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

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GigaOM: So even if you are taking an open approach, you need to have a business model?
Wales: I'm not sure about the term "business model," because if you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a business model, but it's not a business—it's a charity, and its business model, so to speak, is getting people to donate because they love Wikipedia. So there isn't a good buzzword for this, but you need a sustainability model; you need a model that brings in enough attention, revenue, whatever resources you need to make something happen in order to actually get it done. And what we've seen is that in open-source software, in some areas it's worked and it's great—so if you want a fabulous Web server, and you want to scale up a Web farm, the tools are free, they're out there, there's a whole ecosystem of developers, and it makes a lot of economic sense for people to participate in that ecosystem and it works. On the other hand, if you want to get your mom a laptop, I'm still not recommending Linux right now, because there hasn't been an ecosystem, a sustainability ecosystem around making that happen in a really professional way.

GigaOM: There seems to be a belief that open systems are more free, but that they are also more chaotic and in some cases ugly, and that a closed approach like Apple's works because it produces a uniform experience and high-quality design.
Wales: There's definitely a lot of truth to that [but] at the same time, I don't think it's the whole story. We don't have enough data points, really. We have Apple at one extreme and Linux at the other extreme, and Microsoft somewhere in the middle; so at one end you've got the highly controlled thing from a very controlling company that is obsessive about design; it's proprietary, it's top-down, and it's gorgeous, beautiful, elegant, simple design. And the open-source thing is chaotic, hard, difficult, complicated—but also embodies a lot of amazing values, and it's highly customizable, and really enjoyable if you like tinkering. You can do all kinds of things with it; it's very powerful. We shouldn't be too quick to judge the two. We can envision, for example, a proprietary system that is also complicated and difficult, but powerful because of the complicatedness and difficultness. But we can also imagine an open-source process that produces a really simple and clean design—I think probably Firefox is the best example.

GigaOM: And why did you decide that Wikipedia should be built on a completely open approach?
Wales: Nupedia (Wikipedia's predecessor) was top-down and not very open—it was open-source, but in terms of management it was centrally controlled. But it failed, because it wasn't fun for the people who did it; it didn't harness the passion of the individuals who were involved in that project. I think it's fair to say that we couldn't have built such a huge project with literally thousands of people without taking that kind of open approach—it just wouldn't function. I suppose with a lot of money and time we could have created a traditional encyclopedia, but couldn't have done this.

GigaOM: But Wikipedia has added controls to the system through the use of moderators and editors and so on, yes?
Wales: Yes, we've had to add some features like that. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. It's a balance that you have to strike, where if you leave it alone then the trolls take over, but if you're too central and controlling, then you can crush it, and we try to strike that balance.

GigaOM: I'm trying now to imagine what Wikipedia would be like if Steve Jobs ran it.
Wales: It would be interesting—it would probably be prettier, too.

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