 Well, my time with you is almost up, and I need to make sure that I mentioned one last time the sponsors who made this event possible. The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Freedom Factor, Bitcoin.com, The Atlas Network, Retzel, Free2Choose, and Liberty Health Share are among many, many sponsors that we've had here at FECOM. Thank you so much. And there is one other group of people I need to thank, and that is the staff of FECOM who have made this event go off without a hitch. Thank you so much. And our speakers and our volunteers, everyone's just made this such a great event. So it's my distinct honor now to introduce you to someone who I've respected for a very, very long time. I don't know, does anyone here have a favorite website? Because mine is actually the website this guy started. Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is an American internet entrepreneur. He's the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit Encyclopedia Wikipedia. His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time Magazine to name him to their 2006 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy Wales. Okay, great. Thank you very much. It's really great to be here. And I'm going to talk today about some of the history of Wikipedia. I'm going to talk a little bit about Austrian economics. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I'm working on now, which is called Wikitribune. So let's just get started here. So the original vision for Wikipedia is for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing at Wikipedia. So as you can see in this vision statement, it's quite a huge, big concept. And actually every word of this, I wrote very, very carefully to cover some important ideas. When I say every single person on the planet, that means that Wikipedia is inherently multi-lingual and inherently global. Free access, that's something really important to us, and it means more than just free as in we don't charge any money. It's actually everything in Wikipedia is freely licensed. And that's a very, very important concept to us. And then finally the sum of all human knowledge, and the word sum there tells you that there are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not. Wikipedia is a summary of human knowledge, and that really helps to define for the volunteers what it is that we're working on. So in the last 16 years, we've managed to create over 40 million articles. We have over 400 million unique visitors every month. That number is according to ComScore, but our actual internal server logs suggest a much higher figure. ComScore is really good at measuring traffic in places where there's a strong advertising market, but they don't, they will admit they're not as good at measuring traffic across Sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, and so on. According to our internal server logs, one of the things we look at is the number of unique devices accessing Wikipedia, and that is more than one billion every month. That doesn't mean a billion people, because obviously, probably most people in this room access Wikipedia from at least two devices, but still it's a lot of people. Wikipedia is in 284 languages, but I actually think that that number is a little bit unfair. There's only about 220 languages that have at least 1,000 entries. So the last chunk of versions of Wikipedia, mainly they just have the interface translated and maybe 50 or 100 articles written so far. So there's still a long way to go in the languages of the developing world. Several years ago, I set as a goal for Wikipedia, when I say every single person on the planet in their own language, I set the goal to say, let's have at least a quarter of a million entries in every language that has at least one million speakers. There's about 330 languages that have one million native speakers. So there are some languages, mainly in Africa, smaller languages of Africa that may have one or two million speakers and we don't even have those languages yet. Often those people are covered by a regional language or something like that, but still we want to get into as many languages as possible. One of the things that people are always interested in when I talk about how global Wikipedia is, is the questions about censorship. Obviously we work all around the world and there are many governments around the world who don't appreciate the idea of high quality, neutral information for their citizens. And so we have had to deal over the years with censorship. Now our approach to dealing with censorship has always been extremely hard line. We will never compromise on this issue. My view is that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. It's a corollary of the right of freedom of expression and it's something that we don't compromise on. Now a lot of companies do compromise on this. A lot of companies in different jurisdictions will agree to take things down, which I think they shouldn't. And I'm somewhat sympathetic to at least some of those companies. Some companies just don't care and I think that's wrong. Other companies say, look we have to work, we're working to bring about more information, more access to information. We have to work in the current circumstances. We can't just stay out of the country completely. Okay, I appreciate that. Whenever I see a company saying something like that, I want to say, what are you doing? What are you actually doing on the ground to lobby for change? Because otherwise those are some nice words to appease people back home in the land of the First Amendment and you're not actually doing anything. So anyway, but for us we never compromise and one of the things that happened that was very, very interesting recently is due to some of the revelations that actually came about from Snowden. We found out about upstream surveillance where there was a slide, a particular slide which was really pissed off our developers saying that Wikipedia was quite easy to spy on because we used only HTTP instead of HTTPS so it wasn't encrypted. We had been planning to go to encryption for quite a long time. It didn't seem particularly urgent. This made it very, very urgent. So we went to full encryption and we actually, we didn't know what was going to happen with respect to freedom of expression. Why is that? Well, under HTTP they can see which URL you're visiting and they can filter certain pages out. But once you go to HTTPS, it's just like when you go to your bank. They can see that you're talking to your bank but they can't see what the page says or which page you're on. So we knew that the countries that were out there and there's a fair number of them who were filtering certain pages would then have a new set of policy options or I'd say a restricted set of policy options. It's no longer an option for a government to say, we're just gonna block this one page of an opposition political figure we don't like, you have to take all of Wikipedia or none. So we thought, hmm, we'll see what's gonna happen now. As it turns out, every country in the world decided to accept all of Wikipedia except for China, which we're completely