 Ladies and gentlemen sharing with us today his vision for a wiki future. Please welcome. Mr. Jimmy Wales so Thank you very much for having me here today I'm going to be talking today about a few different things But it's all in the context of leadership And I basically, you know one of the main points that I want to make about leadership Is that leadership is a very different thing from authority? And I actually have a dictionary definition in the slides, which you're not allowed to see yet Where I go through Some of the the key elements of the concept of authority and then I talk about leadership as being something different from that And how each of the elements and it basically has to do with the question of Persuasion versus coercion and I think of leadership As the capacity to persuade people to inspire people rather than coerce them Now in my work, this has been really fundamental because I lead a volunteer movement of tens of thousands of people around the world Who build wikipedia this great gift to humanity that you've all Seen and that you've all used But in fact, I think it's relevant to all businesses and I think when we think about you know if you think of the phrase great leaders throughout history you might think of Some great military leaders or political leaders and some of them can be quite authoritarian in a way But even there they didn't get to to accomplish what they accomplished By forcing people to do it or by you know command and control They also had to inspire because in order to get people to really achieve something impressive You've really got to inspire them and so that's what I'm going to be talking about So in the context of wikipedia so wikipedia of course Wikipedia is Very huge website as you may have noticed We are Something like the fifth most popular website in the world and that is true You know in almost all places in the world It's a very very big website so Wikipedia began with a very simple vision And and wikipedia began with this idea 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 So that's what we're doing at wikipedia and so every element of that vision statement is important when we say Every single person on the planet. I mean something very specific by that. I mean You know literally every single person on the planet in their own language and so Wikipedia is inherently a global project. It's inherently multi-lingual We try to be in as many languages as we possibly can be and also we have a vision that reaches beyond the internet Everything that we do is freely licensed and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute But one of the reasons for that is we want people to be able to take our work and distribute it as widely as possible Even to people who are not yet online In terms of our organization We're always driving to think about the developing world to think about how can we reach more people? Still today, obviously the primary mode for doing that is through the internet and the internet is really beginning to explode in a lot of the places that You know, we didn't expect to see online for quite some time So every single person on the planet. That's really important Free access is really important when I talk about free access to Wikipedia That's a very particular expression. So we come Fundamentally from the open-source software world Free software and the idea here is that everything in Wikipedia is freely licensed. So this means that it is Everything in Wikipedia you can copy it you can modify it you can redistribute it You can redistribute modified versions and you can do all of these things commercially or non commercially So when people are putting things into Wikipedia, they're not just adding to this one Storehouse of knowledge this one humanitarian project. They're contributing to global intellectual commons Something that can be reused and repurposed for just about anything. So you can take from Wikipedia and you can Create a book you can create a textbook you can hand it out to students in a class you can translate it to a new language All of these things are completely freely possible under the terms of our license So when we think about Wikipedia We shouldn't just think about it as a Website it's really much something much bigger than that it's something more important. I think than that And this is something that really permeates our entire community in all of our decision-making Leadership different from authority. I just wanted to sort of make this point because I think it is important And it sets the context You know authority is the concept the power of the right to give orders make decisions and enforce obedience This is kind of the this is the top-down aspect of getting people to do things and Leadership is a different mode taking those three things that's inspiring guiding and encouraging people so we can take a look at These things in turn You know in terms of authority you can give orders. Well at Wikipedia. I can't really give orders to volunteers But I can't inspire action. I can talk about where we want to get to and why we need to do certain things in order to achieve those goals I Don't really make decisions, but I can guide decisions I can remind people of our fundamental principles and what we're trying to accomplish and the values around that in order to guide the decisions and Enforcing obedience is not really something that's open to us now in the Wikipedia context We do have certain tools if you're misbehaving in Wikipedia. You can be blocked or banned by the community But really a much more powerful mode of dealing with people is to encourage cooperation So oftentimes people come to Wikipedia. There may be new They've been out in the wilds of the internet and they think the way to get things done It's just by yelling at people or insulting people or misbehaving and we say no no no That's not what we do around here. Yes, of course We do have the tools to enforce obedience i.e. if you don't behave yourself you can be blocked But much more strongly we try