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The man behind the Wiki

James Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on the past, present and future of the online collaborative encyclopaedia

PHOTO: K MURALI KUMAR

CONCENTRATING ON QUALITY Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikimedia Foundation

Much like the revolutionary product he helped create, Jimmy Wales has a disarming charm about him. In many ways, he is a reflection of the ethos of mutual growth that underlines efforts behind Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopaedia he founded. "We found that Nupedia, our first attempt at an encyclopaedia, was too top down and not much fun for anyone," says Wales, who delivered a lecture on the success of Wikipedia at the British Library. "We tried out the Wiki software as just a test, but we got more work done in two weeks than in two years. And so we launched Wikipedia."

Contrary to what many believe, says Wales, Wikipedia wasn't much of a technical innovation. Although the in-house programmers at Wikipedia (two of only five full-time employees involved in the effort) have made significant customisations to the software involved, the basic technology is quite straightforward. "All the technology we use for Wikipedia was around for six years before we started. Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technical one."

Five million entries

And what an innovation it is. The encyclopaedia today boasts over five million entries in various languages, with the English edition alone notching up close to 1.5 million articles. With editions in over 200 languages, of which more than a dozen have 50,000 articles each, Wikipedia is today one of the most frequently visited sites around the world. What is most fascinating about this venture, however, is that this gigantic system is almost wholly maintained and run by a growing group of volunteers, including Wales himself.

As with any system of such size and nature, Wikipedia too has come under a fair share of criticism. Larry Sanger, an organiser for Wikipedia who helped set up the project but quit in 2002, for instance, claims Wikipedia is anti-elitist in that it places consensus ahead of expertise. Wales, however, claims this accusation has no real basis in truth. While the core community is always excited to have expertise on board, he argues, they do not accept anything based simply on the credentials of the expert doing the talking. "At Wikipedia, we defend ideas based on their merit. So you could say that we are anti-credentialist. In a lot of cases, we have failed to retain the experts. But normally, experts are respected in the community."

Another sore point for many is what they see as a lack of credible sources of reference. Based as Wikipedia is on the Internet, much of the reference material for its entries comes from online sources, sources many people still do not attribute credibility to. Wales contends that although Wikipedia's sources are online, the parameters used to ensure reliability are the same as those used in print. "We're still old-fashioned about that, and only consider reliable sources such as online editions of prominent newspapers (although you have to be careful there too), peer-reviewed academic journals and so on. We encourage people to cite books as references, but online references are so much easier to track."

Indeed, this perceived credibility attached to print publications gives traditional encyclopaedias such as the Britannica an edge over Wikipedia, admits Wales. "A former editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica once told me that they sell two things — high quality information and furniture. The fine, polished finish of the Britannica gives it an aura of credibility." However, contrary to the general understanding, Wikipedia hasn't fared too badly compared to the Britannica. "A study by Nature Magazine compared various articles of equal length in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica and found that while the latter had an average of three errors per article, Wikipedia had only four. What shocked people wasn't that there were four errors in Wikipedia, but that the Britannica had errors at all."

As unusual a growth path as Wikipedia has taken, predicting its future is a difficult task for Wales. "It's easier to predict the course of the other language editions than the English Wikipedia. We know the course of evolution, and it's easy to extrapolate what the Kannada Wikipedia, for instance, will look like in five years. With the English Wikipedia, we are on the cutting edge, facing all the new problems first. So there are now moves within the community to concentrate less on growth and more on quality. I refuse to predict how big Wikipedia will be in the future because any number I give now will seem silly in five years."

Besides Wikipedia, Wales also runs Wikia, a for-profit venture that hosts sites built around specific interests, "like encyclopaedias of pop culture", one of the most popular of which is Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia.

"That site opened my eyes to the possibilities of collaborative work. Encyclopaedias are designed for collaborative work, but this shows that even humour writing can be done collaboratively."

Checks and balances One of the issues that Wikipedia has constantly had to deal with is the balance between freedom given to contributors and controls put in place to ensure accuracy and reliability. While the policy of letting just anyone edit any article has been questioned in the past, most recently the website came under fire from many sections of the media for introducing a new measure called semi-protection, where articles cannot be edited by anonymous users or those registered with the site for less than four days.

Although Wales repeatedly insisted this was a move towards softer instead of firmer controls, the website still came under attack for what was popularly perceived as a move towards exclusivity.

New control system

In an effort to quell criticism on both sides of the divide, Wikipedia is introducing a new system of control called flagging in its German edition. Now, articles that are intact and reliable will be marked non-vandalised. When edits are made to such articles by new or unknown contributors, they will be added to a queue and will be checked for errors or vandalism before appearing on the page, thus ensuring only accurate, reliable material appears on the website.

Wales does admit that even this isn't the best system the website can adopt. "Even if a new contributor makes a good edit, it will not go live for a while. That may discourage newcomers from posting edits. If there's too much of a barrier to entry, then that becomes a problem."

With the community working on ways to overcome this problem, though, Wales is optimistic the new system is a step in the right direction.

RAKESH MEHAR

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