blocked in China. And then more recently, Turkey has suddenly just in the past few months blocked Wikipedia. And in the case of Turkey, we are in dialogue with the government, so I can't talk about it too much, but I can say there are particular pages that they don't like, which are factual and objective and quite neutral. So, I don't want to curse. I don't want you to tweet this, but they can go fuck themselves. So, and I'm serious, there's a lot of young people in the audience. Please don't tweet that, it will complicate matters enormously. I shouldn't have said that out loud, I'm just having fun. So, China, we've been blocked in China, we've been up and down in China over the years, currently we are blocked in China. We're hopeful about the progress in China in the long run. But even though we've been blocked in China, we have had a kind of a cultural impact in China. This is a menu someone sent me, I'm not sure you can quite read it. It says fried special Wikipedia, Wikipedia fried with eggs. Somebody sent me this and they said to me, Jimmy, what does this mean? I said, I have no idea, but I know who will know. So, I emailed the Beijing area of Wikipedians and I said to them, what does this mean? And they deliberated for a few days and they wrote me back and they said, Jimmy, we have no idea, beef brisket and Wikipedia flavor. So, all of these are from menus in Beijing, Shanghai, places around China. And the only thing we can figure is that these started popping up around the time of the Beijing Olympics. So, Wikipedia had been banned in China, but was unblocked just before the Olympics. They opened up a lot of websites just for the Olympics. They knew lots of foreigners were coming and they were trying to put on a good face for the world. And what we think is a lot of restaurant owners in Beijing and Shanghai knew that millions of foreigners were coming and that for the first time ever, they should probably translate their menu. And so, what did they do? They just went on Google and they typed the name of the food. And of course, what's the first thing you find when you Google anything? Wikipedia. There's actually a Wikipedia bread company. It's kind of like a Starbucks, it's quite nice. Stir-fried Wikipedia, there's a lot of these. I like it spicy myself. Anyway, so one of the further questions that is really worth addressing is, who writes Wikipedia? Who are the Wikipedians? Because obviously, we've had a huge impact on the world. Why do we want to know who the Wikipedians are? Well, here's one reason. This is a tweet from a woman who turns out a school librarian. She says, yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is. And she said, is it something like Wikipedia? So, if you think about it like this, so Wikipedia is now 16 years old. And so, young people who are in university now, say 18 to 22, Wikipedia has existed since they were learning how to read. It at least existed. And certainly in the last five years, five to 10 years, when you would have started going online to research to get information, Wikipedia has been ubiquitous and huge. It's part of the infrastructure of the world. It's like the air we breathe, it's just there. And so the question is, who writes it? We're part of the infrastructure of the world. So by the numbers, we are about 87% male, which is I think even worse than this room, I have to say. Average age of 26, which is, I don't have a strong opinion about that. We've got a fair number of people younger, fair number older. We have double the percentage of PhDs compared to the general public. That does not mean that Wikipedia is mostly written by PhDs. It just means there's quite a lot of them in the community. As you can imagine, writing an encyclopedia is quite a nerdy, geeky hobby. So you would expect people who are very academic to be very interested in it. And that certainly has been the case. One of the things that happens as you experience Wikipedia, of course, Wikipedia is written in a very authoritative style. It's very dry. And one of the reasons I think that Wikipedia is so dominantly male, and I say this as a joke against men, is that men have no problem speaking in a very authoritative way about something they know nothing about. Women are typically more sensible. But this is something we'd like to change. We think that the gender imbalance is not good for Wikipedia. We know that it is reflected in the content in various ways. It isn't so much that the content itself is directly misogynist or anything like that, that isn't the issue. It's that we know that by gender, people have oftentimes different interests. So when we look at award-winning novelists who've won major literary prizes, the male novelists tend to have much longer and much more detailed entries than the female novelists. Now, this isn't because the male Wikipedians look and they say look by a girl, who cares, that's not interesting. Now, that's not what's going on. What is going on is people write what they know about, and that there are certainly within fine literature and so forth. There are definitely cases where mainly women read something or mainly men read something and that results in some bias in Wikipedia. So now one of the things that is hard for people to imagine because of that very fact-based authoritative style that we use is it's hard to envision the people behind Wikipedia. And so now I'm going to show you a video which tells you a little bit about some of the people in Wikipedia. The fact that information spreads quickly means that truth can spread quickly and lies can spread quickly. And Wikipedia I think really tries to be that place you go when you've got a moment to reflect and say okay, I actually need to learn about this. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia. You don't have to buy it and anyone can edit it. So you have to have your sources and you have to have your citations. So there's always a way to back up the information. So it's not just out there recklessly or irresponsibly. There's always something backing it up. So that you can always start back from the original source. Working with Wikipedia is not only about writing articles but to understand the whole system of knowledge production. What's our place in the knowledge society? We came down and we're going to leave it on the side. And with such challenges, we don't have any challenges. We don't have any challenges that we can enter quickly. Or we can enter quickly on any side. Do you know anything about the technologies that Wikipedia has published in the world? I'm from Ukraine. I'm from Ghana. I'm from Argentina. I'm from Moscow, Russia. I come from Egypt. Hong Kong, Israel. Berlin, South India. Ramallah, Palestine. I didn't expect them to have such a good foundation. It's a huge number of volunteers from the open source around the world. This is what I'm talking about and I really liked the idea. We are fundamentally community driven. And this is very different from any other top website and it matters. Whatever you might think of Wikipedia, whatever problems Wikipedia has, of course we have problems. Nobody ever sits around and