Q&A: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales on the Virtues of Openness

The Web encyclopedia maven says businesses that encourage open collaboration can attract more resources and attention than closed ones

By Mathew Ingram

In the history of modern media, it's unlikely that anyone of similar size or scale has embraced open principles more than Wikipedia. Co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the so-called open-source encyclopedia has grown to the point where it now encompasses 3.2 million articles, and is almost certainly far more influential today than print-bound predecessors such as the Encyclopedia Britannica are. Although the site has a team of editors, known internally as "the cabal" (a wink to conspiracy theorists), and occasionally locks down contentious articles, the vast majority of the site is still open to anyone to edit.

As part of our ongoing series on the tension between "open" and "closed" business models across a range of industries, I recently spoke to Wales while he was in London. Our conversation follows, edited for clarity and length.

GigaOM: Where do you stand on the debate between open and closed standards? I'm assuming that given the nature of Wikipedia, you would probably come down on the open side.
Wales: There are benefits and costs to both approaches, and a lot of those are well-known at this point—although I do think that today, the open approach still isn't as well-understood as it should be, because it is a newer approach. There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily. It's what [companies] know, it's what they're familiar with, and sometimes thinking up your business model in an open context is a lot harder. When you've got something closed and top-down and proprietary, you pretty much know what you're going to do—you're going to make something and then you're going to put it in a box and sell it; and the box might be a downloadable box in the modern world, but it's the same concept. Whereas with the open approach, it's more about fostering an ecosystem and then making money in various other ways. What I would encourage people to do if they're looking at doing something is to sort of step back and recognize the downsides of a proprietary approach.

GigaOM: Taking a more or less closed approach doesn't seem to have hurt Apple (AAPL)—if anything, it seems to have succeeded more than anyone ever imagined, despite being closed. What are your thoughts on that?
Wales: If you look at the emerging competition between iPhone and Android, clearly the iPhone has the early edge, and of course Apple is quite good at what they do, their extreme controlling nature allows them to do certain things quite well. But at the same time, we're seeing the beginning of a flood of new phones coming out from all kinds of different manufacturers…because of the open nature of the Android platform, and that's going to pose a very interesting kind of competition. Google (GOOG), in this instance, ironically, is more playing the Microsoft (MSFT) role here, to Apple's Apple. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary. But the truth is that compared to a lot of other companies, they really embraced a very open set of standards and had a very open platform, and it enabled them to gain dominance.

GigaOM: What about the open approach when it comes to desktop software? Being open may have helped Microsoft in the early days, but it doesn't seem to have helped Linux become competitive. Why?
Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models—like Red Hat (RHT)—have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the Web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn't really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open-source, or very nearly open-source, and that doesn't hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.