jimmy wales

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Japanese Wikipedia remained something of a mysterious outlier to the community of global volunteers. A main motivation of global Wikipedians at Wikimania was to meet one another, and particularly the legendary founder Jimmy Wales they’d heard so much about. When Takashi Ota, one of the two Japanese Wikipedians who attended, and who edited anonymously, was told he must meet Jimmy Wales, he famously quipped, “Who’s Jimmy Wales?” The Japanese language is one of the tougher languages in the world to learn because it effectively has three different writing systems, used simultaneously and mixed in varying proportions. It consists of two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana, as well as kanji, which is based on modified logographic Chinese characters.

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The Wikipedia REVOLUTION How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia Andrew Lih For my wife, Mei Contents Acknowledgments viii Foreword by Jimmy Wales xii Chapter 1_THE WIKI PHENOMENON 1 History 3 Chapter 2_ A NUPEDIA 13 What Is an Encyclopedia? 14 Alabama Rising 17 The Mother of All Directories 23 RMS 24 Linux on the Scene 28 Remember DMOZ 30 The Nupedia Idea 32 Nupedia’s Rules 36 The Nupedians 37 Chapter 3_WIKI ORIGINS 43 Ward’s Start 45 HyperCard’s Inspirations 51 A Web Browser 53 Viola 54 HyperCard Revisited 55 Chapter 4_WIKI INTRODUCED 61 Slashdotting 67 Contributing the Meaning of Everything 70 The GFDL 72 v _Contents UseMod Grows 73 Give Me More Space 75 Server Load 77 Chapter 5_COMMUNITY AT WORK (THE PIRANHA EFFECT) 81 Usenet’s Legacy 83 Lessons from Usenet 87 Growth 88 How Wikipedia Works 90 Urban Jungle 96 Signaling One Another 97 Then Came the Bots 99 Lots of Red Dots 106 Peer Production 108 Dot Map Obsession 109 Essays, Guidelines, and Policy 112 Fix It Yourself 114 What to Include 115 Gaming the Vote 121 Small Ball 122 Gdansk/Danzig Wars 122 Chapter 6_WIKIPEDIA GOES INTERNATIONAL 133 To Split or Not to Split 135 Spanish Wikipedia Fork 136 Making It Multilingual 139 Encoding Language 142 A Colossal Waste of Space 143 Japanese Wikipedia 145 German Wikipedia 147 Chinese Wikipedia 150 Serbian Wikipedia and Kazakh Wikipedia 155 African Languages 157 The Numbers Game 159 Contents_vi Chapter 7_TROLLS, VANDALS, AND SOCK PUPPETS, OH MY 169 Vandals and Sock Puppets 176 Jimbo Doesn’t Scale 179 Chapter 8_CRISIS OF COMMUNITY 183 Criticisms 188 The Seigenthaler Incident 191 The Essjay Controversy 194 Chapter 9_WIKIPEDIA MAKES WAVES 201 JewWatch 202 Microsoft Encarta’s Experiment 204 Wikitorials 205 Nature Study 208 Britannica Goes Free and Collaborative 209 Digital Universe and Citizendium 210 The Future 213 To the Afterword 217 Afterword 219 Notes 231 Index 237 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright Acknowledgments The idea for this book started in 2003, when I met Jerry Michalski for cof-fee at the top of the mountainside campus of the University of Hong Kong.

