The birth of Wikipedia
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0:00 - 0:04In 1962, Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica,
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0:04 - 0:08said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe.
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0:08 - 0:11But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962,
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0:11 - 0:13it was anything but radical:
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0:13 - 0:18still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia.
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0:18 - 0:23Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea,
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0:23 - 0:25and that's for all of us to imagine a world
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0:25 - 0:27in which every single person on the planet
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0:27 - 0:30is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
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0:30 - 0:32And that's what we're doing. So Wikipedia --
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0:33 - 0:35you just saw the little demonstration of it --
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0:35 - 0:39it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. It's written by thousands of volunteers
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0:39 - 0:41all over the world in many, many languages.
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0:41 - 0:43It's written using Wiki software --
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0:43 - 0:46which is the type of software he just demonstrated
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0:46 - 0:48-- so anyone can quickly edit and save,
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0:48 - 0:51and it goes live on the Internet immediately.
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0:51 - 0:56And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff.
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0:56 - 1:00So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization,
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1:00 - 1:04he's exactly describing Wikipedia. And what I'm going to do today
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1:04 - 1:08is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside.
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1:08 - 1:13So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded,
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1:13 - 1:18a nonprofit organization. And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation,
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1:18 - 1:21is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
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1:21 - 1:23And so if you think about what that means,
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1:23 - 1:26it means a lot more than just building a cool website.
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1:26 - 1:30We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide,
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1:30 - 1:34empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need
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1:34 - 1:35to make good decisions.
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1:35 - 1:39And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet.
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1:39 - 1:43And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model,
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1:43 - 1:45because that empowers local entrepreneurs --
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1:45 - 1:47or anyone who wants to, can take our content
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1:47 - 1:51and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it
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1:51 - 1:53and you can do it commercially or non-commercially.
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1:53 - 1:57So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia
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1:57 - 1:59all over the world.
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1:59 - 2:01We're funded by donations from the public,
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2:01 - 2:04and one of the more interesting things about that
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2:04 - 2:07is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia.
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2:07 - 2:12So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was.
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2:12 - 2:16And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is,
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2:16 - 2:18but first I'll show you how big it is.
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2:18 - 2:22So we've got over 600,000 articles in English.
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2:22 - 2:26We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages.
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2:26 - 2:29The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French --
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2:29 - 2:33all the Western European languages are quite big.
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2:33 - 2:36But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web
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2:36 - 2:38clusters to the English Wikipedia,
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2:38 - 2:40which is surprising to a lot of people.
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2:40 - 2:44A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet,
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2:44 - 2:47but for us, we're truly global. We're in many, many languages.
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2:48 - 2:51How popular we've gotten to be -- we're a top 50 website
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2:51 - 2:53and we're more popular than the New York Times.
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2:53 - 2:57So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion.
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2:58 - 3:01This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we're the blue line there --
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3:01 - 3:04and then this is the New York Times over there.
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3:04 - 3:07And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge,
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3:07 - 3:11enormous corporate operation with -- I have no idea how many hundreds of employees.
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3:11 - 3:14We have exactly one employee,
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3:14 - 3:17and that employee is our lead software developer.
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3:17 - 3:20And he's only been our employee since January 2005,
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3:20 - 3:22all the other growth before that.
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3:22 - 3:25So the servers are managed by a rag-tag band of volunteers;
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3:25 - 3:27all the editing is done by volunteers.
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3:27 - 3:29And the way that we're organized
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3:29 - 3:32is not like any traditional organization you can imagine.
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3:32 - 3:34People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?"
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3:34 - 3:39or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in.
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3:39 - 3:42It's a very unusual and chaotic thing.
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3:42 - 3:45We've got over 90 servers now in three locations.
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3:45 - 3:49These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online.
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3:49 - 3:52I can go online any time of the day or night
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3:52 - 3:56and see eight to 10 people waiting for me
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3:56 - 4:00to ask a question or something, anything about the servers.
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4:00 - 4:02You could never afford to do this in a company.
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4:02 - 4:06You could never afford to have a standby crew of people
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4:06 - 4:1024 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia.
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4:10 - 4:13So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly,
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4:13 - 4:16so it's really gotten to be a huge thing.
