3:00 P.M., EST
MODERATOR: Okay. Good afternoon, folks. Today, we're very pleased to have with us Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia as part of our American Business Leaders series, so he's going to talk about his story and his plans for the future and afterwards, take some questions.
So, Mr. Wales.
MR. WALES: Okay. So I'm going to talk mostly today about Wikia, which is my new organization, and basically update people on what's going on there and some of the background, and then we're going to have question and answer so we should have plenty of time for that.
So my old saying that I've always said about Wikipedia is 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, and that's what Wikipedia is doing. When I click to this slide, if the monitor wasn't all blue, you would see that the word "sum" is in red. Wikipedia is about the sum of all human knowledge. And basically, the idea here is that an encyclopedia is a very big work. A traditional encyclopedia is normally, you know, 30 or so volumes, about this big, in your library. But the library itself is a much, much bigger work.
So important background information for reporting: Wikia is not Wikipedia. This is really important. Wikia is a completely new and separate organization. It's not a sister organization of Wikipedia. It's not a subsidiary of Wikipedia. This gets misreported quite a bit, so I try to really emphasize that it's a completely new and separate organization. Wikia is every other kind of book, work, or community that people might build. What we're trying to do at Wikia is extend the Wikipedia model beyond just the nonprofit, educational, and research communities into every other kind of work that people might want to do.
Everything we do, though, at Wikia, just as at Wikipedia, is freely licensed, so we use open source software, GPL software -- everything that we do is that -- free documentation license content, so that means people are able to copy the work, modify it, redistribute it, redistribute modified versions. People can do all this commercially or non-commercially, so it's really the opposite of the proprietary copyright development model. Instead, we put everything out there into the intellectual commons for people to do whatever they want with it. And we have a lot of creative commons content, so this is content that would be licensed under the various creative commons licenses that allow people to share their work online and beyond.
The basic structure of what we're doing, the collaborative vision here, we have the library that started it all. So this is -- right now at Wikia, we have about 2500 different communities going in 66 different languages. I would say 67, but we don't really count Klingon as a real language. So these are people who are building websites, information of enduring value. We also have another division of the company where we are doing what we call magazine-style sites. I'll show you some examples of all of these in a minute.
Here is news and opinion. It's collaboratively written community websites on various kinds of topics. We also have an initiative -- then called open serving, where we are allowing people to use a collaborative blogging tool and we even let them keep the ad revenue. As long as they're doing free content, freely licensed content and using free software, we want to empower that community to do whatever it is they want to do. And in our search project -- and this is what's probably gotten the most news attention and we just had a major announcement yesterday that we had hired Jeremie Miller, a major open source developer, to be the technical lead on that project and I'll talk a little bit more about Jeremie later on.
This is a graph showing the growth of Wikia in the last couple of years compared with the growth of Wikipedia at a similar stage of development. So this is -- the blue line there, but on your monitor, the dark purple line, is Wikipedia's growth in 2002 and 2003 and the other line that goes a little bit higher is Wikia in 2005 and 2006. So over this same time period, two years but three years later, Wikia is enjoying the same kind of early growth that Wikipedia did a few years ago. And so we're pretty excited about that. We think it's going to become something that's really, really big. In terms of the total size of the site, we actually expect it to be larger than Wikipedia for the same reason that a library is a bigger work than an encyclopedia.
Just to give you some of the ideas of some of the things that are going on there, this is the world Wikia site. This is a travel site. And to understand this, if you think about a travel guide to New York City, that's going to be very different from an encyclopedia article about New York City. And it turns out lots of people are interested in writing about travel online, so we're providing this community with a place to come and do all that.
We have some funny sites that are kind of interesting. We have the Muppet Wiki. If you look in Wikipedia, you'll see around 300 different articles about the Muppets, which is quite a few, you would think. So we've got Sesame Street, Muppet Show, Muppet Movies, Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, Big Bird, Kermit, Miss Piggy, all the famous Muppets, lots and lots of information in Wikipedia. But 300 articles, you might think, would cover everything you could possibly want to know about the Muppets, but at the Muppets' Wikia site, they've made 12,320 articles about the Muppets. It's about the Muppets. In just over a year, they've done this.
So what are some of the kinds of things that people are doing there? What could you possibly write that much about the Muppets? Well, for an example, this is the page in Wikipedia about Itzhak Perlman. He is a very famous violinist and this article is a good Wikipedia article. It tells his history, where he grew up, where he went to school, different awards that he's won. For some reason, though, this article completely fails to cover the time he appeared on Sesame Street and played the violin like a banjo. But this is the only thing that the Muppets community really cares about. So at Muppets Wikia, they are writing thousands and thousands of articles about everything in the world from a Muppet point of view, so it's very different from Wikipedia and yet, it's an activity that people are finding very enjoyable.
For the magazine-style sites, this is one example. This is a site about mortgages, mortgage news, discussions about financial debt and things like this. It's a very important topic for lots of people and it's -- as you can see, it's very highly modified, so the software that we're using for the magazine-style sites is the same underlying software that runs Wikia and Wikipedia, so it's open-source software. It's called MediaWiki. But our New York office -- we have an office in New York -- the New York team has really hacked the software up to make it really different with a lot of new features.
