Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Keynote Dialogue (Page 2):
Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia; President, Chairman, WikiMedia Foundation

Michael Kinsley
Former Editorial and Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times

Moderators: Jan Schaffer and Bryan Monroe

Schaffer:
Mike, you've been listening to all of this, take us back in time a little bit.

Michael Kinsley, Los Angeles Times:
Well, it's true that I'm the opinion and editorial editor for the Los Angeles Times, but it's only true for another couple of hours, and Jimbo is partly responsible for that, so I thank you.

The question the gentleman over there asked him, you might better ask me: What is your business model? At the moment I don't know. Maybe I'll be an administrator on Wikipedia.

I do not know Jimbo – we never met until last night – but I'm really grateful to him actually, not for anything involving me, but for what he did when we tried this experiment.

I came across the Wikipedia a little later than I should have, and I thought that it was a really remarkable thing. Then I thought, as a member of the mainstream media, how can I exploit this and, if possible, destroy it so that it doesn't take away all of our jobs. And then as an editor of course I loved the idea that you put up the headline and a story magically appears. I thought that was very good, and the publisher actually liked that idea, too. So we decided to try it, and it's absolutely true that we did not know what we were doing.

I discovered at the L.A. Times – and maybe it's true at other newspapers – that getting anybody to try anything is hard, so when the Web site guy said "yeah, we could try this," I said "great, let's just do it."

We did it, and we used an editorial about Iraq – the L.A. Times is very much opposed to the war – and we published that and then we let people at it. For a couple of days, it was pretty good. There was a very positive response and people got very involved but it was not well structured to start out with. As Jimmy figured out before anybody, it's one thing if you're putting out an encyclopedia that is essentially collaborative because you all have the same goal and you're working together, but if you're trying to create a dialogue about an issue, it doesn't really work in the standard wiki format.

But Jimbo and his friends took over. I think we launched this on a Friday or a Thursday, and by the weekend he sort of took it over and restructured it, split it into two threads – one for antis and one for pros – and some of his people got rid of some of the early troublemakers. Then on Saturday night, Slashdot published a snooty piece about it and within hours there was some stuff put on it that was so bad, the newsroom lawyer – who is one of the most hardcore "First Amendment covers everything" people I've ever met – came in shaking on Monday morning and said, "I'm ready to censor this stuff." So it was really bad and we just decided to take it down and not even attempt to reformulate it.

I will mention one other thing, which is that the Seattle Times – I think inspired by us and in an attempt to stick in the knife a little bit – had an interesting innovation, which is very low tech and started two or three weeks ago. You go to their editorial page and in the paper itself they list the subjects they're going to editorialize about tomorrow and they invite you to send e-mail in, and that accomplishes 50 percent of what we though we were going to accomplish with zero percent of the downside. And you know it was really embarrassing to us.

Schaffer:
Well, you had 2,000 people who contributed something over two days.

Wales:
That's a lot of people for essentially what was one article that migrated into two, and then there were a few other things that people created. That tells you that people are very interested in the experiment, and out of those 2,000 people I was able to identify maybe 10 Wikipedians I knew and the rest were just interested parties who didn't really know the culture or the methods of the software. So even if they wanted to help, they didn't know how.

Schaffer:
So eventually you split it into two parts, a pro and con, hoping that you could get some consensus around one side or the other, right? Going forward, would you envision this being an antidote to the problems?

Wales:
I'm personally quite skeptical about how you can do editorials collaboratively, because even USA Today has popularized this format of "War: Good. Bad." And you've got the two editorials, but those are still two views, and you can think of a thousand possible views. On the war on Iraq, people think, "Well I thought it was a good idea but then I found out there were no WMDs and now I'm mad about it." And other people think, "It's such a bad idea and we have to get out now," or, "It's such a bad idea but now we're there and we have to help." There are so many positions you can have, so how do you write an editorial collaboratively as opposed to it being one person's unique voice? That doesn't mean it's just mere opinion, but still it's a commentary and it has to have a voice.

Kinsley:
I'm an expert actually on taking complex ideas and oversimplifying them into two sides from my six years on Crossfire, and it is very frustrating, but I don't feel bad about this little experiment we conducted because we learned something and there will be something that even Jimmy hasn't thought of to come along.

One of the great things about the Wikipedia, in fact, is that things come along because of the structure you set up that you haven't thought of.

One thing that I thought of that is not involving the Internet but would be an innovation would be on TV or radio to have a show called "Ceasefire." You get two sides and you get a moderator if you have to, and instead of kicking them under the table to keep them mad and to maximize they're disagreements, you work them together. This is a very familiar concept in labor mediation and, I'm told, in marital counseling.

There was that Fred Friendly stuff that he used to do, but I'm thinking of something more focused. I've pedaled this idea to every news network and other places and no one has bitten, but I think there's something, maybe not exactly like that, that could force people into agreement.

Schaffer:
When all the attention went on the wiki experiment for the Times editorial page, you had other things you were trying as well, right?

Kinsley:
We have something, which I think is really good but has gotten no attention, that is called "Editorials Elsewhere." We manage to take advantage of the time difference between us and the East Coast – we're three hours and three years behind them, as they like to say – but the three hours give us an advantage in that we can read the East Coast papers on the Web, and we're running almost every day – I don't know if it will be there tomorrow – a feature where we go and see what the New York Times and The Washington Post and other East Coast papers have said about the issues that we've editorialized about and compare them. It's basically a gimmick, but it also has the sense of dialectical progress in that if we've taken a stand, it's interesting to see what another newspaper has said. And we do it the same day, so that's our pathetic attempt to be timely in newsprint.

Schaffer:
So, Mike, what was your aspiration in starting this wiki experiment?

Kinsley:
I just thought that this was something we could try and I didn't know where it was going to lead.

Schaffer:
Did you want to improve the editorials?

Kinsley:
Sure, we wanted to figure out a way to get more community involvement. I will not claim to be as pious as to think that more community involvement would necessarily make them better, but I think it would be interesting. Of course one of the things about cyberspace is that the space is endless, so we publish an editorial and we can publish 18 million versions of it in cyberspace and it doesn't matter. I figured we had nothing to lose – not quite true.

Schaffer:
Aspirations for you, Jimbo?

Wales:
Well, with Wikipedia, the encyclopedia project, the big picture charitable notion is that the world needs information and, particularly in developing countries, we want to give a free encyclopedia to every person on the planet with high quality, good, basic information. Right now what I say is that if you live in an English, German, French or Japanese speaking country and you've got a broadband Internet connection, our mission is accomplished. But the big picture goals and aspirations go much beyond that into all the languages in the world.

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