Jimmy Wales

Origin story of Wikipedia.

Well, so I was watching the growth of the free software movement, open source software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, sharing code, doing that under a free license, which is really interesting because it empowers an ability to work together.

That's really hard to do if the code is still proprietary because then if I chip in and help, we sort of have to figure out how I'm

going to be rewarded and what that is, but the idea that everyone can copy it and it just is part of the commons really empowered a huge wave of creative software production.

And I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works.

And the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia.

I thought, oh, that seems obvious that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it.

There's a few reasons why.

One, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like.

You know, you should see a picture, a few pictures maybe, history, location, something about the architect, etc., etc., etc.

So we have a shared understanding of what it is we're trying to do, and then we can collaborate and different people can chip in and find sources and so on and so forth.

So set up first, Newpedia, which was about two years before Wikipedia.

And with Newpedia, we had this idea that in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia.

Because a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting to write an encyclopedia, you know, you could be made fun of if it's just every random person.

So we had implemented this seven-stage review process to get anything published.

And two things came of that.

So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process, a few days later, we had to pull it because as soon as it hit the web and the broader community took a look at it, people noticed plagiarism and realized that it wasn't actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on.

So we had to pull it.

So it's like, okay, well, so much for a seven-stage review process.

But also, I decided that I wanted to try.