So one of the things that they have is a voting feature, where people can come to the site and click to rank stories. And this system pushes stories to the front page of the site, so the front page is controlled by the behavior of the users in terms of what they're finding interesting, so the most interesting stories float to the front page of the site. So that's been something that's been very successful in many areas. We have a sports site that's getting to be really popular and it's a new approach and it's an expansion of the Wikipedia model into other kinds of content.
So for the company, we have several different initiatives. We have the Wikia communities. This is -- as I mentioned earlier, we have about 2500 different community websites that are growing. We have topics -- you know, travel, mortgages, the Muppets. We have things like Uncyclopedia, which is a parody of Wikipedia, which is really hilarious. We have just many, many different things going on that are very different from an encyclopedia.
And Open Serving; we're offering free hosting to people who are working in free software and free content. We've just launched this. There's a few sample sites that have just started. We have a huge waiting list of people who want to work with us on this and we're rolling it out over the next several months.
And then the thing that's attracted the most attention is the search project. The idea here is I'm launching a project to build a completely transparent, open source search engine, community-driven. This has gotten an enormous amount of attention all over the world, so -- and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.
So we're on fire. We've got a lot of interesting challenges. The site is growing really, really quickly and revenues are growing quickly, so we're expanding very rapidly and it's kind of an exciting and crazy time for us. So our vision is to become the world's largest sustainable free content, user-controlled media company. So part of the concept here is I created Wikipedia. It's controlled by the community. It's freely licensed. And Wikipedia is sustainable, but it's sustainable as a charity. People donate money and this is how Wikipedia is sustained.
We don't believe that that model is workable for every type of content there is. It's one thing for people to donate money to create a free encyclopedia. It's another thing for them to donate money for magazines or for an encyclopedia of the Muppets and things like that. So we are trying to show that there are business models around free content and build on that.
As I said, our search project has gotten a lot of really crazy press attention, which we enjoy, but are a little frightened by. This is a cover of Fast Company last month. There's a picture of me. It says I'm Google's worst nightmare. I'm not so sure about that myself, but my mother bought 10 copies, so at least some people like this.
But we have a Wiki set-up and open-source software developers are coming in and discussing and beginning to talk about how to build this thing. We are reaching out to lots of different people in that community. And in order to do that, we just yesterday announced the hiring of Jeremie Miller. Jeremie was the founder of Jabber, which is an open protocol for instant messaging. This protocol has become extremely important in the instant messaging space and really provides a counter to the closed proprietary protocols at AOL Instant Messenger and so forth. Google Talk uses the XMPP messaging protocol and it's expected, over the next few years, for all of the major players to eventually succumb and agree to the open standards.
So the great thing about Jeremie, from my point of view, is he has a huge amount of respect. He is considered one of the top 20 open source developers, very widely loved in that community, and he really strongly shares my philosophy of openness and democratic control of the internet, so he's very excited about the opportunity for taking Surge, which is now closed and proprietary, and turning it into a completely open standard.
So that's a basic summary of what I'm working on these days and what's going on with all that. And I got through that very, very quickly, actually, so now we have time for questions.
MODERATOR: Please be sure to identify yourself. Wait for the microphone, identify yourself by stating your name and media affiliation.
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Torsten Riecke, and I'm with Germany's business daily Handelsblatt. I just wonder, what's your business model. I saw on one of your slides that the users are able to keep their ad revenue if they like to, so I just wonder how you do on the business side and actually what's the logic behind your model.
MR. WALES: So this is for the open serving product, so we have several different initiatives. So we have the Wikia communities. Those are advertising-supported. We have the search project, which will be advertising-supported. And then we have the open serving initiative. The open serving initiative is basically putting out there software tools that people are already using. There's a ton of open source software out there for hosting -- collaborative blogs, community groups, all kinds of different things. What we want to do is allow people to come in and build those communities.
The requirement we'll have for them is that they have to use freely licensed software so that we can provide it to them quite easily, and they have to use free licenses on all the content. If they are doing that, we believe that this will help to push forward the free culture movement, which we're really an integral part of it.
And around that component we actually do not have any kind of a business model at all. We have no idea how we could ever make any money out of that. But we don't worry about it too much, because when we look at the cost of hosting, if you're talking about people hosting video, that can be quite expensive, but if all you're doing is text and images, the actual hosting costs are dropping dramatically year after year. The total cost of carrying this project is going to really run into the tens of thousands of dollars in the foreseeable future, so we're not really concerned about it.
What we are interested in is thinking about how we can build this thriving community of people using our product, using our services, and we believe that if we do that and we contribute in a good way to this ecosystem, there'll be lots of ways to make money around the edges on that.
QUESTION: Nick Krastev, Radio Free Europe. My question is I know that a lot of American academic institutions and probably some foreign institutions as well are now developing policies with regard to using quotes from Wikipedia. There is some controversy. Basically, the main concern is the accuracy. So what's your stance on this?
MR. WALES: So the interesting thing about this is that I think what it really illustrates is how as a small, nonprofit organization we are not very press-savvy. The great irony of it is the universities who are out there and have implemented policies have so far been more conservative than we are about the use of Wikipedia. The one was Middlebury College that got the most press coverage, and I would say that they got the most press coverage because they were extreme enough to actually follow our recommendations. So we don't consider this to be a problem at all. The only problem we have is with the press distorting the issue.
We have always said that Wikipedia should not be used as a source in academic papers, for the same reason that Britannica should not be used as a source in academic papers. This has been the case at universities forever that that is not the role of an encyclopedia in the research process, and Wikipedia is no different. With Wikipedia there is the additional question that it is written live on the internet, it is a work in progress, and any given page in Wikipedia may be inaccurate at any moment in time.
