Do you ever use Internet or a computer?
No. No? Yeah.
You must know Wikipedia. Yeah? Wikipedia?
No. Wikipedia.
Wikipedia. Web site. Online encyclopedia.
No, sir. I'm not good. That's no problem.
Oh, this is good.
Yeah, it's basic... some stories and poems.
Stories and poems. Great.
You know the Web site Wikipedia?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I'm the founder of Wikipedia.
Okay. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi. Very nice to meet you.
I'm excited when someone knows Wikipedia. So that's good.
**
Have a seat, please. Please have a seat.
You know Wikipedia? You've seen it? Yeah?
No. I don't see. No? Okay. That's my Web site.
Look. Anyone can edit this Web site. This is Hindi, right?
Yes. What's it say?
See something wrong? No. That say,
"It is written 1,000 years old, Varanasi."
But I don't believe it. It is 5,000 years old.
What? This says 1,000? It is written 1,000 here.
Oh. But I can't believe.
So I want to show you. We can... It's really 5,000, yeah.
You can change it. This Web site you can change.
You can change it. So look. We can click here. What does it say?
Change. Yeah. Change, yeah.
So now it's fixed. Yeah.
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.
When you change the way...
you come to know things, you change your capability.
And what that means is that it's not just a shift in the accessibility of knowledge.
It's an autological shift in knowledge itself.
You have the 20th century... read-only labor,
read-only culture, read-only politics.
Read-only culture is culture that comes to you to be consumed only.
So you watch a television show or you listen to a CD.
Much of printed culture is like that.
A massive, powerful,
controlling, centralized, read-only society,
that was the 20th century.
But fortunately that century is over.
That century is past.
The 21st century is the revival of a different way...
to organize and produce within society.
Read-write culture invites you to consume and to add back.
And it's the Internet which has enabled...
the explosion of this new read-writing culture.
People can now participate in the creation of content,
and rather than just reading an encyclopedia, you can write one.
The new digital revolution that we're living through...
has changed the very notion of the organization of knowledge.
Wikipedia is an example...
of a collaborative worldwide effort...
that could have never been envisaged without the new technology.
It is the child of this century.
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia...
that's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world.
You thought you were going to be the audience.
No, you're... you're part of the performance.
Wikipedia uses a Web technology called a wiki.
Wiki... It's a term adapted from the Hawaiian word for "speed."
I said, "Well, I need to give this a good name."
I showed up in Hawaii the first time.
The clerk says, "Take the Wiki Wiki bus."
"Wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick."
And I said, "Oh, yeah. This'll be good."
A wiki is a Web site that can be altered in real time...
by anyone who has privileges to do so,
and in Wikipedia's case, that's all of us.
Everyone. All the people on the Internet.
Everybody, potentially, could be a Wikipedian.
You can start a page on almost anything you want.
However, according to Wikipedia's policies,
the article should be notable or worthy of notice.
You can create an account, establishing a user name for yourself...
or you can edit anonymously.
It all starts with the "edit" button.
Say you create a page on nuclear power.
You can add text, pictures, and, most importantly, your references.
For Wikipedia, because it's encyclopedia,
everything has to be factual.
No original research. You can't say "I think this."
You can't put that in Wikipedia. That's not an encyclopedia.
A Wikipedia article must cite its sources.
Over time, anyone can come and make changes to the article.
The editing sometimes means correcting something that's wrong.
But sometimes it means breaking something out into a new category or topic.
Wikipedia keeps an archive of all of its edits.
On the "history" tab, you can see all the previous edits made in the article.
Wikipedia attempts to be a neutral encyclopedia without bias,
however people often disagree on the presentation of the article.
The "discussion" tab lets you see what people are arguing about.
There's people who say nuclear power is terrible.
There's people who say, "No, it's wonderful. It's safe. It's nonpolluting."
One editor comes to the article to add something.
If someone disagrees with the new information, it can be changed.
If the original editor disagrees with the new change,
he or she can simply revert it.
If there are three such reverts happening in any 24 hours,
then it's an edit war.
We encourage people to communicate...
and discuss the issue and to reach some consensus.
It's not the mission of Wikipedia...
to tell the public whether nuclear power is good or bad.
It's the mission of that article...
to say that there are arguments on both sides...
and to let the reader decide.
An online search for information often ends up at the Web site Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia. - Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is now the ninth most popular Web site on the Internet.
Wikipedia is able to show up...
really early in Google searches...
because Jimbo Wales...
made an agreement with Google.
I have no idea whether it's a money deal or what,
but it's certainly mutually advantageous...
to both Google and Wikipedia for there to be a partnership.
We're the 12th most popular in India.
We're the sixth most popular in Germany,
the 12th most popular in Japan...
and the 12th most popular in Iran.
Out of a hundred people, eight people...
eventually will end up on Wikipedia on a daily basis.
Wikipedia is so big that everybody wants to be part of it.
It's, like, the de facto source of knowledge for the entire world now.
Although we have more than one and a half million articles in English,
this is actually less than one-third of the total work.
More people see Wikipedia each day than see CNN and the BBC combined.
He's created a Web site that's interesting.
It's loaded with information that's good, sound, solid.
But it's also loaded with information that's unreliable.
And, depending on when you go in there to Wikipedia and what you're looking for,
you can get burned badly.
Information is flowing onto the Web...
that is unedited, unmonitored...
and is not answerable to anyone.
That is a dangerous situation.
Wikipedia can, in a sense, control what people think.
They paint themselves as a democracy...
with a neutral point of view, and neither are true.
I actually do think Wikipedia is an amazing thing.
It is the first place I go when I'm looking for knowledge or when I want to create some.
Fabulous. Jimmy, thank you so much for stopping by.
There's no one in control.
It's intellectual and cultural anarchy.
Any user can change any entry,
and if enough other users agree with him, it becomes true.
Why wait for somebody else to write history...
when you can write it, or rewrite it, yourself.
If you're in a situation where you absolutely...
have to be spot-on correct, don't trust it.
Everybody's an editor on Wikipedia,
so nobody's an editor.
I don't trust Wikipedia.
Published encyclopedias are written by experts.
The problem, of course, with Wikipedia...
is that anyone can put their two cents in, and they do.
Readers make modifications.
You don't know whether those modifications...
are any more accurate than the original was.
An infinite number of anonymous editors.
You don't have the ability to make a judgment about the source.
I think most people will be surprised to find out...
that the people who run the site are known only by names like...
Durova and Slim Virgin.
You have no idea who wrote what for what purpose,
what the writer's qualifications,
state of knowledge may be.
Traditionally, anonymity in written materials...
has been associated with such things as ransom notes,
poison pen letters, graffiti,
and the anonymity was quite straightforwardly...
a way of avoiding responsibility for what's been written.
There is a First Amendment right to anonymity. No doubt about it.
The pamphleteers in the early days of this country, most of them were anonymous.
And if there's some reason to do that, I can understand it.
But nobody at Wikipedia knows who writes what.
The greatness of free speech is that everybody has the right to publish their own opinions,
stand behind them, without being penalized legally for having those opinions.
But the kind of free speech we have on Wikipedia,
in which anybody says anything and can't be held accountable for them...
Well, you don't need a First Amendment to protect that kind of free speech,
'cause nobody knows who these people are.
The way I like to explain this to people is,
there's... there's anonymity and then there's real names,
and in the middle somewhere is pseudonimity...
where you've got a pseudonym, but it's got a stable identity...
and that you're willing to stand behind it.
And so you create a user name and you start working under that one user name...
and you start generating a reputation.
That's very different from anonymity, which in anonymity...
it's really about sort of hit and run,
like, you know, every day you're a different person, right?
And every day you... you have a different name.
That's really hard, because then you don't build up a reputation.
You don't get this, kind of, history of trust over time.
Even if you can look at an archive...
and find out what they said about Susan Jacoby...
on May 2007, as opposed to May 2008, so what?
Who knows who's written it? Who knows if it's not an old lover who hates me?
With the entry. You don't know that.
Doesn't really matter who you are. Maybe you're a...
Maybe you're a gifted teenager, right?
Or maybe you're a... a respected professor of biology...
who happens to, embarrassingly, be a fan of Britney Spears...
and you want to write about pop culture or something.
You really don't want to do it under... under your real name.
Hey, that's great. And who your real name is... Why should that matter, right?
What really matters is what work you've done.
Finally tonight, a matter of trust on line.
Recent case of a Wikipedia contributor lying about his credentials...
is raising doubts about its accuracy.
Classic epitomization, I think,
of the kind of activist involved in Wikipedia.
Dropped out of three Kentucky colleges.
Not successful in academic life.
So what did he do? He reinvented himself on Wikipedia,
and he claimed that he had three advanced degrees in theology, of all things.
I don't know why he chose theology.
Having done that, he spent his time bullying other people...
perhaps real Ph.D.'s in theology...
about his expertise in theology.
S.J. edited some 16,000 entries,
at one point defending a book called Catholicism for Dummies,
saying, "I would hang my own Ph.D. on its credibility."
The biggest irony of the S.J. scandal...
is that S.J. was outed by mainstream media.
He was outed by Stacy Schiff in The New Yorke magazine.
And in an even worse context, Wales defended him at first.
It was only when it became a public scandal...
that Wales was actually forced to get rid of S.J.
Even to this day I defend him.
This is a young man who made a mistake.
And in the grand scheme of things, what he did is pretty minor.
Having a pseudonym and sort of flushing it out with some traits...
That's really no big deal. That's part of online life.
If Wales really wanted to... to establish Wikipedia...
as a serious intellectual enterprise,
he would reveal who these people are.
The fact that he doesn't tells me...
that there are many more S.J.'s in there than he would ever admit.
The truth of the matter is...
there's a huge number or people editing this encyclopedia...
who are completely anonymous.
There's much talk in the community...
of the so-called "ruling clique,"
um, the administrators with the most power.
Now officially there's no ruling clique, okay?
There is no inner circle. But in practice there is.
A very, very small number of people...
are doing a very large percentage of the work.
About 50% of all the edits were being written...
by these top one percent of editors.
You don't know who they are. You don't know if they have a conflict of interest.
And it's the eighth most popular site on the Web.
And for better or worse, this is where people get their information.
And this core group of people has the power.
The cabal, if you like, who we are supposed to trust...
simply because they are frequent contributors to Wikipedia...
I think their cover has to be blown.
We should know who they are. We should know what their take on life is.
I mean, are they as bright and intelligent, as wise...
as one would hope an editor of a major publication is.
We know who the editor of the New York Times is.
We know who the editor of the Guardian is.
We should know who the uber-editors of Wikipedia are too.
* I don't care what they say
* You and I have come too far now *
* I don't care what they do
* 'Cause everything I was told is done for *
* One by one, take it slow
* Make it last
* Let it go
* One by one... *
These kids between the ages of 13 and 29,
the children of the baby boom,
are the first generation to grow up digital.
And these kids are different. Rather than watching TV,
they've grown up interacting.
They process information differently, and in many ways...
they're driving this whole collaborative revolution.
I think, like a lot of people, I became aware of Wikipedia...
because you would search for something on Google,
and you would notice the Wikipedia link...
was right at the top of the page.
So even before I'd actually used Wikipedia, I'd heard of it.
The first article I read was called "Long Way Round,"
which is a documentary that Ewan McGregor made...
when he took a motorbike around the world...
from Europe through Asia, over to America and back around again.
And the article was maybe one or two paragraphs,
so I said, "Right. That's gonna change."
And then I spent a whole day editing "Long Way Round"...
and then from then just graduated to editing more about where I lived in Scotland.
It wasn't very well covered. Lots of bands I like,
lots of skateboarding issues weren't really well covered.
So I just started editing more and more and more.
It snowballed when I started getting more into the community...
and more into about how Wikipedia works.
You could say that I'm different in a lot of ways 'cause I'm not really techie,
but, you know, maybe there's a slightly more diverse base...
with the people who are really interested in Wikipedia than people think.
Yes.
Come on. Come on.
There's... In the left bar of Wikipedia in English...
they have other languages also.
Then I saw, "Oh, it has Indonesia. Nice.
I don't have to translate."
Then I click by Indonesia, and there's nothing in it.
So I'll translate from the English,
put it in Bahasa Indonesia...
The thing is, in here Internet is expensive,
and we don't have a lot of money.
Some of the content, I scan it, then I put it in text.
Then it's going to be in, so it has to be edited.
I edited, and I edited according to Wikipedian's rule.
It's a lot of work, but it works.
That's what's so cool about Wikipedia.
You know, you prove yourself if you've got the content, it doesn't matter...
who you are or whether you have the power or the recognition.
That's Romanian.
I think this is the first article I actually wrote myself.
It's about the Ryukyuan languages that are spoken in part of Japan.
I'm an amateur linguist.
I can really only communicate sufficiently in Japanese and Spanish,
and I know some Romanian, more than the other languages I know.
That's Navajo. It's been a while since I studied Arabic.
This is the Sicilian Wikipedia.
I have only written maybe five articles here...
because I don't really know Sicilian.
The work I did was requesting it and then arguing in favor of it...
when people didn't necessarily think it should be created.
When I was in fifth grade,
I, um, switched schools...
to a program for gifted kids,
and that was a lot better for me.
I definitely fit in better. People weren't taunting me because I was different anymore.
And when he was about five, he asked me to get him Chinese lessons.
And I really regret that. That really sucked, Mom.
I know. I really regret that.
But I thought, "Oh, come on. Who's gonna find group lessons for a five-year-old in Chinese."
She didn't even look. I didn't, 'cause I thought, "Who would ever have it?"
It's not like we live in L.A.
The Yiddish Wikipedia... near the beginning,
I was the only editor, pretty much.
I don't want to say that it wouldn't have taken off without me,
but I think it's much easier to see something...
that's already there with content and want to add on to it...
than to see something that says there's nothing here.
So that kind of jump-starts things if you just put a little bit of something there,
even if it's not completely correct, if you try your best.
This is the first time in human history...
when young people are an authority...
about something really important.
I was an authority about model trains when I was a kid,
and today young people are authorities...
on this big revolution that's changing every institution in society.
I want to thank everyone.
If you see people wandering around in staff shirts, hug them.
'Cause right...
Like, you're part of a very, very big family.
It's more than just an encyclopedia.
It's a whole way of life, kind of. It's a culture.
And it's just being part of something good.
For me, Wikipedia is just a passion.
And I'm quite convinced myself...
that I'm at least doing the right thing,
that I'm at least spending my energy positively.
Information and knowledge,
that is the most wonderful product of all.
It is the only product that I can give you and still retain,
and both of us become richer for it.
When we first meet a few days ago,
I feel like we were old friends.
