone who stumbles on an error to correct
it quickly. But that's not enough for some detractors. "There is little
evidence to suggest that simply having a lot of people freely editing encyclopedia articles produces more balanced
coverage," the editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica said last year in an online
debate hosted by The Wall Street Journal.
"On the contrary, it opens the gates to propaganda and seesaw fights
between writers." Another Britannica
editor dissed Wikipedia
by comparing it to a toilet seat (you don't know who used it last). A host of
academics charge Wikipedia with having too casual a
relationship with authority and objectivity. Michael Gorman, former president
of the American Library Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006, "The problem with an
online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you
have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or
someone with an ax to grind." Last summer at Wikimania 2006, a gathering of Wikipedians
and various hangers-on at the Harvard
Law
School's
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, university professors expressed
concern that their students were treating Wikipedia
as an authoritative source. In January the history faculty at
Vermont's
Middlebury
College
voted to ban the use of Wikipedia in
bibliographies. Wales has issued statements telling kids to use Wikipedia
as a starting point, but not to include it in their bibliographies as a final
source. Good Wikipedia articles have links to
authoritative sources, he explains; students should take advantage of them.
Referring to the Seigenthaler
controversy during his opening remarks at Wikimania
2006, Wales got one of the biggest laughs of the weekend when he said:
"Apparently there was an error in Wikipedia.
Who knew?" Wales and the hundreds of Wikipedians
could afford a giggle or two because the entry had long since been corrected.
This wasn't a traumatic incident to Wikipedians
because they admit error hundreds of times a day. There is no pretense of infallibility at Wikipedia,
an attitude that sets it apart from traditional reference works, or even The New York Times; when an error is
found it doesn't undermine the project. Readers who know better than the
people who made the error just fix it and move on.
Wikipedia's other major scandal hasn't been quite as easy for Wales to laugh off, because he was the culprit. In 2005 he was
caught with his hand on the edit button, taking advantage of Wikipedia's open editing policy to remove Larry Sanger
from the encyclopedia's official history of itself.
There has been an ongoing controversy about Wales' attempts to edit his own Wikipedia
entry, which is permitted but considered extremely bad form. After a round of
negative publicity when the edits were discovered, Wales stopped editing his own profile. But in the site's discussion
pages, using the handle "Jimbo Wales," he
can be found trying to persuade others to make changes on this and other
topics. If he wanted to, Wales could make these and other changes by fiat, then lock out
other editors. But he doesn't. If the individuals that people Wales' experiment in free association choose to ignore his pleas,
as they occasionally do, he takes a deep breath and lets it happen.
Wales isn't the only one who has tried to use Wikipedia
to rewrite history. In January 2006, all edits originating with the House of
Representatives were briefly blocked after staffers for Rep. Martin Meehan
(D-Mass.) were caught systematically replacing unflattering facts in his
entry with campaign material; among other things, they removed a reference to
his broken promise not to serve more than four terms. In the fall of 2006,
officials from the National Institute on Drug Abuse dramatically edited their
own entry to remove criticism of the agency. In both cases, the editors got
more than they bargained for: Not only was the original material quickly
restored, but a section describing the editing scandal was tacked on to each
entry.
Then there are edits that are less
ideological but still troublesome. Wales has adopted Hayek's view that change is handled more smoothly
by an interlocking network of diverse individuals than by a central planning
authority. One test of the rapid response to change in Wikipedia
is how the site deals with vandalism. Fairly often, says Wales, someone comes along and replaces an entry on, say, George W.
Bush with a "giant picture of a penis." Such vandalism tends to be
corrected in less than five minutes, and a 2002 study by IBM found that even
subtler vandalism rarely lasts more than a few hours. This, Wales argues, is only possible because responsibility
for the content of Wikipedia is so widely
distributed. Even hundreds of professional editors would struggle to keep six
million articles clean day in and day out, but Wikipedia
manages it fairly easily by relying on its thousands of volunteer
contributors.
The delicate compromise wording of the entry
about abortion is an example of how collaborative editing can succeed. One
passage reads: "Most often those in favor of
legal prohibition of abortion describe themselves as pro-life while those
against legal restrictions on abortion describe themselves as
pro-choice." Imagine the fighting that went into producing these simple
words. But the article, as it stands, is not disputed. Discussants have found
a middle ground. "It's fabulous," says Wales, citing another example, "that our article about Taiwan was written by Mainlanders and Taiwanese who don't
agree." That said, other entries-such as the page on the Iraq War-host ongoing battles that have not reached equilibrium.