At the same time, we know that the overall quality of Wikipedia is extremely high and we're not concerned about that. So from our point of view, this is a bit of a press crisis that's completely manufactured because we fully support the idea that Wikipedia should not be used as a source in academic papers.
QUESTION: Juergen Schoenstein from Focus Magazine, Germany. The question of intellectual property: When you have, what, 12,300 articles written about the Muppets alone, there might be, you know, a couple of them that actually belong intellectually to someone else that have just been copied. It's a possibility and it was hard enough to monitor the Wikipedia entries. Now, and this balloons way out of, you know, that proportion. How will you, when it's part of your business model, how will you make sure that nobody gets ripped off?
MR. WALES: So we don't consider that to be a really big problem. At Wikipedia it's never been a big problem. And the reason for this is that communities of people -- it's not individuals posting whatever they like -- communities are overseeing the work and the communities take a very strong and proactive approach to eliminating that kind of behavior.
One of the things that communities are really proud of is this -- the ethos of we built it ourselves. So if the Muppets community say somebody copying things from other sources, they would block that user from contributing further. I've never seen a case where we had a community that was in favor of copyright violations. That just is something we've never had a problem with. Conceivably, it could be a problem. If so, we would have to deal with. But it seems unlikely.
In terms of the -- you know, the ongoing issue that of course even the community may make a mistake or not recognize or notice a problem, then our answer to that is the same as any internet company that would have places where the general public can contribute; that is, we take a very aggressive approach to responding well to complaints. If somebody complains about something, we immediately take it down. So for us, we don't consider that to be a particularly difficult problem.
QUESTION: Lennart Pehrson; I'm with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. You showed the cover of Fast Company and then said that you weren't sure that it was true that you might be their worst nightmare. Why not? And do you see yourself taking on Google?
MR. WALES: Well, why not, because it's just sort of funny, right? Google is huge and enormous and I'm just me. So I think that, you know, a couple reasons why not. First of all, we do see ourselves taking on Google. That's not a question. But what's interesting about Google, if you look at Google's business these days, Google's business is advertising. And really for them, as long as lots of people are doing search online, they're really providing the search services, just a cost to them. What they're really interested in from a business point of view is the ad revenue and controlling the ad distribution, and we're not competing with them at all on where they make their money.
In terms of -- you know, I just think it's sort of funny to imagine that I'm Google's worst enemy, because I know the Google guys socially and like them very much, and they don't seem too mad at me, so I don't think they're losing any sleep.
QUESTION: Hi, Ana Belen Nieto, Cinco Dias - Spain. When you say that you're just you, what do you mean? What is your organization -
MR. WALES: Right. Well, so we are -- so Wikia is -- so, just to be clear, although I've been clear, but let's make super clear -- Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that I founded a few years back. Wikia is the new company. We are a for-profit company. We are venture-funded so we have -- you know, last year we raised $4 million in venture capital, and then additionally in December we had another large investment from Amazon. So we're a small company. We have 33 employees right now worldwide, 33 full-time and a few other part-timers. We are growing quickly, and so yeah, it's not just me, I just meant, you know -- my picture's a little bit silly. I am just me, the company is the company.
QUESTION: Hi. Adrian Novac from Antenna 1 TV, Romania. I have a couple of questions for you. How do you see the contributions that non-English speakers are bringing to Wikipedia? And how do you control their content? And also, you mentioned that you have an office in New York. Do you have any plans to open another offices -- I mean, around the world?
MR. WALES: Okay. So, the first question relates to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now in -- there are languages that have at least 1,000 articles.
And the answer for how we control their content is: The community controls it. It's really -- we're an all-volunteer organization for the most part. And you know, all over the world there are different groups that come together. There are local chapters who elect officers and so forth. So it's really done in a very grassroots way.
The second question was about the New York office. And so this is Wikia, the for-profit company. We have an office in New York. We bought a company that had created these magazine-style sites and they were all in New York, and we just said, well, you can stay in New York and keep working.
In terms of opening other offices, right now the largest office of Wikia is in Poland. We have 15 people in Poland, a developments center there. So the bulk of our programming is, you know, that group in Poland. And we are hiring community management people, individual people from all over the world. Basically, in additional languages as we get a substantial amount of content and languages, we're hiring people who can speak that language so that we can make sure that we're responding well to customer service issues and things like that.
MODERATOR: (Off-mike.)
MR. WALES: Romanians? No, no, I don't think so. We do have some Romanian language sites, but I would think probably not a lot right now. There's a Romanian Wikipedia of course, yeah.
MODERATOR: (Off-mike.)
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Annette Dowideit, I'm with the German newspaper Die Welt. For me, as a journalist, the appeal of Wikipedia is that if you just need a quick glimpse to get an overview over one topic, you just go to Wikipedia, and you might know that the facts might not be 100 percent reliable, but you get a quick overview. And now in Wikia, when you have more than 12,000 Muppet entries, this appeal is lost to me. So there is nothing concentrated. So what is the difference -- what benefit is there for me as a journalist, or just as a consumer, to go to Wikia, compared to just going to "Google" something?
