Transcriber: XINHUI WANG Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
Thanks a lot.
So, let me tell you a story about how I got started 20 years ago
on this mission to discover
what Wikipedia had as a solution for humanity.
One of the things that folks in this room may not know,
because it predates your birth,
is that 1994, what was the dominant way for multi-media
or for new media storytelling
was what we called the CD-ROM.
And I was just hired by the Columbia Journalism School
and we had some decisions to make.
Their new media program at the time was designed around CD-ROM production
and I was the renegade who came in and said, "You know what?
We should be looking at this thing called a web-browser."
And that instead of CD-ROMs which were great
and had video, audio, pictures,
they could fit 650MB on a disk that was there on your computer.
I said, "We should, instead of using that rich media,
go with this untested browser from a weird company
that had no video, had no audio, had texts and barely pictures.
That was a tough sell,
but the real benefit of going with the web in 1994 for journalism curriculum
was that it connected people.
You could click on a link
and suddenly be looking at a page in Russia,
or looking at a page across the country.
That was powerful, but we didn't know exactly how powerful it would be.
To convince the folks at the Columbia J. School
why this was important,
I said, "I don't know how it's going to solve this problem yet
but the Internet is going to solve what we call the knowledge gap."
Which is when you read a newspaper, when you read a magazine,
you have that knowledge there at the time,
but until a movie, a book, or the encyclopedias write about it
there's this of void in the middle.
We really don't have a good record of human history in that in-between state.
The Internet would help solve this problem but we didn't know exactly how.
But now we know that with Wikipedia
and what I call "How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia"
there is a crowd that help fill this knowledge gap.
And here's how.
The first thing that's important is that Wiki,
that Wikipedia's built on, had this crazy idea
that anyone could edit any page at any time.
If I told you this without seeing Wikipedia
you'd say this is clearly a lunatic who created this product, right?
You may not know is that Wikipedia started off
as a for-profit commercial encyclopedia called Nupedia.com,
and the guy who started was, in fact, Jimmy Wales,
who you might have seen before.
It was the sum of all human knowledge that was the goal of this encyclopedia
but there'd be a company that held the copyright
but allow anyone to copy it.
So Jimmy Wales was the guy who started this project,
as one of the many projects in the company,
and he hired this guy named Larry Sanger, who was a Ph.D student,
to head this project,
but he was to find volunteers online to contribute to Nupedia
and get production going in this encyclopedia.
What they did was they, like pretty much anyone else at the time said,
"We need a rigorous process here."
So they came up with a seven-step process
that had everything from assigning an article to finding a lead reviewer,
to copyediting, to open copyediting.
Through the seven-step process, they said,
"We'll get volunteers who are qualified to come write this encyclopedia."
Can you guess how many articles
they created in the first year of this production process
of one paid employee and dozens of volunteers?
Unfortunately, it was... twelve.
So they had a problem.
This was not scalable, it wasn't going to work,
but they had to look at other places for ideas of how to solve this problem.
What they did was they said that if something had to change
they want to look to where other things were happening.
One of the inspirations was the Wiki-Wiki bus,
the shuttle bus between terminals at the Hawaii airport.
It was the genius guy named Ward Cunningham
who had this piece of software called wiki software
that allowed computer programmers to upload computer code,
share them with others,
have them downloaded, modified, and re-upload that computer code.
The folks who were running Nupedia said,
"Why don't we try this wiki software to start the articles.
We'll still use the seven-step process to finish them
but at least we'll get the crowd to come start articles on, let's say,
the site we'll call Wikipedia, as a joke.
And what happened was they found that after a few weeks
there was more production in Wikipedia than in one year of Nupedia.
So what we see is that there are now
roughly 4.5 million English language articles in Wikipedia,
over 31 million articles across all languages,
and 270 languages represented in Wikipedia, as of April this year,
which is pretty amazing if you think about it.
So some of the representative languages of Wikipedia that you see here,
number in the millions of articles for these different language editions.
If you were to print out Wikipedia on paper without photos
it will fill up ten stacks on the shelves.
If you were to print out all Wikipedia,
not just English but in all languages, it would fill up 69 stacks without photos.
It's pretty staggering how much the crowd has been able to do in this time.
If you look at the traffic, 20 billion pages views a month,
that's pretty staggering in terms of traffic.
The only sites that rank above Wikipedia in traffic, consistently,
are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies up there.
Wikipedia as a nonprofit has a budget of roughly 40 million dollars.
So pretty staggering the difference that you see there.
We see that in terms of the editing community
there's about 75,000 users who edit more than five times a month,
and about 11,000 users that edit more than 100 times a month.
So that 11,000-user number is about what you consider
the core audience of Wikipedia.
What are the things that make Wikipedia work?