Skeptics of Wikipedia's model emphasize that
the writers have no authority; there is no way to verify credentials on the
site. But Wikipedia seems to be doing OK without
letters after its name. In 2005 the journal Nature compared the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia with that of Encyclopedia Britannica. Articles were sent to
panels of experts in the appropriate field for review. Reviewers found an
average of four errors in Wikipedia entries, only
slightly higher than Britannica's
average of three errors per entry.
The Federalist
One way to understand what makes Wikipedia unique
is its reaction to the threat of blackout by the Chinese government. When
government censors in China blocked the Chinese-language Wikipedia
page and demanded that the content be heavily censored before it was
unblocked, the site's Chinese contributors chose to lie low and wait. Wales agreed to let them handle it. Eventually the site was
unblocked, although its status is always precarious.
Wikipedia's decision not to censor its content selectively in order to
meet the demands of the Chinese government was easy, since it would be almost
impossible to do anyway. The "encyclopedia
that anyone can edit" would have to employ a full-time staff just to
remove objectionable content, which could be added back moments later by
anyone, anywhere. The diffuse responsibility for the content of Wikipedia protects it from censorship.
By leaving such a big decision to the community
of Chinese Wikipedia users, Wales made good on his boast that he's "a big supporter of
federalism," not just in politics but in the governance of Wikipedia. Wales tries to let communities of users make their own decisions in
every possible case. "It's not healthy for us if there are certain
decisions that are simply removed from the democratic realm and are just ‘the
Supreme Court says so,' " he argues. "I would even say this about abortion, although I'm
a big pro-choice guy. It's not clear to me that it's such a great thing to
have removed it completely from politics."
Politically, Wales cops to various libertarian positions but prefers to call his
views "center-right." By that he means that he sees himself as part
of a silent majority of socially liberal, fiscally conservative people who
value liberty-"people who vote Republican but who worry about
right-wingers." The Libertarian Party, he says, is full of
"lunatics." But even as he outlines all the reasons why he prefers
to stay close to the American political mainstream, Wales delicately parses the various libertarian positions on
intellectual property and other points of dispute without breaking a sweat.
He swears to have actually read Ludwig von Mises's
10-pound tome Human Action (which he ultimately found "bombastic and
wrong in many ways"). And of course, he credits Hayek with the central
insight that made Wikipedia possible.
Wales' political philosophy isn't confined to books. Pulling onto
yet another seemingly identical Florida
highway during our day-long road trip, Wales blows past the Knight
Shooting
Sports
Indoor
Range,
lamenting that he hasn't made it to the range in a long time. "When I
lived in San Diego," he says, "the range was on my way home from
work." Wales used to be preoccupied with gun rights, or the lack thereof.
"In California," he says, "the gun laws irritated me so much that
I cared, but then I moved to Florida and I stopped caring because everything is fine here."
Wales, whose wife Christine teaches their 5-year-old daughter Kira at home, says he is disappointed by the
"factory nature" of American education: "There's something
significantly broken about the whole concept of school." A longtime opponent of mandatory public school attendance, Wales says that part of the allure of Florida,
where his Wikimedia Foundation is based, is its
relatively laissez-faire attitude toward homeschoolers.
This makes it easier for Wales and his wife to let Kira (a tiny
genius in her father's eyes) follow her own interests and travel with her
parents when Wales gives one of his many speeches abroad.
Kira has recently become interested in Ancient Egypt, and a few
books on the subject lie on the kitchen counter of their sparse house. When
she was younger, Kira was transfixed by digital
clocks, staring at one minute after minute, trying to guess which number
would be next. "She just needed time to do that," says Wales. "Once she figured it out, she stopped. Christine and I
were a little worried, but we let her do her thing, and it turned out
fine."
Likewise, Wales says he prefers the users of his encyclopedia
to make their own decisions about governance and follow their own peculiar
interests wherever possible; things usually turn out fine. "Simply
having rules does not change the things that people want to do," he
says. "You have to change incentives."
One of the most powerful forces on Wikipedia is reputation. Users rarely identify
themselves by their real names, but regular users maintain consistent
identities. When a particularly obnoxious edit or egregious error is found,
it's easy to check all of the other changes made by the same user; you just
click on his name. Users who catch others at misdeeds are praised, and
frequent abusers are abused. Because it's so easy to get caught in one stupid
mistake or prank, every user has an incentive to do the best he can with each
entry. The evolution of a praise/shame economy within Wikipedia
has been far more effective at keeping most users in line than the addition
of formal rules to deal with specific conflicts.