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4:16 - 4:18And everything is managed by the volunteers.
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4:18 - 4:23And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars.
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4:23 - 4:25And that's essentially our main cost.
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4:25 - 4:28We could actually do without the employee. We actually --
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4:28 - 4:31we hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years
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4:31 - 4:33and full-time at Wikipedia,
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4:33 - 4:37so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
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4:38 - 4:41So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is,
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4:41 - 4:45why isn't it all rubbish? Why is the website as good as it is?
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4:45 - 4:48First of all, how good is it? Well, it's pretty good. It isn't perfect,
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4:48 - 4:51but it's much, much better than you would expect,
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4:51 - 4:53given our completely chaotic model.
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4:53 - 4:56So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me,
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4:56 - 5:00you think, oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish.
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5:00 - 5:04But when we've seen quality tests -- and there haven't been enough of these yet
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5:04 - 5:06and I'm really encouraging people to do more,
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5:06 - 5:10comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down.
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5:10 - 5:13So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia,
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5:13 - 5:16which is really much, much smaller than English,
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5:16 - 5:20to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus Multimedia,
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5:20 - 5:22and we won across the board.
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5:22 - 5:25They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality,
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5:25 - 5:28and we were very pleased with that result.
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5:28 - 5:32So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy.
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5:32 - 5:36The media has covered this somewhat extensively.
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5:36 - 5:39It started out with an article in Red Herring.
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5:39 - 5:42The reporters called me up and they -- I mean, I have to say
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5:42 - 5:47they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say,
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5:47 - 5:49the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious,
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5:49 - 5:53it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. And so they quote me as saying,
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5:53 - 5:56"They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia."
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5:56 - 5:58What I actually said is, they're not contentious at all.
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5:58 - 6:04So it's a slight misquote. (Laughter) The articles were edited quite heavily.
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6:04 - 6:07And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions.
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6:07 - 6:10Time magazine recently reported that
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6:10 - 6:13"Extreme action sometimes has to be taken,
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6:13 - 6:18and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004."
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6:18 - 6:22This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for --
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6:22 - 6:24occasionally a little bit here and there.
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6:24 - 6:27So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies
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6:27 - 6:31that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community
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6:31 - 6:33are not really controversies at all.
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6:33 - 6:36Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot,
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6:36 - 6:39but they don't cause much controversy within the community.
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6:39 - 6:44And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality.
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6:46 - 6:50The real struggle is not between the right and the left --
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6:50 - 6:52that's where most people assume --
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6:52 - 6:55but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.
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6:55 - 6:59And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.
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6:59 - 7:03The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident
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7:03 - 7:05is that the Bush-Kerry articles
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7:05 - 7:08were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004,
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7:08 - 7:10and it wasn't because they were contentious;
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7:10 - 7:13it was just because there was routine vandalism --
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7:13 - 7:17which happens sometimes even on stage, people --
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7:17 - 7:20sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalize Wikipedia
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7:20 - 7:23and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly.
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7:23 - 7:27And I said -- you know, I always say, please don't do that; that's not a good thing.
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7:27 - 7:29So how do we do this?
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7:29 - 7:31How do we manage the quality control?
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7:31 - 7:34How does it work?
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7:34 - 7:37So there's a few elements,
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7:37 - 7:40mostly social policies and some elements of the software.
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7:40 - 7:44So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point-of-view policy.
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7:44 - 7:47This is something that I set down from the very beginning,
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7:47 - 7:51as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable.
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7:51 - 7:54It's a social concept of cooperation,
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7:54 - 7:58so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity.
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7:58 - 8:02The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic,
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8:02 - 8:05that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write,
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8:05 - 8:07because I don't agree with you about what's the truth.
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8:07 - 8:10But we have this jargon term of neutrality,
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8:10 - 8:12which has its own long history within the community,
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8:12 - 8:16which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue,
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8:16 - 8:19Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue.
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8:19 - 8:22We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it.
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8:22 - 8:25So this neutrality policy is really important for us,
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8:25 - 8:29because it empowers a community that is very diverse
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8:29 - 8:31to come together and actually get some work done.
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8:31 - 8:34So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious,
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8:34 - 8:36cultural backgrounds.
