Jimmy Wales Gives Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Search

Following Cory Doctorow's talk about 2 weeks ago on, "The State of the Copy Fight", Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia gave a lecture during Evan Korth’s Computer’s and Society course at NYU on "Free culture, transparency, and search.” his for-profit company Wikia and its three areas of operation: Library, Open Serving, and Search.

Given the audiences familiarity with Wikipedia, Wales skipped most of his prepared speech on that and after he gave a brief background on open source software, how it works, and the fact that you can be commercially successful doing and using it, he spent most of his time talking about Wikia.

Below is the full video of the talk (about 25 minutes followed by 25 minutes of questions, the beginning is a little jumpy but it settles down, sorry) followed by my notes from the talk.

http://blip.tv/file/get/Nowpublic-JimmyWales661.flv

MY NOTES:

Open Source
Trend towards open source/free software, that originally people didn't think it was going to work. He talked about using Emacs on a proprietary Linux distribution and discovering Richard Stallman's Emacs manifesto (note Stallman is speaking at Professor Korth's Computers and Society class in the upcoming weeks, join the mailing list for announcements: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/computers_and_society_announcements) and how he thought Richard was crazy and that it would never work, but as it turns out Richard is crazy but it DID work (lots of audience laughter).

We are witnessing an explosion early in the free software movement, how much of the software that runs the Internet is open source/free, and there's already a large ecosystems of companies and products with various different business models developed around this, no need to develop proprietary software to be successful - free/open source is better...

From open-source software came open content, free content -- the introduction of the creative commons license was a big part of this (note though that Wikipedia was started before cc was available so it uses the gnu free documentation license for it's content, the only free content license at the time). Again, at the start people thought it wasn't going to work it would be low-quality or no one would contribute etc. but with the massive overwhelming success of Wikipedia, we see that it does work, just like free software.

While Wikipedia was successful, it raised the question - was it successful only because it is a charity/not-for-profit organization? The growth of Wikia, his new company, is going pretty much along the same growth track that Wikipedia had, so in fact, people are willing to contirbute to a commerical project where the content is under a free licence. He said it wasn't necessarily the same kind of crowd that would contribute to a non for profit, but clearly people are interested in free culture and still want to participate in a meaningful way.


Wikia
The, "three pillars" Wikia are a Library, Open Serving, and Search. ALL of the software they create is freely licensed under the GPL, and (almost) all their content is under free licences (with the exception of some sites/content they took over the hosting for) and anyone can can commercially redistributed all of this.

The library
Wheras Wikipedia is nonprofit and does educational and reference type works, the first major initiative at Wikia his for profit company is to do everything else - create a library which is much larger. World Wikia for example is a travel site and Jimmy compared how the information you might find in Wikipedia would be different from what you would find in a travel guide on New York. The Muppet Wikia has several thousand articles on muppets vs. Wikipedia which has 200-300 on the topic.

Open Serving
Wikipedia, on of the top 10 sites on the Internet, currently spends roughly $25,000 a month on hosting, around $12,000 of which is bandwidth - the cost of broadcasting massive amounts of information out to the Internet is relatively low. The second initiative is "Open Serving" that they've basically just started: as long as you use free software, and license your content under a free license (cc or gnu fdl), then Wikia will host your site for free, whatever you want to do - even if what you are doing is commercial - you keep the revenue, they are giving it all away.

Admittedly, he says everyone's first reaction is that "sounds pretty crazy" and then they ask how Wikia's going to make money on this... surprisingly Jimmy said, "we don't know... but we know that even if this project became as successfull as wikipedia, and we don't host video and things like that... as long as were sticking to text and images the monthly cost is $25,000 a month... we have venture capitalists money and we'll spend all their money and hopefully we'll figure out something, but we figure if we mange to basically generate a big cultural movement here we'll find lots of ways to benefit from that". (authors note: when raising money from vc's don't try this unless of course you run one of the top 10 sites on the net)



Wikia Search
what he spends most of his time working on and thinking about: a free, transparent, democratic, open source, community driven search engine.

The 'launch' was accidental, he's been working on this himself quietly for a long time, and he set up a site for people to discuss it; in an interview in December he mentions search and the reporter writes an article about it, a lot people took interest after this... lots of people coming to the site... joining the mailing lists, second-tier search companies contacting them which he compared to private companies getting involved in the development of Apache; if you compare the budget Google has to spend on geniuses you think how am i going to catch up - so these companies are interested in contributing/supporting.

Search is a fundamental part of the Internet's infrastructure, incredibly important to society, and should be transparent for consumers, you should know how the search results are determined, that the results aren't being influenced for political or financial reasons. He loves google, love yahoo, and he doesn't think that they're doing anything evil, but he trusts the court system because it's an open transparent process and while he doesn't want to personally go and watch the trials, he knows that people can. Transparency is critical.

All the algorithms will be published, all the software will be open source/free software, will be testable, it'll be re-searchable. A lot of interest has come from computer science students and researchers because most of the advancements in search are behind closed doors/secret.

Make search particaptory, take the good parts and the lessons from Wikipedia and Wikia, and apply them to search. How's it possible that you can open up a website, let anyone edit anything, and end up with something other than garbage? the answer is it's in the software, and the social structure that's built up around the software - instead of having gatekeepers you have accountability for ideas - it's open public and transparent and people can see what each other are doing.

A similarly motivated project was the open directory Project - when they were faced with the problem of spam, they did what everybody thought was the thing to do at the time b/c none of us understood how to do the community stuff really well - they decided to close the community, to make it really hard to participate, every category is owned by somebody -- it works fairly well but it hasn't lived up to the potential everybody thought it had. The idea of bringing in hundreds of thousands of human brains to help with search is something that has yet to be accomplished.

When he first saw Flickr, he thought it's only a short period of time until there's lots of porn... but that never happened.

build up a network of people that can trust each other and put the controls in the hands of the community to modify the ranking algorithms - change the competitive landscape of the search world, its long-overdue