MR. WALES: Right. So I guess the real question would be -- it depends on what purpose you might have. So if you -- if your purpose was to, you know, write an article about the impact of Muppets on culture, you might find the Muppets Wikia to have far more information than Wikipedia. Wikipedia would have a summary, but at Wikipedia you wouldn't be able to find out about what happened when Itzhak Perlman came on Sesame Street, and you might want that. So some of our sites are like incredibly in-depth reference works that would go into far more detail. And so, depending, you might find something you need there.
The other thing would be, people do all kinds of different things on the internet other than read encyclopedia articles, so maybe sometimes you -- maybe a journalist wouldn't need this, but if you just want to read something humorous and funny, you might go to Uncyclopedia and just laugh about the crazy stuff that they're writing there, which is quite amusing.
So it just depends, right. Readers -- in a sense, I view the question as being something like: Gee, we have a Brahaus, like, why do we need all these other books, right? Isn't that everything? Well, the answer is there can be many, many other things: opinions and magazines and newspapers and things like that as well.
MODERATOR: (Off-mike.)
QUESTION: Hello, my name is Hajime Matsuura from Nikkei, Japan. I have two questions: Could you show us what kind of dialogue you are having with people [on] Wall Street right now, besides raising funds last year? Or, any plans to -- or if any of part of your company's going public? And if yes or no, why?
Second question is: Could you give us a comment on the latest topic that Murdoch had bid for Dow Jones -- if it's good for the (inaudible) business?
MR. WALES: Okay. So first of all, I'm not such a business person, I'm a revolutionary. So I'm just trying to destroy whole industries, so I don't worry about this. (Laughter.)
But to answer the question more seriously, no, not really talking to anybody. We're not raising additional money at this time and we don't have any plans to go public. For the future of Wikia, it's of course, you know, many possibilities, and I think we would probably prefer to go public than to sell out to somebody. But we don't have any plans anytime -- I mean, we've got a lot of work to do building the company first.
In terms of Murdoch buying Wall Street Journal, I'm just hoping that they won't put the same kind of flashing, blinking stuff that they have on MySpace, right? As long as they avoid that, it will be okay.
I'm just joking. I really have no real feelings about that.
QUESTION: Hi, I'm Mikael Tornwall - Dagens Industri in Stockholm. First of all, I'm a bit confused to when it comes to your business models. You're talking a lot about open source and so on, but you have raised some money from venture capitalists and so on, and I guess that they want their money back sooner or later. So if you can say anything about the model, do you have the intention to make money from this?
And, my other question is: When it comes to competing with Google, even if you're not really after the same kind of money as they are, for the users, why should they say Wikia has something better than Google?
MR. WALES: Okay. So, the business model is advertising. And so my belief is giving away all the content under a free license will drive lots of traffic back to us. This is what I've seen happen in all of my work: People take the work, they copy it, they give a link back, and it drives a lot of traffic that leads to people using the website, that leads to advertising revenue. So it's a pretty straightforward business model for a consumer internet company. And, you know, we don't have any really radical ideas around that.
In terms of the search project, my belief is right now, if you go and you compare the quality of search results at Google and Yahoo and ASK, they're very similar. There's really nobody in the search space right now who has a clear definitive advantage, in terms of the quality of search results.
Five years ago, that wasn't true. When Google first launched, and for some time afterwards, Google was clearly superior in their search results to all of the competition. That is no longer true. And what I believe is that production of good, quality search results is getting very close to being a commodity. It's something that anybody -- any mid-size organization could do that. And that Google's advantage is now in branding alone. If Google's advantage is branding alone, then consumers will choose their search engine based on whatever factors they may perceive regarding brand and quality and so forth. So a lot of the answers would have to do with the ability of users to customize, the general feel that people have about the product. People like Google, but they like me too. (Laughter.)
So I just think it's really a -- one of the interesting things about search is that there is no lock-in effect. When Microsoft was an early leader in the operating system space, there was a really strong lock-in effect. People -- there were what are called network externalities. People -- they need to use the same operating system that everybody else is using so they can be compatible, and that gave Microsoft a really strong lead for a very long time that's only now beginning to be eroded.
In the search space, that's not true. In other words, if all of your friends are using Google and you switch to using Yahoo or ASK for your search engine, that's fine. It doesn't affect anything, and there's no real cost of switching. So I think that the idea that we should have two or three major search players is going to go away in time -- that we're going to see lots and lots and lots of outlets doing good, quality search, and people will choose those depending on, you know, how well it meets their particular needs.
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Kim Riseth, I'm from a Norwegian newspaper. Could you expound a little bit about the philosophy [of] Wikia? Why did you want to start that? Why didn't you want to continue with Wikipedia? Why start all these new -- and expanding to search? What was the reason that you might do that?
MR. WALES: Right. So I'm a huge advocate of the free culture movement; the idea that we are at the very beginning of, you know, a major movement that is just getting underway, which is a complete democratization of media, democratization of knowledge. And I want to help push that forward. So Wikipedia is of course quite successful, but it's also quite limited in what it is. It's one thing, it's an encyclopedia. I believe that people can collaborate and produce really good quality works of many, many different kinds, and I want to push that forward. So that's a big part of it.
In terms of the search project, my philosophy is -- almost every part of the fundamental structure of the internet is based on open standards, open protocols, open-source software. So we have this for e-mail, for web-serving. But in search, which is a fundamental component of the internet, it's all closed, proprietary, secret. And I think that should change. And I see an opportunity for that to change.
