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Wiki is collaborative software
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I made it on the web and
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allowed people to come to a website and
create something.
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And I think what's really turned out is that
people discover that
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with other people that they don't even know
but they come to trust
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and they make something that surprises
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surprises them, all of them,
in terms of its value.
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HyperCard was a
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kind of a drawing program where you could
draw a bunch of pages,
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a bunch of screens, and then cause one
screen to link to another.
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Well, nobody knew what hypertext was then
and so it was kind of hard to
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figure out, well, what are you supposed
to do with this?
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And I liked that idea of having
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something that kinda challenges you and
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I like to figure out what to do with things so
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so I thought, well,
I'll make a bunch of cards
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about how ideas move through my company.
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An interesting thing about it was that it assumed that
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if you wanted to make a link, if you wanted a button on one card to go to
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another card
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you would know what other card, and it would already exist.
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And when I was asking people to tell me about
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how ideas move through the company -
they were always talking about moving to a company
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someplace that
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there wasn't a card for -
so I just made it so that
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you could type the name of something and
when you press the button
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to go to the link, and it wasn't there,
it made the card.
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And making it on-demand, let you
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move around a hypertext and when you got
to the edge of it,
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it would just push that edge out further. And so
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I could tackle a subject that's
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unimaginably large - every idea in my whole company -
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but people who knew about ideas would
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just follow it around, they would go from card to card until they went to some place they
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got to the edge
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but they went to the edge because they knew about that edge. They wanted to see what I
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said about it. And my program said
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"I don't know about this, tell me something about this."
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And they just loved to write.
In fact in HyperCard, people would come to sit at my desk
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and they would want a demo of HyperCard
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and I would show them this program and they wouldn't leave.
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You know, I had a pet theory that
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engineers wouldn't use an idea
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unless they had seen it work before.
You know, that they were basically conservative.
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And so
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ideas were slow to be absorbed. And so, I was interested in how ideas moved around
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in communities.
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And that notion was more important than any particular hypertext.
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But we had held some conferences,
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we called it the "pattern languages of programming" conference,
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or "Pattern Languages of Programs",
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and had a hundred people come out to the University of Illinois
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- this was the summer of 1994 -
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and talked about how
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we needed to write about computer programs in a different way
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so that we capture these ideas
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and why people decided an idea was good or bad.
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And then my friends said:
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"Oh, let me show you this new thing called the 'World Wide Web'".
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It was the University of Illinois, right?
They created the first graphical browser.
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And they showed this to me and they said:
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"Ward, we think you need to make
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a hypertext pattern repository."
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Well of course, I thought, you know,
I've done this before with HyperCard
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and I just needed to move it over to the Web
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and then I wouldn't have people sitting around my desk
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because it was the Web, it was international.
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So it solved that problem. And could I do it?
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Could I get forms into ... and I had to make up this idea of markup.
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Because I had to account for the fact that I didn't have the buttons
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that I had in HyperCard.
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You know, it is a different system.
But I made markup,
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and then I tried it, and I sat there, and I started typing stuff in,
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and it was as much fun as I remembered.
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I knew it was fun to do it in HyperCard, I knew people wouldn't leave my desk.
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But I could sit there on the Web and I said: "I've got it - this is the feeling".
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You know, I pay attention to what it feels like to use computer programs, and it felt right.
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So I knew it was important. I knew it would serve the purpose
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which I wanted: to talk about ideas -- again in computer programming.
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So the audience I was imagining was people just like me.
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People were very surprised, or in fact sometimes people would
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you know, send me e-mails saying
"I don't want to mention it, but
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you've got terrible bug in your system -
it lets people write anything!"
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or they would say: "You've got a mistake on this page",
and they
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would send me
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an email telling me what the mistake was
and what I should have said instead.
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And to encourage them I would just take
their email and paste it into
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the wiki and then send them a pointer
to the page.
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I said "I took the liberty
of taking your message and
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putting in the wiki for you,
but you could have done it yourself."
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And I babysat the community that way
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for a couple of years.
The other thing is, because I didn't have any notion...
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You know, I encouraged people not to sign their words.
