September 8, 2016

KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: I wasn’t aware of the mission statement of Wikipedia until recently: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” And a conversation with Jimmy Wales – one of the architects of that philosophy and the project and global community that has grown up around it – is full of surprises. What Wikipedia has been learning for 15 years now – about communally navigating facts and truth while honoring the integrity of many points of view — feels relevant right now. And I’ve never interviewed anyone who uses the word “kindness” more naturally and insistently than Jimmy Wales.

MS. TIPPETT: Seth Godin used this phrase when he talked about what he sees in Wikipedia, “The insane power of the well-organized crowd.”

MR. JIMMY WALES: [laughs]

MS. TIPPETT: Which — again, it’s like — it takes the language of democracy to a slightly new 21st-century place.

MR. WALES: I like that, “organized,” because a lot of what people refer to as online community in various places is not organized, and it’s atomistic is what I call it. So, an organized crowd is a group of people who are working together under a set of agreed principles for a common end, and hopefully doing that with a certain modicum of kindness to each other and thoughtfulness. And that is very special and has to be nurtured. It doesn’t happen automatically.

MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating]

MS. TIPPETT: Jimmy Wales worked as a future and options trader early in his career and has created for-profit companies, but Wikipedia remains passionately non-profit. He lives between Florida and London, and grew up in Alabama.

MS. TIPPETT: I’ve seen you referred to a few times that you grew up an atheist in Alabama, which is kind of poetic. And also a little counterintuitive.

MR. WALES: A little, yeah.

MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. And your mother ran a two-room schoolhouse. Is that right?

MR. WALES: Yes. Yeah, exactly.

MS. TIPPETT: That’s so interesting.

MR. WALES: Yeah, it was a very unusual, I would say, educational upbringing. Two-room schoolhouse, so like Abraham Lincoln or something. And we had four grades in each room — first through fourth grade, and then fifth through eighth grade. We also had a kindergarten, so it was technically a three-room. And yeah, I went there the whole time. And in my grade, there were four kids, so very small school. So we had a lot of flexibility and time to explore activities at our own choosing.

MS. TIPPETT: So I’m always interested in this question, whoever I’m speaking with, of how they would describe the spiritual background of their childhood. And it seems to me that there are these virtues and values that run through your work about a kind of — there’s a kind of faith in community, and in human kindness, and kind of a trust in the goodness of people. I’m curious about where the roots of that are in this earliest life of yours.

MR. WALES: Yeah, I do think there is something to that. I mean, certainly growing up in the South, my parents were very, very nice people, and we were always taught to be very nice people. And there is that kind of community sensibility I would say.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

MR. WALES: And yeah, and so that was, I would say, a big part of how I was brought up. I mean, I just remember my father lamenting, because we lived in the big city of Huntsville, which was around 200,000 people, that unlike where he grew up in the countryside, when you met people driving down the street, they didn’t wave at you, which is sort of funny. I’m like, “Well, Dad, there’s a lot of them driving by, so…”

MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right.

MR. WALES: But it was that kind of thing. Like, people should be nice. And my father was a grocery store manager. And as such, he had had many, many, many people had worked for him over the years, young people. And everywhere we would go, people would come up to Dad, and they knew him and so forth, and always joked that he should run for mayor. But he never did.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And where do you trace the roots of your imagination about what an encyclopedia is and what it does in the world? I mean, did you have World Book Encyclopedia when you were growing up?

MR. WALES: Yeah, yeah. We had the World Book at home from a very young age. My mother, in the classic style, bought it from a door-to-door salesperson when I was a baby.

MS. TIPPETT: We’ll have to tell our kids those stories, and they won’t believe us, right? [laughs]

MR. WALES: [laughs] Exactly.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

MR. WALES: Yeah, there’s a great thing I show in my speeches. It’s a tweet from a school librarian who said, I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia was. And she said, is it something like Wikipedia?

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. Right.