And we wrote this article, "The Freedom of Speech."
I'm a scientist by training. This article is on HIV.
If I feel bored or upset,
I think write article will cheer me up.
Yes, I'm very addicted to Wikipedia.
I even... I can't miss a single day...
without contributing to Wikipedia.
Let me show you again, once more, my contributions.
I've written an article about surgery...
and many articles about anatomy and many other things.
It's a very special feeling you're doing something...
that's beneficial to others.
I feel great.
It's something you're contributing...
to maybe a schoolkid in Africa...
or maybe to someone who is just learning geometry...
in a country you've never visited before.
And it's that thrill.
Just having a job, having a family...
would not be enough by the end of my life.
So I need to find something...
that is a participation to the common good.
So that's it.
It was the first Web site for me which had an edit button.
And now it's become normal for me.
I actually miss it when I visit other Web sites.
I see all these mistakes, and I think,
"Well, they're stupid. They don't have an edit button."
I'm a skeptic at first, because I don't trust that,
"Oh, this thing can... Everybody can edit it."
But, in fact, I can see the system works.
Wikipedia is becoming sort of like a lighthouse...
to explain to people how they can collaborate differently as peers.
We're used to collaborating within corporations...
in terms of hierarchies, and Wikipedia shows that, no...
that people can now work together as peers.
There's this belief in this ideal,
and the question is...
are they being successful in carrying out that mission?
Right? Is it truly the case...
that anyone can participate in the process?
And that's really, I think, at the root of what we mean...
by a utopian, sort of, democratic system...
is that the minority voices are heard as well.
A lot of people have this idea of Wikipedia...
It's like millions of people all contributing a couple of sentences,
and somehow it magically becomes an encyclopedia.
But it's not true. And it really is not a democracy. I mean, it's...
There's a whole internal social structure to it.
Anytime you have an open access system like this,
you are going to award authority...
to the people who spend the most time with it.
It's a few hundred, at most, activists...
who've got nothing better to do with their time...
than argue on line about Wikipedia entries.
We've come across people...
who've spend more than 40 hours a week on Wikipedia...
doing the work there.
Those who spend a lot of time with it develop, in a sense,
a territorialism over the subjects that they feel very passionately about...
and spend a lot of time editing and updating.
You have this hierarchy within the community...
contributors, administrators with a bit more power,
the ability to ban users.
If you become part of this inner circle,
it's incredibly easy to rig the content,
to hijack an article to further your own agenda,
to lock down an article so no one else can edit it,
to ban people.
It's a very close-knit group.
Anyone who's outside that group they're extremely wary of.
There's this overarching paranoia...
that people from outside the community are trying to bring it down.
If you're not known by the community,
and you go into an article and start editing,
there's a pretty good chance that you'll be blocked,
if not banned from the site.
It's just a fact nowadays.
One of the core contributors,
known only as Durova,
was sure that a relatively new editor...
was sent by this attack site called "Wikipedia Review."
Her evidence for this was that this new account...
was much too productive.
He was trying much too hard to build a really fine encyclopedia.
And it stood to reason, she thought,
that because he was so productive...
and was relatively new to the site...
that he must be sent by this attack site...
to undo her and the rest of the inner circle...
and the entire encyclopedia.
And so she banned him. This sort of thing goes on all the time.
A perfectly good editor...
who was merely trying to build a decent encyclopedia...
was banned.
Wikipedia articles tend to converge...
toward the shared understanding of the most active...
or most aggressive contributors to Wikipedia.
If you can control an article,
you can, in a sense, control what people think.
People go to Wikipedia because they think that it's a neutral...
it has a neutral point of view.
They think they can go to Wikipedia for the facts.
Well, I had heard of Wikipedia, of course.
I knew that everybody could contribute, anybody could contribute.
High school teacher, social studies teacher told me it was intellectual democracy,
and I sort of accepted that.
And then one day an old, old friend...
called me on the phone and said,
"Have you seen what Wikipedia has done to you?"
And I said, "No, I haven't."
And he said, "Well, Google yourself,
hit the Wikipedia link and sue the bastards."
Jimmy Wales had said "Studies now indicate...
we get any mistakes down in five minutes."
Well, I'd been up as a suspected assassin...
and defector to the Soviet Union for four and a half months.
It was clear to me I had to do something.
I said what had happened to me.
I said this is an unreliable research tool in U.S.A. Today.
It was interesting that after I went public...
I heard from furious Wikipedians,
angry about what I had written.
Wikipedians focused on my Web site...
and defamed me again and again and again.
On line and under fire, Web resource Wikipedia...
is an Internet encyclopedia that anyone can use.
Some vandals came on line, contributed to that encyclopedia,
that biography of me, and it was...
I'll tell you, it was salacious, homophopic.
It even took me from the position...
of being a suspect murderer to being a murderer.
"He killed Kennedy. He killed Kennedy." He said it over again...
and then concluded with the words "murdering" expletive.
It's not just individuals like John, but me and many other people...
that just have concerns that this is creating gossip that can be very harmful.
And people go to these sites thinking that this is the truth.
First of all, our disclaimer is really patterned after the disclaimers...
that you'll find on any Web site.
If you go to Britannica and read their disclaimer,
the New York Times and read their disclaimer,
it's a very standard type of disclaimer that you have on any Web site.
The disclaimer, if you read it, says, "We're not accountable."
There's no other way to explain what that disclaimer says.
"We're not accountable."
And with accountability comes credibility, you know.
But the only way you get credibility...
is just make people sign their names.
A lot of things happened. We had a lot of news this year.
One of the biggest things that you can remember...
was that whole Seigenthaler controversy.
For those of you who somehow don't know what this is all about,
apparently there was an error in Wikipedia.
Who knew?
So this error was found in Wikipedia, and Seigenthaler, who...
I will say it was a really bad error.
Really was a terrible thing that was written about him in the encyclopedia.
It was fixed very quickly, as soon as we realized it.
They dragged me on CNN to yell at me,
and that was about here in...
And as you can see, it almost killed us.
Our traffic essentially tripled in a short period of time.
A whole class of students were laughing about it...
and making fun of me about it.
I mean, that is just basically wrong.
And, you know, there's that old story... put the buzz bombs up in the air.
If they fall on somebody, I have nothing to do with it.
I just shoot 'em up. I don't know where they come down.
I mean, that's sort of the concept, you know?
Anybody that wants to put a bomb on Wikipedia...
that's gonna explode in somebody's family's face...
can do it, and it explodes.
And Jimmy says, "Oh, I don't know who did it."
My position in the world is really funny to me...
because a few years ago I was just this guy...
You know, I'm sitting at home in my pajamas...
typing on the Internet like anybody else.
And now, you know, Bono's invited me go to a party in Switzerland,
and that's kind of weird.
Didn't really realize that Wikipedia was gonna be this huge, enormous phenomenon.
It was truly just a hobby.
I remember I got a call, out of the blue really,
to come and speak at a conference in Berlin.
And I was like, "Wow, Berlin." I'd never been out of the country basically,
and I'm like, "Wow, I can't believe somebody wants me to come speak in Berlin."
So what we did is we made it a whole big family trip...
and took five weeks off and went over to, sort of, tour Europe.
It has the Eiffel Tower on it.
Oh, so this is just, like, famous monuments?
Okay, who's been there?
A true vacation we haven't done...
A true vacation. In a long time.
The closest thing was, like, those few days in Lisama.
When we were in South Africa.