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8:36 - 8:38By having this firm neutrality policy,
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8:38 - 8:40which is non-negotiable from the beginning,
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8:40 - 8:42we ensure that people can work together
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8:42 - 8:44and that the entries don't become simply a war
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8:44 - 8:47back and forth between the left and the right.
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8:47 - 8:49If you engage in that type of behavior,
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8:49 - 8:51you'll be asked to leave the community.
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8:52 - 8:54So real-time peer review.
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8:54 - 8:57Every single change on the site goes to the recent changes page.
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8:57 - 9:00So as soon as he made his change, it went to the recent changes page.
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9:00 - 9:04That recent changes page was also fed into IRC channel,
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9:04 - 9:06which is an Internet chat channel
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9:06 - 9:08that people are monitoring with various software tools.
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9:10 - 9:12And people can get RSS feeds --
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9:12 - 9:15they can get e-mail notifications of changes.
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9:15 - 9:17And then users can set up their own personal watch list.
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9:17 - 9:20So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists,
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9:20 - 9:22because it is sometimes vandalized.
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9:24 - 9:28And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly,
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9:28 - 9:32and then they'll just simply revert the change.
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9:32 - 9:34There's a new pages feed, for example,
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9:34 - 9:36so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia
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9:36 - 9:38and see every new page as it's created.
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9:38 - 9:40This is really important, because a lot of new pages that get created
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9:40 - 9:43are just garbage that have to be deleted, you know, ASDFASDF.
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9:43 - 9:46But also that's some of the most interesting and fun things at Wikipedia,
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9:46 - 9:48some of the new articles.
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9:48 - 9:50People will start an article on some interesting topic,
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9:50 - 9:52other people will find that intriguing
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9:52 - 9:54and jump in and help and make it much better.
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9:54 - 9:56So we do have edits by anonymous users,
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9:56 - 10:00which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia.
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10:00 - 10:04So Chris was able to do his change -- he didn't have to log in or anything;
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10:04 - 10:07he just went on the website and made a change.
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10:07 - 10:10But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website
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10:10 - 10:12are done by anonymous users.
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10:12 - 10:14And that's a really important thing to understand,
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10:14 - 10:17is that the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website
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10:17 - 10:21are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people
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10:21 - 10:23who are in constant communication.
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10:23 - 10:25And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists.
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10:25 - 10:29All these people know each other. They communicate; we have offline meetings.
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10:29 - 10:31These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site,
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10:31 - 10:36and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing,
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10:36 - 10:40that the standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than
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10:40 - 10:42professional standards of quality.
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10:42 - 10:44We don't always meet those standards,
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10:44 - 10:46but that's what we're striving for.
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10:46 - 10:49And so that tight community is who really cares for the site,
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10:49 - 10:51and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met.
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10:51 - 10:53Of course, it's my job to say that, but it's actually true.
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10:53 - 10:57The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun
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10:57 - 10:59tend to be pretty smart people. (Laughter)
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11:00 - 11:02The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us --
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11:02 - 11:06allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work.
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11:06 - 11:08This is an example of a page history on "flat earth,"
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11:08 - 11:11and you can see some changes that were made.
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11:11 - 11:14What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this
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11:14 - 11:16and see, oh OK, I understand now.
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11:16 - 11:19When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone,
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11:19 - 11:21an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page --
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11:21 - 11:24that sounds suspicious -- who is this person? Somebody looks at it --
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11:24 - 11:28they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place,
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11:28 - 11:32to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this.
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11:32 - 11:37So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page.
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11:37 - 11:40Another thing that we do within the community
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11:40 - 11:43is we leave everything very open-ended.
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11:43 - 11:47Most of the social rules and the methods of work
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11:47 - 11:49are left completely open-ended in the software.
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11:49 - 11:51All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages.
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11:51 - 11:54And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules.
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11:54 - 11:57The example I've got up here is a Votes For Deletion page.
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11:58 - 12:01So, I mentioned earlier, people type ASDFASDF --
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12:01 - 12:04it needs to be deleted. Cases like that, the administrators just delete it.
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12:04 - 12:06There's no reason to have a big argument about it.
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12:06 - 12:10But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is,
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12:10 - 12:12is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia?