"It's always better not to have a
rule," Wales says. "But sometimes you have to say, ‘Don't be a dick.' " On
the English Wikipedia, there is a rule that you
can't undo someone else's changes more than three times. It is formalized, a
part of the system. But Wikipedias in other
languages have a more casual approach to the same problem. Wales himself sometimes talks to troublemakers. "I try to talk
jerks into adopting a three-revert rule as a principle for themselves,"
he says.
Wikipedias in different languages have developed their own policies
about practically everything. Only one point is "not negotiable":
the maintenance of a "neutral point of view" in Wikipedia
encyclopedia entries. Wikipedia
has been uniquely successful in maintaining the neutrality ethos, says Wales, because "text is so flexible and fluid that you can
find amongst reasonable people with different perspectives something that is
functional." ("Most people assume the fights are going to be the
left vs. the right," Wales has said, "but it always is the reasonable versus the
jerks.")
The jerks range from the Chinese government
to the giant penis guy. But mostly they're regular contributors who get upset
about some hobbyhorse and have to be talked down or even shamed by their
communities.
Although he professes to hate phrases like
"swarm intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds," Wales' phenomenal success springs largely from his willingness to
trust large aggregations of human beings to produce good outcomes though
decentralized, market-like mechanisms. He is suspicious of a priori planning
and centralization, and he places a high value on freedom and independence
for individuals. He is also suspicious of mob rule. Most Wikipedia
entries, Wales notes, are actually written by two or three people, or
reflect decisions made by small groups in the discussion forums on the site. Wales calls himself an "anti-credentialist"
but adds that doesn't mean he's anti-elitist. He likes elites, he says; they
just have to duke it out with the rest of us on Wikipedia
and his other projects.
"Jimmy Wales is a very open
person," says his friend Irene McGee, the host of the radio show No One's Listening and a former Real World cast member. "He has
very genuine intentions and faith in people. He'll come to San Francisco
and come to little Meetups that don't have anything
to do with anything, just to find out what's going on. He'll go to meet the
kid in this town who writes articles and then meet with people who run
countries. He can meet somebody really fancy and he could meet somebody who
nobody would recognize and tell the story as if it's the same."
The Individualist
Communitarian
Rock star status can be fleeting, of course. Whether Jimmy Wales will still
be meeting fancy people who run countries five years from now may depend on
the success of his new venture, Wikia. Wikipedia is here to stay, but the public has an annoying
habit of demanding that its heroes achieve ever more heroic feats. Wikia is an attempt to take the open-source,
community-based model to profitability and broader public acceptance.
Consider, for instance, the astonishing
growth and readership at the Wikia site devoted to
Muppets. At a little over one year old, the Muppet Wiki
has 13,700 articles. Every single one is about Muppets. Interested in an in-depth
look at the use of gorilla suits in the Muppet movies? No problem. Just type
in "gorilla suits" and enjoy a well-illustrated article that
documents, among other things, the names of actors who have worn an ape
outfit for Jim Henson. There is a timeline of all things Muppet-related. An
entry on China details Big Bird's reception in the People's Republic. The
site is astonishingly comprehensive and, perhaps more impressive,
comprehensible to a Muppet novice.
This ever-expanding encyclopedia
of Muppetry is just a tiny part of Wikia. It is an arguably trivial but hugely telling
example of the power of open publishing systems to enable professionals and
amateurs to work together to aggregate vast amounts of data and conversation
on topics and areas ranging from the serious to the sublime. Founded in
November 2004, Wikia communities use the same
editing and writing structure as Wikipedia. The
site provides free bandwidth, storage, blogging
software, and other tools to anyone who wants to start an online community or
collaborative project. If you don't care for Kermit the Frog, you can try the
Your Subculture Soundtrack, an "interconnecting database of the music
scene" with more than 5,600 articles. Many of them are just enormous
lists of discographies, lyrics, or guitar tabs. The topics of other Wikis range from Star
Wars to polyamory to transhumanism. Wikia also
includes collaborative online projects such as the Search Wiki,
an effort to create an open-source competitor to Google where a Wikipedia-style universe of users rates websites and
sorts the search results instead of relying solely on an algorithm.
