Jimmy Wales talks to Antonio Mora

If you were able to talk to your younger self, a guy who was involved in finance — you were out there, trading futures in Chicago — and you [said] you were going to create a not-for-profit Internet encyclopedia, what would you have thought?

I would have thought, "Cool, that sounds great." You know, I was always an Internet geek from very early on. I think I first got on the Internet itself in 1989. That's pre-Web days. 

But it was a natural move, then, being somebody who was so interested in the Internet and especially with the Internet exploding in the '90s, to go over and try to do something for profit. 

Well, I mean, it was a great time of innovation and experimentation. I give a talk to young entrepreneurs where the title is "Failure: Jimmy Wales Is Really Good at It" and talk about all the different kinds of things I did. One of the things I did was — the concept was ordering food online for lunch in downtown Chicago, which was a great idea, but boy, it was way too early

So I tried a lot of different things. The idea of an encyclopedia, a free encyclopedia for everyone, really captivated me.

Did you ever expect that it would have the kind of explosive growth it had?

I always say I'm a pathological optimist. So I did think it could be big. I mean, I thought, "This is something I wish existed in the world. And I would use it a lot. So it seems like it could be big." But now, today, Wikipedia is the No. 5 website in the world, so in that sense, exceeded my expectations, for sure.

You could have said, "We're going to get some ads into this," and you could have made it for profit.

Yes.

As you said, this is one of the most visited websites in the world, and the company is worth — if it were a for-profit company, it would be worth billions, and you would be a billionaire. Why did you resist that?

Part of it is just the unfolding of history. I don't regret it at all. But at the time, it was the only way forward, the only obvious way forward, to say, "You know, we need to buy more servers. There is no business model here, so we're just going to try to get donations." And so we just moved in that direction.

Even if there were a business model, could it have succeeded … if it had been for profit?

Well, so this is the interesting thing. Because if we had gotten venture capital funding — let's say we had a year earlier or something, before the crash happened — and if we had gotten $10 million in funding, there's a lot that we would have never tried.

We were kind of a child of the dot-com crash in the sense that, if … you've got a community website and you see, "Oh, there's some problems here and there," your immediate thought is, "Oh, we need to hire some moderators." So we would have gone out and hired moderators to do things. Instead, there was no money for moderators. So we suddenly had to think in a very innovative way about "How could the community moderate itself? What are the things that we need to do in the community, the institutions we need to build of people so we have volunteer admins in the community?" A lot of the social innovation came about because there was no way to hire people to do those things. 

So what happens, then, when there is — especially hot-button issues, when you've got abortion rights or gun rights, things that people are very passionate about, where you've got people who are going to go in and edit those pages with completely different opinions — who's the referee?

Basically, what we do — Wikipedia, we have a policy, neutral point of view, that Wikipedia itself shouldn't take a stand on any controversial issue. And as it turns out, if you get together a very kind, thoughtful Catholic priest and a very kind, thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist, they can come together, and they can say, "Look, we're never going to agree about the topic of abortion. But we can still write a good summary of the issues."

The Catholic priest will understand Wikipedia can't say, you know, "Abortion is a sin." But it can say, "The Catholic Church position of abortion is this and such. The pope has written this, and critics have responded that." Those two people can, if they are kind and thoughtful people, at the end of the day, at the end of a period of work, they can point to the entry, and they can say, "You know, that's good.'"

Well, what happens if those two kind people don't manage to agree?

It works more often than not. If there are people who aren't so kind and thoughtful and they really have an agenda they push, those people don't do very well in the Wikipedia community. We have a lot of behavioral policies. If you insist on continually edit warring, we call it, where you're just trying to push an agenda over and over, first thing, you'll be temporarily blocked. But people do have to be banned, and it does happen.

There's the argument that the model itself lends itself to bias, because of the fact that the people who are going to have access to it and to be able to edit are, almost by definition, have to be wealthier. They have to have computers. They have to have the time to be able to do that — tends to make them much more male, fewer minorities represented and, again, mostly voices from the developed world.

Yes, that's absolutely right. It is a problem. And it's one that we really are taking seriously in the sense that we know that diversity in the community is very important. And it's not so much about overt bias in the entries. It’s more people write about what they know and what they care about. 

The typical kind of Wikipedia editor is a 26-year-old tech, male computer geek, single … a college graduate, reasonably well educated, reasonably well to do.

So if you go to our entry on the USB standard, you know, USB plugs for your computer, and you want to learn about that, it's a fantastic entry, really well written. It's easy to understand. But the further down you go, it gets more and more technical. It's a really good entry.

But as a parent, I can tell you our entries on early childhood development, well, they can be a bit thin. They're a bit thin because your 26-year-old male, single computer geek doesn't know anything about children and doesn't think about it very much and just doesn't take an interest. 

At the foundation level, we are supporting various kinds of initiatives to try to address the problem. 

I know, early on, you were kept up at night worrying in your words, that extreme rubbish would find its way onto Wikipedia. 

So part of it is that communities inherently scale … The more people, by definition, you have editing, the more people you have looking at it, the more people you have discussing things. So that inherently scales.