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12:12 - 12:16Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what?
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12:16 - 12:19So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this.
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12:19 - 12:22And so the method that arose organically within the community
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12:22 - 12:24is the Votes For Deletion page.
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12:24 - 12:26And in the particular example we have here, it's a film,
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12:26 - 12:28"Twisted Issues," and the first person says,
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12:28 - 12:32"Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably."
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12:32 - 12:35The Google test is, you look in Google and see if it's there,
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12:35 - 12:39because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all.
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12:39 - 12:43It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research.
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12:44 - 12:47So somebody says, "Delete it, please. Delete it -- it's not notable."
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12:47 - 12:49And then somebody says, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, I found it.
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12:49 - 12:51I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide:
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12:51 - 12:53the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'"
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12:53 - 12:55Oh, OK. So the next persons says, "Clean it up."
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12:55 - 12:59Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep."
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12:59 - 13:02And what's interesting about this is that the software is --
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13:02 - 13:05these votes are just -- they're just text typed into a page.
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13:05 - 13:10This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue.
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13:10 - 13:12Now it is true that at the end of the day
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13:12 - 13:15an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say,
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13:15 - 13:18OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it.
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13:18 - 13:23But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it,
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13:23 - 13:25because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute.
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13:25 - 13:27Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book,
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13:27 - 13:31and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow,
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13:31 - 13:34so please don't delete it," then it would survive.
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13:34 - 13:36And it also matters who the people are who are voting.
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13:36 - 13:38Like I say, it's a tight knit community.
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13:38 - 13:40Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," Rick Kay.
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13:40 - 13:43Rick Kay is a very famous Wikipedian
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13:43 - 13:46who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes
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13:46 - 13:48and votes for deletion.
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13:48 - 13:51His voice carries a lot of weight within the community
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13:51 - 13:53because he knows what he's doing.
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13:53 - 13:55So how's all this governed?
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13:55 - 13:59People really want to know about, OK, administrators, things like that.
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13:59 - 14:03So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community,
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14:03 - 14:07is a very confusing, but a workable mix of consensus --
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14:07 - 14:09meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles,
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14:09 - 14:13because the majority view is not necessarily neutral.
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14:13 - 14:15Some amount of democracy, all of the administrators --
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14:15 - 14:18these are the people who have the ability to delete pages,
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14:18 - 14:20that doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages;
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14:20 - 14:23they still have to follow all the rules -- but they're elected;
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14:23 - 14:25they're elected by the community. Sometimes people --
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14:25 - 14:29random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators
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14:29 - 14:31to bias the content of the encyclopedia.
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14:31 - 14:35I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually.
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14:35 - 14:37There's a certain amount of aristocracy.
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14:37 - 14:40And so you've got a hint of that when I mentioned, like,
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14:40 - 14:43Rick Kay's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know.
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14:43 - 14:47I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected
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14:47 - 14:50to the Board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation,
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14:50 - 14:54with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it.
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14:54 - 14:58And I always embarrass her because I say, well, Angela, for example,
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14:58 - 15:01could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia,
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15:01 - 15:03because she's so admired and so powerful.
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15:03 - 15:07But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person
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15:07 - 15:10who you know would never, ever, ever break any rules of Wikipedia.
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15:10 - 15:13And I also like to say she's the only person
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15:13 - 15:16who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ...
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15:16 - 15:20And then there's monarchy and that's my role on the community, so ...
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15:21 - 15:26I was describing this in Berlin once and the next day in the newspaper
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15:26 - 15:29the headline said, "I am the Queen of England."
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15:29 - 15:32And that's not exactly what I said (Laughter), but --
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15:34 - 15:36the point is my role in the community --
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15:36 - 15:39within the free software world
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15:39 - 15:44there's been a longstanding tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model.
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15:44 - 15:47So if you look at most of the major free software projects,
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15:47 - 15:49they have one single person in charge
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15:49 - 15:52who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator.
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15:52 - 15:55Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator,"
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15:55 - 15:58and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas
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15:58 - 16:03to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world.
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16:03 - 16:05It just isn't appropriate.
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16:05 - 16:08But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy,
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16:08 - 16:11a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision,
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16:11 - 16:14and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily
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16:14 - 16:16in formal decision-making processes.
