Exclusive: Jimmy Wales on what's next for Wikipedia

By Natasha Lomas, 5 November 2009 15:37

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In an exclusive interview, Wikipedia founder and silicon.com Agenda Setter Jimmy Wales talks to Natasha Lomas about what's next for Wikipedia and why the site needs geeks of all kinds.

If you've ever written something about Jimmy Wales and posted it online, chances are he's read it. He mentions a Twitter post I made, prior to our interview, asking whether people think he's a hero or villain.

With my tweet I'd been hoping to get a feel for opinion on the Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia founder. Which is he then, I ask? Hero or villain?

"Oh I would say both," he replies with a smile. "Depends on who you are."

The Wikipedia vision is one of "a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge". Launched in 2001, the online encyclopaedia Wales founded now counts some 13 million articles all written and edited collaboratively by volunteers.

But for all the knowledge it holds, Wikipedia can't answer my hero-or-villain question: the site prides itself on its unbiased content.

Articles are written in "a fairly neutral style", says Wales: "We really tend to use less inflammatory words - try to stick to basic facts and so on. And that's come about over time."

"You have people come together [on Wikipedia] with different viewpoints but in general they tend to be trying to work in good faith to collaborate and compromise with other people," he adds.

Such willing collaborators are drawn to the site, according to Wales, "because the combative types just find it frustrating. They would rather blog where no one edits what they write".

Combative types or no combative types, the site is no stranger to spats over some of its more contentious subjects.

"Sometimes what happens in certain controversial articles is the style of the article goes downhill, even as the quality of the content is improving," Wales admits.

For instance, he describes how strength of opinion for and against the actress Jane Fonda resulted in "a bizarre laundry list of facts" appearing in her entry - a paragraph that both the pro and anti-Fonda camps could agree on but which no reader could love.

"Somehow in this process the idea of a properly written style, with proper emphasis to due parts of her life, got lost."

However, such episodes are rare, according to Wales: "One of the things that's important to know about Wikipedia is that the entries that are edited by hundreds of people are really anomalies."

"There's a vast majority of Wikipedia where the entry was started by one person, really heavily edited by one more, and two or three more have added some comments or critiques and changed some spelling or something, so that it does tend to be small group collaboration," he tells silicon.com.

This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site's biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia's pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous - or "a certain type of person", in Wales' words.

"Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy," he says. "What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male - tragically 85 per cent male." In the days before Wikipedia, they were probably spending a lot of time watching Star Trek or...

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