In December, Wikia
announced that its first corporate partner, Amazon, had committed $10 million
to further development of the project. Amazon's money added to the $4 million
kicked in by angel investors earlier in the year. Amazon and Wikia have not integrated their services, but Wales has not ruled out the possibility of cooperation at a later
date, spurring not entirely tongue-in-cheek rumors
of a joint Wikipedia-Amazon takeover of the Web.
The site plans to make money by showing a few well-targeted, well-placed ads
to massive numbers of community members and users.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
(a supporter of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit
that publishes this magazine) has spoken enviously of Wikipedia's
collaborative model, expressed his regret that Amazon's user reviews aren't
more like wikis, and credited Wikipedia
with having "cracked
the code for user-generated content." Bezos
"really drove this deal personally," Wales says, adding that he was in the enviable position of vetting
potential investors.
Wales is reluctant to get into more precise detail about what
exactly Wikia will do, or what the communities or
collaborative projects will produce, since that will be up to the users. This
reticence turns out to be, in part, philosophical. Wikia
is radically devoted to the idea that if you provide free, flexible tools,
people will build interesting things. It's the same concept that drives Wikipedia, but expanded to nonencyclopedic
functions. Like the rest of the cohort sometimes dubbed "Web
2.0"-YouTube, MySpace, Blogger,
and other services that emphasize collaboration and user-generated
content-Wales is relying on users to make his sites interesting. It isn't
always easy to explain this to investors. "Before Wikipedia,
the idea of an encyclopedia on a wiki seemed completely insane," says Wales. "It's obvious that it works now, but at the time no one
was sure. Now we're going through the same moment with Wikia."
Perhaps because of the indeterminate nature
of the final product, Wales has opted for the '90s approach of "build the site now,
make money later." Industry analyst Peter Cohan
thinks Wikia isn't likely to fall into the same
trap as the busted Internet companies of the dot-com era. "Wikia is getting two and a half million page views a
day," he says, "and it's growing steadily. There are people who are
willing to pay for those eyeballs." (It has been growing at about the
same rate as Wikipedia did at this stage of its
development.) Still, says Cohan, there will be some
hurdles for Wales, who is known only for his nonprofit
work. "When you bring money into the picture it might change the
incentives for people to participate in this thing" he says. "When
people know that there is no money involved, then ego gets involved and it's
a matter of pride."
Wales is banking on strong communities to give Wikia
the staying power that flash-in-the-pan Internet sensations or more loosely
knit social networking sites lack. Wales is plugged into social networking sites (and has more than a
few online friends/fans), but he says he finds the exhibitionism and
technical precocity of MySpace somewhat creepy.
It might sound strange, but Wales' interest in community dovetails nicely with his interest in
individualism. No one is born into the Muppet Wiki
community. Everyone who is there chooses to be there, and everyone who
participates has a chance to shape its rules and content. People naturally
form communities with their own delicate etiquette and expectations, and they
jealously guard their own protocols. Each one is different, making Wikia communities fertile ground where thousands of
experimental social arrangements can be tried-some with millions of members
and some with just two or three. Like the "framework for utopia"
described in the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick's
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Wikia maximizes the
chance that people can work together to get exactly what they want, while
still being part of a meaningful community by maximizing freedom and
opportunities for voluntary cooperation.
Wikia boosters contend that many existing online communities would
benefit from the kind of curb appeal a wiki offers.
The firm hopes to co-opt, buy, or duplicate them. Wikia
CEO Gil Penchina, formerly of eBay, is a
frequent-flyer-miles enthusiast, for example. But most of the sites now
haunted by airfare obsessives deal in nitty-gritty
details and are useless to the outsider hoping to figure out the best way to
get a free ticket by gaming various frequent-flyer plans, or by finding fares
listed erroneously as $3.75 instead of $375. "This makes it hard to
monetize that content," says Wales. "People just come and look around and don't find what
they want and leave." Incorporating those same geeks into a wiki community could make their considerable knowledge
available to outsiders and make the page more welcoming to advertisers. If
lots of outsiders looking for a good price on a specific product can use the
site, advertisers will compete (and pay) to grab their attention.
For now, Wikia
makes money solely from Google ads running on its community pages. Wales says this is because they're "lazy" and because
Google ads are a good way to generate a little revenue while they "build
communities." Since its 2004 launch, Wikia has
spent exactly $5.74 on advertising-a small fee for Google analytics to track
stats on the site. "That makes our ad budget about 25 cents per
month," Wales grins. It's early yet to expect a big push to generate revenue,
but this charming laziness could be troublesome if it persists much longer.