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Also, fellow Wikipedia-oriented blog-gers and editors Ben Yates, Geoff Burling, Brianna Laugher, and Danny Wool were instrumental to my understanding of the community. The book would not have been possible without extensive interviews with the principal enablers of Wikipedia: Ward Cunningham, Larry Sanger, and Jimmy Wales. Michael Davis, Tim Shell, Terry Foote. Thanks to Wikimedia Foun- Ac know ledg ments_x dation board members Florence Devouard, Angela Beesley, and Michael Snow for discussions and insights. Smart folks who provided insight on the community and wikis included Re-becca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Sunir Shah, Mitch Kapor, Jason Calacanis, Ross Mayfield, and Joseph Reagle.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
by Dariusz Jemielniak
Published 13 May 2014

London: Sage. Commons talk:Sexual content. (2013, August 17). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved August 22, 2013, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual _content/Archive_4 Commons:Deletion requests/file:Jimmy Wales by Pricasso.jpg. (2013, August 20). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved August 22, 2013, from http://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Jimmy_Wales_by_Pricasso.jpg 2 4 6    R e f e r e n c e s Community Logo/Request for consultation. (2013, October 29). Wikimedia. Retrieved November 7, 2013, from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Logo/ Request_for_consultation Conlon, M.

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Seven years, one million edits, zero dollars: Wikipedia’s flat broke superstar. Gizmodo. Retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/5903743/seven -years-one-million-edits-zero-dollars-wikipedias-flat-broke-superstar-editor Hough, A. (2012, March 11). Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia chief to advise Whitehall on policy. The Telegraph. Retrieved 2012 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipe dia/9137339/Jimmy-Wales-Wikipedia-chief-to-advise-Whitehall-on-policy.html Hsieh, H. F., & Shannon, S. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277–1288. Humphreys, M., & Watson, T. J. (2009).

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Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/ Metz, C. (2008a, March 5). Ex-Wikipedia staffer harpoons Wales over expenses. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/05/jimmy_wales _and_danny_wool/ Metz, C. (2008b, March 6). Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/06/a_model_wiki pedian/ Metz, C. (2010, May 9). Jimbo Wales exiles “porn” from Wikiland. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/wikimedia_pron_purge/ Meyer, J.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Tim Berners-Lee interview, Riptide Project, Schornstein Center, Harvard, 2013. 84. Kelly Kazek, “Wikipedia Founder, Huntsville Native Jimmy Wales, Finds Fame Really Cool,” News Courier (Athens, AL), Aug. 12, 2006. 85. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 86. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 585. 87. Marshall Poe, “The Hive,” Atlantic, Sept. 2006. 88. Jimmy Wales interview, conducted by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN, Sept. 25, 2005. 89. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” first presented in 1997, reprinted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999). 90.

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Nupedia, http://archive.is/IWDNq. 93. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 960. 94. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 95. Larry Sanger, “Origins of Wikipedia,” Sanger user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 1049. 96. Ben Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand,” Kovitz user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz. 97. Jimmy Wales, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021463.html. 98. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021460.html, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021469.html, and subsequent.

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See also Larry Sanger, “My Role in Wikipedia,” http://larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html; “User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; “History of Wikipedia” and its talk page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales edit changes to the article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jimmy_Wales&diff=next&oldid=29849184; Talk: Bomis, revisions made by Jimmy Wales, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=11139857. 99. Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand.” 100. Larry Sanger, “Let’s Make a Wiki,” Nupedia message thread, Jan. 10, 2001, http://archive.is/yovNt. 101. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 1422. 102.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Published 4 Oct 2006

When we heard about a new online encyclopedia, we expected a variation on Britannica—short articles written by experts, covering the basics on a variety of subjects. But then we found out that the entries were all user-contributed. A truly open model. Wikipedia has fascinating origins that in many ways capture the evolution of an open system. It started with Jimmy Wales, a successful options-trader-turned-Internet-entrepreneur-turnedphilanthropist. In 2000, Wales launched a free online encyclopedia to be used by children whose parents couldn't afford their own set. The project, called Nupedia, used peer review. But getting something published on Nupedia was a chore.

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As the articles were slowly being churned out, Larry Sanger, Nupedia's editor-in-chief, learned about something called a wiki. Derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick," wiki is a technology that allows Web site users to easily (and quickly) edit the content of the site themselves. Sanger pitched the idea of using wiki technology at Nupedia. Taking a cue from Bill W, Jimmy Wales agreed, and Wikipedia was born. Just like AA, the project took off. Within five years, Wikipedia was available in two hundred languages and had extensive articles— more than one million in the English-language sec- THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER tion alone—on a host of topics. And just like the AA offshoots, Wikipedia spawned Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews.