says, ah, yeah, well, they're beholden to their advertisers. Our community has a very high degree of intellectual independence. No one can come to us and try to lean on us to put false information in Wikipedia or to hide some true information that they don't like because, frankly, the money comes from the general public and that means we're beholden to the general public. In 100 years, when people look back on this era, these decades around the first of this century, they're going to point at Wikipedia as one of the things that was really good. We can! And of course, since it's a Wikipedia video, we've got like hundreds of references at the end where all the images came from, blah, blah, blah. So let's talk for a second about the real community. A lot of people have this idea of Wikipedia that it's somehow 100 million people each writing one sentence each. But that isn't at all how it really works. There's about 80,000 volunteers, loosely defined. That's people who are making around five edits per month. But the real community is 3,000 to 5,000 people and these are the ones who are organized, passionate. They're the ones who really build Wikipedia. They do all of the administration. They do all of the planning, all of the work. There's so many different elements of what those people are doing without which Wikipedia would just descend into chaos and that's really, really important. These are people who know each other and they work together under a set of guiding principles. And it's those principles which are all focused on quality of information, being nice to each other. All those kinds of things are really what makes Wikipedia work. It isn't a magical software story. It's a story about humans and culture. I want to talk a little bit about the influence of Hayek. So one of the things that you might not know about me is I went to Auburn University and I wore eagle. And that's where, I don't even know if they're still there. The Ludwig von Mises Institute was there and I met a couple of economists there when I was a student. Got interested in Austrian economic ideas. And I read the use of knowledge in society which was an American economic review in 1945, one of the real classic pieces by Hayek. And in this he says, he's discussing the problem that we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order. And basically what he's talking about in the essay is the question of the distribution of information throughout society. So the question is, is it more rational and more sensible economically? And this is back when real central planning was a live policy option. Like people actually believe that central planning might be more efficient than a market economy. So the question was, could we bring in all the information to a central set of decision makers who could then solve a set of differential equations and find out all of the correct allocations of assets across the economy? Or was it better to push the decision making out to the end points? So instead of bringing all the information in and having the decisions in the middle, leave the information out where it is and push the decision making out to the end points. And that was kind of the approach that he talked about. And then he makes a very convincing argument that that's the only way. That in fact most of the knowledge that we need to have a rational economic system is out at the end points. It's knowing very particular details about how much bread to stock in a particular corner store and things like that. So how does this apply to Wikipedia? Wikipedia and the price system is basically the solution to this, is that you've got a price system which sends out signals and it sends the information that people actually need to make those local decisions. So how does this apply to Wikipedia? It really only applies by analogy, but it's a very powerful analogy. Wikipedia is not a market system. There is no price structure. But the key is rather than with a traditional encyclopedia where you try to have some team of experts in the center who gather in all of human knowledge and then distill it for everyone, we say, no, let's push the decision making out to the end points, out to every single article. So on every page of Wikipedia you can go to that particular thing and you may know something about it and it may be something that you have no professional qualifications in, but you've made a detailed personal study of because it's your hobby or you're just interested or you're willing to go and do some work. I was just reading backstage because I'm obsessed with Wikipedia about a temple in India I'd never heard of. Apparently they found it has $22 billion worth of gold buried underneath it. Amazing story, I have no idea who wrote this. I doubt if it's an expert. It's probably a whole group of people because it's been in the news and so on. But it's out at those end points. No one had to communicate this inward to a body of editors at the Wiki Media Foundation in San Francisco who then decided. And that's a really powerful tool in Wikipedia to say let's have a distributed system rather than a centralized system. So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about entrepreneurship, talk about how did I get here? Because in these days, I think particularly for young people who are thinking about entrepreneurship, there are a lot of myths around entrepreneurship that are driven by the media and just driven by various facts. So the idea that a lot of people have about entrepreneurship is, Mark Zuckerberg is complete anomaly. He is literally one in seven billion people. And the idea that at age 21 you have to have some genius idea. It wasn't even 21 when he, I can't remember how old he was when he found it Facebook. And then it explodes into this massive global phenomenon. That isn't really how it works, not for almost anybody. And so what I like to talk about is failure. Jimmy Wales is good at it. Got a few examples. This is downtown Chicago. I lived and worked in downtown Chicago early in my career after I finished doing half of a PhD in finance and dropping out from doing that. And I had a brilliant business idea. I was on the internet very early. I was using the internet. I saw that people were using very inefficient ways to get food at work. They were faxing in orders with fax machines. They were calling. They were sending someone to get the food. And I realized that all of that would eventually go onto the internet. And I thought, this is brilliant. I'm gonna sign up all the restaurants. You're gonna be able to go online, order your food, have it delivered. What was the result? Failure. Jimmy Wales is good at it. In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars. They had no idea what I was talking about. So it didn't happen. I couldn't get anybody really to pay any attention. I had another idea. This was an idea for a search engine. I was also really quite a master at branding. So I called the search engine three apes. Type your search and the apes will find it. How is this not a success? It's genius. The brilliant business I hear was actually, I think quite clever. It was pay-per-click advertising, but