to explain to people. Hey, no, we're trying to write in encyclopedia You know, we try not to behave that way. Obviously we're human beings. So not everybody behaves perfectly all the time but we try So framework for thinking so a big framework for thinking about all of these issues are Two things I would say personal values and clarity of purpose and I actually Got these from from from Icliffe In sort of our introductory conversation talking about the kinds of things and it really resonated with me the idea of personal values meaning You know my vision for Wikipedia is something that is very very personal Wikipedia comes from a place where I say what kind of world do I want to live in and how can I participate in making that happen? And really that is a driving force through all of my work To really think about what it means to me and what I want it to be like and then there's the clarity of purpose and certainly When you're talking about a largely volunteer organization clarity of purpose is crucially important People when they show up and they say oh, I like this Wikipedia thing. I want to participate They need to know exactly what it is. We're trying to accomplish because if we have an unclear purpose Then people are all over the map and you can't really get moving in the right direction And again as I say I think that even though I come from this from the perspective of a largely volunteer organization I think that these concepts apply across all organizations and in and that you if you don't have clarity of purpose in any kind of a business then People don't know how to come together to work appropriately If it doesn't come from a place of personal value It all seems kind of meaningless and and that doesn't inspire people to do the right things So imagine a world in which every single person is given free access Is this clicker actually connected to something or I could just say click if somebody's on it Yeah So So what is Wikipedia? So I've already talked a little bit about this, but I just want to say You know one of the things that's important when we think about that clarity of purpose You know I gave you the vision statement already, but what is Wikipedia Wikipedia? Is an encyclopedia and this is really important. So when we think about Wikipedia Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. So it is not a blog Wikipedia is not a textbook. It's not a library It's not YouTube. So although I do love a funny cat video. We don't really have funny cat videos in Wikipedia And the idea here is that one of the things that has made Wikipedia successful is that everybody is familiar with the concept of an encyclopedia You know the old-fashioned set of books about this big a through z a Summary of every topic that can fit in there and so that general idea of what an encyclopedia is if I say Encyclopedia entry about the Eiffel Tower in Paris Everyone in this room more or less knows what that's supposed to be It is a clear factual explanation of the history why it was built where it was built who was the architect What was the cultural impact all those kinds of things and Wikipedia is not for example a travel guide So if you go to Wikipedia you won't find You know what are the five best restaurants near the Eiffel Tower or what are some activities to do after you've been to the Eiffel Tower? That's a travel guide. This is an encyclopedia And so having that kind of a concept means that a lot of the kinds of arguments people might have if we weren't clear on what we were trying to accomplish Are simplified we know exactly what we want to do free access I told you about the sum of all human knowledge. That's you know, we're you know an encyclopedia Presents an essentialized summary of human knowledge and so it's not all over the map It's not everything in the world. It's just the basic factual information that you need So this community has come together. We've written over 34 million articles. We have now over 400 million visitors every month We actually it's actually very increasingly difficult to measure our visitors Because we're seeing a huge increase in mobile traffic, which is not always measured As as effectively as we would like and it's also difficult to measure our Impact simply based on visitors or page views these days as many people Will have noticed if you go to Google and you type in a question a basic factual question. So let's say you type how old is Tom Cruise? Well in the old days Google would just look for web pages that might mention the words Now Google just tells you how old Tom Cruise is But they got that information from Wikipedia because they go through Wikipedia and they gather a lot of the factual information in our structured data And they're able to answer questions. So when we think about our impact on the world It's larger than just what we're doing on our website It's fueling a lot of knowledge engines of all kinds all over the web. This is important We're in 288 languages now. I feel that 288 is a bit optimistic There are in fact about 220 languages that have at least 1,000 entries And so for that last group of languages, they're very very small projects and so One of the things that we're really interested on I mean different studies have shown that Wikipedia is by far the most Linguistically diverse website, but it's something that's very meaningful to us My you know, we say a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language a Few years ago actually nearly 10. I think it was in 2006. So nearly 10 years ago now I made a more specific definition of that for my own personal goal Which is to have at least At least 100,000 entries in every language that has at least One million native speakers there are languages that have only 50 native speakers yet I doubt with 50 native speakers We'll be able to get a fully comprehensive encyclopedia in their own language But if you've got a million speakers, we know there are successful language versions of Wikipedia They're relatively small, but to get to 100,000 is possible