Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia at its tenth birthday lecture in Bristol: transcript

Key points

• Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages, free as in speech, not free as in beer.
• Wikipedia had over 16 million articles in over 270 languages.
• Wikipedians are about 87% male with an average age in the late 20s, and have double the share of PhDs of the general public.
• Growth in content and readership has slowed, with a turn from quantity to quality.
• Wales said his net neutrality views are personal, and he warned that Apple's app approval model is a dangerous choke point.

Chapters

1. 0:26What Wikipedia is and what it is not
2. 1:36The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia's scale
3. 2:40Who the Wikipedians are
4. 3:58Slowing growth and the shift to quality
5. 5:40Closing remarks on outreach and participation

Full transcript

0:26Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, one of the legends of the modern age, Mr. Jimmy Wales. Thank you. The legends of the modern age. You will all be disappointed now. What is Wikipedia? The core definition of Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. And all of that is very important to us. When I say freely licensed, I'm saying, you know, free access to human knowledge.

1:02what do I mean by that? Well I mean more than just the cost of Wikipedia. We come from the world of free software or open source software as most people know it and in this world when we talk about free we have an old joke we say Free as in speech, not free as in beer. When I say the sum of all human knowledge, what do I mean by that? What I mean is that Wikipedia is a certain well-defined concept of an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not everything in the world. It's not an archive, it's not a library, it's not a textbook.

1:36Wikipedia is not YouTube, so we don't have funny cat videos. The Wikimedia Foundation is the charity that owns and operates Wikipedia. And my slide's a little bit out of date here because my slide says we have 35 employees. It's actually around 50 employees now. I'm a little concerned the organization is getting bloated. Just kidding. The staff has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of the editing processes on the site. The foundation's task is to keep Wikipedia running.

2:07So it's a very tiny organization. If you can think about the scope of what we're doing, the fifth most popular website, 400 million visitors and only 50 staff and a budget of only $20 million is really an astounding thing. So in Wikipedia today we have over 16 million articles. We're in over 270 different languages. We now have over 400 million visitors every month. Who are the people who write Wikipedia? I think that's a really important question.

2:40Why should we want to know who the Wikipedians are? I mean, it's a great website, what do we care who wrote it? And one of the interesting ways of looking at this, this was a message that someone posted on Twitter, it turns out she's a school teacher, and she says, yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said, is it something like Wikipedia? And so it's really, really important to all of us that Wikipedia be as good as it possibly can be. So who are the Wikipedians? So by the numbers, we are about 87% male, which is not a good thing.

3:12The average age is around 26. Somebody told me a different survey said 27, but I mean you get the general idea, it's late 20s. We're a pretty geeky crowd. We have double the percentage of PhDs relative to the general public. Who are the amateur encyclopedias? We're at the center of this Venn diagram between intelligence, obsession, and lots and lots of free time. But in the main it's a very friendly group of people who are very passionate about getting it right and that makes all the difference for the next five or ten years both in terms of content generation and attracting new editors. When we look at the growth of Wikipedia let's just talk about the growth in the content it has slowed to some extent as it's become harder and harder to find.

3:58Subjects about which we don't have an article. Also the rate of growth, say in English, for example, of the readership has also slowed down, but that is easy to explain when you're already the fifth most popular website online. The way I see the next few years, there has been a turn from quantity to quality. What are your views on net neutrality? The first thing I should say is that the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that owns and operates Wikipedia, takes no political positions on anything whatsoever, including net neutrality.

4:30I want to make clear that my views are not necessarily the views of either the community or the Wikimedia Foundation. My view is that many of the people who are in favor of legislating for net neutrality are acting in good faith, but they're very naive about what they're doing and that they are at risk of introducing regulation that will slow down innovation online. The bit about net neutrality doesn't strike me as where the action is taking place right now. Where the action is taking place right now is in the development of the apps model, which is in some ways an incredible boon.

5:06There's some really interesting and amazing things going on. However, the concern that you have to have is in order to make software and distribute it, you can distribute it to a handful of friends if they do this very complicated thing with getting a key and all this. But to actually just distribute it for free, say, oh look, I wrote this cool app, everybody can have it for free and you can look at my source code and everything, you have to get permission from Apple. And so that choke point that we have in the Apple apps model is very dangerous. I own a device and you're a programmer, you want to give me your software, we should not have to get permission from anyone else.

5:40Jimmy Wiles. Thank you. We had a lot of fun. Lots of people here are already editing Wikipedia and familiar with Wikipedia. See ya. The rates of participation in Wikipedia track very well with the rates of sophistication, of the use of media, new media in particular, and so that's something that we really want to reach out to.

6:25It was really exciting to be here.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Jimmy Wales Bristol Public Lecture wp10 6min promo.theora.ogv by Digital Village, BBC Bristol with Steve Virgin of Wikimedia UK (2011-02-14), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.