Say what? Jimmy who, for what? Okay, so maybe my proposal is a bit over the top. And maybe it’s a bit premature: after all, Jimmy Wales has only been doing supremely wonderful things for about five or six years, and they still haven’t made Mother Teresa a saint after a lifetime of good work (though she did receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979). But if Jimbo (as he is popularly known) keeps up his good work, we should at least award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and maybe put his likeness on a postage stamp.

If you don’t know who Jimmy Wales is, you obviously weren’t at Wikimania this year. Wales gave the opening keynote address — which was only fitting, since he created Wikipedia back in 2001, and has been the driving force behind what’s arguably the largest and richest collection of “free knowledge” in the world — a world, as he put it, in which “every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” It’s an easy thing to say, and — at least at the surface level — an easy thing to understand. But if you stop and think about it for more than a few seconds, which I did for the first time in this conference, it’s a profound, provocative, radical, and revolutionary thought — not just because of the economic threat that it might represent for publishers of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and newspapers around the world, but also because of the threat that it potentially represents to governments, religions, and any number of “authorities” who have traditionally presented us with the “official” version of whatever knowledge we were allowed to know about.

A small example will help put this in context. I grew up in the 1950s, in a world where most of the non-trivial knowledge that one might want to know about any subject was contained in a multi-volume encyclopedia. Because of the bulk, but mostly because of the economics, there were few copies of such documents: if I had to write a social studies report on the economy of Afghanistan, I had to shuffle down to the school library and spend hours reading through one source of information on the topic — there were no URL “links” to additional resources. And if my parents had ever considered emigrating to Afghanistan (hey, why not? they could have become opium farmers, and we all would have been rich!), they would have had little alternative but to spend several Saturday afternoons at the local library, consulting the encyclopedia for detailed information — assuming that the local library was open on weekends.

I’m not sure exactly when, but all of this began to change in the 1960s and the 1970s, when encyclopedia companies realized they could bully middle-class families into spending large sums of money to buy their own personal copies of an encyclopedia. I was grown and out of college by then, so I didn’t notice this trend at first. But in the early 1980s, when my children were in elementary school, the encyclopedia salesmen descended upon me like locusts. Without their own personal encyclopedia, they argued passionately, my children would fall behind their peers in the intensely competitive New York City private-school environment in which the winners went to Harvard and Yale, and the losers were doomed to a career as chicken-flippers at the local Popeye’s fast-food joint. Did I want my children to be intellectually inferior because they didn’t have their very own World Book (for what it’s worth, Jimmy Wales indicated in his keynote talk that a representative from World Book would be on one of the Wikimania panels; I don’t know which one) or Encyclopedia Britannica in the living room? Did I want to sentence them to a life of misery, mediocrity, and poverty? Did I want them to be stupid?

Egad! Perish the thought! For all I know, I may have been the very last parent in North America to fork over a couple thousand dollars for my very own encyclopedia, which I assumed was an adequate demonstration that I really did love my children. But, no, that wasn’t the end of it: the encyclopedia salesmen descended upon me for another year or two, demanding that I spend another exorbitant sum of money for the “annual updates” to the encyclopedia, without which the entire 20-volume set would somehow become completely obsolete and unusable.

As it turned out, my children never used the encyclopedia that filled the bookshelves of our living room — and this was at least ten years before the first version of Netscape was circulated. And now, in the mid-2000’s, the whole thing seems ludicrous … well, except that the major publishers are still trying to play the same game, but have shifted the battlefield away from dead-tree materials that fill your bookshelf to “premium” content on the Internet. Yes, you can get some information free, but you get what you pay for; if you pay peanuts, the old saying goes, you get chimpanzees. If you want quality information, of the sort that we used to get from our old-fashioned encyclopedias, today’s encyclopedia salesman tell you, you need to pay for it — in the form of fee-based subscription services to the New York Times, or the Encyclopedia Britannica, or other “official” sources of information.