and that number of languages is about 330 so there are about 330 languages that have at least one million speakers And so you can see we haven't even reached all of those languages a lot of those small languages are Local languages in Africa and so those people are not completely unserved because they will often know a broader regional language like Swahili or they'll know English or French So it's not that people are completely unserved, but we still want to be in those languages We have very very active communities In some small languages because people are very passionate about their mother tongue particularly in places where Their mother tongue has been suppressed for a long period of time or is in danger Maybe not from suppression, but just from being a small language in a broader culture And so some of our really great projects are in some of those small languages if you look at Catalan Wikipedia Catalan is a language of the area of around Barcelona in Spain it is similar to Spanish, but it is sufficiently different that it is definitely a different language and The Catalan Wikipedians are very very enthusiastic Many years ago under the dictator Franco Catalan was really oppressed In recent years. Well, if you ask really really patriotic Catalonians, they'll say it's still being repressed But more realistically it's just in danger because of the overwhelming dominance of the Spanish language culture But it's still a very vibrant language with the local newspapers news programs people speak it every day And the Catalan Wikipedia is Larger than you would think because this group of people is very very passionate about that language going forward People are always interested in when we talk about linguistic diversity. We talk about being global and in many many different places One of the languages that is particularly interesting is Chinese Chinese being Obviously a very very large language, but also China practicing the most extensive censorship program on the internet of any country worldwide and Wikipedia So our history with China is quite long at this point There was a time when we were you know in the early days. We were freely accessible in China Then we went through a period of about three years when we were completely banned in China And so during that time Obviously Wikipedia didn't become famous and it didn't grow It did grow Chinese language Wikipedia did grow one of the things to remember about Chinese Is that the number of people speaking Chinese who live outside mainland China is about the same as the number of Germans? Period right there's a lot of people who speak Chinese And therefore we always had vibrant communities around the world Taiwan Hong Kong the diaspora, you know broader people There's a lot of people available who are passionate about writing in Chinese And then we were accessible around the time of the Olympics in Beijing they opened up the internet quite a bit they unblocked Like the BBC for example, they unblocked Wikipedia and then we went through a long period I I went to visit the minister in China twice. He's been to visit me in San Francisco twice There was a long period of I would say equilibrium in which we We were broadly accessible in China all language versions, but certain pages are filtered out So the pages that would be filtered out would be things that are politically sensitive topics in inside China So things like I way way the artist you weren't able to view the page about him you can anything relating to the Tiananmen Square Incidents that was a Sensitive topic Etc. Etc. There's there's several topics that are and it's what you would pretty much expect is everybody's aware of the topics that the Chinese are very sensitive about But then more recently We've we've taken a step backwards. So as of today Wikipedia is completely blocked in China again I will be visiting I have to go back to London and then I'm back to Beijing in two weeks time To meet with the minister to see what we can do about it But there has been a shift and the shift is technological Wikipedia is now Completely encrypted when you visit Wikipedia. It's the same as when you visit your bank We do HTTPS So SSL which means that the Chinese government can't see which page you're reading at Wikipedia They can only see that you're accessing Wikipedia Which means that they're no longer able to filter out certain pages And so they have a choice of all of Wikipedia or none and that's You know, that's an interesting position to be in so in the past You know, I would go to China and say oh, why did you block the whole site and they would say well We're offended by this particular page and we would say well We don't think you should block that page, but if you're gonna block something just block that page and not the whole thing Now we're not gonna be able to say that we're gonna say you know You really need to have Wikipedia in your country and so you should reconsider this decision So it's a little bit more tougher diplomacy than what I've had to do in the past, but well, that's my job So even though Wikipedia Has been banned in China and has a long history. We're about the number 50 website We have had a kind of a cultural impact in China This is a museum a menu that someone sent me from a restaurant in Beijing Wikipedia fried with eggs We can click here Beef brisket and Wikipedia flavor Someone sent me this menu and they said Jumbo that's what they call me a line jumbo What does this mean? And I wrote back and I said I have no idea But I said here's the Wikipedia bread company Got a little note in the background. That's very funny that that just showed up. It's like a Starbucks. It's quite nice Good coffee shop. So I emailed back. I said, well, listen, I I don't know the answer But I know who will know I'll email the Beijing area Wikipedia group and I'll ask them so I emailed them and I said to them What does this mean and they wrote me back and they said Jimmy? We have no idea Stir-fried Wikipedia I I Like it spicy myself with fermentos so We