Like, we were in Japan. That was kind of a vacation, right?
So we were somewhere interesting.
We had time to, like, do some tourist stuff and so forth.
But it was also just, like, while I was working there, so...
Right, right. But that was good, because we were in the same...
Mm-hmm. place for a month.
And Jimmy would... Yeah.
Jimmy didn't travel, so we actually all slept in the same apartment...
every night for 30 days.
Which hadn't happened in years. Yeah. Exactly.
It happened very quickly that after the trip to Europe,
I started getting more and more invitations, the traffic kept growing.
I began to realize that when I would travel,
I could do press and cause traffic to go up.
I thought that was important.
I started getting more and more phone calls every day, getting interviews.
I like traveling.
I liked it especially by train every couple of days.
That's fun. You like traveling. That's pretty obvious.
Oh, yeah. So...
And then when I'm home, like, there's nothing going on here,
so I can just, sort of, chill out at home, so that's kind of good.
Well, you're not home that much anymore.
That's true.
Let's practice.
Oh, yeah.
When the PC revolution happened in the early '80s,
there were lots of companies started building PC's and selling them.
I was looking up prices of mother boards...
and what would it cost to start building computers.
So that was kind of where I was. When I saw this Internet thing going on, I'm like,
I don't want to be sitting here 10 years later going,
"Yeah, see I knew the Internet was gonna be big, but I didn't do anything about it."
So that was when I started Bomis.
The search portal Bomis.com was founded in 1996.
Its goal was to cash in on advertising on the site.
Bomis was billed...
as a Web ring-based search engine.
Rather than providing search results,
Bomis allowed users to have a hand in creating content.
As time went on, they found one idea in particular to be extremely popular.
They started something called the "Bomis Babe Report."
I don't know too many details about that end of the business and didn't want to know.
You know, the press has this idea that I'm porn king.
I really wasn't the king of anything, frankly, you know?
'Cause at the time when we looked at it, we were just, like,
"Okay, well, this is what our customers want. Let's follow this."
Having achieved modest success with Bomis,
Wales began to think about other ways to exploit user-generated content.
I had been thinking a lot about this idea of...
people can come together and collaborate to build stuff, right?
So Nupedia was the first effort.
Wales actually hired Larry Sanger,
who was a philosophy professor.
Jimmy Wales offered me the job of being editor-in-chief of Nupedia.
The theory was that anyone could write articles for Nupedia...
by submitting through e-mail.
They started Nupedia as a conventional encyclopedia...
where they were going to have experts and Ph.D's.
Experts would vet, edit,
approve and then post finished articles to the new site.
The problem is, seven-step process...
of draft and edit and re-edit and fact-checking and everything.
But it looked like...
from all of our experiences in how to create an encyclopedia,
that's certainly the right way to go.
You get smart people with pedigrees.
But after eight months,
only two full-length articles had been published.
The certification process was so difficult and was taking so long...
that the project began to fizzle,
and then Larry found out about wiki software.
He came to my site, wrote on a page,
"Do you think that this wiki idea would work to build an encyclopedia?"
I said yes.
I think it was minutes, almost immediately...
after he had described... just described... the concept of a wiki,
I thought this could be the solution to our problems.
We named the new project Wikipedia... that's a name I came up with...
and launched five days later.
Sanger and Wales anticipated...
that the wiki would generate a variety of rough-draft articles...
to then be put through the Nupedia system.
And then the crash came, and the crash just basically blew everything up.
Well, no one is officially calling it a crash,
but it sure looks and feels that way to many.
And that was the story of a lot of dot-coms, right?
It was just a disaster.
In December of 2001...
Jimmy tried to sell ads for Nupedia and Wikipedia.
But he didn't have any luck.
The amount of traffic was so low and there was no ad revenue...
that it was just, like, whatever, let's just put it in a nonprofit.
Tossed away as a lost cause,
Wikipedia, although created as a for-profit endeavor,
was handed over to the community.
Larry decided, "Well, let's just put all these articles on the wiki...
and then open it up to the world and see what happens.
And it turned out that a lot of people went on and started editing it.
It just rocketed with success...
and just tens of thousands of articles being added to Wikipedia,
and it just kind of left the Nupedia model in the dust.
So for me that's just an interesting quirk of history.
Had the crash not happened, Wikipedia might not have happened, so...
You know, I'm a nice guy and everything, but, you know, if somebody said,
"Well, gee, you know, I'll write you personally a check for $100 million.
We'll put some ads on Wikipedia."
I'd probably say, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea," right?
* Fame makes a man take things over *
* Fame let's him loose Hard to swallow *
Pretty much what I do every day.
Yeah, just walking around the tarmac, get dressed up?
Wave at the crowds.
When he first started leaving me out of the story,
it was extremely disappointing to me.
It isn't something that I would have thought Jimmy was capable of.
Jimmy Wales desu. America king desu.
Internet king desu.
I named the thing. I led the thing.
I think that that means I was also a founder.
But other people disagree. At least one other person disagrees.
**
I mean, one of the guys... His name was Larry Sanger.
Mm-hmm. He cofounded Wikipedia with you.
He says. Okay.
* The weight of words will end transmission *
Hi. Warren.
Warren. Hi. Nice to meet you, Warren.
And then?
Then you have to basically suck the liquid through the center.
Mmm.
It's in Wikipedia.
So I want to see a new picture in the Wikipedia article.
There's already one there. I don't know who it is, but that guy's gotta go.
I'm the new guy.
Such a great guy. I mean, think of it.
He's created the world's largest reference,
and he's giving it away for free.
Jim Wales is the guy with the bright idea.
He's also the guy with a big head.
You know, what else can I say?
My work is my art.
He's the person that we look to for guidance...
in cases where we do not know which way to walk.
We are a democracy with a benevolent dictator.
Anyone can just come and click on the edit link.
Anything he does, even if it's, like, a random off-hand remark,
it's considered gospel.
He is sometimes referred to as the "god king."
It's a lot like a cult.
Even Jimmy Wales refers to himself as the Wikipedia spiritual leader.
I call it servant leadership.
In other words, you lead people by being there to support them.
And kind of a spiritual leader, which is something I take pretty seriously.
He doesn't have the cultural, intellectual background to do anything.
The Serbians getting this? Or the Croatians?
I'm sure it matters a lot which is which, but...
In any way.
Here's my honorary doctorate.
* I know you'll see it my way
I think a lot of people just hear a lot about him,
so they treat him as, like, this god before they even talk to him at all,
which is kind of disturbing to me.
You know, I'm happy,
but I also have a desire to do more things, bigger things.
That's the interesting thing about Wales...
is he's rebuilt himself...
as this, sort of, altruistic public intellectual...
as the lead on Wikipedia,
and I don't think that probably reflects the kind person he is.
But there's something ironic about a self-proclaimed entrepreneur,
not a political activist, not really an intellectual,
who stumbled on the holy grail of this generation of Internet businesses...
and hasn't made a penny out of it.
It's hard to imagine that he's not unhappy...
by the fact that he hasn't become a multimillionaire,
if not a billionaire,
which, had it been a for-profit, he would, of course, been.
It's rather like turning up a winning lottery ticket...
and then realizing you can't cash it.
There's something tragic about that.
It's easy for me to laugh. I never found the ticket.
My biggest problem with Wikipedia...
is it doesn't create a hierarchy of knowledge.