There have been open-source search engine projects for many years. Nutch is one, Lucine is part of Nutch. These projects have actually come a long way in the last year or two, to the point that Nutch is almost usable in production for a full-scale search engine. So I see an opportunity there to basically give those open-source developers the platform and the space they need, and the financial support, in terms of hardware, to be able to push through and do that in a major way. And I think that can be really good for the internet as a whole.
Search, if you think about it, is an editorial function. It is political with a small "p." You type in a search term, and the search engine tells you what's important for that search term. I think that's something that should be open, transparent, amenable to community control, and also a competitive landscape where lots of different players can be involved in that.
This is -- one of the reasons we hired Jeremy is that he has been working for quite some time on a protocol for data exchange among search engines that would really change the economy of how search is done, so that different groups of people can specialize in different parts of it and exchange data. So you can have people whose only job it is to crawl the web.
Lots and lots of different organizations are crawling the web all the time. There's a lot of redundant work going on. I can see a company specializing in just crawling the web, and selling those results and exchanging the data through Jeremy's protocol. Those are some of the kinds of fundamental structural changes that I think we need to see take place so that search can become a neutral platform, the way almost everything else on the Internet is.
QUESTION: Thank you. Gabe Plesea for Romania Libera. In terms of accessibility, you answered some questions on the platforms -- you know, Microsoft and Internet Explorer and some other search engines. Could you elaborate a little bit on that is this part one, part two? Are you aware of limitations, given the openness, that, you know, your search for democratic advancement, in terms of spreading out knowledge -- are you aware of limitations or an outright ban on using your site? Thank you.
MR. WALES: Okay, so -- yeah, couple of things. The -- you know, elaborating on the open standards and so forth, Internet Explorer, I'm not sure what the question is exactly, but I'll just make a pitch for Firefox, which is the greatest thing ever. We're coming out of this era of proprietary software. It is coming to an end very quickly. We have not seen Microsoft be able to move into any new areas in a long time, and they are in fact losing hold on some of the old areas. We are finally to the point where we're beginning to see major inroads being made in consumer software that's open source. And the biggest and most popular example of this is the Firefox web browser, which is rapidly gaining market share, even though it's -- you know, it's completely open source, it's gaining market share over Internet Explorer because it's a better product, because it's made in a better way. I think we're seeing this trend in many, many areas, and I think that's really important.
In terms of limitations on democratization on knowledge and access to knowledge, the main limitations that we see -- so the biggest and most prominent of course is that Wikipedia is completely blocked in China. All language versions have been blocked for a long time now, more than a year. I consider this to be quite unfortunate. We are hopeful that we can convince the Chinese Government this is a bad idea, but we are not willing to compromise with censorship. So -- well, it's a bit of an impasse.
In fact, China has the ability to filter based on keywords, so it's really unnecessary for them to block all of Wikipedia if there are some parts of it they don't like. So, although we would never cooperate or support them filtering Wikipedia, we still think that would be far better than what they're doing now, which is blocking it entirely.
Lots of other countries have problems in this area, with filtering the internet. Tunisia is just one example where certain web sites are banned and certain search words associated with the opposition parties are, you know, filtered on the internet. I think those kinds of things -- I'm generally an optimist about those kinds of things. I think that technologically it's becoming more and more difficult for China to maintain the firewall, and it's -- it makes less and less sense for them to attempt to do so. So I think, you know, another five or ten years, we will see some policy changes there.
QUESTION: Hi, this is Mercedes Gallego from the Spanish newspaper, El Correo. I have two questions. First one: As the cyber world becomes larger and larger, the problem of consumers is to screen out the need to get the information you need. Very few people can pass the first couple of pages of any search. And since you are a revolutionary, I wonder if you have been thinking about this problem and have something in mind to help consumers to get what they need from the cyber world.
The second question is about advertising. You said that's the model of your business. And for many large companies, including large newspapers, getting money through advertising in the internet is becoming a -- is a pending subject. I was wondering how was that coming for your company, and is making business over the internet with advertising just for the super-big guys?
MR. WALES: So it is a what-subject, you said?
QUESTION: Making money with advertising?
MR. WALES: You said that for many companies, it's a something-subject. Failing subject or --
QUESTION: It's a pending subject.
MR. WALES: Pending. Okay.
QUESTION: Yeah. Something that you haven't been able to --
MR. WALES: Right. So, yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the advertising model is a workable model. There are lots and lots of websites and lots of companies who are making money from advertising. There are a lot of smaller organizations which are doing reasonably well with advertising models. Some bloggers, you know, make a living just blogging because they have enough readers that they can support the site through advertising. So for me that seems like a functional model.
I also believe that there are other models which can make sense. I just came this morning from a meeting at the Wall Street Journal, and of course the Wall Street Journal is the classic example of a website which charges money for people to access and read it, and they have been very successful with that. But that's because of the very type of content that they have. You know, it sense for them as a business model. So I'm pretty much of an optimist about advertising as a model for sustaining a lot of content online.
The second question was?
QUESTION: (Inaudible)
MR. WALES: Oh, how -- yeah, yeah, excessive -- so I think that the -- you know, my view is that the key to that question is good-quality search results. Unbiased search results controlled by a community of, you know, thoughtful people seem like a very important tool in that, so that when I go to search for something on the internet, I find what I'm looking for. It's -- we've come a long way already in that regard. If you remember the days before Google existed, it was getting to be unbelievably bad. The existing search engines were quite bad. It was getting really hard to find anything. I remember thinking, gee, if we don't get some good, quality search, this whole internet thing isn't going to work. I mean, it's just a mess. You can't find anything.