really do have no idea that the one thing that we see is that a lot of these menus started to appear around the time of the Beijing Olympics and so what we think is that in China a lot of restaurants that traditionally did not have their menus in English at all They knew that millions of foreigners would be coming and that English would be a good language And so they decided to translate their menus But they maybe they don't really speak English and so they would say Oh, how do you say this in in English? And I don't know and so they would go on the internet and they would type the name of the food and of course What's the first thing you find when you type anything into Google? Wikipedia so That's our only theory. So we don't really know When we look at the the top languages per capita, this is another thing that's interesting to look at in terms of the global scope of Wikipedia Some of the top languages in Wikipedia per capita So this is the number of entries relative to the number of speakers and it's a very high number of entries So Icelandic Estonian Norwegian Swedish Finnish. This isn't this is a selected group These aren't necessarily the top top But these are in that group of the top and I chose them for a specific reason So when we say why why are those languages so big in Wikipedia? I Have a theory It's really cold there And nice in by the fire so So it's a joke, but when we do look at the the range of Wikipedia around the world Most of the factors that we see are easy to understand So if you have if your language because we divide things by language not by country if your language has high literacy rates, then you tend to have a larger Wikipedia if you have broadband fast Affordable broadband internet access that helps a lot and but also Weather does matter and we find in the colder climates. We have larger wikipedia So when we look at the content of Wikipedia, so what is the content like in different languages because obviously? There are cultural differences around the world people have a different view of the world in many cases And so this is a common question is how does it change now? One of the things that's important to understand about wikipedia is that wikipedia is not translated From language to language to language. It's not primarily an English website that gets translated It's written, you know by local people in their own language and obviously some people do some translations If it's the easiest way to work, but in general Wikipedia is written by local people everywhere Well, sometimes reporters say to me because we know that we have a strong male demographic in our community People say oh, isn't it a problem that wikipedia is all written by young white men? And I always say to them obviously you've never met the Japanese wikipedia community It is a problem that it's mainly written by young men and we'll talk about that in a minute, but we are reasonably diverse at least globally So when we look at the the content comparisons One of the things that we looked at so it's not in terms of what people write in terms of what people read and we did this study looking at the What is popular so the languages here are English Chinese Japanese French German Russian and Spanish? One of the things that immediately will jump out at you is the Japanese Love pop culture And if you know anything about Japan actually somebody here in the front is laughing about this But it's actually true, right? It's a it's a true thing about the Japanese is that they do love pop culture They love English pop culture America pop culture Japanese pop culture It's a big part of life in Japan, and so it actually makes a lot of sense that the pop culture topics are very popular there Other things to look at is that the Germans are the most interested in geography. I'm not sure this is a good thing. I I Don't make that joke when I'm in Germany Still a little sensitive about their past And then finally of course everyone knows that human sexuality is an important topic on the internet It's a you know, it's something that people in the privacy of their homes. They like to read about and if you look here In Wikipedia and almost all of the languages and this is a very limited study of course. We didn't study all the languages Sex is among the most important topics except for in French and in Spanish I wasn't really sure why this would be the case And then somebody explained to me it's because the French and the Spanish are actually having sex The rest of us are just reading about it on the internet Especially the Russians so Okay, well it is fun To have a laugh about this but the good news is actually a lot of these differences are actually when you really dig Into the data more some of the differences are actually show more similarity than difference And so if you look at what's pop it I like to give this one example If you look at the traffic statistics for a politician called Nick Clegg You will find that most people who are reading about Nick Clegg are in the UK Nick Clegg was the deputy prime minister and so he's not doesn't have a huge global profile If you look for David Cameron, you will find much wider readership around the world because David Cameron as the prime minister Would be famous in many many places around the world and people would go and look but Nick Clegg was mainly known locally So when you see that Nick Clegg is more popular in the UK you would say oh, that's a difference But in a way, it's not really a difference. It's just showing that people are interested in their local politicians And so if you look anywhere in the world, you'll see that the traffic tends to be higher for local things And this would be true of You know Geography technology things that are more relevant locally, but they so although you see differences They're actually similarities. No when we talk about my my experience. I'm mainly. I'm not talking about wikia today I will talk a little bit, but my experience has been primarily about getting large groups of people to work together