Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, offers lessons of collaboration
Marla Crockett interviews Jimmy Wales via telephone.
Where would we be without Wikipedia? When Jimmy Wales launched the free content encyclopedia in 2001, the Internet entrepreneur gave birth to the most influential experiment in collaboratively created content. Wales added the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003 to support the concept, and a year later, he founded Wikia Inc. to take the community approach into the for-profit realm.
Though not a fan of the term “crowdsourcing,” Wales remains a strong advocate of the principles behind it, and he
endorses the online pairing of amateurs and experts. He spoke with Assignment Zero about his philosophy and where it's taking him — and the rest of us.
Martha Crockett: Do you consider yourself a social architect?
A: Yes, to some extent, although I like to avoid terms such as “social engineering” and “social architecture” because they’re very different kinds of things, engineering and architecture. In fact, I think one of the problems that we’ve had in the past is that those kind of analogies — coming from the kind of people who are really programmers and not social people — have inhibited our understanding. So, other than that, I definitely say social design is a really important topic for the future.
Q: What’s your sense now of what works and what doesn’t in bringing people together to work collaboratively?
A: One of the things that is really important to enable people to collaborate is that they have a shared vision of what it is they’re trying to accomplish. In the early days of Wikipedia, I thought that neutrality was an absolutely indispensable principle for getting lots of different people working together. But after seeing many other projects become successful, I realized that it isn’t so much neutrality as having the same idea of what it is that we’re here to do.
Q: What have you rejected at this point?
A: What really doesn’t work is the opposite of that, right? If you’re trying to bring a group of people together, and maybe they’re eager to help out in some way but they don’t understand what their specific mission is or what they’re trying to do, things tend to get very scattered and people break into endless arguments about what is going on without actually getting very much accomplished. So the successful collaborative projects I’ve seen are those that have a core purpose, and those that I’ve seen fail are a little vague about what it is they’re trying to do.
Q: Anything else about what works?
A: Communities that are really combative may be entertaining places to go for combat, but in terms of building something, I think kindness and love are indispensable.
Q: What are you working on right now in terms of social design?
A: At Wikia, I have this new search engine project. Basically I’m spending a lot of time right now thinking about and designing the social interaction aspects of that, thinking about what the rules should be. It’s an interesting challenge that’s similar in some ways to the Wikipedia challenge, but different in some really important ways.
The whole point of a search engine is to link to things and to try to traffic in things. You have a much stronger and much more direct problem of people who may be editing from a particular biased point of view to promote themselves or their standing Web sites or whatever, and so that’s a challenge. There’s always going to be a huge direct incentive for people to get involved for those reasons, and that’s a tricky thing to think about — how do you give the community the kind of control they need to make sure that doesn’t become dominant while at the same time being open and flexible?
Q: How do you think this participatory online culture is changing American culture?
A: I think there are a lot of interesting things going on. This may not be what you’re driving at exactly, but one of the intersections between the Internet and technology and pop culture is the advent of the new genre of television that I call the really complicated TV series. Things such as "Lost" and "24" are, in part, successful genres because the fan culture around them has an expression on the Internet. If you sit down and start watching "Lost," you’re liable to get lost yourself, but you can go on a wiki like at lost.wikia.com and really figure out what’s going on and really have a full documentation of all the complex relationships of the characters.
I think that’s an interesting symbiotic relationship between technology and culture, and it isn’t just the Internet technology. It’s even the existence of TiVo and the ability to pause the show and discuss what happened. Because it’s like, who is that guy again? Oh yeah, we saw him six episodes ago lurking around the corner, and now we know who he is. That kind of stuff is hard to do on live television when it’s just going by and you can’t stop it while you’re watching it. It makes it really hard to be very intellectual with the complexities of plot. Now the way we watch television is changing, in part, because of technology, so for me that’s one of the interesting things that’s happening.
Q: You were talking about the need to change and corral this Internet culture. Do you think wiki users and followers and people online are ready for that development?
A: Definitely. I see a pretty strong personality difference between bloggers and wiki people, in the sense that blogging is all about stating your own unique perspective on the world. It’s very much a discussion or debate culture, whereas wiki is a lot more about collaborating and working together with people who maybe you disagree with, but you’re trying to build something together. So the incentives are all different and the kind of personalities end up being different as well.
If you’re somebody who has a really strong political ax to grind and your purpose is to basically convert people to seeing things the way you see them, you don’t find a wiki a very comfortable place to work. And I’m not being negative about that kind of person at all. I think we need people who are passionate advocates for the truth as they see it, and that’s an important role in society. But there’s also a role for a different kind of person who says, "Yeah, I don’t have a strong opinion on that subject, but I’m willing to pitch in and flesh out all sides of the debate in a useful way."
I’m here as a person who likes to mediate conflict, not to engage in conflict, and those personality types tend to be drawn into wiki more. So I think certainly within the wiki community, this idea of an increasingly friendly place — and also a place where the tools are given to the community to help deal with the bad characters — is very popular.
Q: Where are you in developing your code of conduct for the blogosphere?
A: Right now, it’s basically at blogging.wikia.com. There’s a discussion going on there. I feel it’s not up to me to determine the code of conduct, because for a code of conduct that really works, it has to be hammered out by people who disagree strongly about what it should be about.