Can you imagine such a dialogue taking place today? There are a lot of middle-class families who could probably afford to pay a thousand dollars for encylcopedia-packaged knowledge for their children if they had to — after all, they’re spending that much money for a new hi-def television, or for the increased cost of gas in their oversized SUV’s. But there are millions upon millions of people in advanced countries who can’t afford that kind of expenditure, not to mention the billions of people in developing nations who are equally concerned with providing their children with the knowledge they need to survive in today’s world. But for all practical purposes, the debate about whether it’s more important to spend money on encyclopedias than food has become moot in the age of Google and Wikipedia; as long as you’ve got access to the Internet, knowledge is rapidly becoming free and ubiquitous.

But a related debate continues to rage, perhaps subsidized and fomented by the official purveyors of information: how reliable is the free information we can find on Google and Wikipedia? Wales addressed this issue at the very beginning of his talk by playing the video from Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central spoof about the techniques for introducing “fake” information onto Wikipedia. If you haven’t seen this video, you should watch it; it’s not only funny, but thought-provoking.

All of this provided a mental framework for me to listen to Wales’ presentation on where Wikipedia has been in the past, where it is now, and where it will be in the future. He rattled through some statistics to illustrate all of this: Wikipedia passed the 100,000 mark (in terms of articles published) in Swedish in 2005; the Spanish language version passed 100,000; Japan passed 100,000; Holland passed 200,000; Germany passed 400,000 and will soon pass 500,000; and the English-language version passed 750,000 in 2005, 1 million in March 2006, and 1.2 million when the Wikimania conference took place in early August 2006 (note: as of August 26th, it’s up to 1.336 million).

But while this growth is indeed impressive — Wikipedia’s English-language inventory of 1.2 million articles now dwarfs Encyclopedia Britannica’s inventory of 80,000 articles — Wales acknowledge that there are non-trivial debates about the accuracy of Wikipedia’s information. This became relevant recently with the so-called Siegenthaler Controversy, in which John Siegenthaler complained (quite justifiably) about a grossly inaccurate Wikipedia page that said that he, not John Hinckley, had been the person who shot Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. This episode created somewhat of a firestorm in early 2006, and Wales had to suffer through a fairly hostile interview on CNN; but as he pointed out in his presentation this morning, the interesting thing is that the number of page-hits on Wikipedia tripled in the days and weeks after that CNN interview. Meanwhile, what very few people recognized was that the error, egregious as it was, did get noticed, and did get fixed; indeed, the mean time to repair such egregious errors in popular Wikipedia pages is four minutes. Can you imagine the Encyclopedia Britannica or the New York Times correcting their errors so quickly?

Of course, you could take the position that “official” source of information like the major encyclopedias and newspapers don’t make that many mistakes. But as Wales reminded us, a recent study by Nature magazine, based on scientific articles of roughly the same length, showed that Wikipedia had an average of four errors per article, while Encyclopedia Britannica had an average of three errors per article. Wale emphasized that the reviewers were told to focus strictly on errors, not style, and that the comparisons were based on articles of roughly comparable length. Thus, the comparisons ignored some of the Wikipedia articles that consist mostly or wholly of “stubs,” and thus represented what Wale described as “our best work.” Consequently, his conclusion was that the comparison showed that “we are not as good as Britannica … yet.” But it also showed that the traditional sources of information aren’t perfect either, and it’s not a bad comparison for a creation like Wikipedia that’s only five years old.

It was in the context of this comparison with Britannica that Wales emphasized that one of his goals for the coming year was a higher quality of Wikipedia articles. But this became both the title (”Wikipedia Founder Seeks More Quality“) and the first five paragraphs of the story filed by Associated Press; it seems to me that the mainstream media (MSN) is still pushing the implied message that Wikipedia’s current quality is suspect, and that perhaps we really should be spending our hard-earned dollars on subscriptions to Britannica. But Wales presented it from another perspective: in the early days, he argued, quantity of published articles was critical, because nobody would pay serious attention to Wikipedia as a source of useful information until it reached a critical mass of content. But that has now been achieved, at least in the major languages like English, French, German, and Spanish. And especially in English, with 1.2 million articles, Wikipedia’s emphasis in the future should be to emphasize the quality of each new article, and revision to existing articles.

