Wikipedia founder "Top" Jimmy Wales spoke at Suffolk University last night as part of the Ford Hall Forum. Bostonist was there to get the scoop on how open source will kill Google in the search battle, how Wikipedia is evolving differently in different cultures (did you know the French think they invented the airplane?), and how much Jimmy Wales friggin' loves Ayn Rand.
The evening didn't have a promising start: a tech guy labored at the platform for several minutes, attempting to get Jimmy's the venue's PC [We've been informed that Wales does not use a PC or Windows--whew! --Ed.] hooked up for his PowerPoint presentation. You'd think that a threat to Google could easily menace a laptop into submission, but apparently Jimmy just doesn't do his own tech work. Anyway, the laptop finally communicated with the projector, and we could see Jimmy's simple slides.
We didn't know Wales was such an Objectivist, but he sandwiched his entire speech between two toasty Ayn Rand quotations. The first
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is not happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
dealt with our response to tragedy, saying essentially that we should seek to affirm success rather than expect failure. This jives with the Wikipedia vibe: everyone thought spammers and vandalists would overrun the site immediately, but moderators have been able to handle inundations of false information or foul language surprisingly well.
Wales shared some anecdotes about the uses of Wikipedia, including his encounter with a young slumdweller in India who used Wikipedia to pass his school exams--and to find pick up lines. The remarkable diversity of Wikipedia around the world reflects the sensibilities of different cultures. For example, our own Wikipedia is heavy on the Pokemon, with separate pages for individual cards in the game, while Germany thinks Pokemon should only have one page, rather than hundreds. Wales was only directly critical of one country--China, which has blocked Wikipedia in the past (though lifted the ban for the Olympics). Noting that downloading music is illegal but all the kids find ways to do it, Wales said that most young people knew how to get around the block and access Wikipedia in China anyway, showing the power of the internet to combat censorship.
More about Wales--including his plot to overthrow the big G--after the jump.
To form Wikipedia, Wales and his colleagues had to "radically change our perceptions about how you would run a community." He commented later in the Q&A session that Wikipedia's original incarnation (Nupedia) had been run from a more academic, credentialed perspective, requiring participants to register and prove their expertise in a field before contributing articles. This obviously would have created intense headaches administratively, and would have made for a far more limited site in terms of the information available. For example, the muppet wiki has more than 17,000 articles. Would there even be a muppet wiki if we had to fax in our undergrad transcripts in order to use Wikia? Grover's pretty groovy, but not worth that much effort. Wales says of Nupedia, "It failed because it wasn't any fun." The other initial concern with Wikipedia was the manageability of such a big site. Wales asserts that communities, both online and off, are scaleable. Nobody says, "Oh, you could never have a city of 10 million people"--it just happens, and we adjust. Likewise with online communities, and it's even easier when things are digital.
Now to the big question: how will Wales get Google? With your help, basically. Wales wants to wikify search, making it "open source" and giving users the opportunity to rate search results and ensure that the best sites--not necessarily the biggest, or the oldest, or the most monied--make it to the top of the page. You can check out Wiki Search right now; the results are pretty interesting. Search for Jimmy Himself and you'll find that his personal life is a hot topic--hotter than his actual ideas. If that's what people want to know about "Top" Jimmy, though, that's what should come up in search results, and it speaks fairly well of Wales that he hasn't gamed his results to show only good things. This is open source search, and Wales thinks it's the wave of the future.
Wales argued that "speech is journalism," an editorial matter that should be transparent and participatory, not an algorithmic matter that should take place behind the scenes. He implied that it's problematic for Google to recommend search engine optimization to sites; this feeds into the idea of the search algorithms as all-knowing and more important than actual people. We've all gotten Google results that point us to spammy pages created solely for the purpose of making money off ads or redirects. Is that really where searches should send us? No. How can we rid our results of pages like that? With open source search: search that's people-friendly rather than Google-friendly. Mahalo has already tackled wholly human-powered search; Wales wants to make it codeable as well.
Naming four guiding principles for Wikia (transparency, community, quality, and privacy), Wales made some interesting assertions about privacy. He characterized reading, or consuming information, as something that should remain private, while writing or creating information must necessarily be a public act open to criticism and revision. His distinction makes sense, and is a big of a dig at Google's practice of tracking our every move online--whether we're consuming or creating.
Wales didn't talk about Chrome at all, but it would have made sense for him to comment on an open source endeavor by the big bad Google. Though there were many concerns raised about who will own anything developed on Chrome, Matt Cutts claimed Google doesn't really want to own your stuff, and the terms of service have been changed accordingly. It'll be interesting to see how the browser affects our internet experience, and what developments come out of the open source availability. Wales mentioned many times that collaboration is often quelled by a fear (much like the one expressed in response to Chrome) that a corporation will take and license volunteers' work--thus crushing the incentive to innovate. Only by sharing openly can we achieve success.
Wales' talk touched on a variety of important points about both internet usage and content creation, and showed his true belief in the basic goodness of people. So Jimmy clearly believes in us--but do we believe in him?
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