Talk:Interview with Jimbo Wales

Please note that this article (and the corresponding talk page) are still protected from page moves. —MESSEDROCKER (talk) 02:45, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Original reporting notes

An interview with Jimmy Wales took place in the #Wikinews IRC channel, with several Wikinews reporters including Kim_Bruning, Mats_Halldin, Datrio, and Amgine asking questions collected from a range of sources about Wikinews, the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Fund Drive, and related topics. Here is a transcript of the questions asked and answered.

Transcript

Wikinews seems primarily dedicated to regurgitating what is already being published on main stream media news sources. Was this the vision for Wikinews?

[JWales] I would not use the term 'regurgitating', which sounds rather negative, but rather 'synthesis' which is a more subtle and more important process. This was always a part of the core vision for wikinews, though of course we want to do a lot more in time.

The wiki movements seem focused on local expertise; people work on things they are interested and expert in. Why is there very little local news on Wikinews, which it seems like it would be best qualified to produce?

[JWales] Wiki editing thrives on local knowledge, but 'local' in an epistemological sense, not necessarily in a geographical sense. For example, I personally know a lot more about world news on topics that interest me and could synthesize much better in those areas, than I know about local politicians where I live.

Do you believe that Wikinews, or any of the Wiki projects qualify as a meritocracy?

[JWales] I hope so. :-) Although the wiki process sometimes strikes people as being inherently favoring egalitarianism or anarchy, there is a certain sense in which the wiki editing tool is neutral to social structures. As a matter of simple description, it does turn out that users who do quality work end up having a lot more power than users who do bad work. So in that sense, yes, it is a meritocracy, but an informal one.

Current Events" is not "encyclopedic" enough to reside on Wikipedia! On many Wikipedia projects content have been moved to Wikibooks and Wikisource, shouldn't "Current Events" be transfered to Wikinews in the same way?

[JWales] I have no very strong opinion about this. Encyclopedia articles about current events are in many ways different from news articles about current events. I suspect we should have some parallel work going on, and Wikinews should be more prominently featured in this way on the Wikipedia homepage. But that's a big internal community discussion that other people know more about than I do.

When Wikinews was started a year ago, a need for new functions quickly appeared. Dynamic Page Lists are crucial to Wikinews and several other tools should be developed as they are asked for. The situation is similar on other projects (e.g. Wiktionary), maybe a plan for developing a project specific software package should precede the creation of new projects?

[JWales] I do think we could do a better job of anticipating the software needs of new projects, but it is also important to understand that a lot of needs are not readily apparent a priori. Sometimes we have to try to do things for awhile before we really have an understanding of where the problem points are.

AP has changed their copyright notice with articles to include "you may not rewrite this article." Is Wikinews creating an impact on how other news sources release their information?

[JWales] I think that mainstream news sources are very much paying attention not just to wikinews but to the entire citizen journalism movement. I think that many thoughtful people in the business understand that a sea change is happening, and are interested in figuring out how to empower more community input while still getting the best out of the old models.

I had dinner with Don Graham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Graham) last Friday night, and he's an example of someone who isn't reacting to new media with shock and horror, but rather with keen interest in trying to see what the trends will be and how to adapt.

Could you expand on "the best out of the old models."?

[JWales] Well, to expand on 'best of the old models' -- one thing that often comes up is that you have a reputation mechanism in traditional publishing, a mechanism which sometimes breaks, but which mostly works. Citizen journalism has to find ways to generate the same kind of reputation mechanisms. Blogs are finding that, to some extent.

What is your opinion on Wikinews users gaining credentials to be used in the field?

[JWales] It sounds cool to me, although I'm sensitive to the concerns that people have put forward about it. It's something I plan to study further this month, to see how it is working in practice so far, and to see what users feel about it.

Have you had any reports back about it so far? As in experiences that people have had?

[JWales] None.

This fund drive is open-ended; there is no financial goal. One can find rumours there are estimates of unstated goals which start at a million dollars US and go up from there. How much money does the Wikimedia Foundation need to raise from this drive?

[JWales] Rumors sounds strange to me. Rumors? Anyway, our best estimate for the bare minimum needed in the next year just to keep the website running is $1 million to $2 million depending on how long and how fast traffic continues to grow. Traditionally we have been constrained in our growth by the website responding slowly during the time we are waiting for new servers to be purchased and integrated into the system.

Our _stated_ goal is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language.

We know that we are achieving that goal very well in some parts of the world, and not so well in other parts of the world.

It is my intention that we should experiment with some ways that funding could help with this: for example, hiring co-ordinators for some small languages, to recruit native speakers to work on the project.

1-2 million USD is a big jump from the past budgets; is that kind of budget growth sustainable with the fundraiser model?

[JWales] Well, that's an open question but I think so. Needs increase with traffic increases, but with traffic increases we have a bigger audience to ask for help. Hopefully those two things scale together reasonably well.

Ward Cunningham was discussing a distributed wiki model at wikimania, has this avenue been pursued further?

[JWales] I don't know of any serious technical work being done on a distributed wiki model, but I'm personally a skeptic about whether such a model would serve our actual needs. I'm open to ideas though. :-)

Do you think having an open fundraiser will bring in more or less money than having a fundraiser with a definite goal? Why do you think so?