Google's done a pretty good job, and now we're seeing Yahoo has caught up to them, in terms of search quality. So has ASK. So I think that's a big part of it. Good quality search and always keeping focused as an industry on helping people find what they need is, you know, super important.
QUESTION: Mark Dittli with Finanz und Wirtschaft, Switzerland. Two questions, if I may, about search. One is: How -- what do you think about intelligent search machines using artificial intelligence for search? And the second is: Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, they're building these huge server farms. To what extent do you think sheer computing power becomes a factor of success in the search field in the future?
MR. WALES: So these are very interesting and very good questions that I'm not necessarily sure of my answers to. Right now when we look at machine intelligence, it's still quite bad. It's very low. One area where I'm very confident about this -- people often ask me about the possibility of machine translation for Wikipedia, and the truth is, our volunteers, our communities, have never found machine translation to be of any use whatsoever other than, you know, maybe I can, you know, load up a webpage in Chinese and read the machine translation and figure out at least what the topic is. But that's about as much as you can get. It's just really badly done. And I think it's the same kind of thing for machine intelligence around search.
You know, one of the questions we like to ask people is, you know, have you gotten any spam lately, right? Even though there's been huge efforts going on in trying to have machine intelligence to be able to identify the difference between a legitimate e-mail and a spam, there's been very little progress. I mean, spam filters do kind of an okay job for the worst kinds of spam, but there's still tons and tons that gets through. And any human can look at it and instantly tell you this is spam; this is complete nonsense, right? And machines still cannot do that. So I'm a little bit skeptical about, at the present time, machine intelligence getting us very far in these areas.
Of course, who knows what the future holds? I mean, they keep inventing faster and smarter machines and, you know, I don't know what the future might hold. But for right now, I don't see a lot of advantage in that approach. I do see a lot of advantage in understanding that for certain matters of editorial judgment, humans are far, far better than machines right now.
QUESTION: What about the computing power?
MR. WALES: Yeah, I don't think it's a really important factor, so, you know, it can be useful for some things, but computing power gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time. So, you know, if -- you know, if something that five years ago, you would have said, gee, this is going to take, you know, $1 million to do, well, now you can just go out and do it for $5,000.
MODERATOR: (Off-mike.)
QUESTION: Hi, (inaudible) - just a follow-up on the quality-controlled and unbiased search engine. I mean, I'm not a tech myself, but how would it work technically to actually have this unbiased resource?
MR. WALES: So, I mean, that's an interesting editorial question, and, you know, my views on this are pretty well known because of the way Wikipedia functions -- is the -- this idea of open participation, thoughtful people coming together and debating things reasonably and trying to find, you know, compromised results. So I don't have any -- you know, that's a little vague, but that's the only way I know to put it, right? It's good people coming together and doing the best that they can, which is exactly what good journalists do, right? You try to be unbiased and you sometimes fail and you sometimes succeed and -- to varying degrees, and that's just the human condition.
In terms of the technical aspect of how do we bring a community together and empower them to do that, well, we know a lot from how Wikipedia functions, and how to make that happen. But we've also learned a lot from a lot of the more recent Web 2.0 type developments, in terms of quality control in places like Flickr, which is a photo sharing site, or Facebook, where people are coming together and building things in communities that have peer-controlled mechanisms that encourage people to behave themselves. This is the real revolution of Web 2.0 is software that actually supports good behavior in communities.
In the old days, the internet had a reputation as a really hostile environment where -- you know, lots of flame wars and bad behavior. That's beginning to improve as we're beginning to understand better what are the tools that communities need to be able to self-regulate. Is there a better way to self-regulate than screaming at people who are misbehaving? Well, yeah. Right? And so, those are the kinds of inputs that we are evaluating in the design of the community aspect of the search engine project.
MODERATOR: (Off-mike.)
MR. WALES: Okay.
QUESTION: Vladimir Lensky, Channel One (TV), Russia. I have a question about content again, if you don't mind.
MR. WALES: Sure.
QUESTION: When you open any, you know, regular encyclopedia, you know that it's been written by, you know, scientists and specialists that have been hired for that. When you read the traditional media, you know that it's been written by journalists. But when you read an article in Wikipedia or look through a magazine on Wikia, you don't really know who's behind that. How are the communities being formed; the ones that control or oversee the articles, the quality of the content? Who are those good and well-, you know, meaning people that you describe?
MR. WALES: Right. So each -- any method of production for intellectual works is going to have certain strengths and certain weaknesses. So if we want to talk about the -- for the encyclopedia for example -- if we want to talk about the weaknesses of a traditional encyclopedia, well, that's pretty easy to do. In Russia, there's an online encyclopedia, (inaudible) and I met with them and it's a wonderful product, but it's quite limited. It's quite small, and that's one of the limitations of the old-fashioned ways. It's very expensive to do it. And so the Wikipedia model allows us to generate much more content, much broader, much more in-depth in many areas. At the same time, it doesn't get you that last final stamp of approval, and so that's a limitation of the current model. And so each model is going to have certain strengths and certain weaknesses, and that's just the nature of the world, that different media are different in different ways.
I don't consider that a major problem, although I do think that communities who are trying to do good work online have to remain flexible. They have to remain very thoughtful and aggressive about thinking about how can we improve quality at every step of the way, but that's true of any type of organization.