there would be two ways to pay. You could actually pay to advertise. And if you bought a keyword, you'd get your ad to the top. Or you could send us traffic and earn credits. And so I thought, well, this would be a great way because the hard part about a search engine is how do you get the initial traffic? How do you get people to use it? I thought, well, I'll just get people to send traffic. They earn credit for advertising. It sounds brilliant. What was the result? Failure. Jimmy Wales is good at it. Chinese spammers took over the site within three months. It was a small problem of communication. I was getting all this traffic from China. I didn't really understand why I was getting so many Chinese search terms. And then I was getting kind of nasty emails in broken English about why I wasn't sending the money. And I tried to explain them. No, you get credit. Anyway, it just didn't work. So then I had the idea for a new pedia. What was new pedia? It was another brilliant business idea. A free encyclopedia for everyone. Ooh, that sounds good. Written by experts. I hired a PhD in philosophy to design it. What was the result of new pedia? Failure. Jimmy Wales is good at it. I spent $250,000 on the first 12 articles. I still keep them by my bedside. Read them every night. I will get my money's worth. No, but the thing about new pedia. New pedia was the same vision. A free encyclopedia for everyone. But I adopted a very old fashioned model. And in fact, Larry, who was the PhD in philosophy that I hired, we had some debates and he convinced me and he was right. Given what we knew at the time, we just didn't know enough, that in order to be taken seriously, it had to be even more academic than Britannica. And so we had this seven stage review process to get anything published. You had to fax in your CV to prove you were authorized. For me, I had done all the coursework. I never did a dissertation. I did all the coursework for a PhD in finance. And I decided to write about Robert Merton who had recently won the Nobel Prize for his work on option pricing theory. And I thought, well, I can write a biography. I knew all of his work. I had published a paper in the area. And I sat down to write and I had like writer's block. It was not fun. It was like I was back in grad school. They were gonna go and take my proposal, take my initial draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors they could find to give me notes and comments back and it was like super stressful. And I realized then that this was never gonna work. So then I had a really dumb idea. Free encyclopedia for everyone. Just open up the website, let anybody edit it with no advertising and in fact, no sane business plan of any kind. And what was the result? Success. Even Jimmy can do it sometimes. So Wikipedia has been a truly massive success. The number five website in the world. Changing the face of knowledge forever and it's inspirational. It takes me around the world and meet great people like you. It's really an exciting thing to have been a part of. So then I had another idea. I never stopped. I'm actually an entrepreneur at heart. That's my main sort of view of myself and I always want to do something new. So I had a concept called a Wichita search. I'm not sure it was a good idea but got a lot of press attention. Google's worst nightmare it says. Not sure how true that was but my mom bought 10 copies of the magazine so it was all right. So what was Wichita search? Wichita search was different. We were gonna be a search engine like Google but we're gonna have all open source software. Real transparency around the algorithms. All freely licensed content. The users could control the search results. Add, edit, move around, delete. We knew we were gonna have to deal with spammers and how are we gonna cope with that? What kind of community would we have? A lot of open questions. We were making some progress. What was the result? Failure. Jimmy Wells is good at it. We had to close the project during the economic downturn so back when Lehman Brothers went under. All of the venture capital firms were sending out these very alarmed messages to everyone saying get to cash flow positive immediately. And one thing that the, I would say that the internet industry learned and the venture capitalists learned from the dot come crash was to respond in a serious and vigorous way to changing economic conditions. And so they said look we will get through this one. It's not gonna be like last time. But that meant we were at a point in the project where we were making progress but we knew it would take maybe a few more million dollars to get it to a real product stage that would be ready to move forward and there was no way to raise that money at that time. So we decided to close it. But at the same time, this was at Wikia. The brilliant business idea of Wikia was build on the Wikipedia model, empower everyone to build the rest of the library, focus on and make it easy to use. Think about topics that will have good ad revenue because Wikia, unlike Wikipedia, which is a charity, Wikia is a for-profit business. And what was the result? Success. Even Jimmy can do it a second time. Wikia is now around the number 20 ranked website. And what you would mostly know Wikia for is our sites, its fan sites is what has evolved to me. In fact, we're rebranding the company to be called Fandom. But if you search, like if you're a fan of any of the modern super complicated TV shows like Game of Thrones or House of Cards, if you Google a character or you Google a scene, more than likely you're gonna find the Game of Thrones Wiki, the House of Cards Wiki, that's us. And so that has been a big success, 165 million monthly visitors, still growing very strongly, 20, 30% a year. And that's all very exciting. So, great. What next? So as I say, I never stop, even though I'm gonna fail again and again because I enjoy failing. Not always, but. So now I'm working on a new idea, which I've just in the middle of launching now. So the concept is called Wiki Tribune and the name gives it all away. Bringing together a Wiki-style community, so volunteer community to help write and fact check the news and paid professional journalists to go out and do all the things that communities can't do. I'm gonna show you a quick video here. That was our promotional video we did. The news is broken, but we figured out how to fix it. See, before the internet, we could only get our news from traditional news organizations. Editors, fact checkers and reporters were the gatekeepers of news and we trusted them to tell the truth. We even paid for them to tell the truth. That's how much we respected the news. Then the news went online and suddenly we wanted it all for free and we wanted advertisers to pay for it. This is a problem because ads are cheap, competition for clicks is fierce and low quality news sources are everywhere. Social media, where most people get their news these days is literally designed to show us what we wanna see, to confirm our biases and to keep us clicking at all costs. It fundamentally breaks the news and the truth is on the internet, no one is