An interview of Mr. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Nupedia, Wikia and Wikia Search.

-by Omkar Sathe and Abhijit Tiwari (Batch of 2012)

As I understand, you started out working in an options and futures trading firm. What made you leave that and become an entrepreneur?

Well I always have had an interest in doing whatever I thought to be the most interesting and exciting thing and I had seen the growth of the internet. I have been on the internet since early on,before the web even. When the world wide web began to explode, I became very excited about it and decided that it would be a good place to focus my energy going forward because it seemed like at that place, a lot of cool things were happening.

Is it true that you were inspired by Netscape and it’s tremendous IPO?

Yes, that’s right. I had been watching Netscape and at the time I used to work in the evening’s writing a web browser of my own. When Netscape went public, it was worth $4billion and my web browser was not as good as Netscape at that time, it was just a hobby program I was playing with. But I knew it wasn’t 4 billion dollars worse (Laughs). So I thought – hey, there’s something interesting and exciting happening over here.

So that’s quite interesting – having a day job as a trader and then writing your own program at night…

Well yes. I was a programmer, although perhaps not a very good programmer, but I do love programming.

You’ve had a few entrepreneurial experiences before Wikipedia, one of them being a website aimed at adults. Could share with us about what all you learnt from those first entrepreneurial experiences and how they shaped you ?

Yeah, we tried a lot of different things. We did very early blogging and we had a search directory. Well, the very first thing we attempted was actually a lunch delivery service where we would get orders online and send them to restaurants to deliver lunch to people working in downtown Chicago. That was a lot of work, but not successful at all because at that time, the net was so new that the restaurants had no idea what we were talking about, they couldn’t understand what we meant at all. So that was interesting. And that was when I got started.

Ahh, so it seems your idea was far ahead of its time.

(Laughs )Maybe. Or my programming was so bad that we couldn’t get very far. But it was an exciting time and it was a time when all of us were beginning to learn about communities online and to think in the direction that eventually became Wikipedia in terms of how can we help people participate online in new ways. But, it was all very exciting since the internet was in a very nascent stage then.

What were the challenges that you faced when you came up with the idea of Wikipedia?

Well, prior to Wikipedia, I had started a project called Nupedia. It was the same vision – to have a free Encyclopedia for everyone. But we didn’t know about the ideal Wiki, we didn’t really understand how communities could work together online. So a big part of the challenge was learning how to let go of control and allow the community to come forward, how to build a happy and healthy community with an ideal quality and so forth. So there was a lot to be learnt.

So was it difficult letting go of control over your project? After all, it must have been difficult letting anyone writing whatever they wanted…

Yeah, the main thing is there was no real choice for us. The project was failing and hence we were allowing our people to just do things. We were better suited in a way since no one knew about us. So we could just do some silly stuff on our crazy website that nobody had ever seen before and it didn’t cause any trouble because the only people who knew about it were the people who were working on it. So not being famous actually helped us initially. We could experiment without being worried about our brand or anything like that.

So it might not be always a good idea for a new venture to go out all guns blazing, is that the right conclusion to draw?

Sure. I mean sometimes I feel like if I want to do something new myself nowadays, I sort of wish I could do it anonymously so that I can make a lot of mistakes without anyone noticing. (Laughs). But whatever I do now is noticed. That’s the other side of being famous.

What was the thinking behind introducing the rating system for Wikipedia pages? How are you using the data to better the website?

Well, the idea of getting feedback is definitely to try to find a few ways we can help the community find pages that are not as good as they would like them to be. So, we have got this feedback tool which is still experimental actually. The new version will be released soon, the data is being collected. So it is still a long way to go in terms of making what I hope it will be some day. But it’s really about helping the community find pages that need to be fixed. Sometimes as an editor you are happy to go around fixing things that aren’t very good. But it’s hard to find things which the public thinks aren’t very good. So that will be a useful thing to know. It’s a feedback tool to let editors know which areas to work upon.

Currently, Wikipedia is focusing on expanding the non-English pages. However, Wikipedia also displays different content in different languages. So if you see a topic on the Russian Wikipedia, it will different from that on the English Wikipedia. Sometimes there can be a lot of content missing on the Russian Wikipedia that is available on the English Wikipedia. This process tends to exclude content from speakers of a certain language. So, is there a case for using web translation tools here? Don’t you think that using web translation tools will enable us to make Wikipedia a lot more inclusive?

Well, yeah there is a lot to be said here. In the past, the community has used machine translation at times. Of course, anyone can now use Google Translate and similar tools. The problem is, the community generally hasn’t found it very useful because the translation quality is very low. It takes almost as much work to fix a bad translation than do something which is a lot more fun – do the research and write the article yourself. So it’s not really clear how much better off we would be with machine translation. The second thing is that machine translation tends to be much better between pairs of languages that are economically important languages. So, English to Spanish and Spanish to English machine translation can be quite good, but the thing is, we already have a million articles in Spanish and a large community supporting it. So we don’t really need translation there. The languages where it would be an immense benefit to have is for example, some of the languages of Africa. So if we could get machine translation from English to Zulu for example, it would be wonderful. But because no one’s invested money into English – Zulu translation since it isn’t economically viable, then machine translation into those languages is quite bad. So it’s a bit of a paradox – where machine translation tends to be better, we don’t really need it. So maybe in the future, as machine translation continues to improve, it will become more and more useful to the community.

