CHANGING THE WAY WE WORK AND LEARN
Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
- Jimmy Wales
It's the world's encyclopedia... the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled, in every major language on earth. It's one of our most popular and trusted information sources, and one of the Internet's most heavily trafficked sites.
Yet its content is produced and edited by a community of anonymous, unpaid amateurs; it refuses commercial endorsements or ads of any kind; and its pages are, by design, open to revision by anyone with a web connection.
Clearly, Wikipedia is a study in contradictions. But it works.
The concept of an encyclopedia is certainly not new; the drive to gather all of the world's knowledge into a single resource has existed since ancient times. But most such collections have shared a common limitation: they consisted of words (and sometimes pictures) on a page in a large, expensive and unalterable set of printed books.
The Internet, of course, blew that model to pieces.
By the late-1990's, advances in online technology mixed with the explosion in bandwidth had created some exciting new possibilities.
A number of the best-known English-language encyclopedias, including Microsoft Encarta, the World Book, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, had made the leap to online distribution. Their business model, however, still demanded huge teams of researchers, scholars and experts to create and review articles.
That model was about to be challenged by a whole new vision.
Jimmy Wales was an Internet entrepreneur from Alabama, and a partner in an advertising-supported web directory called Bomis.
He wanted to create a web-based encyclopedia that would be freely accessible to all. With funding supplied by Bomis which planned to sell advertising space on the site he launched "Nupedia" in March 2000, hiring Larry Sanger as its editor. It was to be an encyclopedia written by volunteers, but reviewed and edited by experts.
However, Wales quickly found out just how much work is involved in creating such a resource. (Having once published a CD-ROM encyclopedia, I can certainly attest to this fact).
After nine months, only 12 articles had been fully completed. At this rate, they'd never be able to generate enough content!
Clearly, a completely new approach was needed.
In the first few days of January 2000, a colleague of Sanger's mentioned something called the "wikiwikiweb", a new online collaboration tool developed by programmer Ward Cunningham.
The "Wiki" (a Hawaiian word meaning "fast") provides a way for an unlimited number of users to publish, edit, share, review and discuss content.
Sanger immediately saw its potential; this could break the Nupedia bottleneck, by permitting anonymous contributors to work on all parts of the project simultaneously.
It would require a very different way of thinking, and a huge amount of trust. All of the work... the writing, editing and review... would be done by the online community. And the content could be accessed or revised by anyone.
He talked the idea over with Wales, and they decided to try it out immediately. The resulting site, Wikipedia, was launched a few days later... on Jan 15, 2001.
The wiki had an immediate effect on speeding up the production process. By the end of March, the site had 600 entries; by June, it was up to 2,000 and by the end of the year, the site had grown to almost 15,000 articles.
That astonishing growth rate has continued and even accelerated in the years since then.
The English version alone now comprises 3 million articles (Encyclopedia Britannica, by comparison, has about 80,000).
Wikipedia has been rated as one of the top ten global brands. Roughly 12% of all Internet users visit the domain on an average day... 330 million every month.
There are now more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 14 million articles, in more than 260 languages.
But popularity and size alone aren't what makes it so unique.
The fact is, Wikipedia has taken a radically different approach to knowledge creation from any similar work before it.
While other encyclopedias have always relied upon experts to create their articles, Wikipedia places its trust in a community of anonymous users to quickly and constantly build content, to edit and review, and to self-police the process.
It relies not on expertise, but on altruism... tempered by an adaptation of the open-source software philosophy: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". In other words, if the whole community can access and review the work, errors will be minimized.
Because it is created and overseen by anonymous volunteers, detractors say that its information cannot be trusted. Yet in independent reviews, Wikipedia has proven to have as high an accuracy level as most of its competitors.
The policy of open access has sometimes made it the target of vandalism or manipulation. However, with so many people constantly monitoring entries around the world, malicious alterations or questionable content are quickly noticed, reviewed and removed... often within minutes.
Wikipedia may be the greatest example of collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known. What can we learn from its success?
First, we learn the importance of trust. The Wikipedia model starts with the presumption that the majority of people will generally choose to do good and behave responsibly. And in general, the evidence seems to bear that out.
We also learn that the traditional view of leadership decisive, individual, hierarchical is not the only way of looking at things. Nor is it always the most productive.
Jimmy Wales is perhaps the most untypical leader to ever head up a multinational organization. He rarely sets hard rules, has always preferred consensus-building over decision-making, and believes that on the whole, the community will make the best decisions by itself.
As a leadership style it's highly unusual. Yet Wikipedia's growth and success would indicate pretty clearly that he may be on to something.
And it is not just for creating a free encyclopedia. In Don Tapscott's excellent book "Wikinomics" there are many examples of how companies have taken the collaborative lessons from Wikipedia and applied them to their businesses.
Above all, Wikipedia demonstrates the power of a vision... shared equally by thousands of volunteers around the globe, and by Wales himself:
Dialing down is not an option for me. Not to be too dramatic about it, but, to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.
- Jimmy Wales
A clear and simple vision.
Trust.
Collaboration.
Three simple principles at the heart of Wikipedia.
They should be driving every business.