While this may seem obvious, there’s a subtle tension between quantity and quality that Wales only hinted at. What creates the quantity of articles in Wikipedia is its attention to obscure topics that would never get any attention in in the major encyclopedias; since Encyclopedia Britannica covers only 80,000 topics, they obviously want to focus on what they consider to be the most important topics. But Wikipedia’s coverage of 1.2 million topics allows them to address what Wale referred to as the “long tail” of topics; and if Wikipedia is the only place where you can find an article on cultural trends in a remote corner of northwestern Finland in the 8th century, it’s probably okay if it’s a little rough around the edges. But I think what Wales is primarily concerned about is the quality of the articles at the “head” of the tail — i.e., the most popular 80,000 articles, and perhaps the next most popular few hundred thousand. Actually achieving this increase in quality is partly a matter of technology (e.g, software that will scan for revisions made by suspected spammers), and partly a matter of adjusting the “social models” used by the groups of Wiki editors, reviewers, and contributors to revise and edit Wikipedia articles.

Wales described a number of organizational, entrepreneurial, and procedural steps that he and his colleagues are taking to bring about this quality improvement, along with several other initiatives that he identified. There’s now a company — Wikia — that has been formed, and has raised venture capital, that can accomplish things on a “paid” basis, e.g., with full-time paid engineers for improving the Mediawiki software engine, rather than relying on volunteers. He’s planning to form an Advisory Board for Wikia, with people who can bring contacts, expertise, perspective, prestige, and strategic input.

Interestingly, one of the most contentious areas of quality improvement is associated with the biographies of living persons. As Wales pointed out, it’s one thing to write negative, or even insulting, articles about political personalities like George Bush; it’s the somewhat lesser known people in the world of business, fashion, sports, or politics who may be furious with something they consider biased or incorrect in a Wikipedia article. Because of the fundamental nature of Wikipedia, the insulted person can delete the offensive material from his “bio” article; but the person who created it in the first place can then put it back. After a few more deletions and re-insertions, threats of legal action sometimes arise, and “flame wars” between supporters and opponents of the insulted individual break out … and as a result, Wales indicated that Wikipedia’s policy on the biographies of living persons has become more refined, with administrators and experienced editors taking a strong stand against “unsourced” information, particularly if it is of a negative nature.

Wales also talked about Campaigns Wikia, a fairly bold initiative to apply the “wiki” concept to political campaigns — which I, as a typical myopic American, assumed would be focused on U.S. politics, but is already covering such things as elections in Sao Tome, the Seychelle Islands, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wales’ objective is to improve the political discourse (and if it led to the demise of paid TV political ads, so much the better!), and to generate a healthy dialogue and mutual understanding of the issues associated with any political campaign. He is hosting local “meetups” all over the world, with his travel schedule listed here (actually, nothing had been posted when I checked this link on August 5th, but I assume that it will be filled in, in the days to come).

Wales made two announcements for “today,” and a number of announcements of developments planned for the coming year. Today’s announcements included the interesting news that the One Laptop Per Child project, spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte (and discussed in my April 14th blog entry on “ubiquitous computing“), will now include Wikipedia as the first element in its content repository. Parenthetically, Wales added that Negroponte had said that Wikipedia “could be the killer app” for this next wave of end-users who will be able to access the Internet from developing nations.

The second of “today’s announcements” focused on Wikiversity, a center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its objective is to create and host a range of free-content, multilingual learning materials, for all age groups in all languages; when I checked, there were portals to 17 different languages at the current time, and Wales indicated that Wikiversity will be formally launched in three languages, on a six-month trial basis. Wikiversity will host scholarly/learning projects and communities that support these materials; and it will host and foster research based in part on existing resources in other Wikimedia proejcts.

Wales’ announcements for the coming year included Wikiwyg, a porting of Socialtext’s technology to Mediawiki in a joint venture with Socialtext and Wikia. The release date is uncertain, but both Wikia and Socialtext devoting full time engineers to the project. Interestingly, there was no article about Wikiwyg on Wikipedia when I wrote this blog entry (unless, perhaps, I misspelled the name of this new venture), and I must admit that I really don’t understand what it’s all about. But I assume it will become self-evident in the fullness of time, and no doubt there will be some discussion of it in next year’s Wikimania conference.

