Access for All

Founder of Wikipedia has an encyclopedic mission

What Jim Wales seeks is as simple as it is sweeping: He says he wants everyone in the world to have free

and ready access to the sum of all human knowledge. Mr. Wales works to achieve this ambitious aim as head of what, in a sense, could be considered one of the world’s largest nonprofit organizations — its more than a million volunteers put it on a par with the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army — even though it has just three paid employees and a tiny budget.

Mr. Wales is founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, in St. Petersburg, Fla., the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, the controversial, collaboratively written online reference Web site that The New York Times recently dubbed the “biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world.”

In just five years’ time, this ever-expanding electronic encyclopedia, in which anyone can write and edit entries, has grown from just 20 articles to nearly four million. The Alexa Web Information Service, a leading monitor of Internet traffic, ranks Wikipedia among the top 20 most-visited Web sites in the world — logging 2.5 billion page views per month.

This upstart charity’s Web site now receives twice as many daily visitors as the Web sites of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune combined.

Making Information Free

“Our fundamental mission is to create and distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language,” Mr. Wales says. He adds that “free” refers both to the fact that anyone can gain access to all the information on Wikipedia and that its content is not licensed and can be copied, redistributed, or modified at will.

Pivotal to Wikipedia’s growth and lofty goal is its use of “wiki” software technology. “Wiki,” a shortened form of the Hawaiian word for “quick,” is the name for a special type of Web site developed in the mid-1990s that allows anyone visiting the site to quickly and easily add to or edit its content. What’s more, “wiki” Web pages keep track of all revisions made to them and can easily be reverted back to earlier versions.

World’s Brainpower

Beyond technology, Wikipedia’s open-door editorial policy of allowing anyone to write about any subject has led to its rapid growth. It has also fueled the encyclopedia’s numerous detractors who say such an approach is inherently untrustworthy and open to abuse.

Traditionally, encyclopedias were written by recognized experts paid to produce articles about their field of knowledge. But Wikipedia opens the writing and editing processes to anybody who wants to voluntarily contribute. It is even possible to do so anonymously. More than one million people have registered as Wikipedia users and contributors.

The encyclopedia’s enthusiasts describe how Wikipedia eschews dependency on experts and scholars to tap into the world’s collective brainpower. Wikipedia is in constant revision, they say, and poorly written or error-filled articles will improve over time as more amateur encyclopedists work on them.

Many supporters of what has been called the “people’s encyclopedia” believe the online reference work received some vindication last December when the widely respected science journal Nature compared 42 science articles from Wikipedia and the online version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 238-year-old publication whose 32-volume set is a benchmark in the world of reference works. The article said it found 162 errors, omissions, or misleading statements in Wikipedia articles and 123 in Britannica, concluding “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.”

A former Encyclopaedia Britannica editor in chief, however, dismissed Wikipedia as a “faith-based encyclopedia,” joining a chorus of critics who say people will never be able to trust material written anonymously by someone who may possess no recognized authority on the topic at hand.

Indeed, after spending months investigating Nature’s findings, Encyclopaedia Britannica has called the encyclopedia comparison “fatally flawed” and has taken out ads defending its accuracy in major newspapers.

Mr. Wales simply says Wikipedia presents “pretty good work on average” and feels that its approach harkens back to Internet’s early and perhaps more altruistic days.

“The sense that people had when the Internet first started was, ‘Wow! What a fantastic tool. We can share information and people can build all these knowledge bases,’” Mr. Wales says. “Then there was the whole dot-com boom era when it all seemed to be about selling things.”

For-Profit Roots

Wikipedia itself, it turns out, grew out of the for-profit Internet world. Six years ago Mr. Wales was co-founder of an Internet marketing firm called Bomis, which also traded in erotic photographs for a while. The company started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia and began hiring experts to write articles for it. Mr. Wales hoped that the venture could eventually generate revenue, most likely through the sale of advertising on the site.

The process of hiring experts and reviewing the work they produced, however, proved time consuming, and Wikipedia was started (using the relatively new Wiki technology) as a means to provide Nupedia with supplemental content. Fueled by eager volunteers who contributed articles, Wikipedia grew rapidly, and Mr. Wales soon concluded that it “just made sense” to organize it as an independent nonprofit organization. Nupedia was eventually scrapped.

