Ask Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales About Online Collaboration

Back in 2001 we did a "double" Slashdot Interview with Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the then-brand-new Nupedia, which has since become the amazingly useful Wikipedia. This is a perfect time to catch up with Jimbo (as friends call him), and learn not only how he managed to make Wikipedia work and grow so well, but what we can do to help -- and what future plans he has for this outstanding Web resource. (10 of your highest-moderated questions will be sent to Jimbo by email. We'll post his answers as soon as we get them back.)

Licensing and the Wiki

One of the more unique aspects of the Wikipedia (aside from the entire concept of a community edited reference) is its license. The current license for content seems to fit rather well with the goals of the project, but seems to cause a few hurdles as well (i.e. publishing a print version of the Wikipedia). So I guess my question is, what other license models did you consider when starting out with the project and what made you go with the current one? Also, looking back would you have done anything different with the licensing?

Re:Licensing and the Wiki

What do you mean? The GFDL is very friendly to dead-tree publishing.

The only "hurdle" is that no publisher can get exclusive rights to publish it. Is that what you mean? Do you think that is really a practical limitation in this case? (I don't, as I think it is too big and would take too much startup cost with too small a market for some other publisher to come in and poach.)

-Peter

Re:Licensing and the Wiki

Hrm, I work at a printshop. Does that mean I could take some articles (based on a particular subject), put it into print (with all proper acknowledgement of course)

Yes and yes

and profit off of it (charging only the printer fees)?

No need to limit your profits to printing fees. You can charge whatever people will pay. Note that if you distribute more than 100 copies the license requires you to distribute a machine-readable copy with each printed copy, or provide a pointer to the on-line sources.

And if so, what's stopping anybody from doing it in the first place (aside from the constantly changing data)?

Not a thing! And that's the idea. From the GFDL preamble:

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.

Seems kinda shady to me...

Why? The authors of the Wikipedia content have explicitly given you and everyone else permission to do these things, as long as you follow the terms of the license. What's shady about doing what the owner has given you permission to do?

Re:Licensing and the Wiki

And why the GFDL? Would he pick a Creative Commons share-a-like license if he were starting wikipedia today?

The GFDL seems full of arbitrary-seeming and overcomplicated rules about "Cover texts", "Back-Cover texts", "Invariant sections" and so forth that are difficult to 1) understand the reasoning behind and 2) adhere to properly. Read it yourself here [gnu.org]. It's also requires you to give credit to the "principal authors", whom exactly that would be for a given wikipedia page is impossible to tell with legal certainty. It just doesn't seem appropriate for something like the wikipedia.

Academic Co-operation?

Has there been any major academic co-operation from major universities or research groups to contribute wikipedia?

I know people contribute individually, but I am just curious to see if there has been any major institutional contributions that the project is aware of.

Re:Academic Co-operation?

Yes, see Wikipedia:School and university projects [wikipedia.org]

Donations

What's the current state of donations and what is the future of Wikipedia if fund raising without advertisements does not increase?

Re:Donations

The donations are tracked at : http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising The current provisional budget is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisiona l_budget and should cover our need until 2005. I personally think it will stick to donation. The simple fact to talk about advertisement already lead to a fork of the spanish wikipedia ! :o) I am almost sure a big organisation will eventually give found like UNESCO or UN.

google ads..

When is wikipedia going to get google ads or some other form of text ads?

Re:google ads..

how about making the ads optional, in the way that you would have to enable them?

sometimes there could be some intresting stuff from google ads on some weird pages.

Re:google ads..

Interesting thought.

To be able to set a simple cookie that says "Yes, show me ads so I can support this site" would help on many levels. It would allow people to contribute money without actually contributing money, it would provide a source of income for the site, and you wouldn't have anyone complaining about the ads because they specifically had to select to see them.

I don't think I've ever seen a site do anything like this, but I think Wiki might be a great place to try it. I know many of us have Wikipedia's Random Page [wikipedia.org] as our start page and I would happily have a couple of banners pop up everytime I launch my browser as just another way to help.