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16:16 - 16:20So as an example of why this has been --
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16:20 - 16:22or how this can be important:
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16:22 - 16:25we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia,
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16:25 - 16:30and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website
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16:30 - 16:33and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like.
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16:33 - 16:35And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send --
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16:35 - 16:39we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over
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16:39 - 16:41and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted."
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16:41 - 16:44Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up.
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16:44 - 16:46That's neo-Nazi math for you.
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16:46 - 16:49They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18.
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16:49 - 16:54But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way
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16:54 - 16:56to delete a perfectly valid article.
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16:56 - 16:59Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18,
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16:59 - 17:02so there was no real danger to our democratic processes.
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17:02 - 17:05On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do?
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17:05 - 17:09I mean, this could happen and what if some group gets really seriously organized
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17:09 - 17:11and comes in and wants to vote?"
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17:11 - 17:14Then I said, "Well fuck it, we'll just change the rules."
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17:14 - 17:19That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness
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17:19 - 17:22and freedom to undermine the quality of the content.
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17:22 - 17:25And so as long as people trust me in my role,
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17:25 - 17:27then that's a valid place for me.
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17:27 - 17:31Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job,
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17:31 - 17:33the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave --
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17:33 - 17:35I can't tell anyone what to do.
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17:35 - 17:39So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works,
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17:39 - 17:43it's important to understand that our Wiki model is the way we work,
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17:43 - 17:47but we are not fanatical web anarchists. In fact,
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17:47 - 17:50we're very flexible about the social methodology,
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17:50 - 17:54because it's ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work,
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17:54 - 17:58not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.
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17:58 - 18:00Thank you.
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18:00 - 18:03(Applause)
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18:03 - 18:05Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders.
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18:05 - 18:09Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success.
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18:09 - 18:13It strikes me that much of the textbooks
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18:13 - 18:16that are used to educate our children are inherently biased.
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18:16 - 18:20Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers,
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18:20 - 18:22and how do you see Wikipedia changing education?
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18:22 - 18:27Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia.
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18:27 - 18:31There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false.
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18:31 - 18:34It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers.
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18:34 - 18:38And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia,
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18:38 - 18:44but academics hate it and teachers hate it. And that turns out to not be true.
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18:44 - 18:46The last time I got an e-mail from a journalist saying,
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18:46 - 18:48"Why do academics hate Wikipedia?"
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18:48 - 18:50I sent it from my Harvard email address,
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18:50 - 18:52because I was recently appointed a fellow there.
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18:52 - 18:55And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it." (Laughter)
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18:55 - 18:58But I think there's going to be huge impacts.
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18:58 - 19:00And we actually have a project
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19:00 - 19:02that I'm personally really excited about,
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19:02 - 19:04which is the Wiki books project,
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19:04 - 19:06which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages.
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19:06 - 19:08And that's a much bigger project;
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19:08 - 19:12it's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition.
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19:12 - 19:14But part of that is to fulfill our mission
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19:14 - 19:17of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
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19:17 - 19:20We don't mean we're going to spam them with AOL-style CDs.
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19:20 - 19:23We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use.
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19:23 - 19:25And for a lot of people in the world,
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19:25 - 19:27if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level,
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19:27 - 19:29it doesn't do you any good
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19:29 - 19:31without a whole host of literacy materials
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19:31 - 19:33to build you up to the point where you can actually use it.
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19:33 - 19:36And so the Wiki books project is an effort to do that.
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19:36 - 19:38And I think that we're going to really see a huge --
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19:38 - 19:39it may not even come from us;
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19:39 - 19:41there's all kinds of innovation going on.
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19:41 - 19:45But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
- Title:
- The birth of Wikipedia
- Speaker:
- Jimmy Wales
- Description:
-
Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished online encyclopedia.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 19:45
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Krystian Aparta commented on English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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Krystian Aparta edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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Krystian Aparta edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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Joanna Pietrulewicz edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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Joanna Pietrulewicz edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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Joanna Pietrulewicz edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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TED edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia | |
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TED edited English subtitles for The birth of Wikipedia |
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 10/6/2015. Throughout the transcript, "Rick Kay" was changed to "RickK."