Keynote Dialogue:  Jimmy Wales and Michael Kinsley

Transcript for 2005 Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Keynote Dialogue: Jimmy Wales Founder, Wikipedia; President, Chairman, WikiMedia Foundation

Michael Kinsley Former Editorial and Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times

Moderators: Jan Schaffer and Bryan Monroe

Jan Schaffer, Moderator:
We’re going to proceed right now with our luncheon dialogue and we’ve asked Jimmy to start by giving us a little intro into wikis. As you know, we have with us today Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor of the L.A. Times, founder of Slate Magazine and distinguished columnist, who recently launched into the news with his efforts to do some experimentation with the editorial page. And Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, who is the founder of Wikipedia, which has now branched into many other things: Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and, of interest to the journalism crowd, WikiNews.

I’ve asked Jimmy to give us a seven to 10 minute primer on wikis to help everybody in here understand how it works, and then we’ll launch into the conversation from that.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia:
First of all, how many of you in here have used Wikipedia?

(Most of audience hands raised.)

And how many of you have actually edited Wikipedia?

(Almost no hands raised.)

OK, so not good.

I was just speaking at a music festival, of all things, in Austria, and I asked the same question and at least half the kids in the audience raised their hands that they had edited Wikipedia. It was a lot of college kids, so it’s the new thing.

I’m going to give you a quick overview of how Wikipedia works and show you what it’s all about.

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. All over the planet people are working. The English Wikipedia has 727,331 articles as of a couple of minutes ago.

One of the things that’s of particular interest to journalists is that we’ve had a long tradition at Wikipedia of doing a really interesting and good job on breaking news stories. So even though we’re an encyclopedia and we focus a lot on historical topics and things like that—here we have Sandy Koufax, the famous baseball player—we also do a lot of breaking news events and we do a very nice job of that. I wanted to show you a little bit about how that happens.

Listed on the front page in the news is our Hurricane Katrina article, which was created when it was still Tropical Storm Katrina and renamed when it was upgraded to a hurricane. It’s been an ongoing, changing article as events have developed, and we basically cover background information. The table of contents of the article is over here on the left and it goes on and on and on with lots of information. You can see comparisons for some historical context, information about the evacuation and preparations.

So how does this all happen? Who writes all this and how do they do it?

First, I’ll show you what it looks like to edit when you click to edit the Hurricane Katrina article. You click “Edit this page,” and here’s the edit box. You can see all of the information here that is in the article, and one of the interesting things in this article is that it says, “Anyone vandalizing this article may be blocked for up to 48 hours without further warning.” That wasn’t put there by me, and in fact I was a little surprised when I saw it because there’s not actually any formal rule that has come from me that has said that people are allowed to do this. But the community decided that if you vandalize this article it’s like a “shoot on sight”—maybe they saw what happened with the looters—because this is a very high profile, very important article, and we don’t like it when people are goofing around with such an article. So the community just warns people when you click that if you mess with this article you’re going to be banned for 48 hours without warning.

It’s very easy to edit; all you have to do is go down here and change something and hit the save button and here’s the save page that shows you a preview of your changes. I’ll show you just how quickly I can delete a lot of the article, but I’m not going to save because if I save they’ll probably ban me and we won’t be able to finish the demonstration, so I’m just going to show the preview. So that quickly, you’ll see what the page would look like, and all you have to do is hit save page and your changes would go live directly on the site at that moment. That means you could vandalize this page and for a minute or so the page could look really bad.

Every change to the page goes to the history, so I just click on this tab, “History,” and it lists all of the changes that have happened to the article over time, so you can actually look and see different edits by different people. I can go down here and see these names—I know several of these people—and I can check and compare this version after a change that EveryKing made to the last good version by RatBoy. We can quickly look and see the actual change that was made.

These are the tools that the community uses to monitor itself. We can look here, and all of these numbers are anonymous people we don’t know, and the names are people in the community, for the most part.

Here we see the changes that were made, and it looks like this ended up being no change at all, so I guess they were just changing it back to a previous version. Normally you would see the two versions side by side and any changes would be highlighted in red so that it’s very easy for people to monitor. You look and you can quickly see if someone edited the article that you don’t know, then you can check to see if the edit was good.

Associated with every article is also the “Discussion” tab, and that leads to a “talk page.” This is the talk page for Hurricane Katrina, and this is where the community discusses the article and decides what we need to do next or what’s going on here. One of the interesting things here—this is the talk page for discussing changes—is that people have gotten together here to discuss the pending tasks for the article on Hurricane Katrina. There’s a list of sub-articles that need to be created: The effect of Katrina on the United States, Louisiana and Alabama; there’s nothing yet for Florida, and you can tell because the link is red, which means someone has proposed this title for an article but nobody has filled in that article yet. People in the community are devoting themselves to finding this.