Wikia now has 40 employees, including a handful of Polish
programmers-a huge staff compared
with the three people it takes to run Wikipedia.
With 500,000 articles on 2,000 topics produced by 60,000 registered users in
45 languages, the network of websites is growing fast. The biggest wikis are dedicated to Star Trek and Star Wars. Wales is partial to the wiki devoted to
the TV show Lost. He also admires the Campaign Wiki,
which among other projects has neutral voter guides for elections.
Even as Wikia
relies on Google ads for its only revenue at the moment, Wales recently has
started to talk publicly about building a search engine using open-source
tools, a project Wales casually calls "The Google Killer." Wales hopes the transparency and flexibility of an open-source
model will discourage the gaming of the system that plagues Google. A search
for "hotels in Tampa" on Google, a search I tried before my trip
into town to interview Wales, yields nothing useful, just a jumble of defunct
ratings sites and some ads that aren't tailored to my needs. By using a
community of volunteers who will rerank results and
tweak algorithms, Wales hopes to get useful results in categories that are
particularly subject to gaming.
The Pathological Optimist
Later that December afternoon, after an excellent Indian lunch in a
Florida
strip mall, Wales proposes that we hop back into the Hyundai for a stop at the
"fancy mall" in the Tampa area. En route to the Apple store, he surveys the bright
lights and luxury goods for sale and announces that he is generally pretty
pleased with how things are going in the world. In fact, he calls himself a
"pathological optimist." On issue after issue, he pronounces some
version of "things aren't that bad" or "things are getting
better": People are more connected than they used to be (thanks, in
part, to Internet communities), the wide availability of ethnic food has made
the American diet more interesting, bookstore mega-chains are increasing the
diversity of media available in America, entertainment is increasing in
quality, gun rights are expanding, and so on. Tempted to get involved with
free speech activists, Wales, a self-declared "First Amendment extremist," says
he drew back because real repression doesn't seem likely. "There's a lot
of hysteria around this," he says-concerns about censorship that aren't
supported by the facts.
Wales is optimistic about the Internet too. "There's a certain
kind of dire anti-market person," he says, "who assumes that no
matter what happens, it's all driving toward one monopoly-the ominous view
that all of these companies are going to consolidate into the Matrix."
His own view is that radical decentralization will win out, to good effect:
"If everybody has a gigabit [broadband Internet connection] to their
home as their basic $40-a-month connection, anybody can write Wikipedia."
Wales' optimism isn't without perspective. After reading Tom Standage's book about the impact of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, he was
"struck by how much of the semi-utopian rhetoric that comes out of
people like me sounds just like what people like them said back then."
Among Wikipedians,
there is constant squabbling about how to characterize Wales' role in the project. He is often called a "benevolent
dictator," or a "God-King," or sometimes a "tyrant."
While the 200,000 mere mortals who have contributed articles and edits to the
site are circumscribed by rules and elaborate community-enforced norms, Wales has amorphous and wide-ranging powers to block users, delete
pages, and lock entries outside of the usual processes. But if Wales is a
god, he is like the gods of ancient times (though his is a flat, suburban
Olympus), periodically making his presence and preferences known through
interventions large and small, but primarily leaving the world he created to
chug along according to rules of its own devising.
After spending a day cruising
the greater Tampa Bay area, I find myself back at the Wales homestead, sitting with the family as they watch a video of Wales' daughter delivering a presentation on Germany for a first-grade enrichment class. Wales is learning German, in part because the German Wikipedia is the second largest after English, in part
because "I'm a geek." Daughter Kira
stands in front of a board, wearing a dirndl and reciting facts about Germany. Asked where she did her research, she cops to using Wikipedia for part of the project. Wales smiles sheepishly; the Wikipedia
revolution has penetrated even his own small bungalow.
People who don't "get" Wikipedia, or who get it and recoil in horror, tend to be
from an older generation literally and figuratively: the Seigenthalers
and Britannica editors of the
world. People who get it are younger and hipper: the Irene McGees and Jeff Bezoses. But
the people who really matter are the Kiras, who
will never remember a time without Wikipedia (or
perhaps Wikia), the people
for whom open-source, self-governed, spontaneously ordered online community
projects don't seem insane, scary, or even particularly remarkable. If Wales has his way-and if Wikipedia is any
indication, he will-such projects will just be another reason the Internet
doesn't suck.
Katherine Mangu-Ward
is an associate editor of Reason.
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