In terms of how are these communities formed, that's a very deep and complicated subject, right? That's the real crux of my work is to think about what are the kinds of social norms, the social rules that you can put into place that help to amplify good voices and discourage the bad voices. And there's a lot of different techniques and processes involved with that. You know, Wiki -- the fact that everything is editable means, of course, some bad people come in, but the fact that we store the history of everything means it's easier for us to go in and fix something as a community than it is for somebody to wreck it.
So there are little things like that: the fact that the community has the ability to block people from editing, the community has the ability to temporarily lock articles if somebody's causing trouble. There's a whole lot of social discussion and rules and even things, you know, in really successful Wiki communities, one of the things that we see happening a lot is face-to-face meet-ups, you know, where people come together and actually, you know, have dinner together and mediate conflict and think about how they can make things better. It's really social. It's really all about people, not so much about technology. And it requires a real commitment to saying, look, whatever it is that we're doing, if it's something as, you know, a big-picture vision as a free encyclopedia for everyone, or something as sort of just hobby and fun, like we want to make a really great sports discussion site, as long as there's a commitment among the core group of users to say, look, we want to make this to be a good place, we want to be proud of our work and we have the tools to make that happen, then it happens.
QUESTION: Richard Chateauvert, Corus Quebec, Canada. Simple question: Where does the term "wiki" come from?
MR. WALES: "Wiki." So the term "wiki" is -- so where it comes from, there's a Hawaiian word, "wiki-wiki", which means quick. And the concept is: quick collaboration. The term -- the idea of Wiki as a software was invented by a guy named Ward Cunningham all the way back in 1995. And for -- from 1995 until 2001, when I started Wikipedia, Wiki was an underground phenomenon on the internet; very small wikis out there. The Wiki community had a lot of experience. Actually, there was a lot of wisdom gained in those years as there was experience with working with a completely open website, in learning how to create something of value out of what sounds like a really crazy idea. And so that's kind of the history of that, and -- it's a funny word, "wiki."
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
MR. WALES: No, no, no. It's just a word. It's not a trademark of any kind. It's like "word processor." It's just a -- it's a type of software.
QUESTION: Yeah; Luca Bolognini - Quotidiano Nazionale, Italy. Do you think you're going to develop a semantic approach for your search engine?
MR. WALES: Yes, I think there is a lot of semantic meta-data that's being generated on the web right now and a lot of interesting work that's going on in the area of semantic analysis. One of the great things about having a freely licensed search engine is, you know, I've been contacted by people who say, you know, I'm working on my Ph.D. dissertation on search algorithms and the problem I have is that there's no platform for me to do my research. It's very academic research, and all the best work is all top-secret and being done at the major search engine companies, so a lot of people are really excited about the idea that we opened up a platform for innovation and so, that's something that I'm really hoping to encourage.
You know, how well will that work? I don't know. But, you know, my job is to provide the platform and let people experiment.
QUESTION: Guillemette Faure with the French paper, Le Figaro. You -- nonprofits now -- I mean, Wikipedia is a nonprofit and people are volunteering to work for free. Now that you're going for profit, do you think that you might risk to become less likeable and people less likely to (inaudible)?
MR. WALES: (Laughter)So one of the interesting things about having such a strong commitment to communities and a strongly community-based website is that we have to be nice, because if we're not nice, people can just leave. This is part of the reason why we use the free licensing. As long as you -- as long as everything you contribute to a website is contributed in a way that the community cannot take their work and leave then that website has an unfair advantage over the community because they control everything ultimately. We don't want to have that control because we don't believe that that's conducive to generating really passionate communities, so this is way we use the free licenses.
So if we treat the Muppet Wiki people badly, they can take all of their content. They can download the database and they can just leave and leave us with nothing. And so that's a really important part of it -- of community control -- is giving community serious control in terms of the license because it creates a social dynamic that forces us to do the right thing for the communities.
In terms of non-profit versus for-profit, when we first launched Wikia we did wonder. We said, well, you know, why aren't people contributing to Wikipedia? When we asked them, it turns out the main reason most people contribute to Wikipedia is because it's fun. They just enjoy the work. But a secondary reason is that it's a charity and so that was important as well. So we said, well, gee, is anybody going to come to Wikia and start writing and start working? And it turns out they do in droves, right. We've got a huge number of people working on all kinds of different things. I think part of it is people understand and realize that in order to get support for various kinds of projects you need various kinds of models. The fact that the Red Cross is a charity does not imply that your newspaper should become a charity, right? Different kinds of things require different models to sustain them. Some things work best as commercial entities and some things work best as charities.
MODERATOR: (Inaudible).
QUESTION: Hi, my name is David Barroux from the French newspaper Les Echos. I'm a bit confused about the search project. It seemed on one side that it is a web site where you go and type a request, plus it also a tool that could be -- is it something that you're going to license that anybody can use on their own web site like a Wiki search box? And if it is correct, then what is the impact that this would have on your advertising revenue model for you if you don't want to be like Google -- like some advertising agency? So how would you make money? And is it because you expect that there will be different kind of web search engines that people would use and that you would not be competing with Google but more -- some people would use sometimes your engine and some other times somebody else's engine?