guarding the gate. So it's time to rethink the gatekeeper and we call it Wiki Tribune. Wiki Tribune is a new site with a new model for the news. It takes professional standard space journalism and incorporates the radical idea from the world of Wiki that a community of volunteers can and will reliably protect the integrity of information. Articles are authored, fact checked and verified by professional journalists and community members working side by side as equals and supported not by advertisers, but by readers who care about good journalism enough to become monthly supporters. There's no paywall, so anyone can read Wiki Tribune, anyone can flag or fix an article and submit it for review. As the facts are updated, the news becomes a living evolving artifact, which is what the internet was made for. Wiki Tribune is launching advertising free, created by professionals and supported and verified by the people who care most about the news, volunteers, supporters, youth. So sign up now to support Wiki Tribune. It's time to fix the news. So as you saw, so just further to explain some of the ideas behind Wiki Tribune, inside Wikipedia, you've seen some of the community, people are very passionate about facts. The kind of people who are in Wikipedia really wanna get it right. We don't always get it right, but generally we do and generally we try really hard to get it right. But what's going on outside Wikipedia and the broader information ecosystem? One of the things that I've come to understand is that the advertising only business model is incredibly destructive. So in the olden days, the newspaper industry had basically three pillars of revenue. So there was reader revenue, which was subscribers, newsstand sales. There was the classified ads, which was great because classified ads, people selling their cars or whatever, it's very non-political. Nobody there is trying to influence what's in the news. And then the corporate display advertising. So the inserts from the grocery store and the car dealer and all that. And people worried about that corporate influence on the media, but I think it was basically more or less okay because of the other two pillars. So a quality newspaper, a big serious newspaper like the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times, they wouldn't refuse to run a story about a major advertiser that was incredibly negative in a public interest because they're a big advertiser. We might worry about that a little bit, but I think in general they did okay. But today we actually have a different model. Most of the news for the past several years has been funded solely by advertising in the online space, which has directly led to all the clickbait headlines, all the really fluffy content and all of that. And actually the concern that people used to have about corporate influence on the media has actually declined, but for a different reason. So one of the things that has happened in the past, I would say in the past two years has been a huge movement, the rise of what's called programmatic advertising. So programmatic, I don't know what you're like. I like boats. That's my hobby. I have a boat in Florida. And so everywhere I go on the internet, I get advertisements for boats. I get the same ads no matter where I go. Typically they're boats I cannot afford. So that's basically boat porn, but that's okay. I click on them anyway. And so basically in the old days, even on the internet, advertisers would have thought, so a company would have thought, oh, okay, I'm trying to sell this boat and it costs $300,000. So who do I need? I need affluent, sort of 50 year old men. They're the ones who buy boats. And so they say, well, where do we find them? Well, they read the Wall Street Journal and they read the New York Times, they read The Guardian. So we're gonna put our advertising money there, this and that magazine. Now they say, don't really care. We can find those people wherever they go online. And of course we go everywhere online. Which means that now the serious newspapers are competing on equal footing. Their brand advantage has gone to almost zero. It's all about the traffic. It's all about who's visiting. And so you've got this race to the bottom to get as many clicks as possible, to get viral content, to make sure that it gets shared widely, that it's very tempting. I pride myself on reading intellectual thing, but like anybody else, I see some stupid and interesting and I click on it and then three minutes later I hate myself. But to get over hating myself, I click on a boat ad and there you go. So that's been incredibly destructive for the news. If you talk to serious publishers, they'll say, look, we can do a long form investigative journalism piece. It may take a senior reporter three weeks to do something. We run it, it has impact, it gets a lot of traffic. And then we have a millennial intern in the office who we pay almost nothing, writes some nice juicy click bait and it gets the same traffic and we make the same money. Some of them are saying, we're still gonna do the serious stuff, but just putting our hands up, this business model isn't working for us. And so one of the reasons of course is click bait, the next slide is just for amusement. Just imagine if Wikipedia were funded by programmatic advertising and click bait and trying to get you to click and stay as long as not really our style. So those are, I just nicked those from the Daily Mail, which is possibly the worst newspaper on the planet. And this is a fantastic example. So here is a beautiful picture. I have to admit this is a stunning photograph. This is a billboard in China on a very, very smoggy day, a billboard of a sunrise. Mail Online says, China starts televising the sunrise on giant TV screens because Beijing is so clouded in smog. This story did very, very well for them. It was shared widely. The only problem with the story, very small minor problem, which is that it's just completely false. People are not watching giant fake sunrise. It's not because of pollution. Basically, Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape that they'll share anything that confirms it. So basically what has happened here is that there is a giant TV screen in Beijing. It shows advertisements all day long. They rotate through. That particular advertisement is for a travel company. It has nothing to do with the smog. It just happens to be up year-round and it was on a smoggy day. So they made up the story. They had a great photo and they made up a story to go with it. If you know the Daily Mail, and you know their political biases, see, there's no obvious political point in the story, but there is in a deeper sense. It's a cultural point. The Daily Mail in the UK is all very anti-foreigners, very anti-the rest of the world. It suits them very well to sell a story that says China is a horrible dystopian hellscape. And indeed, this is why our miners are unemployed and our steel workers are unemployed is because China is just polluting themselves to death. Okay, there's elements of that that you could argue, but not by making up a fake story, and that's what they do. So this