For that to happen, they need to come into the wiki. They need to figure out what is their common ground, how can we state the shared social mores in a way that’s clear and very, very broadly acceptable. And that has to come from the people that are very actively involved with that.
Q: I understand you also want to develop wiki journalism.
A: At Wikia, we have a whole new category of sites we call “magazine-style” sites. It’s a complete revamp of the look and feel of the wiki software, but it’s still wiki underneath. That’s an idea thing. Let’s figure out the tools people would need that are different to create. The tools you need to create a Web site that’s an encyclopedia are different from the tools you’d need to create a magazine. So, how do we do that? That’s something I’m very invested in exploring.
Q: Does everybody really understand what it takes to make a good news story? And does that frame of reference have to be there, or is it all about the software?
A: It’s almost nothing about the software. The software can be an impediment. The software changes you need have to do with the social matters.
Yes, absolutely, one of the reasons wiki-style journalism can work is that people have a very clear and strong understanding of what a good news story is, and that is not something that is reserved for the high priests of journalism.
Lots and lots of people read the newspaper and know the difference between a good news story and a poor news story and what it takes to make that. Now, how they can do that collaboratively and socially and what is the incentive structure, I don’t think we’ve worked out. I don’t mean we as in me, but as a whole citizen-journalism movement. I don’t think we’ve worked that out in a positive way, although there are many interesting experiments going on, Assignment Zero being one of them, where people are coming together and saying let’s try to do journalism in some different ways and let’s see what works or not.
It’ll be interesting to look back at some of these things like Oh My News or Assignment Zero or Wilki News or the Wikia magazine site, and come back in two or three years and see which ones have been successful and which ones haven’t and to learn from that and say, "Ah, nobody realized it, but one of the big obstacles to doing a good news story is X, and funny we didn’t notice that because now it seems obvious." But that’s the way these things go usually.
Q: Are all of these ventures based on your evolving knowledge of how the intelligent crowd works?
A: Definitely. I reject a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the ideas around swarm intelligence or the wisdom of crowds. I think some of that stuff is pretty sketchy.
It comes down to a really passionate person with a good mind who is committed to doing good work — and doing that in collaboration with other people of similar minds. It remains an individual activity, even when we do it in a group. And I think there’s a lot of mystical talk about how there’s some high mind or cloud of intelligence out there. That’s confusing and sketchy rhetoric.
Q: I understand you take issue with the word “crowdsourcing.” Can you elaborate? Are we really just talking about the same thing, about individuals coming together, pooling their talents and their resources? Are we getting hung up on terms?
A: The term “crowdsourcing” is a direct take off on “outsourcing.” The whole idea of outsourcing is, you look around, there’s a company and you say, "Gee, we could actually go outside of our organization and look for a cheaper way of producing the same thing." Perfectly ethical activity for a company. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think there’s something deeply flawed in it if you’re a company who’s thinking about building a Web site, and you think of what you’re doing as crowdsourcing. You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what it’s all about.
So, one of the analogies I’ll use is, suppose you are a bowling alley owner and you thought your business is the production of bowling and you think what you’re trying to do is produce high-quality bowling and you’re going to crowdsource it by somehow getting the public to produce more bowling. That’s a really weird way to think about what it is you’re doing as a company, and you’re going to make a lot of weird decisions based on that, as opposed to thinking of your job as a company running a bowling alley.
We’re not here to make bowling; we are here to provide a place for people who want to come in and bowl, and we want them to come in and enjoy whatever it is they’re doing. It’s not about trying to trick them into producing bowling cheaply, it’s about figuring out what they’re having fun doing and helping to facilitate that. It’s a very different attitude toward community. Instead of viewing your customers as customers, the crowdsourcing view views your customers as really badly paid employees. And I think that’s a huge mistake.
Q: What role do experts have in this concept? It seems as though the conversation in the past year or so has moved more toward the hybrid, the collaboration between amateurs and professionals. How you feel about that approach?
A: That’s my approach. My approach is really hard core on that point, that experts are absolutely indispensable. People who know what they’re talking about are at the core of moving society forward. And that passionate individual mind who has figured something out at great length is completely crucial. So the great irony of this is that I’m typically poised as being the anti-elitist, when I’m probably the most elitist person, as most people know, in terms of being a complete snob about people knowing what they’re talking about.
Q: One of your principles says: “Newcomers are always to be welcomed. There must be no cabal, there must be no elites, there must be no hierarchy or structure which gets in the way of this openness to newcomers.” Experts for decades have sort of said to the public, “Let us take care of it. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.”
A: I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s really a myth. The best experts have always been the ones who view their role in society as being about participating in a broad, open, public dialogue.
Certainly, the worst of the experts — the kind of person who would say, “I refuse to engage in a discussion with you because I have a Ph.D and you don’t” — those people tend to be idiots, and they’re not really that valuable.
The kind of expert I’m interested in is the person who always has an active, lively mind and is willing to engage in open, broad discussion in a democratic society.
So, for me, there is this sort of mistake when we imagine academics are really not interested in dealing with the general public and not interested in defending their ideas in the open marketplace of ideas, I think that’s just wrong. The best academics have always been very enthusiastic about this enlightenment view which says it’s not about having a guild of protected people, it’s about being right, knowing what you’re talking about. And defending your ideas, not based on a fallacious appeal to authority, but defending your ideas based on sound reasoning.