Mr. Wales, who before entering the Internet world had a lucrative career as a commodities trader, says he has donated some of his own money to the effort, but he won’t say how much.

He says his greatest contribution has been working full time on the project without pay since founding the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003.

Last year Wikipedia’s budget was more than $750,000, with most of the money going toward the computer equipment and networking services required to keep the encyclopedia running. The bulk of the hardware is located in Florida, but there is also some equipment in Paris, Amsterdam, and Seoul, South Korea.

“The vast majority of the money we raise comes from the general public in $50 to $100 contributions,” says Mr. Wales. In an online appeal that was once on the Wikipedia site, he urged donors to help create a world where “culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere.”

Mr. Wales estimates the organization needs to raise as much as $2-million this year to accommodate Wikipedia’s growth, and the charity has just recently intensified its efforts to secure grant money. Over the years it has been awarded small grants from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, in Washington, and the John and Frances Beck Foundation, in Chicago. The Internet company Yahoo has also donated the use of some network equipment.

Going Global

Increasing Wikipedia’s presence in the developing world is a main goal for the organization and a focus of its appeals to grant makers.

“If funding organizations spend a million dollars getting Encyclopaedia Britannica into schools in Africa, well, then they’ve done a good thing,” Mr. Wales says. “But if they spend the same amount of money seeding the growth of free culture and free content that can be redistributed and copied endlessly, then they’ve really made a fundamental impact in a different way.”

Having more Wikipedia articles written in, or translated into, local languages, like Swahili or Bengali, is part of the organization’s thrust to increase Wikipedia’s presence in the developing world. While it is probably too costly to hire full-time translators, Mr. Wales hopes grant money could spur the creation of language coordinators who would work to build a network of bilingual Wikipedia volunteers.

“The amount of outreach we can make in other languages all depends on funding,” Mr. Wales says.

International Hurdles

Yet Wikipedia faces other challenges when trying to increase its availability in the poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere, says Sonia Arias, a project director at the Education Development Center, an international education and economic-development charity in Newton, Mass., that works to increase global access to information technologies. Namely, she cites a lack of computers, networks, and trained people to run and maintain them.

“Wikipedia is a great idea, and it does have a lot of potential,” she says. “However, in the developing world, even if you did get the content out there, how many people have access to it?”

Ms. Arias says that some of the less-developed countries in Eastern Europe might, at present, be in a better position to benefit from Wikipedia.

“There is a dearth of electronic content in Macedonian and Albanian, and I think Wikipedia could be very helpful in these languages,” she says.

Today, the Macedonian Wikipedia contains more than 5,000 articles and the Albanian version just over 6,000. The English-language Wikipedia is by far the largest, having surpassed one million articles in March. The German Wikipedia is next largest, with more than 400,000 articles, followed by the French version, which has some 300,000 articles.

The Chinese Wikipedia has over 70,000 articles, although the government of China currently blocks access to Wikipedia from within China.

Building Community Ties

While tens of thousands of people have contributed in some fashion to the creation of Wikipedia, Mr. Wales says the pool of highly dedicated volunteers, often referred to as “Wikipedians,” numbers perhaps 3,000.

Indeed, he says fostering creation of a “community of thoughtful, caring people” is his proudest achievement.

This network of volunteers had its resolve tested last fall when John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist and former administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wrote an article in USA Today calling Wikipedia a “flawed and irresponsible research tool.”

For four months, Wikipedia had included an anonymously written biography of Mr. Seigenthaler that stated, among other falsehoods, that he had been a suspect in the assassination of both Robert F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy.

The article was changed, and its author eventually came forward and admitted that he wrote it as a “gag,” but the highly publicized situation underscored Wikipedia’s vulnerability to vandals and those who would contribute to the Web site for malicious or self-serving purposes.

“We’ve taken a very serious look at what went wrong in that particular case to try and avoid it, but of course it’s never going to be possible to completely avoid such things,” Mr. Wales says. “Anywhere online where we have a forum that’s inviting broad public participation, people can and will post bad things.”