is problematic and this is not the problem of fake news that we normally think about. We think about fake news, meaning the classic kind of example is teenagers in Macedonia churning out hundreds, thousands of news stories that they just made up out of thin air to try to go viral with no concern. Actually, no politics either. They're just trying to make some clicks and make some money. That is a problem, but that's a separate problem from this, which is just low-quality media. So Wikitribune, that's my effort to do something about it. It's an entirely new organization, so this is not part of the Wikipedia, part of the Wikimedia Foundation, bringing the Wikimedia editing model to news with a twist. I think I already said all this other stuff. And we did really well. We did a crowdfunding campaign, which by the way is a fantastic new entrepreneurial concept to go out to the public first and say, do you want to buy this thing? Normally this is done on Kickstarter, things like that with a designed product, a cool kind of watch or something. And it's a really brilliant idea because instead of having to invest upfront, not knowing what the market will be and possibly losing all your money when you misjudged whether people wanted the thing or not, you describe it, explain it, people pre-commit, you pre-sell the product, then you can go and get it made and then you ship it out and it's all great. Obviously this isn't a single one-time product. What we did is we went out and said to people, hey, come and subscribe, subscribe and sign up. And we got enough people signed up that we hit our target and we're hiring 10 journalists. So actually just before I came here, yesterday I spent all day long interviewing journalists. And so here I am and that's what I'm working on. So thank you. So I think we've got a few minutes left. I have no idea. Yeah, a few minutes. And I think I've been told there are some microphones and runners in the audience. So while those materialize, I see someone just here in the front row who's got his hand up. That will be perfect. First of all, thank you for a fascinating brief. And actually for the runners with the microphone, don't wait for me to call on someone because I frankly don't care who you pick. So go ahead and have the microphone in their hands so we can just move quickly and not wait. First of all, thank you for a fascinating presentation and for your fine work to help us become more knowledgeable about the world. With respect to Wiki Tribune, my big problem with the New York Times is not that their stories are factually incorrect, although that happens occasionally. It's that they're factually incomplete. I think it was Kathleen Jamison who used to be at the Annenberg School who talked about stories that are literally true but inferentially false. Is there some mechanism in Wiki Tribune that perhaps will help people get a fuller understanding of the story in terms of the nature of the review of these stories before they hit the screen? Yeah, so I hope so, I hope so. So one of the things, I'll just talk a little bit about the business model and what it does for us. So I'm not anti-advertising in any big picture sense, but I'm launching this with no advertising because I really wanna get on top of things in the beginning and I wanna make sure that the organization has the incentives that I want it to have. And so if we're chasing clicks, right, then it's important to be really fast. It's actually important to appeal to people's biases. That's what gets people to share content. But I want our journalists to be a little slower. I want us to be a day late but right. Also, we do need to be popular, so that's important. I can't completely ignore that and write things that no one cares about. But the process, if I'm able to build the right kind of community where there is a constructive and positive discussion and dialogue about that sort of thing, then I think we can get somewhere. I don't think there are any magical answers to any of these things. It's really about building a culture. It's about building a group of people. But having an outside community who really care about the values of neutrality, it's actually really interesting. I did a survey the other day of the people who signed up to support. So these are people who've given us money to support and we sent out to about 6,000 people asking them what do you want to see on the site? You know, we just want to see what topics people are interested in, things like that. And one of the things we didn't directly ask, but it was indirectly asked, generated a huge number of comments from people saying don't do any op-ed pieces. There's tons of places for people to publish those elsewhere. Just don't go there. And I thought, oh, okay, that's interesting because I'd like to do that a little bit later on. But certainly in the early days, we want to avoid that. So we want to set a style and a tone early on. And it is about, this is one of the things that's really interesting. One of the things that bothers me about what I would call lazy, pseudo-objective journalism is if you imagine in Wikipedia, if you went to our article on the moon and it said some say the moon is made of rocks, some say cheese, you know? Who knows? That isn't neutrality at all. But you get a lot of that where you'll get sort of, he said, she said on things that are completely uneven and unequal, not just in terms of numbers, because as we all know, the larger number of people leaving something doesn't make it true. But just in terms of, is there really an active debate here, a discussion? It's oftentimes just, it's a little bit silly. I also saw a story the other day where the, it was someone was criticizing an ex-US government official was criticizing Donald Trump by name, put their name to it, record said this is what, this is my complaint, this is this and this. And then it said senior White House officials denied this. And it's like, who are these senior White House officials denying it, right? Like if they really wanna deny it, I'll be much more persuaded as a reader if they're willing to go on record and say that's simply not true. And here's the proof. So I'm a big believer in what I'm calling evidence-based journalism. I show your work as much as possible. These days, like one of the reasons that you didn't show all of your work in the old days is, well, you've only got so much space in a print newspaper. What's the internet? You've got infinite space. There's no reason not to show your work as much as possible. So I don't think there's a simple answer, but I'm really looking for those kinds of mechanisms. I'm looking for community that can, and one of the things I do know from the Wikipedia community, one of the things that they're very good at is knocking the rough edges off of biased language. If you go around in Wikipedia, of course you can find examples of biased language, but in general, you'll find people going around and saying, gee, you're overstating what's in the source. Let's tone that down. Let's get a more measured approach, which I think is much, much better. And it's a really interesting situation. I