Another of the “coming year” projects is “Image tagging.” Wales says that “huge progress” was made in during the past year, with virtually all of the images in some problematic categories eliminated. He argued that “fair use” of copyrighted images (e.g., photographs that someone has created, copyrighted, and then uploaded onto the Internet) is a good doctrine, but Wikipedia will be using it more narrowly in the future as they push to get more freely licensed images as replacements. They feel that image tagging has to be nearly perfect, presumably to avoid squabbles and disputes about potentially improper use of non-public images.

Wales also talked about the concept of rolling out an experimental “stable version” of the German Wikipedia in the coming year. I must confess that I don’t really understand what this is all about, but I think it has to do with the chaos that can ensue when warring camps begin modifying, reverting, and re-modifying Wikipedia articles in which there is intense debate (e.g., with the biographies of living persons, discussed above). Wales said that their existing policies to protect existing articles during waves of “vandalism” tended to be excessive (e.g., by “locking” certain articles to prevent further modifications), and that some form of “semi-protection” was better. The concept of “stable versions” would allow anyone to edit existing material, while at the same time giving the general public a better view of uncontested material. “If we don’t get this done and rolled out in English Wikipedia within the next year,” Wales said, “we will have made a big mistake.” Huh. Well, maybe so. I’m prepared to accept this on faith for the moment, and will be curious to see how things turn out.

At last year’s Wikimania conference (which I didn’t attend), Wales gave a talk about “Ten Things That Should Be Free“; they include the following:

1. Free Encyclopedia
2. Free Dictionary
3. Free Text Books
4. Free Music
5. Free Art
6. Free File Formats
7. Free Maps
8. Free Product Identifiers
9. Free TV Listings
   10. Free Online Communities

Many of these items already exist, or all well under way. In this year’s conference, Wales updated a few of the items on that list. Wikipedia, for example, is alread done in English, German, and French; the Japanese version, he says, is not far behind. But Wales says there is still much work to do globally. While Wikipedia currently supports 100 languages with at least 1,000 articles, they’re not doing much for people in developing countries, with somewhat more obscure languages. Wales proposes that their foundation seek funding to hire community coordinators and recruiters for important languages where they currently do poorly.

For the second item on the list — free dictionary — Wales said that “amazing work” was going on at wictionaryZ, as part of a “wiktionary” effort. As the Wikipedia entry on wiktionary says, “Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is multilingual, meaning that the goal is to define every word from all known languages in every other language, as well as in the original language itself. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English but accepts entries for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have entries for all those same words, but the entries are written in French.”

For the third item on the list, Wales noted that they’re working on Wikibooks, and have launched a beta version of Wikiversity. He feels that WIkia should work with people like Taddy Blecher at Cida City Campus in South Sfrica, which runs a free university that graduates 1,000 people a year; work like this would help them figure out what such universities need, and how it might be provided.

In response to a question at the end of his talk, Wales made an interesting comment: the cost of telecommunications is dropping rapidly, he says, even in the places where the cost of food is not dropping rapidly. So all of those people who are starving in Africa will soon be calling us to complain. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does raise the more general point that ongoing rapid improvements in technology will continue causing economic, political, and social disruptions and asymmetries that we haven’t identified or thought about very much.

How much of this actually gets accomplished in the next year remains to be seen; but overall, it’s a pretty ambitious set of objectives. But Wales’ original objective, back in 2001, of a free encyclopedia was not only ambitious, but downright audacious. What he’s started has become far more than just a personal project, but a whole movement. It may be naive and overly optimistic to think that free, universal access to all human knowledge would bring about world peace, but I can’t help feeling that it would be an excellent start.

While we’re waiting for Jimmy Wales and his friends and colleagues to bring this about, keep that proposal of mine about the Nobel Peace Prize in mind. It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

P.S. This blog posting is only one of several that were written about Jimmy Wales’ presentation; see, for example, David Weinberger’s blog, and Andy Carvin’s blog.