| By Gavin Chait,
on 23 April 2007
|
 Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia The more impressive part of this ambitious venture is the creator of all this content: everyone. More than four million people have helped in the production of over seven million articles in 251 languages. Over 1.7 million of these articles are in English. Wales is in South Africa as part of University of the Western Cape's Digital Freedom Expo. The university has invited a range of speakers from across the open-source movement to engage with it as UWC launches their new open-source software movement on campus. Wikipedia is becoming a major source of international culture. Any parent has probably already noticed that most of Junior's school work is now sourced almost entirely from information on Wikipedia. This, of course, calls into question the bona fides and accuracy of an encyclopaedia that "anyone can edit". And there have been one or two scandals. Craig Newmark, creator of the super-popular craigslist.com, declared, "Bad people are early adopters," to describe the way Internet vandalism seems to start right away. Yet, says Wales, "Most of the people who want to vandalise Wikipedia are idiots."
Aside from the hype, though, Wikipedia is a sophisticated globalised organisation. Imagine the company which can handle 251 languages and four million engaged volunteers. Obscure battles in obscure countries are thrust centre-stage into Wikipedia's domain. "Recently," says Wales, "a small group of people created a new Wiki in a new language. There were only about five of them but, after a few months we received a complaint. It turns out that the language was a discredited version of their country's and no longer spoken. The group of writers were a political faction attempting to re-establish the dominance of this language. We investigated, discovered that it was true and corrected the situation." Does this mean deleting the information? "No, we simply relabelled it as the old version of the language." Neutrality and the neutral point of view are critical, in Wales view. "Monocultures are unsafe; if everyone has to copy the same line then everyone can commit the same error. We need to have thoughtful toleration for everyone's ideals." "Imagine that we're designing a restaurant. We don't want to build it around the worst-case scenario where we're scared to give people knives because they may attack each other. We want to build around good people doing good things. Wikipedia's tools come from the assumption that most people want to do good." That doesn't mean, though, that errors or vandalism don't creep in. When that happens then the community responds as quickly as possible. "Anyone who shows up and isn't an extremist can complain. We had a situation on the Tartar language Wiki where it said on the front-page ‘Long live the Tartars'. This would be equivalent to saying ‘God save the Queen' on the front page of the British entry. It isn't neutral. We thought that the Tartar community would object but they recognised the neutrality issue and took it down." There is even a strong Iranian community of Wikipedians even though their government is ostensibly against free speech and the Internet. "We are worried about the safety of the leader of the Iranian Wiki community. We asked him, ‘What should we do if you get arrested?' He said, ‘Make a noise.' His wife has my personal number and we keep in regular contact." Technology is also changing. Cell-phone access of a content-rich site like Wikipedia is difficult. Mobiled, a South African initiative, allows people to SMS keywords to Wikipedia and the service will then read back relevant entries. At this point, as the service is free, Wikipedia relies exclusively on the donations of benevolent citizens to finance its operations. Last year they spent $ 1 million. This year they expect to spend $ 2 - 3 million. "We have an extremely powerful and recognised brand," says Wales, "and we would like to carefully see what ways there may be to commercialise that brand." So they are planning a certain amount of brand licensing; a Wikipedia Trivial Pursuit game may be in the offing, for instance. "We have to be careful; we cannot lose our neutrality and independence." While Wikia, another component of Wikimedia, hosts advertising and makes a small amount of revenue from Google Adverts, Wikipedia will remain advert free. "Every other week some major company presents a huge offer to work directly with Wikipedia, but we are concerned about losing our independence and so we turn them down. When people read an encyclopaedia they would be surprised to see adverts in it, like a magazine. And there will always be doubts about the neutrality of an encyclopaedia that, for instance, advertises a specific brand of vehicle on the entry for cars." The management of the various Wikis linked to Wikimedia is subject to the will of the "community"; a loose collection of volunteers. Brad Patrick, appointed as CEO in late 2006 and who left suddenly in April 2007, declared, "Decisions may as well be made by a pie-eating contest." He found it difficult to create a system of responsibility and order in a community so diametrically opposed to the concept. "Those with the hubris to believe there is nothing to learn from 400 years of corporate governance prowess are doomed to eventual failure," he said. Discussing the future of Wikipedia Wales is sanguine, "We're looking for a new executive director and we expect it to take a while. We need someone who is good with the community, good with the foundation, good with IT and good with the press." He describes the US Red Cross' fire-response teams. "After every house fire, the fire department calls the Red Cross and a team is despatched that provides blankets, food and a place to stay. Every team is run by volunteers but has a single permanent staff member, often subject to a volunteer team leader. This person is the volunteer-coordinator; there job is to be there and make sure the job gets done. So if the volunteers don't feel like getting up at two in the morning then the permanent staff member is paid and obliged to take care of things." In other words, as Wikipedia gets larger and larger, the difficulty of co-ordination gets more complex. It is essential to have a person who will act as the memory for the organisation and "know" what needs to be done, even if they're not actually leading the process. In a world of big personalities, finding someone who is prepared to co-ordinate the leadership of others is going to be hard. Different versions of this interview have appeared in WATTNow and The Cape Argus. |