There are some notes: “Please don’t feed the trolls,” which is an old saying on the Internet. Some people like to come in and cause trouble, and what they’re trying to do is get a rise out of you and if you respond to them by arguing, you’re feeding them—that’s the energy they’re looking for. So if you click the “please don’t feed the trolls” note, it will give you a little explanation that the best thing to do with troublemakers is just to delete their changes and ignore them because then they get bored and go away.

Here we have a whole list of discussions, and one of the interesting discussions that has come out of this—and this actually came from the WikiNews community—was that we were looking at photos from the media and finding them on Yahoo! News that were pictures of people, uh, doing something. They were either “finding stuff” or they were “looting.” Apparently if you’re black you loot, and if you’re white you find. There were several instances of this, and there’s been a discussion on it. As far as I know, we were the first people to talk about that story and I don’t know if it’s been widely reported or discussed. It’s not 100 percent in all cases, but there were several cases where you would see these captions. Apparently now some of the reporters are saying there was actually a reason for it because they saw someone smash a window and go in and carry something out, or they saw somebody find stuff on the street, but it’s still the kind of question that the community loves to discuss. I looked just now and that doesn’t seem to be in the article, so maybe there aren’t any confirmable facts about it, but they’re discussing and saying that this is interesting.

There are all kinds of things like this that go on. This article starts out, “Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history,” and the person says, “This fact is purely emotional and should be removed. It’s a little too early to tell.” This was September 6, 2005. So this discussion takes place to say how exactly we should word all this, and that’s basically how it works.

Audience Question:
What is the business model for Wikipedia?

Wales:
We’re a community, and in that sense we’re just doing it, so we don’t need a business model. It’s like asking what the business model is for getting a group of friends together to play softball. You don’t really need a business model to do that. It’s fun and it’s something that people like doing, so that’s what we’re doing.

The more serious answer to the question is that we’re now the number 40 Web site on the Internet according to Alexa. We have about 2 billion page views per month and we have a huge reach, and we do that with money donated from the public. We’re a 501(c)3 organization so we get donations from the public, we get some grants and we get some large donations. We just raised $200,000 and our total budget for the coming year is going to be about $1 million. We raise that in various ways, but we don’t have any advertising on the site.

One of the reasons we can do all of this so cheaply is that it is all volunteers editing the site. We have one employee—it’s not me—and our one employee is our lead software developer who coordinates with all of our volunteer software developers to change and modify the software that we need to run the site.

Audience Question:
By shifting the editing to the community, have you created a situation where any edit will be on the site, even if for a few moments? How do you generate confidence in the articles?

Wales:
One of the things about our model that is a little bit astonishing is that if I delete this article, it would be blank, but it would be fixed very quickly.

One of the biggest parts about it is that there is a genuine community of people who know each other online—and we do have offline meet-ups and things like that—but these are people who know each other. So I can look at the history of the article and very quickly see the people who are editing the article and know who they are, and I trust them because they’ve been doing this for a long time.

People specialize in certain areas, so in baseball articles—I know absolutely nothing about baseball, so I probably wouldn’t know anyone editing baseball either—they know each other. Having that genuine community of people is what really matters, and that was one of the things that I think went wrong with the L.A. Times experiment. They launched right into it and there wasn’t really the time to quietly build a community first. A lot of random morons showed up and caused trouble.

Also, since we’re so decentralized, there are no administrators from the staff. The administrators are elected from the community and there are lots of them—there are over 600 administrators on the English Wikipedia. At the L.A. Times, they had just started and they didn’t make anybody from the outside administrators, so a bunch of us from Wikipedia showed up to try to help out because it was starting to look like a mess, but we couldn’t block the trolls and the vandals. So even if you’ve got more good people than bad, if you don’t give the good people the tools they need to kick out the bad people, it becomes the job of the internal staff and that gets very expensive.

Audience Question:
How do people become administrators?

Wales:
They’re elected by the community. There’s a nomination process and people come in and make comments: “Yes I’ve known this person and we’ve been editing the baseball articles together and he’s doing a good job. It’s no problem.” Or people will say, “Well this person’s always getting into edit wars or doing troublemaking things and they probably don’t have the cool temperament needed to be an administrator.”

But it’s all up to the community and I have nothing to do with it at all.

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