Re:google ads..

well, maybe somebody should make a mozilla/firefox plugin that would insert some ads on it and forward the money then as donations to wikipedia...

Advertising?

How has the word about wikipedia been spread? Has wikipedia actually paid a dime for all it's publicity, I don't think I've seen any advertisement when I think about it.

Re:Advertising?

Until now, word of mouth. For instance, I have talked about 10 people into participating. Jimbo has been saying advertising is one of the things that needs to be worked on. You can help. Put a link to it on your website for starters. Limited print editions of wikipedia (called "wikireaders") are being tried out; if it takes off perhaps the revenue could be used for advertising. Currently, though, the priority is to buy more hardware and keep the site going.

Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs?

Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

And do you see the future direction being more or less that way?

Re:Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs?

There were some interesting quotes from Britannica's VP regarding Wikipedia on the Boston.com website [boston.com]:

"I think it's exactly the right price," said Michael Ross, senior vice president of corporate development at Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago.

Ross admits to reading and enjoying Wikipedia, and has even gotten ideas there for future Britannica articles. But the absence of traditional editorial controls makes Wikipedia unsuited to serious research. "How do they know it's accurate?" Ross asks. "People can put down anything."

A few years ago, Microsoft Corp. scoffed at free software; today the company is running scared. Britannica's Ross seems a lot more relaxed about his company's future. It's difficult to see why.

Re:Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs?

Good post.

"How do they know it's accurate?" Ross asks.

I would answer Mr. Ross's question with a question: "Has the Encyclopedia Britannica ever had to correct an article?" The answer, of course, is yes. So you can't trust the EB to be entirely accurate either.

I've been contributing for a short time now, and it's clear there are a lot of eyes on the work. As time goes on, the articles become more correct. There is no way the EB can put the same number of people on any given topic. Ultimately, Wikipedia may become more accurate than the EB. It is certainly more detailed.

Oh yeah. He's watching it all right.

Re:Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs?

It's an interesting idea, but as you suggested, all votes would HAVE to tied to a specific revision of each page. Besides, if someone votes "Inaccurate", others have no way of knowing exactly what the voter had a problem with.

For this, every Wikipedia article has a Talk page where anyone (anonymous and logged-in) can write whatever they want about the article: inaccuracies, suggested additions, etc., without directly affecting the article itself.

In my opinion, openly and specifically discussing inaccuracy is much more effective than seeing a vague "Inaccurate" rating.

User system complexity.

Do you foresee having to add more complexity to your user system? Some kind of rating/karma system to discourage people who have a tendency to write libel?

Re:User system complexity.

The short answer is probably No, but the long answer is more involved. Wikipedia prefers to implement access controls in wetware where possible, to prevent abuse by technically saavy trolls and/or vandals. So, while there may be facilities (eventually) for a web of trust of some sort, and an article review/verification-type system is often spoken of speculatively (ideas and plans bandied about), Wikipedia is not [wikipedia.org] Everything2 [wikipedia.org] and does not, will not have coded experience of that sort.

Quality Control

Hi,

First of all, the concept of a community-built encyclopedia, open to submissions and revisions from users, is wonderful. It's much like open-source, in fact, and Wikipedia certainly exemplifies how to reapply the OS model to other contexts.

However, the contexts of encyclopedias and software are different. Significantly so. I'm interested specifically in quality control- you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior.

In what ways can a Wiki article be bad, and how can one tell? Do you think QC is a large issue for Wikipedia, and do you have any plans to further integrate the community in the QC process (perhaps akin to the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system)?