[JWales] I think that having an open fundraiser will bring in more money, for two reasons.

First, I think people have often looked at the pace of the fundraising and the amount being raised, and made a decision not to give based on the fact that we seemed to be meeting our goal.

Second, I just go by the general behavior of other large charities, which often have open fund drives. I assume they do so for a good reason. In any event, we should try it and see.

But is there a reason to call it a "drive" at all if there is no goal?

[JWales] I often think that, as Wikipedians, we project our own ways of thinking onto our audience. We are the sort of people who look closely at budgets and think about goals and achievability. That's great for us. But a lot of people are ready to trust us and will respond better to our big picture vision. They don't care to know in grand detail (though of course we will always stand ready to tell them) where every penny is going. They respond, instead, to an appeal to the aesthetic beauty of our project.

The fundraiser is very low-key, and barely visible. If raising money is so important to the future of the project, why doesn't WMF put it front and center, giving it real space and bandwidth on the main pages and even article pages?

[JWales] Well, we do that during the actual fund drive, but we're hopelessly tasteful of course, so I doubt we will ever be too horribly glaring about it. :-)

The current fundraiser is manually updated, takes place exclusively online, and so on. It's rather like a high school prom fundraiser in the USA. Have you considered developing an integrated campaign with feedback, for example automating a graph of the funds raised and tracking the donations across countries and currencies?

[JWales] Yes, we would love to have a fancier system. It is my feeling that we're going to have to pay for the development of such a system, because volunteer developers are (quite rightly) more interested in more intellectually challenging programming issues. So part of why we need to raise money is so we can be more efficient about raising money in the future.

You have become a cause célèbre, and famous with the rise of the Wikipedia project. Are you using your celebrity to encourage the rich and famous people you’ve come in contact with to make donations?

[JWales] Yes. I'm now a full-time beggar. :)

Many traditional charity programs spend the majority of fundraising dollars on fundraisers. What is the estimate for the cost of this fundraiser, versus what you expect to raise? To qualify this question; some of the fundraising ratios seen are upwards of 80% of funds raised go for fundraising.

[JWales] For the exact numbers, it will be best to consult with Mav (our CFO) and Michael (our Treasurer) as well as published results from past efforts. But obviously since the fund raising is done almost exclusively on the website itself (which costs no money), our efficiency is very very high. I don't know the exact numbers, but our costs are mostly just the bank fees and paypal fees.

I think it's terrible when charities are that inefficient. I think fundraising expenses should be as low as reasonably possible.

The current conflict over the Seigenthaler article has raised some ire outside the internet wikimedia community; How do you think this will affect, if at all, corporate or personal donations during this fund drive?

[JWales] I don't think it will affect it. It's just news, there's always some news. If anything, I am hopeful that donations will increase just because more people are learning of us.

On what do you intend to spend this fundraiser's donations? Do you plan to use some of the funding raised to improve the reliability of Wikipedia? For example, will you hire fact checkers?

[JWales] The bulk of the money will go, as usual, to hardware purchases. Some of the money will go to improving the software, which in turn will improve reliability. Hiring fact checkers is not being considered.

Fundraisers are not the only source of funding for Wikimedia Foundation. What other revenue streams, such as grants and contracts, does the Foundation currently have? What others are being applied for or worked on?

[JWales] We have a small but growing amount of income from partners who pay us for the service of a realtime data stream. For people who reuse our content commercially this is a nice way for them to get a more quickly updated result. We have gotten a few grants in the past, and some grants are being worked on now.

Danny Wool recently joined the foundation, working in the office as my assistant, but a portion of his time is devoted to grant applications. We anticipate that in the future he will work fulltime on grant applications after training a replacement assistant for me.

What companies are paying realtime data streams?

[JWales] Answers.com for example.

You've mentioned hiring some new employees, like Danny Wool. What's the projection for incresing the budget for employee time?

[JWales] I expect that in the coming year we will want to hire a minimum of 5-10 people, but depending on getting grants, I could see the number going much higher.

One thing which is certainly true at the moment: at the foundation level we are overwhelmed with work.

Today on en.wikipedia the ability to create new pages has been turned off for anonymous users. Is the wikimedia foundation slowly turning away from the original wiki principles?

[JWales] I don't view minor tweaks here and there to our model as either turning towards or away from wiki principles.

The mainland People's Republic of China has blocked WP, and today Onet.pl has removed WP from their search engine. Will changes in accessibility harm the fund drive?

[JWales] We don't traditionally get much money from mainland China, and I doubt if the Polish search engine example will hurt the traffic of pl.wikipedia very much. (It will probably hurt the search engine more!)

Mr. Seigenthaler's bio, and we've just discovered Mr. Graham's, were posted by anons. The first was a smear campaign, the second a copyvio of a press release. Obviously the former is a problem, but doesn't the latter also open Wikipedia up to being an advertising site?

We don't have a huge problem with people using Wikipedia for pr purposes, although I'm sure a little of it goes on here and there. I've never seen a really convincing case.

