 What can we learn from Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a weird weird thing. It's one of those things that works in in practice Just not in theory if you had shown up 15 years ago at a VC's office and said hey, I'm gonna build a free encyclopedia for the world It's gonna be translated into 150 languages. It'll have 3.6 million pages in English by 2011 and We're just not gonna pay a lot of people much to do this It's gonna be mostly a volunteer effort with some some money going in sort of into the heart of it But really it's gonna be a lot of people showing up to do this like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint the fence I would have been laughed out of that VC's office, right? So what's up? There's just a ton of lessons to be learned from Wikipedia and I think the lessons are really profound and Wikipedia is one of many Beautiful big projects that exist in the world today like it. So so let's dive a little deeper into Wikipedia First of all, it's obviously a self-organizing system of some sort and it I don't mean it's a leaderless organization Certainly it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger was there at the beginning It's not that it's leaderless, but that people have sorted themselves out into different kinds of roles They figured out who who likes doing something they've followed their passions into these roles So some people like doing infrastructure So they figured out how to create squid servers and all the elaborate database and other infrastructure that makes the Wikipedia work around The world and the Wikipedia by the way depending on whose numbers you look at is the seventh to tenth most visited site on the web And has been for years for some five six seven years That's crazy and by the way of those top ten sites It's the only one that doesn't leave any cookies on your browser. It leaves no trace whatsoever They don't care about that sort of stuff. They're not looking to place ads on your system crazy, right? Who are these people? so there's there's all this self-organization going on and There's a lot of lessons they've learned how to deal with vandalism Wikipedians are not naive right a lot of people come in and try to change the Wikipedia and make it break There's a whole series of ways to deal with vandalism They figured out how to how to define the Wikipedia how to define its edges and its tone So the edges there's something called the notability criterion for example that bubbles out of the Wikipedia and they said hey We're modeling this after an encyclopedia in order for something to be in our encyclopedia, you know Your kid has started a garage band You can start a web page for that in the Wikipedia and we'll it'll be marked for deletion pretty quickly because we actually want Notable stuff to be in here, which means ironically Old mainstream media mentions are really good to have for entry into the Wikipedia So we'd like things to be notable to go in for the tone There's something called a neutral point of view which also bubbled out of the Wikipedia NPOV just look for that, you know Google NPOV and neutral point of view means We'd like the pages to reflect a balanced point of view so that Alternating arguments about this are in fact present and criticisms of this are present But the page doesn't take one perspective of the other it's encyclopedic instead So all of these things are cultural artifacts are forms of governance are ways of making things work that have boiled out of this effort That started, you know quite a few years ago That we now take for granted now. What does it mean to have a free encyclopedia? I think we're only beginning to understand what it means for education for the news for Electrical process like making legislation getting citizens involved all those kinds of things are only beginning to transform now because of Wikipedia So I think there's lessons to be to be had there, too And the Wikipedia is still only an encyclopedia and I think here I feel like it's limited for example on the page for the New York Stock Exchange Why isn't the ticker there live across the bottom of the page and why isn't there a picture instead of a still picture of New York City? Why isn't there a webcam that's live down the sidewalk looking down 5th Avenue or whatever else right now at New York City? Well those things aren't there because it's an encyclopedia But those things are trivially easy to do on the internet, right? So maybe there's something some other project like the Wikipedia that comes up and becomes bigger than it or different from it Or maybe the Wikipedia evolves toward those things or maybe those things don't have cultural value But I suspect that they do so there's a really interesting path here into what is the future of Wikipedia and how will society make use of it? Now I'm only about halfway through what I want to say about Wikipedia because I'm getting to something that's I think massively important And that is on pretty much every page in the Wikipedia. There's a little word on the upper right that says edit It means you can edit this page It means that anybody who is now looking at the Wikipedia can sit down and go you know start making changes to this Document that is supposed to be canonic about the world. It's an encyclopedia. Is it not? So that has really I think that's a conceptual blockbuster I think what's happening here is tremendous because we've started to believe and allow me to over generalize a little bit here We've started to believe the web is sort of like a magazine that to produce for the web You need some highly skilled crafts people who know how to make graphics and art and web pages in this mystical web language And so on and so forth and what edit this page says is that no no no no It's okay You can come in and make changes to this artifact for all humanity and you can rely on the community to be watchful of those Changes reverse them if they're wrong improve them if they're good That is the dance that that Wikipedians are in together and Wikipedians want to teach you that dance So if you come in and edit and start making changes There are some stories of people getting pounded on the head, especially if you try to edit your own page for example That's a no no, but there's other stories of hey welcome. You wrote this I improved it a little bit because might might look a little bit like that This is all about collaboration and really what's happened is we were starting to learn another lesson from Wikipedia Is that a group of amateurs without a lot of resources can create a shockingly sophisticated and deep resource There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes in Wikipedia that that once you uncover it like wow This is a whole civilization. This is like uncovering life on Mars, right and the depth right when one was Britannica Going to have every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with plot summaries and links outside and all that kind of stuff And you could say well that's trivial except you know There's a There's all sorts of things in Wikipedia that you wouldn't necessarily believe would be in in this kind of document But they're there and I think it really is a great thing for society and for For culture for civilization so One of the other big lessons here and you'll hear Jimmy Wales say this often in fact You'll hear Craig Newmark say this about Craigslist is that people are generally more trustworthy than we tend to think they are This is one of the huge lessons here is that here is a here's an open site. It's vulnerable It's making an offer for people to come in and work with it learn to dance with us learn to do this with us and make it better and On average people will tend to help will actually tend to try to come in and fix it make it better And if the only thing you'd like to do is correct serial commas and you walk around and you correct serial commas and all the pages You've been you've been helping Wikipedia, right? So there's lots of different ways to help So in brief to summarize I think what what's happening at Wikipedia and other large projects like it is that we are evolving new forms of governance that are More about self-governance than they are about government with a big G These are ways of governing the new commons and the commons is a really important concept that we've sort of lost for a really long time We haven't figured out what the commons is and how to use it now This is a commons that's actually being nurtured and improved by a large body of people that includes anybody who wants to show up Right, so that's pretty important. It's also helping reconnect people with each other and Reconnect people with the world with the world around them with things that matter And I actually think that that process has only begun. I think that news entities You look at the local news these days or the national news and they're using Google Maps, right? There's a little icon that it says this map came from Google Earth or whatever. Well, that's interesting Why shouldn't some of their facts come from Wikipedia and then when they discover new facts in the news? Why don't they feed the Wikipedia? Why don't they become a symbiotic entity with Wikipedia? Same goes for educational institutions I'm looking forward to an educational institution that actually thinks of the Wikipedia as a body of work that it is Connected to and trying to improve as part of its students education. How might that work? So all these questions are lessons from Wikipedia and I'm excited to keep seeing what comes out of it And I congratulate all the people who've gone and helped build it And in fact all the people who've gone and just looked at it and gone. What's up with that edit button?