There is no one at the heart of Wikipedia saying...
that the entry on Pamela Anderson...
should be shorter or longer than that on Hannah Arendt.
That's a really strange argument.
You know, Harry Potter, last I checked, is longer than Hamlet.
Should someone have said, "Actually, Harry Potter is not as important as Hamlet,
therefore it should be shorter"?
The fact that a pop novel is, you know, this long...
and Hamlet this long, it's no problem.
And the same thing... If one entry in Wikipedia is longer than another one,
they don't compete with each other.
They're completely separate entities.
It's not like an encyclopedia where we say,
"Look, we've got 30 volumes, and so we have to cut. We have to limit somewhere."
Jimmy, somebody who's not familiar with American culture,
or not media savvy or literate, may not understand...
that Hamlet is more important than Harry Potter.
There's a lot of people who use this as serious education.
Yes. I'm not really sure what you're saying.
The Pamela Anderson entry on Wikipedia...
It's incredibly well researched.
It's as detailed, as sophisticated...
as the entry on Hannah Arendt...
and, perhaps, the most influential political theorist of the 20th century.
And, again, it's fine if you know there's a difference.
But for the kids now coming on line,
they would think, actually, that Pamela Anderson is as important.
So this is profoundly subversive. It's surreal in its consequences.
All knowledge comes with sociocultural, historic and economic baggage.
That's what media literacy is about.
That's why when we read the New York Times, we have some context.
We know, for example, that the New York Times...
is culturally and politically liberal, or pro-Israel,
and we're able to read through those things.
The problem with Wikipedia... We're not able to interpret the context...
because we don't know who's producing the information.
And, ultimately, when Jimmy stands back and says,
"Well, that's none of my business.
Who am I to say that Pamela Anderson...
is less or more important than the concept of truth...
or Maria Curie or Hannah Arendt?"
Ultimately, for those people who go to Wikipedia...
who have no media literacy, I am fearful...
that in this open-source, free-knowledge universe...
we are going to be educating people...
who are not able to evaluate...
not so much the accuracy of information...
but the importance of information.
It's kind of like saying...
if we had a debate in the early era of the automobile...
and we said, "Wow, you know, the automobile...
is gonna devastate the... the horseshoe industry...
and it's gonna cause pollution and noise...
and a lot of people are gonna get killed in car wrecks...
and a lot of bad things are gonna happen,
but there's also this good stuff that's gonna happen."
Well, you can debate about it all you want,
but that genie's not going back in the bottle, so, you know...
I think Jimmy Wales is himself a very good example...
of a Web 2.0 idealist.
His thinking, if that's what you want to call it,
if you want to be kind to him,
is rooted in the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Uh, in my view, a very childish theory...
which suggests that... that all authority is derived internally...
and that we should be suspicious of all forms of external authority,
whether that's the family, the church, religion, the state in particular.
I would just as soon pull out my fingernails as reread Ayn Rand,
whom I thought was absolutely wonderful when I was 15.
And every 15-year-old thinks Ayn Rand is wonderful.
That's why 15-year-olds shouldn't be writing encyclopedias.
Ayn Rand's view of human relationships is well stated...
in that interminable, silly novel The Fountainhead,
which was made into an equally silly but more entertaining movie.
The only proper relationship between human beings is "hands off."
Yeah, I remember when I was a college student...
and I read Fountainhead,
and it had a great impact on me,
both, you know, aesthetically...
and also just thinking about...
what kinds of people do I admire,
um, what kind of person do I want to be.
No creator was prompted by a desire to please his brothers.
His truth was his only motive.
His work was his only goal.
I am challenging the base of all these institutions.
I'm challenging the moral cult of altruism.
I say that man is entitled to his own happiness...
and that he must achieve it himself.
When I say, uh,
you know, I want to distribute a free encyclopedia to everyone,
it's funny because I don't...
like, my motivation is not, like, altruism.
It's not, like, I want to save these people or whatever.
He served nothing and no one.
He lived for himself.
And only by living for himself was he able to achieve...
the things which are the glory of mankind.
Such is the nature of achievement.
You believe that there should be no such thing...
as welfare legislation, unemployment compensation?
That's right. I'm opposed to all forms of control.
I am for an absolute laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.
Government is typically an instrument of force.
You know, you tax people, whether they like it or not,
and then you pass a law to make people do stuff,
and that's just not my style.
My outlook on the world is an individual rights outlook.
Respecting people's rights to live their lives as they choose.
The idea that if we really want to achieve positive social change,
it's really important that we do so through reason and persuasion rather than force.
Wales's ideology, of course, is borne out...
on lots of different levels in Wikipedia.
He doesn't trust people with authority.
He doesn't trust experts. He doesn't trust professionals.
When experts do show up to Wikipedia,
which happens fairly often,
they are confronted with a real meritocracy,
and the idea that "I'm this very important professor"...
doesn't necessarily get you very far.
I have always thought that it's a grand thing...
to allow the general public...
to have a really vigorous role in a collaborative knowledge project.
But as far as Wikipedians are concerned,
it fundamentally does not matter...
what credentials a person has, what prior training they have.
None of that matters.
Wales said very famously,
"I trust a high school child as much as I trust a Harvard professor."
Now this is a ludicrous thing to say.
You know, you may be a 15-year-old kid...
writing about the English nobility,
and if you're doing a really good job,
we don't really care who you are.
That's great, you know. Why should we care?
Nowadays we're at a time when elitism is frowned upon,
scoffed at, derided, and I think that is wrong.
If you have expertise, and if you come armed with credibility,
then oftentimes in the Wikipedia environment...
you're said to be biased, heavily biased.
So, instead, Wikipedia biases for the nonexperts.
If someone says, "Well, I have a Ph.D...
and therefore don't question me, this is the facts,"
that's complete nonsense, right?
On the other hand, if somebody says,
"Hey, look, I've really studied this, and I can walk you through the steps, right?
I can show you the evidence. I'm not just up here saying...
I'm a big, important professor so you have to believe me,
but I'm actually willing to show you the information...
that lets you understand why I believe what I believe."
That kind of authority is priceless, right?
That's the problem. I mean, people with real day jobs,
families, friends,
even of they wanted to, they don't have the time to do this sort of thing.
I mean, it requires a significant investment in time.
Time, I suppose,
is the main reason I haven't contributed anything,
and that's one of the reasons...
I value the contributions of others so much...
because I realize how important my own time is.
The experts don't really have the time...
to be fighting this war.
It's all of those people out there who have nothing better to do.
They're the ones that are getting listened to.
The problem is that, while I might write something...
that would be of good scholarly worth,
someone may come along and then change the article that I write.
I have just finished writing a book about China.
And there's a port on the east coast of China...
called Fuzhou.
Basically, Fuzhou was, in the wartime, taken over by the Japanese.
But, extraordinarily, the Japanese relinquished control of it for a while,
and the British rebuilt a consulate there.
If you go to the entry for Fuzhou, there's no mention made of this.
It simply said it was invaded by the Japanese. End of story.
So to get them to correct that took an awful lot of time,
more time than I had.
'Cause if three or four people get together and gang up on some expert,
you know, the expert then has to go,
"Okay, well, I have to make a request for comment."
And then at least one other person has to agree...
that there's a need for this process.
So then that takes two or three weeks...
on one little point, even.
And then if that doesn't work, then they have to go to mediation.
And I'm still on the mediation tweet, actually. I can tell you.
It doesn't work well.
In the end, I was exasperated and said, "All right. They can just..."