One, it has a neutral point of view as objectivity standard in Wikipedia,
that is really the core non-negotiable policy in Wikipedia that makes it work.
How do you get the crowd work together in the same direction?
It's that you want a neutral point of view to bind those articles together.
But in recent years, as Wikipedia's got more popular,
we also need to make sure that it's not just people who are editing,
but there's verifiable information in Wikipedia
that use reliable resources as references out there,
and that more and more we're seeing
that as companies understand how influential Wikipedia is
we need to look out for conflict of interests of editors
and making sure the contributors
are actually unconflicted in their editing activities.
So what we see with a neutral point of view
is that this one policy has allowed Wikipedia to flourish,
that's representing fairly, proportionally,
and as far as possible, without bias,
all significant views
that have been published by reliable sources on a topic,
and this is what makes Wikipedia work.
Now what is Wikipedia's role
other than help you on your term paper and get you through high school?
(Chuckling)
And the quest that started 20 years ago
I think we finally start seeing in major ways today.
And the way I explain it is that if you look
at what we consider our priorities in information,
the most important thing about information is that it's accurate.
If information isn't inaccurate, it's misinformation,
not something that we want.
But we make two choices when we talk about information.
We either want it fast, or we want it deep in terms of engagement.
So what we do at least here in communications,
in journalism, or any field, is that we make this choice.
In journalism, we care about speed, to make the six o'clock newscast,
it's out for tomorrow's newspaper,
I don't care if it's better in a week
because the deadline is coming up today or tomorrow.
Then we make another choice on the other side.
We have different types of journalism here.
We make a choice on the other side when we talk about scholarly research,
we talk about encyclopedia writing,
pre-Wikipedia,
and we talk about encyclopedias and museums.
These are folks who care about not the view tomorrow, or the next week,
but the book published two years from now,
the film made three years from now,
the history recorded in museums for posterity.
So we make this choice and this is where the knowledge gap comes in.
Because we actually didn't have a good way
of filling in this gap before we had Wikipedia.
You had to go back and look at stacks of newspapers
or you'd have to wait for the museum or the book
to come out on a certain topic.
So this knowledge gap has really been impossible to address
until we saw Wikipedia come along.
If you really want to illustrate how this happens
in what we consider the news cycle,
consider a breaking news item where we see lots of activity
in the first week of something happening.
The next week you might have more coverage,
but by the end of the month, after the monthly magazines come out,
you really don't see much written about a topic.
You need to wait in fact for what we call
heritage institutions, book writers, historians to come around
and write about that topic or to cover that topic.
What Wikipedia does, if you look at how it functions,
is it actually fills in that gap
and is this continuous working draft of history.
So the real goal here is to have Wikipedia,
not just as a fast way to create information,
which is what it was known for in 2001 -
it was a way for people to quickly add information to an encyclopedia,
but we weren't sure about its depth or its accuracy at the time -
to about 2005, when we start to see Wikipedia
become popular and mainstream.
And then finally we see that Wikipedia has filled in this knowledge gap
in a way that really is unique in terms of Internet phenomena.
So we like to say that in the journalism world
that news is the first draft of history, or the rough first draft of history.
And there's also that saying in historian circles
that history is written by the victors.
But I like to say that Wikipedia instead is the continuously edited,
globally contributed working draft of history.
It's something that everyone can contribute to.
And my favorite saying, related to the first one,
is that instead of the victors write the history books,
the writers write the history books, and Wikipedia has lots of writers.
One way that this is making huge impact is in the world of GLAM,
or galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
One of the interesting things they're doing now
is noticing that Wikipedia has a lot more traffic than these museums do.
This was a similar moment in 2010
when the British Museum realized
that there were ten times as many people
looking at the Rosetta Stone article on Wikipedia
than actually visiting the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum
or visiting its website for this information.
So in 2010, they invited a Wikipedian in residence
to spend five weeks teaching curators at the British museum
more about Wikipedia's culture
and actually in helping to improve articles in Wikipedia
related to the Rosetta Stone and other artifacts in their collection.
So this was a huge moment where museums and libraries and government institutions,
at least here in the U.S.,
looked at Wikipedia as a strange project on the side
written by people in the basement in their pajamas,
and weren't sure whether these were human beings or not
that were doing the editing.
For that culture to change
to have curators at the top museums in the world
invite Wikipedians in was a huge change,
and that has only continued in more and more ways,
to the point where the National Archives and Records Administration,
there is a federal employee whose job is to be the Wikipedian in residence,
and this was just a new thing that happened last year.
Dominic McDevitt-Parks is the Wikipedia guy
at the National Archives,
which is pretty astounding, if you think about it.
We also see that there are great and many ways for these GLAM institutions
to collaborate with Wikipedia editors.
One of the things I did this past semester was to structure a whole class
around Wikipedia editing with museums here in Washington D.C.