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I thought, you know -
your words, your ideas are a gift to the community
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and you shouldn't be claiming credit for it,
because then nobody else is
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going to improve it:
They are going to feel it's yours.
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So I discouraged that.
I used that a lot myself.
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I did probably 80% of my editing anonymously
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and that just let people feel that
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"oh, there is a large community here,
there is all this back and forth",
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yet it has a consistency, because I wrote a lot of it.
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But that's a bootstrapping problem:
I had to make it feel like there is a community
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to attract a community.
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And people poured in.
The other thing is that I invited
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the people with the most recognizable names.
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When they showed up and wrote something,
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they only had to write a page or two
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because somebody else, who was less well known,
would say:
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"Oh, he's here - I should be here".
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This kind of stroked vanity.
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I might have been wrong on some of this stuff.
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I mean, sometimes people feel that if they aren't
gonna get credit for that they write,
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they don't wanna write.
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But I was encouraging people to recognize
that they are gifting their words.
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You know, it's just an idea, and ideas are cheap.
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And when people would write something
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and come back later and find that
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their words had improved,
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that's pretty exciting, you see.
"Boy, overnight this got better,
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Who made this better?"
And it's almost a mystery, because
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they didn't sign it either.
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It's like "oh, the wiki made this better".
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Well, you are not used to
things getting better on their own.
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A classic thing on
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computer communication boards and that
at the time was
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you would write something
and somebody would spot a spelling error
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so they would say:
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"You spelled it this and it's spelled that"
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Because the only place you could write
is at the bottom.
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You could add, but you couldn't change.
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So you write something and you come back,
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and all you find is
tedious complaining about what you said.
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Now on my system, you write a spelling error,
somebody just fixes it.
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and you come back and
you don't even notice it was there.
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But you find this one sentence that somebody added
that really gets at something
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you were trying to say.
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So the positive stands out
and the negative is just erased.
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Now the nice thing there is if somebody comes along
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in the meantime and is reading,
who knows less than you
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they might find your partial answer valuable.
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So this idea that you start, that
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every thought is kind of a seed
and it just grows and grows and grows,
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it's been used very effectively on Wikipedia, but
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it was very important on my wiki,
which was really about changing the way
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people talked about computer programs
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because there wasn't anything other
than people's direct experience
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to fall back on.
So as people would write about their experience programming
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people would read it and
it's the first time they had ever read
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somebody talking about, say,
being afraid that they wouldn't be able
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to get the program done, and
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how that changed the decisions they made, out of fear.
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Or, how they
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found a way to work with somebody else
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and find the thing that is acceptable to both.
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There are lots of aspects.
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We were very interested in how computer programs
could form in an emergent way,
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where you didn't have a master plan for the computer program.
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You say, well, we have a general idea what we want to do,
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and you know some of it and I know some of it,
and Joe knows some of it,
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but we're all gonna work together
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and just let the program grow.
Well,
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you know, to talk about something like that,
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which was unheard of at the time
in computer programming,
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in an environment, in a text system,
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well, it was a demonstration of
the very concept we were trying to
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explore for computer programming.
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And it is true in computer programming,
we see it all the time,
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and it's accepted now,
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but it was considered foolishness when we started.
And now it's recognized
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as really the only way
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to make a really great program.
It was my first Hawaiian word
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that I learned as they were trying to
direct me to the Wiki-wiki bus between
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terminals.
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"Wiki" is a Hawaiian word that means "quick",
and so "wiki-wiki" means "very quick",
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so it's the very quick web.
It's always been
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technically called "WikiWikiWeb". But
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when I wrote the script,
the CGI script that made it work,
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it was on a UNIX system,
and of course on UNIX you always use
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abbreviations and lower case.
So I called it "wiki.cgi" in UNIX,
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and so most people didn't want to
bother to say "WikiWikiWeb";
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they just called it "wiki".
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And that's fine with me.
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So it's like saying "here's a system called 'quick'".
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If you need more minds - you know, if one person knows everything
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and they can kind of sit back and really think deeply,
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they can see the whole program and just write it down.