So fine. So it remains wrong.
There is no editorial board at Wikipedia...
that can go in and rescue this expert from the onslaught of the hordes.
There are certain people who make it their life's work to know stuff.
It's ridiculous to not give them some, at least, modest role...
in projects that document knowledge.
The Oxford English Dictionary took about 70 years to compile.
What they did was, they invited the general public...
to read everything, essentially, that had ever been written in the English language.
Since they only had volunteers...
thousands, tens of thousands of them all over the English speaking world...
Murray and his collaborators would receive tons and tons of posts every day...
showing how words had been used in history,
and they formed the basis of the Oxford English Dictionary.
So it was astonishingly democratic process.
It was a bit like the general public,
or the general English speaking public,
holding a great mirror up to itself and saying,
"This is how we speak. This is what we speak.
This is what our language is."
Some of these aggregators were complete lunatics.
One of them was a certified lunatic.
I mean, a chap that I wrote about, William Chester Minor,
was brilliant in providing material for the O.E.D.
He produced hundreds of thousands of entries. He was a complete lunatic.
He cut off his own penis.
I would not, I have to say,
like him to have been the editor of the O.E.D.
He was mad.
A lot of people who have this obsessive interest in facts...
are really strange people.
The comparison of the O.E.D.,
which invited everybody in the world...
to submit words and citations, with Wikipedia is a good one.
The major difference is...
that there are no experts at the top at Wikipedia saying,
"Well, this is... this is a word that's very common,
and this is a word that's not so common."
So I would wish for the ways of the O.E.D. where there is...
a wise body of people...
of enormous wisdom and knowledge...
who act, ultimately, as arbiters of what goes in.
Now that... I know wise people are often white old men,
and I know we want to get away from the opinions and thoughts and prejudices of old white men.
I accept that this is a problem.
But, nonetheless, sometimes when I as a researcher am looking for things,
I long for such people and wish the mob...
and one should never trust the mob...
the mob would just... bite its tongue,
keep quiet and let an editor...
interpose him or herself and turn fuzziness into clarity.
It doesn't help us to have experts...
rewriting an entry, sort of, based on their own knowledge,
which is, you know, if they're somebody...
who's intimately involved in the field...
is probably coming from a perspective...
that one could not call, kind of, universal and-and non-biased.
In Wikipedia you can see every site...
and not just the sites that people who are highly educated,
professors, who decide what you can see,
what you can't see, what the truth is or what not.
Let's not make too clear a distinction...
between the experts and the non-experts.
The so-called expert has a point of view.
The ordinary person has a point of view.
Neither one of them is going to be able to present history...
in a way that avoids point of view.
It's impossible to have anything that's completely unbiased,
or for it to be seen as being unbiased,
because we all carry biases around in our heads.
One of the core values of Wikipedia...
is the value of neutrality.
People have to find a way to come together...
and settle in on the core that they do agree on.
I might have a thousand things I can say about George W. Bush that I think are true,
and you might have a thousand things that you could say.
We're gonna have to settle on those 800 that we can say,
"We do agree George Bush was the governor of Texas."
We can also agree that some critics have said such and such about him...
and that his supporters have said this.
That process of negotiation of discussion ends up mostly working.
It's, like, this belief that the collective is this oracle...
or, like, this god that has this ultimate knowledge,
and the collective is all-wise,
and the collective can adjudicate any disputes on how to interpret history.
And it's wrong. It's absolutely wrong.
The collective is just made of whoever was the most, you know,
brazen of the edit warriors.
And those people have no right to edit history any more than anybody else.
Achieving neutrality is not a good goal for anything.
Neutrality and accuracy are two totally different things.
When people are radically skeptical about neutrality,
um, I just think they're mistaken.
I think there are lots and lots of statements that lots of people can agree on.
What is neutrality, for instance, about Naziism?
You're doing a story about Adolf Hitler,
and you're gonna say that he's a monster.
But to be objective, on the other hand,
he also started the Volkswagen.
Does that mean that that's an objective view of Hitler? No.
Same thing with global warming.
There's so much evidence on this side and much less up here,
so, now, a story that would balance those two things out exactly would be a false story.
The problem is the idea that there's one master description of reality.
Which works really well in mathematics...
and works very well in science, if not quite as perfectly,
and really doesn't work at all in other subjects.
If you apply it to history, humanities, arts, it's a problem.
All history is a matter of selecting...
out of an infinite number of facts,
and the selection itself is inevitably biased.
Henry the Navigator...
The German, the Portuguese and the English one,
they tell a different story.
The German version is very factual...
and, you know, tells you the life and what he did and everything.
The Portuguese version is much more emphatic.
I mean, he's quite a figure in Portugal.
And the English version has a neutrality dispute...
about the fact of whether he was homosexual or not.
The truth is told about Columbus in traditional stories.
He did a very daring thing.
He was an excellent navigator.
He was a religious man. All true.
What is left out is the fact that he massacred,
kidnapped, mutilated Indians in search of gold.
Traditional history has a period...
which is always described as a progressive era.
Progressive Era refers to the first years of the 20th century...
when reform laws were passed.
Well, what that misses is that exactly in those years,
more black people were lynched in this country,
thousands and thousands, than at any other period in American history.
The Civil War...
battles, battles, military heroism.
You hardly ever learn that during the Civil War...
more land was taken from the Indians out west...
than any other period in American history.
More battles were fought.
Massacres took place in order to take Indian land.
This is missing.
You have decisions to make.
Shall I acknowledge that this is just my point of view,
or shall I pretend that this is objective,
this is comprehensive, this is neutral?
What's worse... just telling a bold-faced lie...
or just telling part of the truth?
There's a reason for that oath that's given in court...
to tell the truth, the whole truth...
What's most deceptive is not when you lie outright,
but when you tell the truth but not the whole truth,
when you leave out so much.
If a person lies to you, you can check up on that.
If a person leaves something out,
you have no way of checking... you don't know what has been omitted.
No, you're not going to get an objective history.
In fact, it's impossible.
A few years ago, if you looked up some crazy thing...
aardvarks or Archimedes, just any, sort of, odd topic...
you would see all these wonderful Web sites...
maintained by people on a volunteer basis...
at universities or just on their own, and they were all different.
You could just smell the people in them. You could just tell,
"Here's an individual with a point of view,"
and I just found that to be so wonderful.
And now the first entry is usually the Wikipedia entry,
and then the next three pages are mirrors of the Wikipedia entry.
And, effectively, if you want to find out about something,
you have to go to a lot of work to see anything but this collective product.
And I think we've lost something.
We've lost something of the whole purpose of the Internet.
I mean, originally, before there was the Internet,
there were plenty of encyclopedias that were at least good.
I mean, the Britannica is at least okay.
The whole point of the Internet was to do new, better things,
and I feel it's been a step backward.
Britannica 3, the new learning system...
for the new man in a new age.
Yes, well, this is the classic...
11th edition of Britannica,
which in its day...
and that was about 1910...
it was first published...
was the supreme authority...
on knowledge, or information anyway,
in the English speaking world.
"Negro" on page 344 of Volume 19...
"Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.
We must necessarily suppose the development of the negro and the white...
precedes on different lines.
While with the latter the volume of the brain grows...
with the expansion of the brainpan,
in the former the grown of the brain is on the contrary arrested...
by the premature closing of the cranial sutures...
and lateral pressure of the frontal bone."
Oh, it's quite extraordinary.