So wikipedia, of course, we've talked about wikia is my for-profit wiki site We now have about 136 million readers Every month we're in over 200 languages and wikia is a Very different model in one sense, but very similar in another sense. So where you would have seen wikia It's like the 17th most popular website in the US. It is popular around the world These are communities that are focused around particular interests and the place that you might have seen it the most successful ones are in Computer gaming and entertainment and so for most people if you really like Any of the modern genre of really complicated TV shows so like Game of Thrones House of Cards Lost was a really popular one a few years back These communities come together to write incredibly detailed encyclopedias and they're different from wikipedia in that You don't have to have a source for everything. It's not all about third-party sources people just watch the TV shows They write summaries they write biographies of the characters. So if you're watching Game of Thrones, which I'm trying to do now You'll see if you've been away from it for a few weeks then you come back to it And you're like, oh, yes, there's like a hundred different bearded kings and you have no idea which one is which you can Just go in wikipedia and they'll you'll get a quick summary or you can read the the episodes Summaries for the ones that you watched last I usually try if I've been away for a while I watch two or three I read two or three of the episodes Before I watch the next one so that I can get caught back up and remember what's going on so That's become very very successful. And so one of the things that I think is important when we think about leadership Is not just to talk about successes. And so one of the things that I like to talk about is failure Jimmy Wales is good at it. Hopefully you've seen that today with the failure of the slides to work and so There is this mythology Around success that somebody has one brilliant idea and then it just takes off and it's an amazing thing But in fact the process of entrepreneurship the process of leadership and becoming a leader Is really not usually like that. And so failure is a really important part So early in my career. I was working in Chicago. I was a futures and options trader in Chicago had published a academic paper on Index option pricing and so forth And I was really excited about the growth of the internet and I knew that something really exciting was going on there And I wanted to be a part of that. I remember I was working on Writing a web browser at home in my spare time. So I get off work. I would go home and write a web browser Yes, I had no life and And when I was doing this just as a hobby then Netscape went public and Netscape on the day When public was worth something like four point three billion dollars and my web browser that I was writing at home was not as good as Netscape But it wasn't four point three billion dollars worse. I knew that so I got more and more excited about the possibilities with the internet And so I was working in downtown Chicago and I had a brilliant business idea I saw that people were using very inefficient ways to get food at work They would fax orders on a fax machine They would call and try to explain their order. They would send somebody out to get the food And I realized that all of this would eventually come on to the internet And so I started this That my first sort of commercial website to be an online food ordering service What was the result? Failure Jimmy Wales is really good at it. This is in 1996 and restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars I would say to them oh we want to put your restaurant on the internet and they're like what does that mean? I have no idea what you're talking about And so it I wasn't able to get traction So then I was doing a lot of different things. I was working on I had an idea for a search engine This is a brilliant branding concept It was called three apes and here you would say type your search and the apes will find it How could this not succeed Ah true story But there was a brilliant business idea here the brilliant business idea was to have pay-per-click advertising But there would be two ways to pay because I knew that one of the problems You know if you build a search engine, and this is a very basic search engine One of the problems would be how do you get traffic? How do you get known? So there'd be two ways to pay one you could actually pay and you could pay for advertising in the search engine Just like you do today at Google or whatever Or you could send traffic and earn credits So the idea is if people would link to us and they was in traffic they would earn credits So it was a way to build the build the audience by getting traffic. What was the result? Failure Jimmy Wales is good at it Chinese spammers took over the site within three months We were getting a fair amount of traffic Searching for Chinese keywords. I didn't read a word of Chinese And then I had Chinese people in very bad English emailing me wanting to know when they would get paid And I had to sort of try to explain to them No, you get credit for advertising Anyway, it didn't really work out in the end So then there was new pedia new pedia was the predecessor to Wikipedia and the brilliant business ideas a free encyclopedia for everyone Written by experts a heart a PhD in philosophy To design it What was the result? Well as you've probably never heard of new pedia you can guess failure Jimmy Wales is good at It's been about two hundred fifty thousand dollars on the first twelve articles I still keep them by my bedside. I read them every night. I Will get my money's worth eventually Basically, I we built a system that that didn't work There was a seventh stage review process to get anything published It was very intimidating for volunteers and it was never really able to take off And in fact the seventh stage highly academic review process didn't work One of the first things that