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Bill W. let go of the reins and allowed AA to become its own entity. We see the same pattern with every decentralized organization: a catalyst gets a decentralized organization going and then cedes control to the members. Craig Newmark lets the users of craigslist decide which categories to list on the site. Jimmy Wales allows the members to take over the content of Wikipedia. Brian Behlendorf contributes his computer and lets the programmers take control of the Apache server program. The creator of eMule is the ultimate catalyst. No one knows who he or she is, and he or she has certainly ceded control: the source code for the program is right there for anyone to use.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

Wikipedia is usually pretty reliable, and covers much more ground than a traditional encyclopedia ever has. It may not be perfect, but if you want detailed information on the history of the Jedi, the Pamela Anderson sex tape, or the Homebrew Computer Club, Wikipedia rules Britannica every time. But the site itself makes no guarantees about accuracy. So instead I asked Jimmy Wales, [FN: I interviewed Jimmy Wales before a panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journal- ism in 2006. While he was talking, the dean of students purposely altered a Wikipedia entry on the screen behind him. Five minutes later, the dean rechecked the site. The mistake had already been corrected.] the founder of Wikipedia, to define the wiki/open-source business model personally.

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“A wiki is a website that anyone can edit,” he says. “It's a place where people can edit and share information. It has tools where people can monitor the quality and revert to older versions if anyone has done something bad.” Jimmy Wales is to encyclopedias what David Mancuso is to DJing. Both Mancuso and Wales changed the game, because they saw new possibilities in the idea of sharing. Jimmy Wales grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, close to where NASA's team of rocket scientists were headquartered. He attended a small, private school run by his mother and grandmother. “I remember the windows shaking in my house when they were testing the rocket engines.

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I've drawn on my own experiences growing up as a pirate DJ in London, at the flash point of emerging scenes, and my professional life immersed in the mainstream music, media, and advertising industries. I've met with and interviewed legendary musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and DJs who have changed things for the rest of us, often without us knowing. From hip-hop moguls such as Russell Simmons to media mavericks such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, I'll tell the story of a world ruled by the Pirate's Dilemma with the assistance of some of our best-known change agents. But I'll also be introducing you to some extraordinary people who are telling their stories for the first time. You'll meet the nun who helped invent dance music, and learn how the ideas she promoted in a children's home in the 1940s are transforming the free market as we know it.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/acta-the-internet-freedom-of-expression-privacy/, and map of June 2012 at European Green Party, ‘Europe-wide Demonstrations against ACTA’, 8 June 2012, http://perma.cc/37XC-3Q4B 173. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, explained the reasons and the impact at the Oxford launch of freespeechdebate.com, ‘Free Speech Debate Launch with Jimmy Wales’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/free-speech-debate-launch-with-jimmy-wales/ 174. I first made this point at an ‘Open Up?’ conference organised by the Omidyar Network; see video here: http://vimeo.com/111748146. The variegated representatives of NGOs did not seem all that keen to take it up 175. see, for example, the Twitris monitoring experiment: ‘Twitris’, http://perma.cc/TP6X-CYVL 176. see Amy Qin, ‘Wenzhou Train Collision’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/case/wenzhou-train-collision/ 177. see Hirschman 1970 178. see Kirkpatrick 2010, 246–50 179. see the accounts in Markoff 2005, 47–57.

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, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/acta-the-internet-freedom-of-expression-privacy/, and Brian Pellot, ‘The Stop Online Piracy Act’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/case/the-stop-online-piracy-act/. See also ‘Free Speech Debate launch with Jimmy Wales’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/free-speech-debate-launch-with-jimmy-wales/ 36. The Harvard Library, ‘Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing’, http://perma.cc/WJD2-Y7H4 37. Janet Finch, ‘Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications’, Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, June 2012, http://perma.cc/HQ4X-6Z2E 38. see David Amsden, ‘The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz’, Rolling Stone, 15 February 2013, http://perma.cc/DZN2-GGUC.

