INTRO: Teachers around the world generally despise
Wikipedia given that Wikipedia isn’t always the most reliable or reputable source.
With that being said though, I think students around the world would agree that Wikipedia
is a lifesaver.
Whether you’re trying to look up a simple equation or trying to cram for your fluid
mechanics test, Wikipedia has got you covered.
And the truth is, while Wikipedia may not have been the most accurate in its early days,
nowadays, Wikipedia is pretty darn accurate.
Moreover, most Wikipedia articles are really good at citing all of their sources whether
that be textbooks or news publications.
So, you can easily verify all the info on Wikipedia, and cite the source material.
And let’s not forget, Wikipedia is not only free, but they don’t run any ads, or sponsorships,
or affiliate marketing, or any of that.
It’s basically completely run on donations and unlike textbook publishers, Wikipedia
truly isn’t in it for the profit.
But, who even created this gem of a website and where are they today?
JIMMY WALES: Taking a look back, Wikipedia was founded
by two men the first of which being Jimmy Wales.
Jimmy was born on August 7, 1966, in Huntsville Alabama.
Fun fact, he was born minutes before midnight, so even though he was technically born on
August 7th, his birth certificate ended up saying August 8.
That must be confusing whenever someone asks for your birthday.
Anyway, Jimmy’s father was a grocery store manager, and his mother along with his grandmother
ran a small private school.
Jimmy and his siblings would all end up attending this private school.
From a very young age, Jimmy was a massive fan of reading which is probably something
that most of us can’t relate with.
When he was just 3 years old, his mother got him a World Book Encylopedia, and as Jimmy
grew up, he ended up reading the book several times.
But, this quickly led him to a stumble upon a shortcoming.
If something was wrong in the encyclopedia, how would the information be updated?
Of course, newer editions could just be printed with the updated information, but encyclopedias
were generally long-term investments that cost well over $1000.
So, people weren’t gonna buy new encyclopedias on a regular basis, but they also wanted the
most up-to-date info.
The most common solution for this shortfall was stickers.
Publishers would send out correction stickers to Encylopedia owners, and owners could cover
up the original text with the updated sticker.
Over the years, Jimmy stickered up his encyclopedia which was his first experience in revising
an encyclopedia, but he wouldn’t revisit this experience for decades.
After elementary and middle school, Jimmy attended a university preparatory school called
Randolph School.
Apparently, the school was rather expensive for his family, but they paid the bill anyway
because they highly valued education.
The preparatory school allowed Jimmy to graduate a bit early at 16, and he would end up attending
Auburn University where majored in finance.
After his bachelor’s, Jimmy tried pursuing a Ph.D. in finance from the University of
Alabama, but he ended up with a master’s in finance instead.
He gave the Ph.D. one more shot at Indiana University, but he never wrote a doctoral
thesis which he claims was simply due to boredom.
With all this education, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Jimmy jumped straight into
the world of encyclopedias, but Jimmy actually entered the world of finance.
In 1994, he got a job at Chicago Options Associates which was a futures and options trading firm.
Despite his career in finance, Jimmy’s true interest was always within the internet.
He was a massive fan of a game called Multi-User Dungeons and he regularly moderated various
online forums.
In other words, he was the modern-day Discord moderator.
While Discord mods often get a lot of slack, moderation was actually quite beneficial for
Jimmy.
You see, it was while moderating an online discussion group about philosophy that Jimmy
would run into Wikipedia’s other founder Larry Sanger.
LARRY SANGER: Taking a look back once again, Larry Anger
was born on July 16, 1968, in Bellevue Washington.
His father worked as a marine biologist while his mother was a homemaker.
When he was just 7, the family moved to a rather unique location which was Anchorage,
Alaska.
Despite the cool change of scenery, Larry’s interests didn’t sway much.
Like Jimmy, Larry was also a massive fan of reading and especially learning about philosophy.
Following his interests, Larry would end up attending the same college as Steve Jobs,
Reed College, where he majored in philosophy.
Aside from his interest in philosophy, Larry was also super intrigued by the internet.