Best,
Raindance

Re:Quality Control

I wonder if it would be possible to write software using a wiki approach. You know, have a web site with the beginning of the program, with clearly defined goals. Each function call or class structure would have its own web site with its own clearly defined goals. Better code would complete the goals with less bugs and / or less run time. I know the bottom line isn't that different from OSS, but I think there would be quite a bit more code reuse, resulting in both better quality code and smaller programs. If you somehow added in some automatic code checking (like submitted code was automatically compiled and then the errors, if any, added to the web site for people to fix), along with output vs desired output checking (output within certain ranges, etc.) Or even keep an old (known to work) function, then compile the new one, automatically compare their outputs for the same inputs, and if they match up for all inputs, replace the old code with new code as the current version. Holy shit I hope I didn't just give away the best idea ever!

Wikicracy

Speaking about application of the wiki approach in other fields: What about using the wiki approach for the formulation of laws? Imagine if you would be able to co-author your own laws!

Of course there would have to be the normal off-wiki voting by the usual legal bodies, also probably some law experts would do a finish before that, but a "pre-final" version of the law could be developed the Wiki way.

Re:Wikicracy

What about using the wiki approach for the formulation of laws?

My political science research project (Democracy 2.0 [democracy2.org]) is looking into doing something like that as part of a future ballot initiative building web application. The site currently only makes a fleeting reference to it, but more information will be added in the near future.

Re:Quality Control

Wikipedia currently has several organized quality control efforts - Cleanup [wikipedia.org], peer review [wikipedia.org], and feature article candidates [wikipedia.org]. As the name implies, cleanup is for articles that are really in need of TLC. Peer review is for people to assess the factual/neutrality of an article, and featured article candidates is the promotion process for our featured articles (from which I choose the daily main page article). In addition, watchlists let people see when an article changes, so factually incorrect changes do not last very long on well-watched articles.

How to balance coverage?

Is there an effort to get articles written on specific missing topics? If one looks at a commercial encyclopedia, the full range of human knowledege is covered. On Wikipedia, OTOH, one finds several articles about slashdot trolls, for instance, while other (important) fields are still unwritten.

Re:How to balance coverage?

The community portal highlights things that could be done to enhance the encyclopedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_P ortal One example is a request to create the article "Tibet independance movement". Articles wich are really small are often listed as "stub" and a list of them is available. Often editors looks at those stubs and try to enhance them somehow (see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Find_or_fix _a_stub ). There is also a lot of translators that keep importing / exporting articles. A good example is the Român wikipedia that import french articles :o)

The constant bickering...

How is (and how will) the constant bickering between differing sides of the more controversial issues (abortion, religion, etc...) be addressed? Do you expect any changes to the current system, in which it seems the same pages get edited by the same people back and forth every day?

Re:The constant bickering...

I was involved in something like what you're talking about, on the astrology article [wikipedia.org]. It was extremely frustrating, because the article was being sat on by someone who was a true believer, and we got into an edit war over it. I also remember a linked article that was a bio of a modern astrologer, and it was just the gushiest kind of fan bio you could imagine. Well, I gave up in disgust, but checking back today, it really seems to have been greatly improved. Apparently their mechanisms for dealing with this kind of thing do work, although it may take a long time, and some people, like me, may not have the patience for it.

Sociopaths

The systems in place to protect the database from "crapflooders" and "trolls" seems to work quite well. However, someone who is hell-bent on making it their business to turn a particular entry into an edit war unless they "win" seems to still be an issue. The lesser-read entries are more of a concern. For example, I went to look up some information on the Nintendo Mario character and found this user called Marcus2 who constantly kept making edits to other people entries based on his own point of view. Since these entries aren't as of a high profile as, say, Saddam Hussein, what kinds of safeguards can you think of to help ensure less popular topics become skewed?

P2P?

Have you ever considered p2p-based alternatives to deliver Wikipedia articles, to reduce the load on the web servers?

Getting people involved

What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?

How extensible is the model?

As Wikipedia grows, so grows the opportunity for misinformation to creep in. With a relatively small work, there is a lot of public scrutiny on each piece. What happens when the database becomes huge? What group would care for the integrity of the information?

Advertisers, Spammers, Search Engines, oh my!

I like the concept of a wiki, but I'm a bit concerned about the current implementation.

