An evening with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

Organized by Global Brand Forum and NUS Enterprise with support of IDA, E27 and The Digital Movement, I have spent an interesting afternoon in Ritz Carlton, Millenia here in Singapore to listen to a talk by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Perhaps, the picture on the left speaks a thousand words about how the evening transpired, since the discussion revolves around censorship, creative commons and free software movement. The event began from Jimmy talking about the lessons he learned as a social entrepreneur, the trials and tribulations of Wikipedia, his take about his competitors and also shares what the next steps for the non-profit encyclopedia in the Internet will be making in the coming months.   Here are some interesting lessons which I got from the occasion:

• Taking from a failed model to a successful one: In his talk, he talked about the initial work he did with Larry Sanger about Nupedia and how it did not scale the way which he wanted. In fact, there is a short discussion about when is the time an entrepreneur should give up on pursuing an idea. In fact, the success of the wikipedia stemmed from taking away an initial assumption he had on the free encyclopedia which is to allow everyone to be able to contribute to the free encyclopedia instead of only relying on the experts.
• When management kicks in: I thought the most interesting anecdote in the whole event is about how he transferred the running of Wikipedia to the current CEO. He also made a point on how he has to transition from a founder to an evangelist and the importance of not sidestepping his CEO to ensure that the whole organization runs on its own. In fact, a lot of times, it is difficult for founders to transition to a different role because of the passion and effort they put in an organization.
• Finding the right model for Wikipedia: Clearly, there are challenges to find a model to sustain Wikipedia. In the end, he has to create a company to sell the wiki platform and also not divert Wikipedia's original mission to provide free access to knowledge for everyone out there.
• Editorial Judgment vs Censorship: Clearly, to Jimmy Wales, there is a clear distinction to these terms. It is the heart of the freedom of speech issue. He made the point that the editors should have the right to make the call to stop spammers or vandals in Wikipedia, and that action should not construed as censorship. To him, corporations and government institutions have greater propensity to censorship, which he defines as blocking users access from information. I was heartened that Wikipedia is currently testing a function that moves towards a liberal and open approach in dealing with differences on a certain subject among contributors.
• On Competitors: I asked him the question on what he thinks about the competition from Citizenium, Knol and other wikipedia clones. His response is that he did not bother about them but rather to think about how to make Wikipedia better. He felt that in every market, there should be competition so to encourage innovation and ideas to make the technology better.

In any case, I thought that it was an event that is well worth my time, and a time to meet and catch up with old friends, given that I have been busy lately.

Update: Check out the pictures from Phlook.

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Comments

[Jimmy Wales]

Just to be clear, I don't think that technically speaking corporations can "censor" information, either. Censorship is only possible to governments.

The key distinction between censorship and editorial judgment is the initiation of force to prevent others from speaking. Corporations have no (legal) ability to initiate force in the way that governments can and do.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/censorship.html

[Walter]

Its a pity that I missed his talk due to reservist commitments. One question I would have loved to ask him is how he can continue to sustain Wikipedia just purely based on donations alone. I mean, trying to sell the wiki platform to organisations for their use is cool, but how many organisations can really benefit from it beyond those which are heavily knowledge-centric and research based? In Singapore our working culture somehow doesn't quite promote collaborative knowledge sharing and dissemination, as well as working jointly on a common document.

[Agagooga]

The main problem with Wikipedia, I think, is the morass of rules and norms surrounding it that those who are not part of the community will not know.

These include not just written rules but unwritten ones (e.g. editors' consensus - which won't be documented in the policy pages), and constitute a very high barrier to editing (at least for articles which are regularly monitored)

They are also a good way to stymie efforts to make an article more accurate/inclusive of views (e.g. I tried to add in Obama's flip-flopping to his Wikipedia article but was repeatedly stopped with bizarre and arcane justifications which don't reflect what's on the policy pages)