Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

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

Keynote Dialogue (Page 4):
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:
You both just recently had journalism done to you in some ways: You (Michael) with the wiki story, and you (Jimmy) with a couple of things – the Time Magazine article and the reports that you were going to have some editorial controls. I am interested in what your takeaways were from that experience of being on the other side.

Wales:
It's interesting.

Kinsley:
You're supposed to say that whenever journalism writes about something I have personal knowledge of, they get it wrong.

Wales:
For me it's been kind of funny because I get really positive press. So you read a really great, positive story, and you read that you were home-schooled – and my mother was surprised to read that. That's a little odd because do I really want to complain? It was such a nice story and it's kind of cool to be home-schooled – that's kind of neat.

Kinsley:
I would say if you've had all these favorable stories, there's another shoe waiting to drop.

Wales:
That's why I don't complain too much.

Audience Question:
I used Wikipedia to do some research and contacted someone who wrote an entry to ask what their primary source was and they couldn't give me an answer. Is this an anomaly? Are the people writing for Wikipedia all just self-appointed experts?

Wales:
I wouldn't say "self-appointed experts," but yeah people come and write whatever. We encourage people very strongly to cite their sources, but obviously it's an editorial judgment of what type of fact you need to cite sources for. If you want to say that the moon can be seen in the sky at night, you don't really need to go get a scientific source for that. But for other things, obviously, you do need to get a source.

Typically what we do is if it's called into question it has to be cited or it has to be removed. Within the community, if someone comes in and says, "I don't know, I thought that was true," that's considered very uncool.

Kinsley:
But the ability to take things out is a pretty good advantage that the Web has over print, and it's almost an answer to you. It's true that the error will be up there for a while but it will ultimately be corrected, which we can't do in print. That is powerful.

We had an interesting argument in the beginning of Slate about what to do about errors, and I took the side that we shouldn't leave them there because we can correct them, but my colleague Jack Schaffer, who was the deputy editor and a press critic, thought that was cheating to correct the error. He said that we should leave the error there and then say that it was an error. And we ended up removing the error, but at the end of the article we confessed that we had made it and apologized for it.

Wales:
In our case, because every version of every article is always in the history unless there is a legal problem that leads us to remove versions, that transparency is the answer to this problem.
We say, "Yeah we had it wrong, and you can go look at the wrong version because it's still there."

Kinsley:
Do you have lawyers who work pro bono?

Wales:
Yes.

Kinsley:
Wow.

Audience Question:
What are the tools to deal with trolls, and who gets to wield them?

Wales:
Some of the things are open to anyone. If you see a bad version, you can go into the history and click the previous version and save it, which is three or four clicks for an ordinary user. For people who have been elected administrator it is one click. They just click "revert" and it rolls back to the previous version.

Another tool is blocking by IP number. Usually when people make one bad edit, they get a warning – depending on how bad it is – because if you just go in and blank a page it could have been an accident and we try to be friendly, but the administrators can block IP numbers. That doesn't prevent you from getting another IP number and coming in again, but it slows you down. A big part of our control mechanism is – realizing that there is no absolute security – raising the cost of doing bad and lowering the cost of doing good. You make it easy for the trusted person to revert, and you make it five steps for the bad person to log back on.

Audience Question:
How do you build the community? What did you start with?

Wales:
I type a lot on the Internet and talk to a lot of people.

What we started with is a good question. Before Wikipedia, for two years we had a project called Nupedia, which was the same vision and same mission to create a high quality encyclopedia with volunteers, but we followed a very old-fashioned academic hierarchical method of doing it, with a seven stage review process. It was really boring and not very fun for volunteers, but because of that we publicized this and a lot of people came and were very interested, so there was already a core group of very intellectual contributors who were very excited about the idea. So when we put up the wiki, it was in a sense the opposite of the L.A. Times experiment, because for two years we had mailing lists and people discussing it and forming a community, and after two years of getting to trust each other, then we opened the wiki. That wasn't the plan, that was just the way it happened, but there was already an existing community that from day one was eager to work and then the software just made it possible.

Also, the only people who knew about Wikipedia for the first couple of months were the couple hundred people from the mailing list, so they were able to work more or less in peace. We didn't have very much vandalism at all for a while because nobody even noticed what we were doing.

Audience Question:
Is Biography your most controversial project?

Wales:
No, we don't have too much trouble with Biography. The main thing that we have to deal with is a lot of strange trademark complaints. For example, the people from Formula One were complaining vociferously about our article that contained their logo, and we told them to go to hell and they apologized. They were complaining about the use of their logo and that's ridiculous, so we told them so.

Other problems we have are with images from public domain; paintings, for example. In a lot of museums today, the art that they own is no longer under copyright because it's 400 years old, but they own the sole physical copy of it and they want to control the rights to all their images. They send a lot of nasty letters, but if you read them very carefully they don't actually say anything, they just ominously suggest that something bad will happen. So that's one of the things that we have the lawyers look into. I've taken to sending out a very polite letter explaining public domain, and at the bottom I say, "You are the custodians of our cultural heritage. You should be ashamed of yourselves." So far none of them have called back to apologize, but I'm waiting for that to happen.

Audience Question:
What is the process for keeping track of sources in the history?

Wales:
It varies from case to case so there's no mechanical process for it, but if somebody calls something into question, usually what they'll do is remove the suspicious fact and then put it on the talk page and say that they took it out because it sounds implausible and ask if there is a source for it.

What they should do is find who wrote it and leave them a message on their talk page, and either they respond or they don't, and if they don't then it's already out of the article and it doesn't get put back in. If it's a really contentious point and someone says, "It's on this page of this book," they'll put a footnote at the bottom saying where they got it.

It's informal because there are so many different possible cases that you can't really systematize it.

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