Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia | Lex Fridman Podcast #385

We've never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. We understand that we're hardcore, and actually, there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. And if they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out. You're gonna lose Wikipedia.

The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, one of, if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales. Let's start at the beginning. What is the origin story of Wikipedia?

The origin story of Wikipedia. Well, so I was watching the growth of, uh, the free software movement, open source software, and seeing pro-programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, uh, sharing code, uh, doing that under a free license, uh, which is really interesting because it empowers an ability to work together. That's really hard to do if the code is still proprietary because then if I chip in and help, uh, we sort of have to figure out how I'm gonna be rewarded and, and what that is. But the idea that everyone can copy it and, and it just is part of the commons, uh, really empowered a huge wave of, uh, creative software production, and I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works. Um, and the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia, uh, and thought, oh, that seems obvious that an encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it. There's a few reasons why. One, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like. You know, you should see a picture, a few pictures maybe, history, location, um, something about the architect, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a shared understanding of what it is we're trying to do and then we can collaborate and different people can chip in and find sources and so on and so forth. So set up first Nupedia, which was, um, about two years before Wikipedia. And with Nupedia, we, we had this idea that, um, in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia, uh, because, uh, a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting it out of to write a- an encyclopedia, you know, you could be made fun of if it's just every random person. So we had implemented this seven-stage review process to get anything published. Um, and two, two things came of that. So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process, a few days later, we had to pull it because as soon as it hit the web and the broader community took a look at it, uh, people noticed plagiarism and realized that it, it wasn't actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on. So we had to pull it. So it's like, oh, okay, well, so much for a seven-stage review process. Uh, but also, I decided that I wanted to try... I was frustrated. Why is this taking so long? Why is it so hard? So I thought, oh, okay. I saw that, uh, Robert Merton had won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on option pricing theory, and when I was in academia, that's what I worked on was option pricing theory. I had a published paper. So I'd worked through all of his academic papers and I knew his work quite well. I thought, oh, I'll just, I'll write a short biography of Merton, and when I started to do it, I'd been out of academia, uh, hadn't been a grad student for a few years then. I felt this huge intimidation because they were gonna take my draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors th- that we could find to give me feedback, uh, for revisions, and it felt like being back in grad school. You know, it's like this really oppressive, sort of, like, you're gonna submit it for review and you're gonna get critiques.