Right now, we are seeing several instances where crawlers are disrupting wikis, spammers are embedding wiki links to their sites to boost their Google rankings, and advertisers are placing ads in wikis until someone goes through and nukes them.

Do you have any thoughts as to how wikis can be modified to prevent things like this in the future?

wikipedia

wikipedia has everything, they even have a self-referential entry [wikipedia.org], are there plans as this grows to have any kind of trusted moderator system? how do you handle people who troll (input bad data, delete good data)?

Re:wikipedia

If the experts don't correct those bad articles then they are frickin' useless members of the human race.

Are you saying that people who don't read Wikipedia are useless? Because frankly most experts don't bother with it.

Dr. Jones: "So what you are doing this weekend Dr. Smith?"

Dr. Smith: "I'm going to be spending two whole glorious days reviewing Wikipedia for technical accuracy in the field of nuclear physics."

Dr. Jones: "Good Heavens! Why would you want to do that?"

Dr. Smith: "Some anonymous coward at Slashdot said it was my duty as a responsible member of the human race..."

Applying wikipedia success to other projects?

How did you get so many contributors to Wikipedia?
Do you think your techniques could be used for other
projects as well?

(Specifically, as an open source author, I would love to have my users collaboratively developing the user manual - what do I need to get this going?)

Han-Wen

Limits of Wiki collaboration / vandalism defense

Is there a limit of how successful an open wiki system can be? Sooner or later, not only some simple minded lunatics will try to attack the wiki by breaking its content, but there may be distributed denial-of-service attacks from hacked systems (which makes banning-by-IP impossible) and more intelligent automated vandalism (e.g. inserting semi-random words or sentences in the texts).
Do you think that a volunteer force can defeat this forever manually, or do you expect that wikipedia will be more restricted at one point?
For instance, an Advogato-like trust network could be used to make sure that people are real, and a voting system for entries from unknown contributors.

Re:Limits of Wiki collaboration / vandalism defens

do you expect that wikipedia will be more restricted at one point? For instance... a voting system for entries from unknown contributors.

(falls off chair, laughing)

After all, slashdot and kuroshin show that voting works to weed out incorrect content!

As 'Replies to Common Objections [wikipedia.org]' explains, it's impossible to damage the information stored (short of an unpatched OS/MySQL/CVS vulnerability), easy to clean up the damage done, easy to monitor changes collaboratively (anyone can see the list of recent changes), etc. Defacements tend to be reverted in minutes. There's also a frank admission of wiki*'s flaws. Future possible countermeasures are discussed here, including authentication, peer-review, etc.

The same wikipedia response to common objections talks about bots, automated attacks, marginal quality, etc.

It's even possible to prevent defacing of a link you plan to 'publish': in July 7, 2004's wikipedia story, someone mentioned wikipedia and needing to link to a specific version of a wikipedia entry to prevent slashdot-referenced articles from being doctored. Turned out that this, too, was trivial to implement. In other words, I could create a set of URL's to unalterable articles simply by using the
'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=S lashd ot&oldid=2346815' syntax discussed in slashdot comment 9630476 [slashdot.org].

Pretty cool, huh?

Overcoming knowledge hoarding

How do you think Wikipedia helps humans overcome their tendency to hoard knowledge? In capitalist societies, those with specialized knowledge can reap tremendous profits if market demand warrants. Even in non-capitalist societies, those with specialized knowledge may receive elevated status or other powers. Given that Wikipedia follows a not-for-profit model of anonymous submissions, what drivers lead people to contribute? Do you think status-oriented, rent-seeking individuals contribute to Wikipedia?

Is a collaborative world the future?

We're seeing a definite growth in large-scale collaborative projects with the coming of age of the Internet. These ventures (open source, wikipedia, etc) are run by volunteers, pretty much like traditional non-profit organizations, except for the fact that the number of volunteers that they have access to is phenomenally (sp?) large compared to their offline counterparts.