We seek to be comprehensive, and that's a good thing, to be comprehensive. But we do have limits on what we can write about. We don't have enough information.

You've been described as a benevolent dictator. I've read that you prefer "constitutional monarch." But as you know, constitutional monarchs living in England now don't have that much power. So how much power do you have?

I don't know. And I'm trying not to find out, much like the queen of the U.K. Who knows how power she has? But as long as she doesn't try to find out, no one will ever know. The truth is, in terms of power in the traditional sense, very little. That's by design. Basically, everything we do is consensus based and open discussions.

In terms of influence, I have an enormous amount of influence. I think that one of the reasons I have enormous amounts of influence is that I've always stuck to the same principles and values that built the community. 

Do you care to have the same respect that an "Encyclopaedia Britannica" has? Or is the reality that you're much more important than "The Encyclopaedia Britannica" already?

Yeah, some of the latter. At the same time, we do want to be good enough that people can feel comfortable relying on it. We also want to make sure people are educated about Wikipedia. So one of the things we do — there's a very common, you know, "citation needed."

Right? Everybody knows this expression. Because, in Wikipedia, if somebody writes a claim and didn't put a footnote and the claim seems a bit bold or possibly wrong, somebody will tag it and say, "Citation needed." And, you know, I always say, "I wish The New York Times would occasionally print "Citation needed," you know, when they're reporting something.

How big a problem is vandalism?

I mean, I think sort of outright vandalism — there's always some of it going on. And then it's just a dull roar in the background, and we fix it, and it's not a major problem. I'm more worried about subtle vandalism. You know, people coming in and inserting something that seems plausible but isn't. It's very difficult to vandalize the entry on Barack Obama.

Because so many people look at it every day.

Yes, it's very well monitored. And in fact, usually, it's semiprotected, so that you have to have had an account for a while before you can edit it. But if it's a fairly obscure politician in a local city and you put in something plausible but false, it might last longer than we would like. And that's not good.

Now, normally, it's also harmless. Because if it's an accusation of something horrible, people will catch it very quickly. I always give this example. Once my entry said, "In his spare time, he enjoys playing chess with friends." It only lasted for a day or two, something like that. OK, but — I mean, it sounds great, but it's not actually true at all. I would like to be that guy who plays chess.

Doesn't happen?

It doesn't happen. But what was interesting is, during that small period of time when it was vandalized to say that, a biography magazine picked that up and basically said it as if it were true. Which meant then there was a source for it. I guess an otherwise respectable magazine said it.

Fortunately, I had already said, "No, this is wrong." So we didn't put it in. But that can happen sometimes, that an error in Wikipedia then gets repeated.

You face censorship in some countries.

We do.

You might have to deal with tough defamation and libel laws in other countries. So how do you deal with that?

We have a very principled stand. We'll never cooperate with government censorship. And we never have. We never will. We try to be diplomatic. We try to reason with governments if they're doing something. Oftentimes they don't want to lose access to Wikipedia. They know it's very important and very worthwhile.

Once they begin to understand, "OK, like, Wikipedia strives for neutrality," and so it's not one-sided rants and things like that. Still, not every government is comfortable with neutrality. So we still do face problems around the world.

One of the recent developments is — because of the NSA spying, amongst other reasons and because of the general very positive trend, in my opinion, towards encryption everywhere online, so the increasing security of the Internet is a really important topic now — Wikipedia is encrypted. When you go to visit Wikipedia, it's the same as going to visit your bank. No one can see what is being said between you and your bank, only that you're talking to your bank.

On the knowledge front, do you see Google as a competitor? And if you do, how do you compete as a nonprofit with this behemoth?

No, we don't really think of Google as a competitor. But part of that is because we don't think about competitors at all. Like, it's just not in our nature. We've always been a community. 

Obviously, in terms of strategic thinking at the organizational level, so not in the community but in the Wikimedia Foundation, we do think about "OK, what are some of the changes that are taking place on the Internet? The shift to mobile, the rise of social networks and so on, how does that impact us? How do we make sure that we stay nimble? How do we make sure we are on top of technology so that we don't get left behind?"

And obviously, thinking about Google and rankings and things like that is a piece of that work. But we don't really think of Google as a competitor. Google sends us a lot of people, you know? 

An awful lot of people, I'm sure.

An awful lot of people, yeah. But I mean, one of the interesting things about that is, if you go to Wikipedia right now and you search for "Queen Victoria," I can pretty much guarantee you — I haven't done this recently — but Wikipedia's going to be first or second link.

But when you type "Queen Victoria," there's — generally speaking, when I have checked it in the past — there's no ads. Because what are you gonna sell someone who's searching about Queen Victoria? Maybe a book about Queen Victoria. You know, it's like you're not really shopping. If you search "cheap hotels in Las Vegas," guess what? Wikipedia is nowhere to be seen. Lots of ads, lots of commerce is happening.

So the truth is we fill in, you know, for Google when people are doing information-based searches. And then they'll use Google for things that are profitable for Google. So Google — we're symbiotic, in a certain sense. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.