happened even though we had a very rigorous process to get anything published One of the first entries that we published about two days later We had to take it down because it was found to have been plagiarized And even though we had had this long complicated process to review it that process didn't work So then I had a really dumb idea again free encyclopedia for everybody Open up a website let anybody edit it No advertising no same business plan of any kind And what was the result success Even Jimmy can do it sometimes So Wikipedia of course has been a massive success number five website in the world Changes the face of knowledge. It's very inspirational story the story of Wikipedia and what our community Has accomplished and continues to accomplish Has been really great. So building on the success of that. I had another idea. I'll always have another idea That's the nature of being an entrepreneur is I always want to keep growing and changing Actually as a side note Sometimes I talked to young entrepreneurs and they must say oh, yes It must be very easy for you now to start something new and I say no Actually, it's a lot harder for me to start something new because I can just go around the world and give speeches about Wikipedia and tell retirement It's quite a nice life and I enjoy it Starting something new is actually quite hard when you're young. It's the best time to start something new because if it fails That's okay. Nobody's ever heard of you anyway. So what difference is it make so if I fail today? It's quite spectacular. So Wikia search was the the concept got a lot of press coverage This is fast company magazine in the US as you can see it says Google's worst nightmare I'm not sure that was ever true, but my mother bought 10 copies. So I Was quite alright and the idea of Wikia search was to be a completely open and transparent search engine all open source software We would publish all our algorithm all freely licensed content all APIs open and let the users control the search results You could add edit move things around delete things Etc. What was the result? Failure Jimmy Wales is good at it had to close the project during the economic downturn Actually, this is one of the great sort of I Would say painful moments in my career because the early results the software was coming along nicely People were interested. There were a lot of ideas to explore But this was back when Lehman brothers collapsed and we knew having invested You know we had invested maybe a million dollars in it But we knew to get it to where it needed to be it was going to require another 10 to 20 million of investment just to get to the next level and The venture capitalists were not investing at that time everything was in kind of a lockdown mode And there was just no way to raise the money to continue the project given that it was highly speculative and might not have worked anyway Someday, maybe I'll get back to that but I do think that there is some interesting things to be done there So this was at wikia. So wikia search was one of our projects and wikia itself though continued to grow The encyclopedia was the start But the library is much bigger and this is the concept of wikia as I told you about the idea here Build on the wikipedia model empower everyone to build the rest of the library focus on making easy to use Think about topics that will have good ad revenue, which is something that we never do at wikipedia But here we do think about like what are the things that would have good ad revenue? What are the the the vertical markets that are interesting and was the result success? Even Jimmy can do it a second time Summary of knowledge was just the beginning wikia now has 120 million plus monthly visitors Where we have about I think nearly 300 employees now The company we run it at very close to break even And we do that deliberately we could become profitable, but we prefer to just keep pouring all the money back into further growth But it's a very solid very fast-growing business That's doing very very well So what are the some of the lessons that I've learned and I think this is really key One of the most important I wish I had invented this phrase because it when I heard this phrase It really identifies something that I very strongly believe in which is fail faster And so the idea here is to always be trying small experiments so that the cost of failure is relatively low one of the things that I see a lot of people doing in in a Leadership mistake that people make is they dream and dream and dream the one big idea And then they plan and plan and plan and they never actually get around to doing it And it's really important to do it. Don't tie your ego to a particular business As you can see I've done a lot of different things now. I'm very much the wikipedia guy That's what people know me for I could be known as the the food ordering guy But I missed that business. I was about Those are really big and very successful businesses today. I was about 10 years early I think real entrepreneurs fail and fail and fail, but you have to enjoy yourself along the way If you're enjoying yourself Then in the end you will succeed in one way or another one of the things I always say and I emphasize particularly to young people is The next five years is going to go by no matter what you do And so if you go and you have something and it's exciting and fun and you go and you and you Do it for a few years and it doesn't work out in the end at least you had of some interesting years You can always go and get that job at the you know a big corporation or whatever It's more important that you get those skills one of the things that I would advocate in general In all of business and I think this is something that Silicon Valley does very well is to think about how do you look at a failure? You know of someone early in their career for me. It's an exciting thing to see I just hired someone in London on new project. I'm working on And the main reason I hired her is that she launched her own