Ofcourse, these projects go dead against the brick and mortar corporations (Microsoft, Britannica), which, for years have based their business around selling content that is now available for free due to the effort put in by organizers and volunteers of these open-source projects.

Needless to say, these corporations have been openly attacking these volunteer activities as anti-constitutional, anti-capitalistic, etc. Do you think, that collaborative, volunteer-based societies are the thing of the future? Do you think that someday people/organizations doing things for the good_of_society rather than for profit (hate that term) will become a rule rather than an exception?

Webservices ? Data Formats ?

Ever thought of offering alternative data access services other than HTML ?
examples of other successful community driven sites such as IMDB [imdb.com] can be queried via email (in a structured way) and a huge number of applications are now built upon these capabilities alone, ever thought of offering up the data in alternative formats (XML/SOAP/TELNET/TXT etc etc) so clever programmers can create applications that could utilise the data in new and interesting ways ?

China and Wiki

Hey Jimbo,

How do you feel about China's blocking of Wiki, and what effect, if any, do you think it'll have on the service that Wikipedia can and cannot provide to both the Chinese and the world community?

Corporate intervention

Have there been any attempts by corporations to purchase and/or secure rights to the WikiWiki technology?

Re:How to stop the Cabal

Hello, and welcome Wiki-trolls. We're glad to have you with us. Is this 142.*.*.* speaking? Perhaps you can tell us which you are, so that we can post the detailed explanation of why you are banned? We'll be open if you are.

Besides, everyone knows that there is no Cabal [wikipedia.org].

For those not in the know, and are interested enough to type shortcuts of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/shortcutgoeshere- WP:VFD is Votes for Deletion, where pages are sent to be voted on for deletion, WP:RFA is Requests for Adminship (now featuring at least one completely ludicous candidate), and you can look up the WP:RULES which this user finds so oppressive.

How do you ensure the accuracy...

How do you ensure the accuracy of the entries?

What I would like to see comments on would be...

the abillity to have colabertation in artwork similar to wikipedia and open source. I see this would be most usefull in 3d applications. If there were a universal format for 3d that could be easily converted to-from other 3d formats. This way someone could create a 3d model of say, the statue of liberty, this could then be improved appon and details added by the general public and anytime someone wanted to have a statue of liberty in their 3d environment it would already be available with eventually nearly exacting details.

Is this something that is possible with the type of frame work? Would it be possible within the artistic communities?

Local copy of Wikipedia

I would like to be able to have a copy of Wikipedia for offline use. When will we see the first Wikipedia "distribution"? (SuSE/Redhat etc. Wikipedia anyone?)

Re:Local copy of Wikipedia

Here it is:

http://download.wikimedia.org/ [wikimedia.org]

Also, formatted nicely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_ database [wikipedia.org]

My Question

What are you currently involved in as far as legal pressure to modify the current system of copyright and/or patent law that restricts the public domain and the availability and distribution of information? Where have we gone from Eldred v. Ashcroft?

What can we do to help in the current efforts?

Do you have frequent legal issues brought against you by others with regards to your material, or has this been the exception rather than the rule?

How are these issues dealt with, are there any cases that are particulary indicative of the problems with today's copyright laws?

Thanks for your time, keep up the good work.

Hiawatha Bray's article in today's Globe...

online for 48 hours,
One great source--if you can trust it [boston.com], contains the familiar criticism that "it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability."

How do you respond to this comment?

Does you feel that the Wikipedia community has group standards that are comparable to, say, the group standards of people who have graduated from journalism schools?

How ideal is Wikipedia's license?

Wikipedia's entire content and submissions are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). This license is considered problematic by some people in the free software community because it allows either the author or future editors to put invariable sections into a document. Do you share these concerns? Could somebody, theoretically, fork off a version of Wikipedia "enhanced" with invariable, i.e. proprietary, content?

I understand that there were not any good alternatives to the GNU FDL when Wikipedia was started. But would you rather pick a Creative Commons license for the project today?

