AllThingsD » Jimmy Wales

Hollywood Burns

Eric Johnson — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:38:58 +0000

Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

– From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva

Old-Fashioned Journalism

Jessica Parks — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:16:39 +0000

We really look for reliable sources — we’ll say, for example, that just because someone wrote something in a blog somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s a reliable source. We need to get sources, you know, that are quite old-fashioned about it.

– Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, to Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell

Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia! What's Next? (Video)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:04:34 +0000

Wikipedia now seems like an enduring institution on the Web, but the site was only founded 10 years ago, tomorrow.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

[ See post to watch video ]

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

Wikipedia Co-founder Bothered by WikiLeaks

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:35:36 +0000

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is not a fan of WikiLeaks. At a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, today, he referred to the whistleblowing site’s release of Afghan war documents as irresponsible and dangerous–and he also made it clear he disapproves of the use of the term “wiki” in its name, which implies that it’s a site that allows collaboration. “I wish they wouldn’t use the name; they are not a wiki. A big way that got famous in the first place was by using the word wiki, which was unfortunate in my view.”

You Ask, Jimmy Wales Answers: A Crowdsourced Interview With Mr. Wikipedia

Peter Kafka — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:51:10 +0000

Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia relies almost entirely on free contributions from its users to create a mammoth Web encyclopedia.

Could an enterprising/lazy blogger use the same technique to interview Wales?

Surely someone else has thought about this stunt before. But I’ve never heard of it, so it’s new to me. I tried it out yesterday when Wales dropped by the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit: I asked my Twitter pals to suggest questions I should ask the Wikipedia co-founder, and–boom!–I got plenty of suggestions.

Some of the crowdsourced queries:

What is Wikipedia’s funding target for 2010? What happens if it doesn’t reach it?
Has Jimmy looked at selectable, respectable and relevant ads from big brands as a means of revenue?
What is he doing to promote Wikipedia in schools as a tool?
Is he warming to the idea of paying contributors?

Pretty good stuff! I don’t think I could rely entirely on reader questions to conduct an interview–Wales and I also took time to chat about other topics, like Wikipedia’s push-pull relationship with Google (GOOG). But it certainly was a useful starting point.

Which is a pretty good way to think about Wikipedia in general.

Thanks to @Albertoriva, @msmobileconverg, @kavidmathis, @ac_luke and @jasonhirschhorn (yup, that Jason Hirschhorn), among others, for their suggestions.

[ See post to watch video ]

Google’s Latest Philanthropic Interest: Wikipedia [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:12:13 +0000

During its recent fund-raising campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation–the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia–raised $8 million, exceeding its original goal of $7.5 million. Now the foundation has exceeded it further still thanks to Google (GOOG). The search giant has donated $2 million to Wikimedia. The contribution was first announced in a tweet yesterday by founder and board member Jimmy Wales.

In an official statement this morning Wikimedia said it will use the new funds to “support core operational costs…including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-increasing global traffic and capacity demands.”

So what’s in this for Google? Search traffic. Google is a top referring site to Wikipedia. Indeed, according to a 2008 study from comScore (SCOR)–the most recent I could find–(see table below; click to enlarge) Google was the top referring site to Wikipedia. With its own social encyclopedia effort, Knol, failing to gain the sort of traction it had hoped for, it seems Google has taken a new tack and begun backing the incumbent.

Wikimedia Foundation announces $2 million grant from Google

Donation will support capacity investments in Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects

SAN FRANCISCO, CA February 17, 2009 — The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, today announced that it has received a $2 million (USD) grant from the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. This is the Wikimedia Foundation’s first grant from Google. The funds will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation, including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be used to support the organization’s efforts to make Wikipedia easier to use and more accessible.

“Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” offered Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

Wikipedia founder and Wikimedia Foundation board member, Jimmy Wales, also commented on the Google gift. “We are very pleased and grateful. This is a wonderful gift, and we celebrate it as recognition of the long-term alignment and friendship between Google and Wikimedia. Both organizations are committed to bringing high quality information to hundreds of millions of individuals every day, and to making the Internet better for everyone.”

The two organizations have a long-standing working relationship. Most recently, Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have partnered to support translation of Wikipedia content into key languages with relatively small Wikipedia editions. Google’s Translation Toolkit supports direct online translation of Wikipedia articles, and has been used by Google in Wikipedia translation pilot projects with speakers of Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, offered: “It is wonderful that Google has stepped forward as a major supporter of a global, non-profit information commons. With this generous grant, we will be able to fund additional operations and development work to increase access and contributions to our free knowledge projects globally.”

Wikimedia’s support comes primarily from individual donations made by regular users of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation completed its 2009-10 fundraiser in January. During the drive, 240,000 individuals donated more than $8 million, representing three quarters of its planned revenue for the fiscal year.

Keep a Civil Cybertongue

Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:47:08 +0000

In less than 20 years, the World Wide Web has irrevocably expanded the number of ways we connect and communicate with others. This radical transformation has been almost universally praised.

What hasn’t kept pace with the technical innovation is the recognition that people need to engage in civil dialogue. What we see regularly on social networking sites, blogs and other online forums is behavior that ranges from the carelessly rude to the intentionally abusive.

Flare-ups occur on social networking sites because of the ease by which thoughts can be shared through the simple press of a button. Ordinary people, celebrities, members of the media and even legal professionals have shown insufficient restraint before clicking send. There is no shortage of examples—from the recent Twitter heckling at a Web 2.0 Expo in New York, to a Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be killed.

The comments sections of online gossip sites, as well as some national media outlets, often reflect semi-literate, vitriolic remarks that appear to serve no purpose besides disparaging their intended target. Some sites exist solely as a place for mean-spirited individuals to congregate and spew their venomous verbiage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia Quality and Tips for Contributors

Andrew LaVallee — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:09:29 +0000

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Friday that the online encyclopedia aspires to be a higher-quality source of information but added that mainstream publications could learn from its disclaimers and community features.

“Our goal is to make Wikipedia as high-quality as possible. Britannica or better quality is the goal,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the ad:tech conference in New York.

One of the site’s strengths, however, is that contested entries–ones whose neutrality has been disputed, or that are lacking citations–are identified as such, Mr. Wales said. He wished that controversial New York Times (NYT) articles, for example, noted when they had prompted arguments among editors, he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales on the GigaOm Show

Kara Swisher — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:01:23 +0000

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is the guest on the GigaOm Show on Revision3 this week.

Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interview Wales, who has also founded Wikia and whose thoughts always interest us.

Here you go: