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Gizmodo is 20 years old! To celebrate the anniversary, We are looking back. The most important ways in which our lives are thrown by our digital devices.
Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. In the years since, users have contributed more than six million articles, and the online encyclopedia has become one of the most visited sites on the web. Gizmodo recently sat down with Wells to discuss how the site—and the Internet in general—has changed over the past two decades. The following excerpts from that conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
Gizmodo: What were your thoughts when you decided to start Wikipedia and what was the state of things on the Internet?
Jimmy Wales: I thought it would be nice to have an open source, freely licensed encyclopedia. We started with Nupedia project, to think of getting volunteers to write an encyclopedia, but we don’t know how to do that. We didn’t know about wikis and the whole wiki model. Everything was top down, set the stage, go and publish. And during that time, I engaged in very long email conversations with random professors I met on the Internet. We were writing so long emails back and forth that I realized we could practically write a book together. The interesting thing is that people are very generous with their time, and any random person can write to a Harvard professor and ask an interesting question. Maybe you’re about to find an answer. And so I thought, OK, that’s interesting, maybe people will contribute to an international encyclopedia.
Gizmodo: Do you feel there’s more of a sense then that the Internet is a collaborative thing, something we can build together?
Wales: Maybe. Considering only the specific example Usenet, there used to be a lot of better newsgroup FAQs… they were updated over time collaboratively, different people contributed, there was a moderator that kept it all together. And it was about sharing valuable information. So that’s pretty powerful. There was always an element of collaboration in things like the old concept.Rough communication and running codeAs an early mantra of how the internet works.
We still see a lot of variety. Even in the cryptocurrency space, when there are major forks and changes to the underlying software, who is to decide? Well, it’s a rough consensus and running code. You can yell and scream all you want, but if you don’t implement the code correctly, nothing will happen. And even if you can implement it in code, if no one agrees, they won’t remove it. So it’s a bit of both.
Gizmodo: Do you have any sense of what Wikipedia will become when it expands?
Wales: I always say I’m a pathological optimist, so I’m always no matter what’s great, or big and important. We started in English but from the beginning it was the idea that it should be in every language. Given the scope of the content, that was a very open question at the outset, and of course it is still publicly contested. Things like there’s an English Wikipedia entry for every Pokémon character. That seems excessive, doesn’t it? But it’s good. I think what people have learned over time is that it doesn’t hurt if we get very poor coverage of the mayors of Poland in the 18th century, and I’m not sure if those Pokemon fans will turn to writing about it, they are. Write what you know.
Gizmodo: There’s a lot more talk about “fake news” than there was twenty years ago. Obviously that’s always been the case for Wikipedia. Have we moved beyond what is done in good faith, and now many spoilers abound?
Wales: I think what we see on Wikipedia is always a disaster. We always have people with agendas, and they need to be dealt with. We didn’t always have fake news as we understand it today. There have always been lower quality and better quality sources. But the ecosystem in which we operate has certainly changed.
When Donald Trump first ran for president, the headline was “Pope Endorses Trump” as fake news. It went viral, but you could never get something like that to Wikipedia because all the Wikipedians would go, “Yeah, right. Of course.” If that was true it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world… so you can’t get away with something like that.
The deeper problem I see is the decline in the quality of journalism in the country. In some ways, it’s easier to write the history of my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama in the seventies, than it is to write the history of the last five years, because there were two local newspapers, now there is one, and it only comes out three times a week. It’s mostly an AP news wire, and it’s edited from 100 miles away. By the time they were ten, they might have had two journalists in the country. So I think that’s a real problem. It’s not as exciting as fake news, but it’s deeply important to society.
Gizmodo: If you were building Wikipedia from scratch in 2022, would it look different? Or will it still be basically a high-text document?
Wales: I think it will be very similar. I mean, the writing works well. It’s an encyclopedia, so we’re not going to be like TikTok, I don’t know. I think there are probably some exceptions in terms of the technology behind it.
One of the funniest things when I started Wikipedia was that I had to buy a server when it grew. As presented to me in person. I put them in my car, drive to the data center, and put them in the racks myself. Currently, with cloud services, you’re just running another instance on Amazon Web Services.
It’s nice that you’re able to weigh in like that, because we had to make a commitment. I remember when we found out…we needed a huge database server that cost ten grand. It’s commitment. All though [on the cloud]If we don’t use it, it goes to zero. That’s a real opportunity: if your idea is great, if it’s good, you can get a huge increase in traffic. If your idea is as stupid as most, the balance is at zero, and you’re not stuck paying a huge server bill.
Gizmodo: In the early days of the Internet, the whole point was decentralization. Information is shared between different locations. But now, as you said, we’re at a point where everybody is on Amazon’s cloud service. But what happens when Amazon goes down? Or will Cloudflare go down? Did we go in the wrong direction?
Wales: I do not know. That’s one of the wonderful things, for example, about all things blockchain, it’s so decentralized. But I think the world hit a bullet: it was time for the Internet. [was dominated by] AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, all these closed party platforms… it’s not hard to imagine a world where one of those has gained enough edge to become the default platform for everything. And then suddenly you have this centralized monolith.
Gizmodo: Twenty years later, does Wikipedia still look the same? Do you think it will change?
Wales: I think it will be very similar. I mean, I guess we’ll modernize it a little bit. Certainly the editing experience will continue to improve. But we’re not TikTok.
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