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The American scholar Elizabeth Daley has suggested that the ‘multimedia language of the screen’ may even supplant writing as the primary medium of mass communication online, as Latin was gradually overtaken by vernacular languages such as English, French and German after the spread of printing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.12 Emojis, GIFs and shared pictures are thrusting up beside text. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told me that the most frequent and difficult controversies they had to deal with on Wikipedia related to images rather than words.13 When a Polish pole vaulter, Władysław Kozakiewicz, made a rude gesture to the mainly Russian crowd after winning a gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, that was clearly self-expression.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

Such is the opportunity of top ten Internet portals. Wikia, another wiki site, was launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Its aim is not to build an encyclopedia. Rather, its aim is to be a “platform for developing and hosting communitybased wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. . . . Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content.”34 The site is enjoying the Jimmy Wales magic. With eight hundred thousand articles, it is actually growing faster than Wikipedia was at a comparable period.35 The site is already a treasury of human culture.

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And the project was to be run by a volunteer community (though Sanger was originally a paid editor so long as Bomis’s funding continued). To assure that the volunteers felt they were part of a community, the rules had to be rules anyone could live by. Thus was born the “ignore all rules” rule, which Jimmy Wales explained to me as follows: “Ignore all rules” . . . is not an invitation to chaos. It is really more an idea of saying, “Look, whatever rules we have in Wikipedia, they ought to be, more or less, discernible by any normal, socially adept adult who thinks about what would be the ethical thing to do in this situation.

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If you’re one of the seven people in the world who have not yet used Wikipedia, you might well wonder whether this experiment in collaboration can work. The answer is that it does, and surpris- 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 157 8/12/08 1:55:27 AM REMI X 158 ingly well—surprising even for Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. As he explained to me: As people get experienced using Wikipedia and they’re reading it a lot, they begin to have this intuition that Wikipedia is pretty darn good about being neutral on very controversial subjects. And that’s a little bit surprising; I know certainly if you had asked me before Wikipedia what a big problem would be, I would have said, “Wow, I’m hoping that it’s not going to be incredibly biased on controversial subjects.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

Millions and millions of blogs. <Katherine Mangu-Ward> wikipedia and beyond: jimmy wales’s sprawling vision Originally published in Reason magazine (June 2007). KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Previously, Mangu-Ward worked as a reporter for The Weekly Standard magazine and as a researcher on The New York Times op-ed page. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, New York Timesonline, and numerous other publications. She blogs at reason.com. JIMMY WALES, the founder of Wikipedia, lives in a house fit for a grandmother. The progenitor and public face of one of the ten most popular websites in the world beds down in a one-story bungalow on a cul-de-sac near St.

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your brain is evolving right now section two - social life, personal life, school identity crisis they call me cyberboy the people’s net social currency the eight net gen norms love online we can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies virtual friendship and the new narcissism activists section three - the fate of culture nomadicity what is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software web squared: web 2.0 five years on web 2.0: the second generation of the internet has arrived and it’s worse than ... wikipedia and beyond: jimmy wales’s sprawling vision judgment: of molly’s gaze and taylor’s watch - why more is less in a ... a dream come true the end of solitude means credits index Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2011 by Mark Bauerlein All rights reserved.