MR. WALES: So, for kids today, Wikipedia is ubiquitous. But yeah, in terms of growing up with the encyclopedia — and later on, of course, we had Britannica — it was something that I really loved as a child and read a lot. I can’t say I read it cover to cover, although I did have that ambition at times. But I read a lot of things in the encyclopedia. And I always liked, anything I wanted to know, to go and get a summary of it.

And along with the annual book, they would send you stickers. And you could open up the original encyclopedia, and say there was an updated entry about the moon — people have landed on the moon — they update the moon entry. And then you would go and you would stick the sticker in the main book. So you’d look up moon, and it was say, “Oh, this article is out of date. Go and look in the 1976 edition.” And so now I think back on that, and that was the sort of the first editing the encyclopedia, by sticking stickers in it. [laughs]

MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right. But they were stickers that somebody else had crafted, had written.

MR. WALES: Someone else had crafted, exactly. Yeah.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And so, you started Wikipedia in 2001. I just wanted — that’s the date you use as well? 2001?

MR. WALES: Yeah, mm-hmm.

MS. TIPPETT: And I’m just curious about — just in terms of being something that is just woven into the fabric of life, and that kids grow up knowing about and using. And when you reflect on it, it’s really a very short time. And so, what was the germ of the idea? Like, what came first? What set this off to become the thing it became?

MR. WALES: Yeah. So, I had been really impacted by the explosion of the internet. My family had a computer when I was — very early. Before the IBM PC came out, we had a TRS80 from Radio Shack computer, and the Commodore PET computer, and so forth. And one of the things that I saw in graduate school was the growth of open-source software, free software. And this is software that’s created primarily by volunteers, and they release on the internet under a completely free license.

MS. TIPPETT: Right.

MR. WALES: And one thing that a lot of people don’t know unless you work in the industry is that a lot of the really fantastic software that runs the internet, GNU Linux, Apache Pearl, MySQL, PHP, all of the programming languages and things are open source projects that are created by volunteer programmers collaborating online. So I was watching that thing grow. And of course, when I first heard about it, I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, but obviously that’s just going to be a small hobby thing.”

But as it became more and more impactful, and it was more and more becoming a fundamental part of the internet, I thought, “Gee, that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software into all kinds of cultural works.” And it sort of makes sense that it would start with software, because programmers who wanted to share their work with each other could build the tools that they needed to do that. So they could build their own tools, and they have version control software, so they can check in and out their changes and work together collaboratively. And for the rest of us, if we wanted to collaborate on some kind of a document, the best you could do is email a Word document or something like that, which is a nightmare.

MS. TIPPETT: Right.

MR. WALES: And so, I thought, basically, we need some tools. We need to figure out how to make this work. And I had the idea of an encyclopedia. And I got very excited about it. And thought it’s the kind of thing that people could collaborate on. It’s fairly straightforward to understand what it should look like. And that was how we got started. But of course, in the initial version, called Nupedia, we didn’t have all the ideas of how to do it, and how to build a community, and what kind of software they needed, and so forth.

MS. TIPPETT: Did you have, from the beginning, this kind of mission statement that you’re providing “free access to the sum of all human knowledge for all people?” Was that there at the beginning or did it evolve?

MR. WALES: Well, yeah, that concept was there at the beginning. The actual sort of famous tagline, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” — that I came up with in about — I don’t remember exactly — 2004, 2005. Maybe a little earlier, maybe 2003.

Anyway, I know where I was. I was in Berlin. It was my first time out of the U.S. I’d been invited to a conference to speak in Berlin, which was mind-boggling to me that anybody would want me to come all the way to Europe, and give a talk, and sort of had to sort of sum up what it was we were doing. But the concept, that mission statement, was with us from the very beginning.

MS. TIPPETT: And it’s very straightforward and simple on one hand, and it’s grand and audacious on the other, “the sum of all human knowledge.”

MR. WALES: Yeah. And I do think that is part of why it’s been successful, I think had I set out to sort of — “Let’s write an encyclopedia article abo