would say the history of Wikipedia, and 10 years ago, it was like a joke. Ha ha, it was in Wikipedia. Ha ha, it's probably wrong. And now people come up to me saying, I mean, literally this year I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and three different people came up to me and said, you should do something about the news. Like Wikipedia is the only thing I trust anymore. And the reason is, all of the news, the entire media landscape has become really partisan in a way that's really unhealthy. There is no, and the truth is, as we all know, if you're interested in ideas of economic liberty and so on, it's a tough argument to make sometimes. It gets exponentially harder if you can't even get people to agree on some basic fundamental facts. So here's a valid open question for, I live in London, so I'm very UK-centric these days. What should the relationship of the UK be with the rest of Europe? What should immigration policy be for the UK? Absolutely valid. This is exactly what in a democratic society the public should deliberate on, have a chance to vote and make these decisions. But the debate was such low quality. There was a very famous example of a very spectacularly beautiful and eye-catching campaign bus that was in all the newspapers that made a promise of 350 million pounds a week to go to the NHS, the National Health Service, when we're out of Europe. Well, that was a complete and total lie. It was very quickly admitted to be a complete and total lie. It turns out the UK does send 350 million pounds a week to Europe. They get back a huge chunk of that because there's a lot of stuff going back and forth. And furthermore, there was never any intention to earmark even whatever savings there is from leaving Europe for the NHS. So it was just a complete lie from top to bottom, and that was a big part of why some people voted. Now, not everybody did for that reason, da, da, da. But it's like, it's terrible that we don't have sort of a basic, calm understanding of the facts there. And then we can say, okay, now what do we do about those facts? Okay, sorry, I went on a kind of a rant. Prone to do that when asked an interesting question. Okay, next. Good evening, everyone. I have a small, silly question. All your success work and failure work are surrounded with the word wiki. Why this word is very special to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So wiki, so the original, so, yes. So first I started newpedia, and the idea, I just thought it sounded cool, new. It's like a new encyclopedia, newpedia, and my name was available. But wiki is a software concept. So wiki means a website anyone can edit, and the wiki was actually invented in 1995 by a guy named Ward Cunningham. And it's basically the idea of everyone can come and participate. Everybody can get involved in editing and changing things. Obviously you have to grow mechanisms of control if you're ever gonna get anything of quality. The word wiki is from Hawaiian word wiki wiki, which means quick. So the idea is quick collaboration. So if you go to Maui and you take the bus at the airport, it's called the wiki wiki bus with the absolutely untrue claim that it gets you quickly from one terminal to the next. But yeah, so that's where the word comes from. And so I use it in my work for two reasons. My work is about having software where everybody can participate and everybody can edit. Also it's just good brand value. If you say, if I called it something completely new, I probably wouldn't get all the headlines I got for wiki tribune, so it's sensible to do. It's like Richard Branson calls everything virgin this and virgin that, so. Okay, good. Who's got the microphone? Yeah. Hi, you've been pretty public about your respect for objectivism in general and Atlas Shrugged in particular, while you have a very appreciative room for those concepts. I wondered if you'd comment on the influence they've had. Yeah, so enormous influence. I chuckled it myself when I saw someone here won an award named Kira. I thought, I wonder how many Kiras there are in the audience here. My daughter is named Kira. It's a very popular name in these circles. Very tragic end for Kira and We The Living. But yeah, so it is my fundamental view on the world. It's my fundamental outlook, remains so even today. I haven't been studying objectivism or close to it and let's not go into how old I am, but in quite a long time. But it very much, it frames my outlook. And I think one of the things that is interesting to me about it is I feel like my view on the world, it really transcends most of what we consider left-right political divide these days. And I think most of you would kind of feel the same way. And so bizarrely I find that my radicalism is actually just a really serious form of very centrism. So my personal politics in terms of seeing change in the world, I'm actually quite cautious. I believe in incremental slow, careful change because I think, and I used to when I was much younger, just blow up the state, that would be great, you know. But in fact, that doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is that the state is doing a very bad job in many cases of solving a problem that should be handled in a different way, but at least it's an infrastructure that helps. So for example, let's talk about the UK. The UK has the National Health Service. It's pretty good. It's not terrible. If you, sort of a lot of Americans have the view that it's completely horrifically awful, but frankly, it's all right. And in some ways I would prefer it to our US healthcare system, which is very far from a free market is just like basically broken in many insane ways. Like the craziest thing, I had to go in the hospital, I'm fine. Fainted on stage and da-da-da, went in. It was like, the total bill was like $30,000. So I get all these bills. I've got good health insurance. So I keep up my American health insurance, but, and I get all these bills and it would say, this is such and such, $2,300. Insurance agrees to pay $300, $2,000. We forgive it. And I'm like, what the hell is that? Like where did these numbers come from? Like you're just making up numbers and sending me weird bills that make no sense at all. And it just doesn't make any sense. So I've got lots of complaints about that. But to go back to the question, this is still my fundamental framework. I'm a big believer in free markets, free speech. Free speech is my main issue. One of the things that I try to do in general, I don't speak out on politics most of the time. So what you just heard from me is the most you'll ever hear me say about healthcare. I am not an expert on healthcare. I don't have any credibility on healthcare. I have no interest in running for political office. God forbid. But I can have an impact. There are certain areas where people will listen to me, where I can write a piece and get it published in any newspaper. And that is around internet policy and around freedom of expression because those are the things that people, they think I'm a person you should listen to on that. And so that's, I limit my personal political speech mainly to those areas. I