app. She raised a little bit of money She was clearly undercapitalized the business model wasn't fully thought through but that's okay My business models are never fully thought through She did have an idea for a business model that sounded plausible and it failed it failed She wasn't able to get enough traction. She wasn't able to make it successful But she learned a huge amount from it But it also showed me something about her as a person that she had Ideas and initiative and was willing to take risks and willing to do interesting things So now I think I may be running a little late. How am I doing on time? We're okay. Okay great So I'm gonna shift gears a little bit because I want to really talk about the future and some of the things that I see on the internet and again, this is in the context of leadership and in the context of what I would say is Inspiration a big part of what drives the wikipedia community forward Is knowing that our that our work is having an impact on the world a positive impact on the world? and We're really really very passionate and dedicated to the growth of wikipedia in the developing world And so when people talk about the developing world in the internet, here's what people mainly know talk about mobile phones And and the growth of mobile you'll hear stories like this This is from the Guardian mobiles give Africa's farmers the chance to set out their stall the idea the new story is Farmers they've grown some crops and they want to sell them they can text across town and find out where the best price is They don't get cheated by a middleman They know they have more information about what their crop is worth so that they can sell for a fair price And they make more money Another type of example here how cell phones are helping fight malaria the idea here is and people in in remote Areas if there's a malaria outbreak they can text the authorities and say hey help us. We've got a mosquito problem Can you bring some bed nets? Can you come and spray? We need some healthcare workers And so how cell phones are helping fight malaria now The thing about this is that those kinds of stories they're true enough But I think they cloud your mind if this is your idea of what's going on in mobile in Africa You're already a few years out of date, and it really does not represent what we're seeing today And what we will see coming up. Here's what most people don't know. So here's a phone. I this is an old phone of mine I don't use it anymore, but I did for about two years This is a 3g Android phone It does it has all the apps on it does everything that you would normally do on a phone the screen is a little bit small It's not a great great phone but the battery lasts for two days, which you can't say about your iPhone and This phone when it was bought for me a friend of mine picked this up for me unlocked 3g phone In Kenya for seventy five dollars That same phone today is still available kind of in remnants is about forty dollars But we now have a Whole group of new phones that have come out. These are mainly Chinese manufacturers. They're selling very very inexpensive Android phones the cheapest one that I found Today is just about just under forty US dollars. I saw one for 31 But it wasn't clear to me that I was looking at an unlocked unsubsidized price But for unlocked unsubsidized it is definitely now under forty dollars US And a lot of these phones the sub fifty dollar phones There's one of them that I was looking at where if you look at the specifications of the phone So the pixel size, you know, how many pixels on the screen memory battery life Wi-Fi Bluetooth 3g It's Identical virtually identical to the original iPhone So the original iPhone is nowhere near as good as your iPhone 6 But we all remember that original iPhone and how it impacted the way we thought about our relationship to the internet And having the internet really usable in your pocket all the time It is a dramatic step forward and now that phone which when the original iPhone came out costs I think around eight hundred dollars is now we're looking at something that is under fifty So we're not reaching the poorest of the poor yet But we've come a very long way down the economic ladder and they're selling hundreds of millions of these phones in the next five to ten years This is an important event both in technology. Of course, that's the way people think about these things It's really important culturally politically. It's gonna have an enormous impact. We look at internet usage I'm just gonna look at one country, Nigeria as an example in 2000 point one percent of the country was online by 2006 3.1 2009 16.1 2011 26.5 by the end of this year that number is going to be over 40 percent. So What we're seeing is that the explosion of access to the internet that happened in wealthier countries Back in the early 2000s late 90s is happening now in parts of the developing world When we look at the reason for this it's because of the bandwidth in these places. So in January of 2002 The entire nation of Nigeria had 72 megabits per second Connection just to put this into context at my home in Florida where we have Verizon Fios So fiber optic to the home have a hundred and fifty megabit connection So I when I use it to download Game of Thrones I'm very appreciative that I that I have a connection that's twice as fast as the entire country of Nigeria just That many years ago by 07 693 into 2012 12,000 megabits And that continues to increase what's happening is they're dropping fiber optic cables Undersea into Nigeria down to South Africa cables coming down the other side of the continent, which means that? Bandwidth is being delivered to the continent of Africa In unprecedented ways and this is only going to escalate. I was in Lagos, Nigeria a while back and I Did a broadband seed test I got at that moment. I got 9.33 megabits per second. My friend in New York got 8.38 This is in Manhattan. This is probably more of a statement about the sad state of the internet in New York City But