I'm a contributor mostly on the Swedish projects. You don't speak Swedish, so I'm wondering if you ever look at non-English projects? Do you even notice us?

[JWales] :)

I am learning to speak German, so I do try to read German Wikipedia. And I do look at other languages, although of course I can't read anything there.

What I do to try to be useful to other languages is communicate with people as much as I can, visit people in person as much as I can, and monitor the statistics pages to see what is going on.

Words are interesting things

I just read Jimbo's response to my query on whether or not Wikinews is a meritocracy. Like myself, he obviously takes the positive meaning from it as opposed to the very negative one laid out in the Wikipedia article. It might be an interesting read, but it doesn't back the meaning most people attach to the word. Wiktionary could probably do with an expansion on the term, and I suspect this interview is a defining use for the word.

What is lacking in terms of a focus to turn this into a good article is a particular subject, it really constitues a "hi" with no clear focus on an issue or topic. I'm sorry I didn't have a conf. call channel available, but I don't think it would have produced any more information for use in an article. As I have no idea what is the cause of controversy on Wikipedia I couldn't help there, and there are so few articles in mainstream media on Wiki that you can't gauge what would be a subject of interest. Brian McNeil / ^talk 21:53, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Fairly interesting editorial ran in USA Today about a couple weeks ago. The subject of the Wikipedia entry, Seigenthaler, called the anonymous contributor a "poison pen intellect", because the information was allegedly wrong. The following links to an aftermath editorial from the incident. I think it just points to ... well I'm just glad people keep an eye on things being posted here.

• Dan Goodin, Associated Press. "Online encyclopedia tightens rules following false article" — USA Today, December 5, 2005

-Edbrown05 00:37, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

USAToday search page with a series of editorials published on the topic (somebody is noticing): http://asp.usatoday.com/search/yahoo/search.aspx?qt=both&nr=5&kw=wikipedia -Edbrown05 00:42, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Enough.

Previous comments on this article are about the subject matter in the article and not the article itself. The interview is news and this is a news site. As in irc, and elsewhere people have been asking why it hasn't been published without recieving any answer. I'm publishing it before it gets stale. If anyone has a problem edit it. If anyone edits it realize that this subject touches everyone at wikinews and you are asking for an assault by anyone you offend. BE EXTRA VERBAL about any changes you make in your comments. --Sfullenwider 22:13, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Alteration

Changed the date, it's been sitting there for so long that it's been inadvertently shoved way down on the list of news. This makes it appear old-news that's been posted days ago. --Sfullenwider 00:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Pictures

Shouldn't we put some photos of Mr. Wales into the interview? There are plenty of them at the Wikimedia Commons... Sawran 07:34, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Hows that? Bawolff ☺☻ 20:23, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Much better. Sawran 20:41, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

What's the meaning of '"distributed wiki model"

A question for our translation in Frensh language from one of our contributor.

• Is it an "economic model" ?
• A kind of grid computing ?
• ????

not clear for me (and others)

Jacques Divol

I don't really know either ;) but I think he was refering to this presentation; maybe that helps. --Deprifry|+T+ 12:38, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Please change interwiki

Please change the ru interwiki to ru:Интервью с Джимбо Уэйлсом (current version is very irrelevant). --Ssr (talk) 11:18, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

It was a redirect, I see. Iw retargeted. --Pi zero (talk) 11:29, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

I have consolidated all the various Wikidata items into one for proper inter-wiki. See: Wikidata:Q17710285. The only one I couldn't find was the Polish article. Did they delete the interview? --SVTCobra 11:46, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Pi zero. By not removing the old inter-wiki links, we have many more broken links. I updated the Wikidata item to the current titles on all the local projects. I do not want to create redirects on all those projects or keep updating our inter-wiki links every time they move the interview. Do you? --SVTCobra 11:50, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Ah, it looks like it just took the servers a few minutes to update the links. They all seem to be working now. --SVTCobra 12:05, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Improving Wikidata's Wikinews links is good, though I admit I've never bothered with Wikidata tracking of individual articles, which strikes me in most cases as playing to the inherent design flaws of Wikidata. In this case, though, it seems there would be no blurring of the identity of the news story, as the focus is the actual interview.

It [Polish] appears to have been deleted twice, once in March 2006 ("decision to remove") and once in March 2007 ("Bot: Deleting a list of files").

The inherent negatives of Wikidata as a substitute for local interwikis were discussed some time back. English Wikinews and English Wikibooks do not remove interwikis once the information is also on Wikidata. The ideal situation as best I can figure, which I hope eventually to support via (all together, now) the dialog tools, would maintain local interwikis and a local list of wikidata items and local reasons for any deliberate discrepancies between the two. If our interwikis do not match the wikidata items, modulo explained discrepancies, a semi-automated assistant would offer to help a human operator to decide whether-and-how to update either something here, or something on Wikidata. --Pi zero (talk) 12:17, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, the German one still isn't working. I did set Wikidata to the correct link of n:de:Interview mit Jimmy Wales von der Wikimedia Foundation. Are we going to have to change it manually? It is unclear to me at this point which method the software favors when providing the "In other languages" links. --SVTCobra 13:16, 18 May 2018 (UTC)