The beer aspect

I understand the concept of free as in freedom, and not as in free beer. I recognize that they are not always the same thing. And I am an advocate of free software, quite frankly.
But one night when I was driving home with my father, I explained to him the concept behind wikipedia. He thought it was fascinating, and yet it dumbfounded him. How can such a thing afford to exist? What about the massive server costs?
I did the usual explaining of donations and such. However, he raised a valid point: It would be difficult for us to have many successful projects donation-wise.
How do you think free as in freedom content can continue to exist in the future, and where do you see it going... financially?

Have any libraries found you?

That is to say, do you know if libraries (especially any major research libraries) have begun linking to Wikipedia on said libraries' online resource pages?

One area Wikipedia seems to lack

Other encyclopedias cite sources for their work. Wikipedia does not seem to have a facility for this, and I have yet to see sources cited in any of the articles. Am I correct in my assumptions? Why aren't sources cited? It would add credibility to the project.

Re:One area Wikipedia seems to lack

Other encyclopedias cite sources for their work. Wikipedia does not seem to have a facility for this, and I have yet to see sources cited in any of the articles. Am I correct in my assumptions? Why aren't sources cited? It would add credibility to the project.

I have seen sources cited in some articles. But it seems inconsistent, true.

Anyway, citations only mean that some other schmuck said it too ;) OK, it may help somtimes...

I think that Wikipedia and similar efforts highlight how we should question all media. The mere fact that something appears in video or dead tree does not necessarily make it more likely to be true. Nor are expert reviewers infallible or free of bias.

Reliability and Sabotage

What is the incidence of well-meaning but misinformed people introducing incorrect information? Do you make any attempt to track this?

Related, what is the incidence of what appears to be intentional sabotage by introducing incorrect information? Can you distinguish?

Maybe...

... this isn't the right place to ask, but how about integrating Project Gutenberg with Wikipedia? Wouldn't it be great to have hyperlinked online books? :-))

Collective Authoring Process of the Future

Today, to write into a wikipedia article, you find a page, make a few changes in wiki syntax, and talk about the changes in the talk page. You also send notes in your personal user page.

I'm wondering: Is that process going to remain the same?

What process do you see people using in the year 2015 to collaboratively build articles in the future?

What about organizing groups of related pages- what kind of process do you think will develop there?

False and swayed information?

How do we keep the entries honest?

I was able to alter a current entry with no questions asked. The change was an attempt to add information according to my point of view.

It seems to me that someone could do this with an agenda and repeat daily. Is there anything to stop someone from leaning entries in favor of political or (anti)corporate positions.
Once an entry is considered historically correct, can the entry be locked? Would we want to?
I realize there is a way to point out disputes once found. I'm concerned with bent truth, finalizing a dispute and keeping it from recurring.
KenWood

Question really for /.ers...

Is Wikipedia basically becoming the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Money issues

Considering the fact that wikipedia has gotten bigger than ever, are there any real potential fears that the lack of a steady cash flow may cause the whole project to collapse? Has any (and what kind of) unfavorable contingency plans been considered (like ads) and outright rejected, only to be reconsidered again at a later time?

Can it be made distributed?

I see the long term danger to Wikipedia being that control over the key data, the trust metric, is centralised.

Do you see any way in which readers of a future version of the Wikipedia could choose for themselves on an individual basis who they trust, and be presented with an edited view of the data based on that preference?

This might require third order mediated trust [toothycat.net]

What happened to Nupedia?

I know this is a late question and probably won't get modded up, but I'll ask it anyway:

What lead to the demise of Nupedia? What is wrong with a set of peer-reviewed articles instead of the free-for-all that Wikipedia as turned into? Can a more scholarly version of Wikipedia ever succeed? (I.E. something more like Nupedia where you have to somehow demonstrate knowledge of a particular topic first.)

While I can find info about this elsewhere, I would like to get Jimmy Wales' perspective of this, particularly with his ties to Nupedia in the past.

Re:Online collaborators?

What really motivates people to write extensive information about a subject? How reliable is the information the some John Doe submits?