Jimmy Wales: 2 Million Articles Down and More to Do

SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES

At the Wikimania conference in Taipei, this weekend there was a group of volunteers active in editing the online encyclopedia who started calling themselves “The Old-Codgers Coalition.” Like many at the conference, they were trying to cope with the impact of the site’s popularity.

These days, Wikipedia editors bandy various guidelines and rules of thumb for assessing the merit of articles. The old codgers have proudly followed the credo “Ignore All Rules.”

Success has also meant that there is less so-called “low-hanging fruit,” articles to write from scratch about important subjects. And finally, success means that Wikipedia has become too big for states around the world to ignore.

In an interview on Friday in Taipei, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, discussed the burden of popularity.

QUESTION: With its popularity, is the Wikipedia project losing steam?

JIMMY WALES: One of the concerns we had early on was, how long can this be sustained and how long is this fun for volunteers. There was a time when you could go – you know how when you link to something in Wikipedia and the article doesn’t exist, it is a red link and you click on the red link and it says edit this page. So I remember when Africa was a red link. And you could click on Africa and you could type, “Africa is a continent” hit save and you were the pioneer who discovered Africa. Obviously now that is not true anymore.

For nearly two million topics in English there already is some kind of an article. And it gets to be problematic in some areas, if you think philosophically, how many articles could there legitimately be in Wikipedia. That’s a question I am smart enough never to answer. Because any answer I would make is inevitably doomed to be a classic mistake. … Just last year, at Wikimania in Boston, there was a guy from Poland who brought … a big book in Polish, it was a concise biography book of 20,000 notable Polish people. And what he had done is he had gone through this book and made a random selection, flipping through, of like 100 names. And he checked in English Wikipedia to see how many of those names had been covered and it was less than 2 percent. Some of these were … the ones naturally enough, Lech Walesa, people who we would know, but the mayor of Warsaw in 1868. We have nothing.

QUESTION: And it should?

JIMMY WALES: And it should. And it could. There is no reason why it couldn’t. On the other hand, who is going to write that exactly? Well, somebody is. There are Polish history buffs out there. There are also people who say, “Give me a list and I’ll work on it.” Here is a list of all the mayors of Warsaw and I will go through and find what I can find. There will be short articles maybe. So those kind of things are legitimate and still remain to be done. Lots and lots of stuff like that. So in the early days I worried if participation would fall once it gets big. Well, participation doesn’t seem to be falling. The kind of work that needs to be done is of a different type. It is kind of interesting.

QUESTION: So there is still more to write?

JIMMY WALES: There is always the contemporary news, contemporary topics that need updating, and that can be lots of things. One thing I have looked at before is that when we started the project we thought we could use the 1911 Britannica which is in the public domain. Use that as a base to get some articles. And frankly they were unusable. They were just out of date. So you would think, if the article is Julius Caesar, how much could have changed. A whole lot, frankly. Since 1911 a lot of our understanding of historical things has changed dramatically with discoveries in archeology and things like this. If you go digging around in 1911 Britannica you would get that white, male, colonial view of the world that shines through in surprising places. Things do change, even with something like Julius Caesar. You would think, gosh the Wikipedia article must be basically done. But I am sure it has been edited several times in the last week.

So it seems we have lots to do, but I still wonder in the long run, do people lose interest. I remember when we were drawing close to 1,000,000 articles and I was extrapolating when that might happen. It was not that close to April Fool’s Day but I remember thinking if we cross on April Fool’s Day I am going to send out a post to everyone saying, that was fun. I deleted everything. Let’s do it again. Start over. That was good. We’ll do it right this time.

QUESTION: Is quality still a big concern?

JIMMY WALES: In the English Wikipedia there has been a huge focus in the last year, particularly in biographies, which is where I really placed a lot of emphasis. As we have gotten bigger, and the low-hanging fruit is gone, now people are writing biographies on less and less famous people, which is harder and harder. … it gets really touchy for people. It gets harder to maintain. In general, speaking very broadly, you can write anything you want about Michael Jackson because he is over it. George W. Bush, he’s over it. He really doesn’t care what Wikipedia says about him. You probably do. … For one thing, it will be the No. 2 link in Google. And it feels very historical. This is my epitaph, in a certain sense. This is who I am. It sums up my life in three paragraphs. And if there is an error you are going to be annoyed.

Particularly there are certain people who are famous for being controversial. And so that gets very touchy. Though certain people, like Ann Coulter, I met her. I chatted with her. And she was not happy with her biography but what she was not happy about was surprising.

QUESTION: It was too short?

JIMMY WALES: Somebody had written that she was raised as a Catholic. And she wasn’t. And someone said she had gotten money from the Mellons or somebody and she hadn’t. But all the sort of, she says these outrageous things, that was fine. She accepts that. She knows her position in the culture. She didn’t say, how dare you say I made this inflammatory remark. That’s what she does. There are a lot of people who maybe aren’t that comfortable. So the community has taken this to heart and we have become much more rigorous about sourcing.

QUESTION: What sort of impact do you think Wikipedia has made?

JIMMY WALES: There was a young man who was assigned to drive me around when I was here in Taiwan last time and he told me that he had been raised in a very Taiwanese nationalist family. He told me he was raised with the very basic belief that the mainlanders had been brainwashed and had all the wrong history and he told me that now that he has been working on Wikipedia and he has met a lot of them he said, I still think they are wrong about a lot of things but I can kind of see they have a point here and there. And it was interesting to me because this was a young man who has moved from thinking of the other as some sort of mysterious, brainwashed masses to going oh, actually, these are people like me. That’s just one person, but this spirit is reflected, hopefully, in Wikipedia. And that is kind of a microcosm of what is going on bigger picture around the world. There is a real spirit of global humanity that begins to transcend other things.

I don’t want to get too utopian here. There is a great book. Marc Andreessen gave me this book called “The Victorian Internet,” which is a fabulous read. And it’s about the telegraph system. The book makes the argument that the telegraph in its day was much more revolutionary than the Internet is in our day. Because … it took a month to get a message from England to New York and New York was a week and half. And suddenly that became instant in the space of 10 years. And so the author goes back and reviews a lot of the hype of that era. They sort of had their own Internet bubble back then. There were a lot of utopia arguments back then that really echo some of the stuff you read today. People would say, now that universally acknowledged, I think today, that kings and governments go to war by getting ordinary people to hate the others. So the argument was made that now that people can communicate directly, so the English can speak with the French, one Englishman can speak to an ordinary Frenchman directly in real time by sending messages back and forth we will have a deeper understanding and then we will have no more war. The 20^th century came and it was pretty much a fiasco.

So whenever I hear myself waxing too poetic about the world coming together, there is a cautionary face to say, well, the technology doesn’t automatically make that happen, we really have to think about how to encourage those kinds of things. I do think it absolutely makes a difference.