Over the course of a semester, we had what we called edit-a-thons.
So we had students leave the classroom,
go down and sit next to curators
at the American Art Museum and other institutions,
to actually look at entire swaths of Wikipedia content
to see what things could be improved on in those areas.
Some of the things that we covered:
women scientists, the gender gap.
In terms of coverage of females in Wikipedia
it's been a mixed record,
and we want to address some of these systemic biases in Wikipedia
to see how these things can be improved.
One of the organizations that we collaborated with
was the Smithsonian Institution Archive
which actually had a scholar in residence
who looked exactly at this problem of woman scientists
being much lower profiled
than male scientists in American literature.
And we also had an edit-a-thon with a bunch of these other museums here.
Some of these shots that we'll take a look at.
This is at the American Art Museum down in Gallery Place.
We had a scan-a-thon actually at the National Archives
where David Ferriero, the Head Archivist of the United States came
and gave a pep talk to our students.
And students were scanning Civil War era documents there,
uploading them to National Archives
but also bringing them into Wikipedia.
Then finally getting museums into the space
of where news organizations are working as well.
We worked with the National Museum of the American Indian to look at issues
of cultural appropriation,
the Redskins mascot controversy.
Really interesting questions
that museums historically have never really addressed
in terms of current events,
but folks like the National Museum of the American Indian have
and they looked at the Wikipedia articles,
and our students helped to improve those articles in Wikipedia.
How do we address this knowledge gap
or how have folks been addressing this knowledge gap
in a way that is interesting?
Well, one is that we know that Wikipedia fills in the space,
but besides the GLAM side
of galleries, libraries, archives and museums filling in this space
we see that there are new ways
that museums are interacting with the public
in an area that we call "Open Authority" in the museum world.
So that museums are no longer the last word on what is historical truth,
they're actually engaging the public to find out these things.
The National Museum of the American Indian is a good example.
Another example from the journalism side
is that there are a lot of journalism start-ups
that are looking to Wikipedia as models.
One great example of this is something happening here in Washington D.C.
As Recline started this new thing that he calls the Newzia Wikipedia.
News organizations are looking at the Wikipedia model and saying,
"Why are people reading the news on our site
but then leaving us to go to Wikipedia
to find out what the historical context is.
Some things they're trying is to create Wikipedia-like experiences
in their news organizations.
What are the challenges going forward then?
Wikipedia has solved this knowledge gap,
but there are challenges,
and it's not clear Wikipedia has another 15 years
of guaranteed existence in the future.
And why is this?
One is that sustainability is a big issue.
Every time you see that fundraising banner at the top of Wikipedia,
it is a hand-to-mouth existence.
There is no endowment that the Wikimedia Foundation has.
They raise money every year to pay the next year's bills.
That's it. That's the model that you have.
So is there a black swan event?
Is there competitor on the horizon
that suddenly Wikipedia will not be the favored encyclopedia on the Internet
and is the infrastructure there to sustain Wikipedia
even if you have a gap in funding or a gap in fundraising?
Right now, it's not clear if that's possible.
Another thing we need to look at
is that Wikipedia right now is predominantly text and images.
When's the last time you looked up a Wikipedia article and saw a video?
Probably don't remember ever.
Only 0.1% of Wikipedia articles have any video content related to them.
So it's lacking multimedia, videos, interactivity.
So we made that choice in '94 to go to the web
and we've never looked back, and it's great.
But what we have lacked is, believe it or not,
that multimedia capability we had 20 years ago.
So we would rather have an encyclopedia that had multimedia features
that we had for CD-ROMs.
Unfortunately, Encarta and those other folks
have been killed by Wikipedia as a text-based encyclopedia,
but the multimedia functions need to come back to encyclopedias.
Finally, the big problem with Wikipedia is this massive gender gap.
How can Wikipedia woo women editors
was a story that the BBC came out with recently,
and if you look at the demographics it's pretty grim.
Over the last ten plus years,
it has consistently been 90% male in terms of editorship.
Any time, any place, any way that you measure it,
it's been between 88 to 92 percent male.
There really is no budging from that number.
So to get more woman involved is a huge problem for Wikipedia.
Well, the good news is if we start to look at those two other areas,
journalism and museum studies,
the good news is they're about 70% female, at least in academic programs,
so there's a lot of opportunity here
to tap more female editors to contribute to Wikipedia,
drawn from those two fields.
And then finally,
how many productive online collaborative communities exist today
that existed 15 years ago?
You'd be hard-pressed to find any.
In fact, history is not on the side of long-lived online communities
that can keep generating good content.
So we're in unchartered territory.
That's why Wikipedia could use a new generation of diverse volunteers,
and I can think of no better people than folks like you in this room
that now know more about Wikipedia than the average person
and can be that next generation of editors.
Thanks a lot.
(Applause)