you know this this was true when I I tweeted these results and some local people People there in Nigeria said oh no, that's that's not true. The government's tricking you You know we don't have that kind of bandwidth here, but it wasn't a trick But the truth is I was at a five-star conference hotel that had a nice internet connection So I don't want to leave you the impression that people in Nigeria have faster internet than in New York The point is it's to the country and this is having a huge impact. We're seeing wholesale broadband prices are collapsing Retail costs of accessing the internet is dropping all the time. So the question is what are people doing? Are they searching for prices for crops? So are they reporting malaria outbreaks? Well maybe but Really what you want to see is what are the top sites across Africa and it turns out their Google Facebook Twitter Wikipedia Local newspapers the point is when these people are coming online for the first time They're joining the global conversation They're doing all the kinds of normal things that everybody does online They all have local eccentricities and things that they do locally that aren't done elsewhere of course the same thing is true any any location The point is there is now a very strong rising. I would say information middle class Even amongst people who are still very poor. They are beginning to have very affordable access to information And this is a really important global trend The ongoing march of technology is making real and usable internet access Available to millions of people tens of millions of people today This is already happening, but if you really think forward 20 years We're going to have massive connectivity the real internet for hundreds of millions of people And importantly they don't speak English or French. So a lot of times when people think about Africa they say well, you know, everybody speaks English or French. So why bother? It's just not true I was actually I was in India had a lovely dinner with a group of Wikipedia volunteers We were on the table and people filled out on a piece of paper. They marked what their local tongue was We had eight mother tongues around the table quite common for a beat-up in India And afterwards this young man came up to me and he said I don't really know why you care so much about all these local Languages because everybody in India with a computer can speak English He was wrong then but he's really wrong now Only like 40 to 80 million people in India speak English depending on how you how you count and how you measure it and You know, there are hundreds of millions of people who do not so it's really important that we have Wikipedia available to people in their own language So one of the projects that we've got going out Wikipedia is called Wikipedia zero And the concept of Wikipedia zero is we go out to the mobile carriers and we negotiate with them to offer Access to Wikipedia with no data charges So the idea here is that we want to go into places where data is still very expensive for people And we want to get them access to Wikipedia remember Free access to the sum of all human knowledge is our primary goal And we've been very successful at this as of today There are about 600 million people who in theory have access to Wikipedia in this way I say in theory because these are the carriers where we've signed deals But those inexpensive smartphones are not yet ubiquitous and so a lot of these places. These are people they have basic feature phones They've got their trusty old Nokia. They are not really accessing Wikipedia, but they are on a carrier Who does it this has ended up being a really fantastic program? It's a really a win-win For us for the consumer and for the carrier The carriers are very interested in upgrading people getting people moving along getting them off that old Nokia phone onto a new phone They want to sell them a phone they want to get them used to using the internet and this is a great way to Get them involved. So one of the things that happened and I'm going to close with this video We had a group of young people Teenagers in South Africa. We had announced a few deals And they started on their own without any intervention from us. They started a petition asking their own carriers To do Wikipedia zero and I just want to show you the video because it gives you a glimpse of what Wikipedia means to people young people in particular in the developing world Hi, this is a letter which me and my classmates my classmates wrote to access to Wikipedia for free It goes as follows Open letter to South Sea MTN, Fordacom and A-town We are learners in grade 12 at Sininjong High School Joe Slobopark, Lunatin, Cape Town. We recently had that in some other African countries like Kenya and Uganda Cell phone providers are offering. They are customers free access to Wikipedia We think this is a wonderful idea and would really like to encourage you also to make the same offer here in South Africa Our school does not have a library 90% of us have cell phones, but it is expensive for us to buy airtime So if we could get free access to Wikipedia, it will make a huge difference to us Normally when we do research Wikipedia is one of the best site and there is information on just about every topic Think of the boost that it will give us as students and to the whole education system of South Africa Our education system needs help and having access to Wikipedia would make a very positive difference Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you This is an open letter to the youth of South Africa and the student of Sininjong High School in Cape Town You recently shared a video asking South Africa's cellular networks to give their customers free access to Wikipedia We think this is a wonderful idea We know that many schoolchildren in this country don't have access to research material Which can make excelling at school so much more difficult That's why MTN is proud to be the first South African cellular network to make Wikipedia free