This was holy writ in 1910 and 1911.
Goodness knows it... it provided an informational basis...
for racism, for segregation, for all manner of injustice.
And, of course, it would be laughed out of court today.
It's a highly offensive entry.
At Britannica, we tried to remember...
to describe what we were doing...
as setting down the state...
of our current knowledge.
We certainly never claimed...
to be writing the truth.
Morays change.
Solomon had a thousand wives and yet he was thought to be a moral person.
I daresay we would not have the same judgment...
about him today if he still had a thousand wives.
It just displays the fact, however,
that knowledge is a creature of fashion.
When I started teaching journalism in 1995,
I had always thought that the Internet was gonna be...
the tool to fill in what I call this, kind of, media gap,
the lack of good sources between what we consider the news...
and what we consider the history books.
In the fall of 1989,
I was visiting our printing plant with a few of our editors,
and suddenly word came on the news...
East Germany's borders are being opened wide, all of them.
East and West Germans are celebrating the news.
They haven't printed that particular signature of that volume yet,
although it's due to be printed in two days.
Do we change it, or do we let it go?
It was a very, very hard decision,
and it was decided that we would change it.
And we tore out the printing plates that had already been made.
We had editors quickly rewriting several pages.
Then the Berlin Wall came down,
and the reunification of East and West Germany was on the table,
and we had to go in and make changes on,
as I recall, about 1,300 pages.
But Wikipedia's completely changed that.
Wikipedia is a working draft of history.
It's a continually changing snapshot...
of what is being done in the course of history,
and I think that's a huge revolution...
in what kind of resource we have available.
Breaking news out of Mumbai, India.
Deadly coordinated terror attacks there.
Gunmen went into those hotels and opened fire.
Indiscriminate fire has been witnessed.
This is what he was talking about.
You can see those flames going up in smoke.
There have been multiple reports of gunfire.
It's not in print, in a sense that it's unchangeable.
It's in process, which means it is always changeable.
And so the fact that it is fluid is merely an indication...
that we're living in a digital age.
* You brought it to the surface... *
There are a lot of regimes in the world...
that depend on ignorance to keep them in power,
and the invasion of knowledge really threatens those regimes.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is freedom.
Those are, I think, the inherent goals.
An example of the maxim "knowledge is power"...
happened in Myanmar where there was a cyclone,
and the government knew that there was a cyclone coming...
and the government controls all the media...
and it failed to tell the people.
Tens of thousands of people died...
as a result of hoarding that piece of knowledge.
Well, the people had a right to know.
**
Deciding to have a monopoly on information can be fatal.
**
Totalitarian and dictatorial governments block information,
including information from Wikipedia, because they don't want to lose power.
They don't want an organized, active public...
to challenge authoritarian rule.
I was here in China,
and I visited with some schoolkids, teenagers,
and I asked them about the famous 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square.
* A fractured spark in everyone *
* Does it still burn in you?
Two of the kids never even heard of it.
One of the teenagers said, goes, "A big misunderstanding,
and a few students were arrested, but fortunately no one was hurt."
Which is an amazing thing to hear,
because even the official version of the story from the Chinese government...
which is disputed by others, does concede, like, a couple hundred people were killed.
We said, "Well, what do you want to do after high school?"
And one girl said she's trying to get her SAT scores high enough to go to Princeton.
What's gonna happen to this girl?
Let's say she goes off to the U.S. and goes to Princeton,
and suddenly finds out, "Wow, like, I wasn't even told...
that even the Chinese government says there were 200 people killed there," right?
That's a huge problem, because now you've got somebody,
one of your best and brightest students,
who's gone overseas and now feels, like,
"Hey, I was ripped off. The truth wasn't told to me."
You know, what's gonna change? What's gonna bring down...
the totalitarian government in China?
Is it going to be guns? Is it gonna be tanks? Is it gonna be missiles?
No, it's gonna be K.J.
K.J.'s a 25-year-old girl who lives in Taiwan,
and every day K.J. is on Skype,
and she is talking to the mainland Wikipedians,
and she's helping them get through the firewall.
She is teaching them where the open proxies are.
She's running interference for them...
in making sure that the open proxies are available for editing in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia not just for some people in this world.
Everyone have right to read this article,
and they have right to share their knowledge to other people.
People have right to know how they think.
Wikipedia, and most all sources of information,
are wonderfully subversive...
to totalitarian and dictatorial governments.
Saudi Arabia, for example, have big restriction on information,
so that's why we're all focused on trying as much as possible to push Wikipedia forward.
When I was in Saudi Arabia, in order to get on the Internet,
you had to go through a proxy server.
Well, I pity the Saudi government...
trying to outsmart 13-year-old boys...
who are gonna spend their lives...
figuring out ways to go around it.
They're going to win.
This is happening. You can't stop this.
You can... You know, you can put your finger in the dam for five minutes,
but you're not going to stop people getting on the Internet.
We want to give everybody that access...
so they can learn about tigers or the moon...
or the upcoming elections, you know,
so they can make better decisions as citizens.
So it's important. Like, this is what I do.
This is what it all comes down to, really.
The human immune system is all about...
Okay.
Be sure to copy the notes.
There are really, really people deprived of information.
People are finding stuff they want, stuff about science and about community...
and about things that were not available to them.
If I go back to my own country,
I'm able to access a computer,
go to Wikipedia to be able to do some of my research...
where I can show that we all get benefit.
I didn't know much how Taiwanese people feel...
about our mainland Chinese.
But with Wikipedia, when we are working on the same article,
we can avoid that.
Through Wikipedia, it's unbelievable.
I could make friends with a Communist.
So I think Wikipedia...
not only brings free knowledge to the world,
I think that it even promotes peace and mutual understanding.
The more diverse the Wikipedian base gets,
the more of a worldwide view the information's gonna have.
And until we have that, how can we call it a real encyclopedia?
It is the younger generation of India who should get involved with Wikipedia movement,
because it is truly a movement...
like our Gandhi's movement which made India free,
which is the movement of the 21st century.
You know, it's hard, 'cause I think a lot of the people who work on the Wikipedia...
are obviously sincere, and this is the way they're expressing their idealism...
and their idealism is genuine,
but it's very frequently the case that a generation of idealistic people...
band together and, kind of, lose themselves in their idealism.
That's happened a lot in history,
and usually the kind of idealism...
that subsumes individuals into some sort of group movement...
turns out to be pretty confused.
So, for instance, the American '60s,
which are still the reference point for idealism in America,
were wonderful.
I view myself as operating within that framework.
And, yet, it's important to know all the failures of it.
It's important to know that some of the Marxist ideas, in every case,
led to some of the cruelest regimes in history.
There's, in a way, a natural tendency...
by technological optimists to think that if you connect a bunch of people together,
this super being will emerge that's smarter than any of us.
But that is just not true.
In fact, if you just do it in a sloppy way,
this super being will probably be a fascist.
Unfortunately, human beings have a demonstrated ability...
to again and again and again form into mobs of different kinds.
And those were... that was the mob...
that ruined the French Revolution,
that ruined the Russian Revolution.
And as a historian, I think I have a better understanding of that...
than a lot of these technologists and business people like Wales...
who don't have much of a grasp with the way in which utopian movements...
have been corrupted by the crowd.
We're always going to live with danger of crowds.
The wisdom of crowds would be to understand the danger that they represent.
What it all comes down to is, what does Jimmy want on the site and what does he not?
Okay? That's how it works.