MR. WALES: Right. So the -- we really are thinking of a consumer web site, a consumer front end, consumer search engine where there's a huge community of people who are working on the search, who are using the web site in a social way to, you know, share bookmarks and do all those kinds of things around searching and navigation on the web in this context. So there is that aspect of it but everything being freely licensed does absolutely mean that we expect some people to take our work and build their own web sites and compete with us or compete with Google themselves and that will limit our ability to become as big as Google. But I'm not concerned about that.
I don't know of any way to build a proprietary search company that would compete with Google. You know, you could go out and raise hundreds of million dollars and just try and do that, but I don't know how easy that would be to do. It isn't really my thing of doing. So if I choose a path for the business in the early days that means that we will be, you know, building software that will be used by people who compete with us. Well, that's okay -- it's open source software. That's part of the whole way that ecosystem works. But if we go from, you know, zero to five percent of the search business, that's still a really good business and it's something that we're willing to do. The fact -- you know, will we ever get to -- I don't know what percentage of the total search business that Google has, somebody told me 60 percent -- will we ever get to 60 percent of the search business? No. It's basically impossible because we're going to give away all the software so other people can compete with us. But we don't really worry about that because what we get in exchange for that is a shot. We get the ability to bring lots of people together to create this at low cost, so it's an interesting -- from a purely point of view -- it's an interesting trade off. From my political perspective of what I'm trying to accomplish, this is just -- it's something cool so I want to do it.
MODERATOR: Time for two more questions.
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Sandro Pozzi; I work with the Spanish daily El Pais. One question: Do you think Google costs $500 a share -- you will pay that? You are a funding site. You know how the system works. You think it's overvalued or it's the right price for a company, at least, you know, engine research and --
And second of all, Google, Yahoo, a lot of medias are -- a lot of web sites are preparing themselves to the new devices in the wireless sector. Are you planning something for this segment because people are now in front of the computers but there are more new devices. The (inaudible) phone is going to be a revolution, people say that.
MR. WALES: Right.
QUESTION: And second of all, I want to know what is your revolutionary view about the traditional press?
MR. WALES: Okay. Three very big questions; actually the first one is quite small. I have no idea or opinion about what Google stock prices -- I don't keep up with it and I don't know what the current evaluation is or what it should be. I do come from a financial background, but I haven't done any analysis so I have no idea.
The second question was about wireless. Yeah, so I don't have immediate plans about wireless. I have some very strong opinions about wireless. I think that we need to free up more spectrum. We're seeing amazing things going on with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is the unregulated portion of the spectrum and it's a really small bit of the spectrum that's kind of like really not very good spectrum. It's the spectrum left over that nobody wanted and look at the revolution that's going on in that space. If we took some of the spectrum that we have basically, you know, given control of to broadcast and to cell phone companies and made it free for people to use under the same kind of open protocols of sharing that were used for Wi-Fi, we would see unbelievable things happening very, very quickly. Free phones call all over the world, you know, within five years. I don't think that's going to happen because there's big political obstacles to doing that. But I think that's an important part of what we need to see happen with the wireless spectrum in the long run.
And then the third part --
QUESTION: (Off-mike.)
MR. WALES: Oh, the traditional press -- I actually -- my views on the traditional press aren't nearly as revolutionary as people might hope. My view is that traditional newspapers and news-gathering organizations of various kinds; that the ones who will be most successful in the future will be those who do not stick their heads in the sand and reject the new media, but those who realize that, gee, in some cases communities can do really good work and we should be here to empower and support that work. And in some cases traditional journalism is doing really good work that communities are not replicating and so what we need is a hybrid approach. So you want to have organizations and we're already beginning to see this. You know, your better news web sites are beginning to move beyond simply having a comment board at the bottom of the news article. I think we're going to see a lot more of that where we see collaborative experiments where the community is invited in to interact in a more substantial way. But I don't think that we're going to see the end of traditional media.
I mean, the joke I always make is everybody tells jokes but we still have professional comedians. And that's basically where I think we stand -- you know, just because everybody can write on their blog doesn't mean we're going to do without professional journalists.
MODERATOR: Last question here.
MR. WALES: Of course, it's always good to say that in a room of professional journalists. (Laughter.)
QUESTION: My name is Olli Herralla - I come from Helsinki, Finland, Finland Business Daily. My question is about the timetable of the search engine. Can you tell us something about it?
MR. WALES: Yeah. So we are hoping to launch the community front end by the end of this year. We're going to be really, really careful when we launch that to make it really clear that we don't expect to have a fully functional high-quality search engine by the end of the year. That's when we're going to launch the public part of the process of building it. When I started Wikipedia and I said the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, it would have been very easy to have very embarrassing news stories about well, they call it an encyclopedia but it only has three articles in it, right? That's much of an encyclopedia. But we had the luxury back then of nobody caring what we were doing.
Now, you know, when we launch something -- when I launch something on the Internet, well, it gets a whole lot of interest and so we're going to have to make really clear that, yes, we know it isn't very good right now. So that's a little bit of caution, but we hope to launch the public aspect of beginning to gather URLs and beginning to start ranking and rating things by the end of this year.
QUESTION: (Off-mike)
MR. WALES: Yeah. It will be www.wikia.com The front page of the site will be the search engine. Right now the front page of the site is the front into the communities. As soon as we have the search -- you know, it's going to take -- we'll redesign the front page. It will be more like a Yahoo portal kind of front page.
MODERATOR: Thank you very much, everybody.
MR. WALES: Okay, thank you, super.
