Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (a supporter of Reason Foundation, the
nonprofit that publishes this magazine) has spoken enviously of
Wikipedia's collaborative model, expressed his regret that Amazon's
user reviews aren't more like wikis, and credited Wikipedia with
having "cracked
the code for user-generated content." Bezos "really drove this deal
personally," Wales says, adding that he was in the enviable
position of vetting potential investors.
Wales is reluctant to get into more precise detail about what exactly Wikia will do, or what the communities or collaborative projects will produce, since that will be up to the users. This reticence turns out to be, in part, philosophical. Wikia is radically devoted to the idea that if you provide free, flexible tools, people will build interesting things. It's the same concept that drives Wikipedia, but expanded to nonencyclopedic functions. Like the rest of the cohort sometimes dubbed "Web 2.0"-YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, and other services that emphasize collaboration and user-generated content-Wales is relying on users to make his sites interesting. It isn't always easy to explain this to investors. "Before Wikipedia, the idea of an encyclopedia on a wiki seemed completely insane," says Wales. "It's obvious that it works now, but at the time no one was sure. Now we're going through the same moment with Wikia."
Perhaps because of the indeterminate nature of the final product, Wales has opted for the '90s approach of "build the site now, make money later." Industry analyst Peter Cohan thinks Wikia isn't likely to fall into the same trap as the busted Internet companies of the dot-com era. "Wikia is getting two and a half million page views a day," he says, "and it's growing steadily. There are people who are willing to pay for those eyeballs." (It has been growing at about the same rate as Wikipedia did at this stage of its development.) Still, says Cohan, there will be some hurdles for Wales, who is known only for his nonprofit work. "When you bring money into the picture it might change the incentives for people to participate in this thing" he says. "When people know that there is no money involved, then ego gets involved and it's a matter of pride."
Wales is banking on strong communities to give Wikia the staying power that flash-in-the-pan Internet sensations or more loosely knit social networking sites lack. Wales is plugged into social networking sites (and has more than a few online friends/fans), but he says he finds the exhibitionism and technical precocity of MySpace somewhat creepy.
It might sound strange, but Wales' interest in community dovetails nicely with his interest in individualism. No one is born into the Muppet Wiki community. Everyone who is there chooses to be there, and everyone who participates has a chance to shape its rules and content. People naturally form communities with their own delicate etiquette and expectations, and they jealously guard their own protocols. Each one is different, making Wikia communities fertile ground where thousands of experimental social arrangements can be tried-some with millions of members and some with just two or three. Like the "framework for utopia" described in the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Wikia maximizes the chance that people can work together to get exactly what they want, while still being part of a meaningful community by maximizing freedom and opportunities for voluntary cooperation.
Wikia boosters contend that many existing online communities would benefit from the kind of curb appeal a wiki offers. The firm hopes to co-opt, buy, or duplicate them. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, formerly of eBay, is a frequent-flyer-miles enthusiast, for example. But most of the sites now haunted by airfare obsessives deal in nitty-gritty details and are useless to the outsider hoping to figure out the best way to get a free ticket by gaming various frequent-flyer plans, or by finding fares listed erroneously as $3.75 instead of $375. "This makes it hard to monetize that content," says Wales. "People just come and look around and don't find what they want and leave." Incorporating those same geeks into a wiki community could make their considerable knowledge available to outsiders and make the page more welcoming to advertisers. If lots of outsiders looking for a good price on a specific product can use the site, advertisers will compete (and pay) to grab their attention.
For now, Wikia makes money solely from Google ads running on its community pages. Wales says this is because they're "lazy" and because Google ads are a good way to generate a little revenue while they "build communities." Since its 2004 launch, Wikia has spent exactly $5.74 on advertising-a small fee for Google analytics to track stats on the site. "That makes our ad budget about 25 cents per month," Wales grins. It's early yet to expect a big push to generate revenue, but this charming laziness could be troublesome if it persists much longer.
Wikia now has 40 employees, including a handful of Polish programmers-a huge staff compared with the three people it takes to run Wikipedia. With 500,000 articles on 2,000 topics produced by 60,000 registered users in 45 languages, the network of websites is growing fast. The biggest wikis are dedicated to Star Trek and Star Wars. Wales is partial to the wiki devoted to the TV show Lost. He also admires the Campaign Wiki, which among other projects has neutral voter guides for elections.