also have a huge community behind me. So the community of Wikipedians that you saw in the movie, those people do not necessarily share my politics in general. In fact, they very likely do not. And so I do have to be thoughtful about, I can't go out and pretend to represent a community that may not agree with me on everything. They do agree that we should be factual and that we should be serious about learning and that's enough for Wikipedia. And they do believe in freedom of expression and certain issues around the internet. So I can have the backing of my community in some indirect sense, as long as I don't go outside. And if I step an inch outside that, believe me, I hear from them that I shouldn't be spouting off my own random views. So, okay. I wonder if you could give us a sense of how Wikitribune will deal with highly controversial and full of bias topics that generate so much energy like climate change. Well, that's a very, very good question. And I think that the key is, much like Wikipedia, I think that Wikitribune should try really, really hard not to draw the conclusion for you, but to show you the evidence so you can draw your own conclusion. And I think that's really crucial. I think it's really hard when you're talking about breaking news events where there's a lot of contention because you don't want to get into some say rock, some say cheese. But I think that being fact-based as a commitment, being neutral as a commitment is an ideal to live up to is already a big step forward from where we are today. Where you definitely have people out there who clearly are not, they're not interested in facts really. And I'll say that about both sides of that particular issue. You'll definitely have people who put forward, I mean, completely unscientific thoughts with no backing by any serious scientists. And then you have people on the other side who say, yes, but 97% of scientists think this. And it's like, well, that's not an argument. That's actually appeal to majority, that's a fallacy. So instead, I don't wanna hear why, I don't wanna hear that 97% of scientists believe this. I wanna know in a way that I can understand as someone who is not an expert, show me the evidence. How can I understand that so that I believe why one of the 97% of scientists, that's what I want is more understanding of the world, not more telling me what the answers are. I don't know if that helps. There's no magic answer to this. You just gotta, intellectual work is hard, so. Right. Next question. I would love to ask for a personal commitment from you to open up every single page to the same constitution regarding editing rules. There are two pages that are not subject to the open constitution of editing rules. One in particular is an issue that is near and dear to me, which is naked short selling. And I would love for you personally in front of all of us being taped here to commit that all pages are subject to the same constitution of Wikipedia and that if we edit those pages that we won't be banned. Thank you. Right. Okay. Are you, I know this controversy. Are you from Overstock? Are you from Overstock.com? Are you somehow related to that? Okay, hi. I know about this. I know about this controversy. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't looked at it in a few years. I'll take a look. Let's follow up later. I'm not sure the whole audience is interested. Right, so anyway, I have to say I have nothing to do with the financial crisis of 2008. But yeah, anyway. One more question, yeah? I wanted to ask what do you think what will follow Wikipedia and being the main source of knowledge in the world? What will follow Wikipedia? Oh, I don't know. If I knew I would start building it. So. Yeah, we can do one more. That was very short. What is your process as an entrepreneur for building communities? Yeah, so for building communities, I think it's really important that, so one of the, so in this video, which I didn't personally produce, one of the volunteers says, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia. And I always cringe when I hear that because I don't like the term crowdsourcing. And had I reviewed this, I would have asked the editor to take that bit out. So here's, when we think about how to build a community, one of the most important things we can do is to say, look, so this term crowdsourcing comes from the term outsourcing. The idea of outsourcing is, okay, I'm doing some work in a high-wage country. I need to get it done more cheaply, so I'm gonna outsource the work to a low-wage country and I can hire people there and get it done for a lower price. And then crowdsourcing is the cheapest of all, I'm gonna trick the public into doing it for free. And this idea of, say, starting with the work and then trying to figure out how to get people to do it is really contrary to what I think you need to do to build genuine community. So if you think about, if you start, let's say you were gonna build a bowling alley and you said, gee, I'm gonna build a bowling alley. We need to get a lot of bowling done. Some people make a lot of money bowling. How are we gonna trick the public into bowling? Like, you've really got it wrong. Like, that is not how you think about it. What you think about is, what do people wanna do? What are they trying to accomplish? They come, they wanna hang out with their friends, they wanna have some beer and hot dogs. Maybe they wanna be in a friendly competition with some of their neighboring businesses or something, so we're gonna set up a bowling league. But what you do is you start with, what do those people wanna do and how do you help them accomplish that? And so in too many cases, I remember this example, there was this big sort of news fluff about, there was a website that was going to crowdsource, looking at video, like security camera video. You could go on this website and you could click through images and if you saw anything unusual, you could flag it. And then this would be a really cheap way of like monitoring. I'm like, who the hell wants to do that? Like, no one wants to do that. Nobody really wants to monitor security camera videos for free. That person who had proposed this concept, they weren't thinking, what is something that people wanna do and how can I help them do it? And so oftentimes, when you have a community, don't start with the work you wish people would do for you for free, start at the other end. What is it that people wanna do? So for example, when I think about Wiki Tribune, I think about the community, I'm actually at this point a little bit unsure about what does that community want to do. Got a lot of people interested. Do they wanna fact check articles? Do they wanna, do they want to supervise the journalists? Do they wanna go out and do interviews and reporting? I'm not sure yet what exactly they wanna do, but I wanna find out what they wanna do because by finding out what they need, what they want and then providing them with an atmosphere where that happens, then I can build a successful community. So that's my main advice there. Okay, I think we're done. Yeah, great. Lovely. Super. Great, fantastic.