He wasn’t a gamer or an online memer though.
He was primarily intrigued by the internet’s potential to be used as a publishing outlet.
You could reach millions if not tens of millions of people through the internet without having
to spend millions yourself on publishing, licensing, and distribution.
Larry decided to put this theory to the test during college by creating a discussion forum
that allowed students to meet with tutors online.
In other words, he basically created the modern-day Chegg.
So, you got the discord mod and the Chegg founder, and these two would meet in 1994
when Larry subscribed to Jimmy’s mailing list called Moderated Discussion of Objectivist
Philosophy or MDOP.
The two quickly became friends and had discussions about life and philosophy here and there,
but neither of them had the idea of starting a business together.
So, Larry simply continued on in his educational journey stacking on degree after degree.
In 1995, Larry earned a Master’s in philosophy from Ohio State University and he would turn
around and also get a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State in 2000.
In the meantime, Larry also ran a website called Sanger and Shannon’s Review of Y2K
News Reports which was dedicated to discussing the Year 2000 problem.
If you’re not familiar with this, it was basically the fear that computers would glitch
out and have a bunch of errors as soon as the date changed from 1999 to 2000.
While there were some errors here and there once we hit 2000, nothing catastrophic unfolded,
and the Year 2000 problem ended up being a big nothing burger.
Larry’s site never really gained that much popularity in the first place, but even if
it did, it wouldn’t have mattered much given that its popularity would’ve fallen off
a cliff once 2000 hit.
Clearly, Larry’s wasn’t having much success with the internet, but the same could not
be said about Jimmy.
NUPEDIA: Unlike Larry who likely didn’t have too
much money to invest into internet projects, Jimmy was stacked thanks to Wall Street.
Jimmy had correctly speculated on fluctuations in interest rates and foreign currencies for
years which made him quite a bit of money.
And seeing the insanely successful IPO of Netscape in 1995, Jimmy knew that he had to
invest all this money into an internet project.
Initially, he launched a search engine called Bomis which was a guy-oriented search engine,
but this never really took off.
So, Jimmy decided to revisit his childhood interest in encyclopedias.
The idea was to create a free-to-use online encyclopedia called Nupedia that made money
by displaying ads.
For Jimmy, the accuracy of the content was extremely important, so he wanted academic
experts to review all the content before it was published on the website.
And who better to hire as an academic expert than his philosophy friend with a Ph.D., Larry.
In early 2000, Jimmy hired Larry as editor in chief and together they launched Nupedia
in March of 2000.
Nupedia didn’t just instantly blow up though.
You see, while the information on Nupedia was extremely accurate, no one wanted to contribute
to the site due to their extremely rigorous approval process.
Jimmy had hired a bunch of highly respected professors to review articles on the side
which was great for readers, but simply intimated writers which makes sense.
If you’re writing an article for the internet for free, I’m sure you want it to be accurate,
but it’s not like you want it to be graded by university professors.
So, very few people from the outside contributed which meant that most of the articles came
from Jimmy and his team.
Jimmy didn’t let this discourage him though, he felt that Nupedia had great potential,
and he got to work on grinding out articles.
But, this all changed when he started writing an article about a Nobel Prize-winning economist
named Robert C. Merton.
As ya’ll know, Jimmy had a master’s in finance and had years of industry experience,
yet he himself felt intimated to write about Robert.
He says that it felt like writing a doctoral thesis, and he didn’t even wanna do that
during college when a Ph.D. was on the line.
So, why in the world would anyone ever want to do this during their free time.
It was clear to Jimmy and Larry that the current model wouldn’t work, so they decided to
launch a more casual version of Nupedia called Wikipedia.
WIKIPEDIA: Neither Jimmy nor Larry had very high expectations
for Wikipedia.
All of the professors that they worked with dismissed the idea as something that would
never work.
Jimmy and Larry themselves largely agreed with this viewpoint, and they were simply
trying to recruit more writers through Wikipedia, but to all of their surprise, Wikipedia turned
into much more than just that.
Wikipedia’s first edit came out on January 14, 2001, and within just a couple of days,
the number of articles on Wikipedia outgrew Nupedia.