Issues may or may not be escalated up to him.
But if the fight goes deep enough,
he will appear and he will lay down the law.
There are certain articles I have written...
that you cannot mention on Wikipedia because they're critical.
You know, a site like antisocialmedia.net is not allowed...
to be mentioned on Wikipedia 'cause Jimmy doesn't want it mentioned.
A contributor, and American living in Japan named Charles Ainsworth,
who has contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other people...
He's a respected contributor.
He felt that the points made by antisocialmedia.net were valid...
and tried to make these points heard on Wikipedia.
Even this longtime contributor was immediately banned from doing this.
And in the end, Jimmy Wales swooped in and said,
"This has gone on long enough. I support this ban.
If this happens again, shoot on sight."
Like I said, it's a bizarre world at Wikipedia.
"Shoot on sight," says the spiritual leader...
of the world's most popular online encyclopedia.
Please join Jimmy Wales.
I assume everybody who's used Wikipedia...
The idea is for all of us to imagine a world...
in which every single person on the planet...
is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, and that's what we're doing.
Of course we all want free access...
to knowledge for everybody, you know.
I think that goes without saying.
But there's this question of what is that knowledge.
One can only laugh when you hear something like that.
And it's hype. It's the sort of silly thing...
that people in Silicon Valley will say over drinks.
You can't make a single encyclopedia...
for the sum of human knowledge,
because there isn't a single sum of human knowledge for most topics.
And it's just... it's a bizarre idea about what knowledge is.
We've confused information with knowledge.
The information is only as good as the research skills of the person looking for it...
and the background the person has to fit the information into.
If you just survey masses of information,
you're just flooded with irrelevancies.
Intelligence is not a matter of just collecting...
from anybody and everybody and shoveling it into a format.
We are like a person who's very thirsty and needs to drink.
And we are parched...
and used to get somebody bringing you water in a dropper with one drop at a time...
and barely time... and you can't really be satisfied with it.
Now it's like somebody opening a fire hose at you.
Well, you can't drink out of a fire hose either.
In order to make knowledge free, we have to make it...
into some, sort of, singleton rigid idea of knowledge.
If we get rid of all the books in the library...
and we turn them all into one big mash-up book...
that no longer has any voice or any personality or any perspective,
then we have made crappy, useless knowledge available to everybody for free.
* You're looking better now
**
* Watching everything
* Fall down
**
What we're starting to move into...
is a world where what the truth is...
becomes a question of who you trust.
A lot of kids are consulting Wikipedia...
as the first, and often the last, source of information...
on anything that they're curious about.
If it continues on in that capacity,
we might have a generation of kids...
who have a fundamental confusion...
about basic principles of epistemology.
Now people look at Wikipedia, and they say,
"This was written by people on... How can I trust this?"
I think in the future people are gonna look at Britannica and say,
"What? You mean this was written by, like, one expert and reviewed by two editors?
How could I possibly trust this?"
I, as a user of Wikipedia, am very, very leery of it.
I mean, I don't trust it at all. But I know that I will trust it in another 10 or 20 years.
It's not some project that they want to finish in 10 years and get it over.
Something like the next hundred years. We're thinking about that kind of goal.
We can definitely achieve that. And I like that goal.
Every child in the world will need books to learn from.
And when you have those books for free,
more children can use education.
So Wikipedia might become even more important...
than the traditional learning books.
If this is a revolution created by amateurs,
by idealists who don't know what they're doing...
and who trash the family jewels of professional media,
then in 25 or 50 years we're gonna look back,
and we're gonna be profoundly regretful.
Whether Wikipedia can achieve its goal...
as the whole sum of the human knowledge...
I wish it could, but even if it couldn't,
it's not a bad thing because we've already done so much.
**
** I think expressing knowledge is like art.
It has an aesthetic appeal.
Building systems of knowledge is wonderfully rewarding and fun.
That's actually always been, sort of, my life's goal.
Since I helped inflict Wikipedia on the world,
I'm, perhaps, one of the only people...
who could help start something better.
I guess I sort of feel I have a, kind of, calling.
I think that, ultimately, I owe it to people...
to, sort of, help undo a mistake I made.
You know, once before we did an interview...
when I was in Florida, living with my, at that time, wife and daughter,
and now my wife and I are separated,
and I'm living part time here in New York.
And then I'm in Florida every other weekend. I have my daughter for the weekend.
So it's tough. The work has had its toll.
I've made a lot of choices to travel, to go out and spread the word,
and, you know, it's cost me at a personal level.
These are the choices people have to make in life,
and sometimes you regret the choice you've made,
and sometimes you think it was the right choice,
and sometimes you just don't know.
You go through a door, and you can't go back.
And so, you know, yeah, it's complicated.
The central question in whether Wikipedia will survive or not...
depends on whether the social, the community, stays together.
It just seems like there's always more and more people...
who want to change everything you wrote.
There's more people who want to pick fights with you.
So it's just a different community dynamic than it used to be.
Is it gonna stop? I think you'd sooner argue with the law of gravity.
I think, personally, that the community cannot survive.
I mean, there's such infighting, even among the core contributors,
I don't see how it can sustain itself.
Only the apocalypse, I think, is gonna stop Wikipedia in its tracks.
I don't think the work is ever done, as long as the universe exists.
And that's gonna be around for at least... Oh, it depends.
You've seen this?
God knows. Oh, is this the current Wikipedia?
Yeah, this is your...
No, I haven't looked at it since they wrote that thing.
Um...
Wanna take a look at that real quick?
I actually would rather not. I've never read it.
Pulling up my wiki page, and let's see...
"He is most widely known for inventing voice mail systems."
Well, I hope I'm most widely known for cha-cha now.
"Serving 23 years as anchor of the Saturday edition of the CBS Evening News,
moderator of Face the Nation," and so on and so forth.
Uh, "Interim weekend anchor of the CBS Evening News...
from March 2005 to August 2006."
All that's right.
"Covered four beats." So far, so good.
"The social critic activist and playwright,
best known as author of the best-seller...
People's History of the United States.
Says philosophy incorporates ideas...
from Marxism, anarchism and socialism."
Well, all right. I'll accept that.
There were three errors.
One of them was a, kind of, insignificant error...
about... about my last book being named a notable book.
It gave the wrong newspaper that named it as a notable book.
Another one of them gave me a job title...
of a job I haven't held for four years.
Well, the first line happens to be false.
"Hebrew and Yiddish." It's got nothing to do with Yiddish.
My first entry on Wikipedia had an incorrect birth date.
It actually had my brother's birth date.
He's three years younger than I was.
Somehow that got corrected by someone. Not by me.
I figured, why do I want to correct a date that's three years younger?
That's only the first line. And we go from there.
It's actually pretty accurate,
because I think that my P.R. people have been here.
It has all of my patents.
"Has written two books. Face the Nation...
My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-Winning News Broadcast...
and This Just In."
Actually, I have written three,
and that is the one thing that's missing here.
I wrote a book called The Acting President.
It came out in 1989. It was about Ronald Reagan.
"Roslyn Zinn has had a role...
in editing all of Zinn's books and articles."
That's true. She's my only editor.
Hmm, it's not too bad.
It's funny 'cause it doesn't cover any of my technical stuff at all.
But, anyway, it's fine.
It's taken from one bio. I have many bios out there.
Um, so, um...
It's not bad. I mean, it's not wrong.
It would give somebody an introduction to myself.
Huh.
It looks okay.