After the Seigenthaler case, Wikipedia’s procedures were changed to allow only registered users to create new articles, though anyone can edit articles that are already on the site. (While the registration process makes it easier to track the quality of a user’s contributions, registered users can still remain anonymous and enter malicious content.) Mr. Wales says they are “always changing and tweaking” the Wikipedia system as volunteer contributors improve ways to monitor and govern the Web site. Many volunteers strive to catch editing attempts by vandals quickly by placing select articles on “watch” lists, wherein the system alerts them whenever they are changed.

Last year, an Arbitration Committee was formed to settle disputes among volunteers who edit articles. The most dedicated volunteers can be elected by their peers to serve as “administrators” who have the authority to electronically block troublesome users from gaining access to Wikipedia.

A future change that Mr. Wales is contemplating is having a committee of volunteers determine which articles have achieved an acceptable degree of accuracy and completeness, and those articles would then become uneditable, “stable” versions. Each “stable” article would also have an editable, “working” version where changes would be made first and vetted by volunteers before being incorporated into the “stable” version. Pending the development of such a system, some 80 articles were recently made uneditable by Wikipedia administrators because they were repeatedly being vandalized. (These include the articles on President Bush, Islam, and Adolf Hitler.)

Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities have done little to dampen the enthusiasm of its fans. “There’s effectively nothing you can do to stop anyone from vandalizing Wikipedia,” says Mark Pellegrini, a Wikipedia contributor since 2003 who is pursuing a doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware. “It becomes a question of how many obstacles you want to throw in the way of legitimate users wanting to edit the site.”

Mr. Pellegrini says an Internet search brought him to Wikipedia while he was looking for information on the novel Catch-22, and after making a simple addition to the Wikipedia article on the book, he was “hooked.” He estimates he has since made some 30,000 edits and spends 20 hours or more a week working on Wikipedia.

Mr. Pellegrini has also gotten to know a fair number of his fellow Wikipedia volunteers at meetings that have been held across the country.

While Mr. Pellegrini says there is an “altruistic aspect” to their motivation, many simply find writing and editing the encyclopedia enjoyable. “It is very addictive in a way that’s hard to describe,” Mr. Pellegrini says.

He sums up the collaboratively written encyclopedia this way: “Wikipedia only works in practice; in theory it can never work.”

‘Complex and Difficult’

As Wikipedia’s network of volunteers increasingly becomes self-regulating, Mr. Wales says he continues to serve “very rarely” as the final authority on disputes.

Last fall, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he overruled a group of volunteers who wished to place an appeal for the American Red Cross or other relief charities on Wikipedia’s main page. Given the site’s enormous traffic volume, even the briefest of appeal could be fruitful for the charity involved. Mr. Wales says it was a “complex and difficult” decision not to allow such a solicitation, but one made in the interest of furthering Wikipedia’s image of “neutrality and inclusiveness.”

The Wikimedia Foundation has also started several other free and collaboratively written reference Web sites, including Wikinews (a place where anyone can write and edit news stories), Wikiquote (a collection of quotations), and Wikispecies (a directory of life forms). There is also talk of creating a free online education program to be called Wikiversity.

Mr. Wales maintains a hectic travel schedule promoting and discussing Wikipedia and the organization’s other “wikis” at computer and education conferences around the world, while also arranging to meet with groups of volunteers at “wikimeets.” He says the charity is seeking an experienced executive director “to really push forward the building of the organization.” The foundation’s recently hired general consul, Brad Patrick, is serving as interim executive director and is leading the search. Mr. Wales says his business and technological background have not prepared him for nonprofit management and fund raising.

“We don’t do a really good job managing donors,” he says. “People donate money to us, and we don’t do all the proper things that a well-run nonprofit should do in terms of responding to them. We need to focus on professionalizing our organization.”

Part of the problem, Mr. Wales admits, is that Wikipedia’s rapid growth simply caught him off guard.

“All of a sudden we’re the 18th most visited Web site, and there’s an enormous amount of things going on, and there are only the two employees,” he says. “We’ve come up so quickly as a Web site. But it takes longer to come up as an organization.”