Initially, Jimmy was super paranoid about how Wikipedia would affect Nupedia’s brand
image.
Apparently, he would wake up in the middle of the night to read through new submissions
on Wikipedia and make sure that they were of acceptable quality.
In the meantime, Larry was having quite a bit of fun with Wikipedia.
He came up with the policy for the website which included “Ignore all rules”, “Neutral
Point of View”, “No original research”, and “Verifiability”.
Ironically though, Jimmy and Larry would quickly swap places.
You see, while Larry was having a lot of fun with Wikipedia, he never wanted it to replace
Nupedia.
On the other hand, while Jimmy highly prioritized accuracy, at the core, he was a businessman,
and Wikipedia was clearly where the opportunity was.
So, as funding dried up following the dot-com crash, Jimmy pulled the plug on Nupedia in
early 2002 and went all-in on Wikipedia.
Jimmy no longer wanted to fund a job relating to Nupedia and Larry was unwilling to switch
over to Wikipedia, so the duo would split ways in March of 2002.
Over the next year, Larry tried his best to revive Nupedia by looking for buyers and even
trying to buy it himself.
But when Nupedia’s servers crashed in September of 2003, Larry knew that that was the end.
Soon after, Jimmy tried to monetize Wikipedia by displaying ads, but this was met with a
lot of backlash from the community.
It was the community that made Wikipedia what it was, so why should one organization or
person reap all the benefits.
Jimmy didn’t fight back much and gave in pretty easily.
It seems like Jimmy’s main goal wasn’t trying to make a lot of money but to create
something big and influential, and it was clear to him that Wikipedia was exactly that.
JIMMY & LARRY TODAY: In mid-2003, Jimmy launched a nonprofit organization
called the Wikimedia Foundation, and this nonprofit would take over the daily operations
of Wikipedia.
Over the next couple of years, Wikipedia would crush milestone after milestone growing into
hundreds of thousands of articles.
Jimmy served as the foundation’s official chairman for a few years, but in 2006, he
decided that the foundation no longer needed him.
He does still have a special seat on the board called the community founder’s seat, but
his role today is pretty hands-off.
Since leaving Wikipedia, Jimmy has primarily spent his time on other community-oriented
projects.
In 2012, for instance, he was an advisor to the UK government helping to make taxpayer-funded
research freely available on the internet.
Similarly, in 2017, he launched an online publication called WikiTribune which was dedicated
to fighting biased news.
And in 2019, he launched an ad-free social network called WikiTribune Social.
In the meantime, Larry has grown more and more distant from Wikipedia.
In fact, he has actually become a major critic of Wikipedia and has commonly made statements
that discredit the site.
He also tried to launch a competitor to Wikipedia called Citizendium in 2006.
It drew on the community nature of Wikipedia but also had more checks in place to ensure
credibility.
Unfortunately, Citizendium never took off, but Larry also never gave up.
For example, between 2008 and 2010, he worked on the WatchKnowLearn project which attempted
to create a repository of educational videos for kids.
Similarly, in 2013, he launched a crowdsourced news portal called Infobitt.
And in December 2017, he launched Everipedia which was again a more credible version of
Wikipedia but based on the blockchain.
You just have to take one look at the all-time graph of the everipedia token to see how that
turned out.
Despite all these failures, Larry still hasn’t quit in trying to create an antithesis to
Wikipedia.
In October of 2019, for instance, he launched encylosphere.org.
At the end of the day, the truth is that most of Larry’s criticisms about the credibility
of Wikipedia are true and fair.
But it seems like Larry has never been able to look past that and see the bright side
of Wikipedia which is truly quite a shame.
Jimmy, however, was able to see Wikipedia for exactly what it was, and I think he says
it best.
He estimates that Wikipedia is worth at least $3 billion today, so by donating Wikipedia
to the foundation, you could say that he lost out on $3 billion.
But, he also strongly believes that if he didn’t donate Wikipedia, it wouldn’t be
worth $3 billion today.
So, donating the site will forever be the dumbest and smartest decision of his life.
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