Another point for this is that of culture, where machine translation doesn’t really help. If you can imagine, if you mention Queen Victoria in some parts of the world, she will be quite famous in most of the English speaking world including India. In China, however, they might not know much about Queen Victoria and you may need to explain it. Another example is, if you need to explain to a reader in India about a particular temple in Varanasi, you may begin to assume a lot of knowledge about this context in an Indian language, because everyone who knows that language would already have that basic knowledge. But for an English speaker, you would need to explain more about the whole context. So even if we could use machine translation, we would still need to adapt the content to the needs of the local readers.

Although Wiki is not Paper, the current form of Wikipedia is very similar to what a printed Encyclopedia would be – text and images. Are there any plans to include animations, videos and other multimedia content in a more mainstream role?

Well, we do have videos and images right now and we would be happy to have more. But, there hasn’t been a whole lot of demand from the editing community to add a lot more video. It turns out text is very good at writing an encyclopedia. I do think we would have more video in the future as the reader gets faster bandwidth and so forth. But I don’t think it’s ever going to be a major part of Wikipedia. So it would be more to augment the existing content rather than replacing it.

Wikipedia is a non-profit and works under a donation system currently. Have you explored any other funding avenues, since there is a possibility that it might not receive enough donations a certain year?

Well, we have got a few alternatives that are possible. We do get a fair amount of money from licensing the trademark to mobile companies who want to advertise that there is good access to Wikipedia on their network. That’s been a small revenue stream for us. There is a possibility of spin-off things in the future – books, TV shows. But we are not really in discussions with anyone about this. Those are really vague ideas that people have mentioned for the future. Primarily, the donation model is quite strong for us and we are quite happy with it and it will continue to be the central avenue of funding for Wikipedia.

What is your vision for Wikipedia?

The core vision has always been the same – a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language. So that’s a bold but a simple concept and it’s something that we have stuck to. I think it’s very important that we do stick to just having a very simple purpose and staying focused on it.

You have also started two other ventures – Wikia and Wikia Search. Could you throw some light on why you decided to start them?

Wikia is the concept of building the rest of the library, the different kind of work that doesn’t belong in Wikipedia. We are doing very well. We have recently reached top50 most visited sites according to ComCast. And we have grown very quickly. Last year in fall we had a record 20 million visitors a month and now we are at almost 58 million visitors per month. So it has been very fast growing in the past year and we expect that growth to continue. The idea is to push this kind of participatory media revolution into new areas and keep driving forward on the cutting edge.

So is there any scope for Wikia in the corporate space?

Yeah, a lot of corporations are using wikis for internal collaboration. It’s a great tool for a group of 10-20 people to work together on some document and a lot of companies are doing that. I am not really an expert in that area, because my organizations are focused on large public facing wikis rather than internal wikis.

What need was Wikia Search trying to fulfill? What went wrong and was there anything that you could have done differently to make Wikia Search a success?

Wikia Search was the idea of having an open-source search engine. So having the software be openly published and analyzed by the programming public for quality, neutrality and so forth. While the software and the project was going very well in a technical perspective, what happened was, we realized that the project was going to take several million more dollars of investment. At the time of the financial crisis, it became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to raise money in spite of it doing very well because the venture capitalists were being very cautious. So we were forced to close the project due to the recession. So it is a real disappointment, but we also refocused our efforts on the rest of the Wikia and it is doing quite well.We don’t have any plans at the moment to go back to search, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I am thinking about search. I think someone should do it.

What would you suggest to MBA students who want to go into entrepreneurship?

I think the biggest thing is to not be afraid of failure. It is important to develop a culture of entrepreneurship that is highly tolerant of failure. I did many projects which failed and I am not retired yet, so I hope to fail many more times. When you don’t have that, it makes it very difficult, particularly for a young person to have the courage to go out and try something. If you feel like, “Oh, I’ve gone and tried something, it failed and my career is over”, then you would be tempted to take up a job at a bank or something. But if you have the idea which is more valid, which is “Hey if I go out and try something and it doesn’t work out, but it is a clever idea. I’ve made myself more valuable to a future employer because I have shown initiative and have also gained a lot of experiences through the failure. Certainly, in Silicon Valley, lots of people who had failed start-ups ended up getting lots of nice jobs at Google. So that’s the kind of thing we need to encourage. Innovation never comes without any failures along the way, and a failure should never be a stigma on someone.

This interview was published in ‘CrossRoads’, the annual magazine of Systems Consulting Club, IIM Calcutta . For more please download the magazine from www.iimc-syscon.com