Even as Wikia relies on Google ads for its only revenue at the moment, Wales recently has started to talk publicly about building a search engine using open-source tools, a project Wales casually calls "The Google Killer." Wales hopes the transparency and flexibility of an open-source model will discourage the gaming of the system that plagues Google. A search for "hotels in Tampa" on Google, a search I tried before my trip into town to interview Wales, yields nothing useful, just a jumble of defunct ratings sites and some ads that aren't tailored to my needs. By using a community of volunteers who will rerank results and tweak algorithms, Wales hopes to get useful results in categories that are particularly subject to gaming.
The Pathological Optimist
Later that December afternoon, after an excellent Indian lunch in a
Florida strip mall, Wales proposes that we hop back into the
Hyundai for a stop at the "fancy mall" in the Tampa area. En route
to the Apple store, he surveys the bright lights and luxury goods
for sale and announces that he is generally pretty pleased with how
things are going in the world. In fact, he calls himself a
"pathological optimist." On issue after issue, he pronounces some
version of "things aren't that bad" or "things are getting better":
People are more connected than they used to be (thanks, in part, to
Internet communities), the wide availability of ethnic food has
made the American diet more interesting, bookstore mega-chains are
increasing the diversity of media available in America,
entertainment is increasing in quality, gun rights are expanding,
and so on. Tempted to get involved with free speech activists,
Wales, a self-declared "First Amendment extremist," says he drew
back because real repression doesn't seem likely. "There's a lot of
hysteria around this," he says-concerns about censorship that
aren't supported by the facts.
Wales is optimistic about the Internet too. "There's a certain kind of dire anti-market person," he says, "who assumes that no matter what happens, it's all driving toward one monopoly-the ominous view that all of these companies are going to consolidate into the Matrix." His own view is that radical decentralization will win out, to good effect: "If everybody has a gigabit [broadband Internet connection] to their home as their basic $40-a-month connection, anybody can write Wikipedia."
Wales' optimism isn't without perspective. After reading Tom Standage's book about the impact of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, he was "struck by how much of the semi-utopian rhetoric that comes out of people like me sounds just like what people like them said back then."
Among Wikipedians, there is constant squabbling about how to characterize Wales' role in the project. He is often called a "benevolent dictator," or a "God-King," or sometimes a "tyrant." While the 200,000 mere mortals who have contributed articles and edits to the site are circumscribed by rules and elaborate community-enforced norms, Wales has amorphous and wide-ranging powers to block users, delete pages, and lock entries outside of the usual processes. But if Wales is a god, he is like the gods of ancient times (though his is a flat, suburban Olympus), periodically making his presence and preferences known through interventions large and small, but primarily leaving the world he created to chug along according to rules of its own devising.
After spending a day cruising the greater Tampa Bay area, I find myself back at the Wales homestead, sitting with the family as they watch a video of Wales' daughter delivering a presentation on Germany for a first-grade enrichment class. Wales is learning German, in part because the German Wikipedia is the second largest after English, in part because "I'm a geek." Daughter Kira stands in front of a board, wearing a dirndl and reciting facts about Germany. Asked where she did her research, she cops to using Wikipedia for part of the project. Wales smiles sheepishly; the Wikipedia revolution has penetrated even his own small bungalow.
People who don't "get" Wikipedia, or who get it and recoil in horror, tend to be from an older generation literally and figuratively: the Seigenthalers and Britannica editors of the world. People who get it are younger and hipper: the Irene McGees and Jeff Bezoses. But the people who really matter are the Kiras, who will never remember a time without Wikipedia (or perhaps Wikia), the people for whom open-source, self-governed, spontaneously ordered online community projects don't seem insane, scary, or even particularly remarkable. If Wales has his way-and if Wikipedia is any indication, he will-such projects will just be another reason the Internet doesn't suck.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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Excellent points on current issues with wikipedia. I am very concerned about James Wales recent approach to get more funding for this portal. Of course, a vast majority of people benefit from it every day, but there are still some problems on the horizon to be solved. In times of a free browsergame and other web2.0 trends like youtube or flickr, wikipedia has to keep up...
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While the article says (in 2007) that Jimmy Wales' net worth is not known, it is now known -- http://www.examiner.com/wiki-e.....-net-worth -- Wales is worth about $470,000.