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Or write a poem, you know.
Poetry is one of those things that's personal enough
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that if you write a poem a day,
after thirty years you're a great poet,
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and it's probably a solo thing.
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But computer programs and encyclopedias are
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of a scale that you have to make it a
collaborative effort.
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And then to make it good -- to make it read
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like it was from a single mind -- is the
challenge, and that's where people have
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to learn how to complement each other,
or I like to say,
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play to each other's strengths, where you take
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what you're good at and I take what I'm good at,
and we find a way to fit it together
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-- to make it like we were one superman.
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And that happens. It's not that hard.
There is a style of working together
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where
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we'll agree ahead of time that
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you'll do this part and I'll do this part
and if you don't hold up your end of the
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deal
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then I'm gonna, you know,
take you to court or something like that
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that's this contracting
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style stuff
And I think that's better than competition
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but it only works for things
where you know where you're going in the
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act
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You know what the whole is gonna be.
That's
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a useful way to work, but that --
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because people who were funding
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computer programs, they thought, "well,
that's how we wanted to work this way --
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if I'm gonna pay you for six months to
write a computer program,
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I want to know what you're gonna do and
you're gonna do and you're gonna do"
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and --
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and it was the master plan.
And it turns out that
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that uses a small percentage of the
capability of the computer.
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The computer is much better if you
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let it become what it really wants to be
your
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the best that you can make it and that's
a
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you know has a sort a sense of faith you
have to believe
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that it's gonna come out even though you
can't say what it is. I mean if somebody
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decided what the pages Wikipedia we're
gonna be
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you know to be any other project they
would have made it worst I've importance
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and pages and they would have been all
kinds of stuff that people
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in here that they would have thought a
You know I got this
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"grow from the center out" kind of dynamic right
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for a hypertext document on the web
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and that has been a model of sharing and involves
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you can learn enough about each other to
develop this trust relationship
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But there is a couple of things that Wikipedia did right
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that didn't even occur to me.
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For example, getting the licensing right.
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I was careless about the licensing and I think that
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saying "this has to be licensed this way, here is the ownership,
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here is the guarantees going forward" - that's important.
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And I just wasn't interested in that stuff,
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so I didn't do that right.
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Can you explain what that means, getting the licensing right?
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The openness -
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you know, I was open, but there was no guarantee
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that is was open,
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there was no agreement when somebody submitted.
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There was an expectation,
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but it wasn't written down. And in fact I think when I finally did write it down,
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I said I own it -
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you have the right to use it, but you can't keep it.
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And that's not really open.
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But I think Jimmy Wales' relationship
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with Richard Stallman got that right.
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The other thing that I just didn't think about,
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or I thought would be too hard, was being international.
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The fact that because it's licensed to be reused, of course that means
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the content is free to go into other languages.
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free to go into other languages
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And the fact that people might want to read and write
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in their own language - that international aspect is profound.
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In terms of actually having an opportunity to,
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in some sense, bring the world together.
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Wikipedia is probably one of the strongest forces
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in computers for, you know, creating peace in the world, in essence.
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That's fabulous, this understanding -
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to just believe it could be done in every language.
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When you find yourself reading
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an encyclopedia that is about the things you care about, because
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it was written by people just like you, talking about what they care about
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and that caring
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becomes so important to you, you trust this.
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Well, the fact (is that) that same sort of
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interaction is happening in a lot of different cultures.
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Now, we can talk about edit wars and stuff like that.
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But
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what really is happening is that there are people who are moving back and forth
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between different languages.
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People who are fortunate enough to know and understand multiple cultures,
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can, in this world, just carry little bits of culture back and forth.
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And when I read something, even in the English Wikipedia,
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and I see some mention of, you know, where the airplane was really invented
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or something like that,
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it's broad, in a sense,
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because people who have a worldly view
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- I'm unfortunately not very worldly -
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have shared their worldly view.
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And part of it is because they got involved with their language.
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English is a big one,
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but it is even more important if you have more obscure languages.
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It makes you part of
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one world.
One world of ideas.
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And that idea that every language is important,
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just as every person is important too.