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Many of the comments, says Seigenthaler, are things he would not want his nine-year-old grandson to see. Seigenthaler says he never intended to sue (surprisingly, the site has never been sued), but he worries that Wales will eventually find himself in legal trouble unless he takes more action to control what appears on the site: “I said to Jimmy Wales, ‘You’re going to offend enough members of Congress that you’re going to get more regulation.’ I don’t want more regulation of the media, but once the Congress starts regulating they never stop.” Coverage of the scandal was largely anti-Wikipedia, focusing on the system’s lack of ethical editorial oversight.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Comparisons to the Philippine-American War were inserted by some people and removed by others.17 And then, of course, there were the disgusting images repeatedly posted by vandals. Jeff Jarvis, an important voice for openness in the debate about the future of journalism, blogged that “[a] wikitorial is bound to turn into a tug-of-war” and suggested that an alternative wiki page be set up for those who disagreed with the editorial. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, responded that he had already done so, creating a “counterpoint” wiki on the Los Angeles Times site for those who differed from the newspaper’s view.18 “I’m not sure the LA Times wants me setting policy for their site,” wrote Wales, “but it is a wiki after all, and what was there made no sense.”19 No sense at all.

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Ultimately, the decision was made to list them with minimal detail: Ryan Clark is listed as “senior in Psych/Biology/English” and Emily Hilscher as “freshman in Animal Sciences.” Only six of those listed have links to their own Wikipedia articles: five professors, and the murderer.10 The debate among “inclusionists” and “deletionists” at Wikipedia continues to this day. But the choice in this instance was made easier by a prior decision made by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and its titular head. In September 2006, Wales added some language to one of the wiki pages that serves as a policy manual for Wikipedia: “What Wikipedia is not.”11 To negative descriptions such as that Wikipedia is “not a publisher of original thought,” is “not a soapbox or means of promotion,” and is “not a crystal ball,” Wales added that Wikipedia is not a newspaper “and especially not a tabloid newspaper.”12 Wales spoke and the policy was created, just like Jack Welch deciding that GE will no longer make nuclear reactors.

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Over the years, Wikipedia has developed a set of policies and processes that enable the community—the network—to make and amend decisions. When the network cannot come to agreement, other processes kick in, including an arbitration committee, and then, rarely, the ultimate arbitration committee-of-one, Jimmy Wales. But those escalations up the chain of command are considered to be failures of the preferred system of bold action by individuals, reviewed and elaborated by the community. “In the early days, I made a lot of policy decisions,” Wales told me, “but that’s not really sustainable.”15 These days, most of his decisions are either essentially coin-tosses when the community is evenly split or judge-like applications of principles that all in the community accept.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution. Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia. Nupedia was to be written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time. Wales had had a taste of collaboratively produced work while running Bomis, an internet company he’d helped found in 1996.

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Sanger understood this objection and titled an early essay on the growth of Wikipedia “Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn’t it full of nonsense?” In that article he ascribed at least part of the answer to group editing:Wikipedia’s self-correction process (Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calls it “self-healing”) is very robust. There is considerable value created by the public review process that is continually ongoing on Wikipedia—value that is very easy to underestimate, for those who have not experienced it adequately. One other fateful choice, which actually predates the founding of Wikipedia itself, was the name, or rather the “-pedia” suffix.

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In 2002 the Spanish-language version was growing quickly, but the Spanish users were concerned that Wikipedia might opt for a commercial, ad-driven model. They threatened to take all of their contributions and start an alternate version (a process known as “forking”). This was enough to convince Jimmy Wales to formally forgo any future commercial plans for Wikipedia, and to move the site from Wikipedia.com to Wikipedia.org, in keeping with its nonprofit status. Similarly, he decided to adopt the GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia’s content. As with Linus Torvalds’s adoption of a GNU license for Linux, the GFDL assured contributors that their contributions would remain freely available, making them likelier to contribute.

Citation Needed: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing
by Conor Lastowka and Josh Fruhlinger
Published 14 Oct 2011

—Conor Lastowka & Josh Fruhlinger citationneeded.tumblr.com In barely one decade, Jimmy Wales has succeeded in establishing a worldwide network of knowledge. Wikipedia, his online encyclopaedia, accessible on the Internet for free, has become a symbol of a radical change in the media economy. Moreover, it revolutionized the access to knowledge as man’s most important resource and thus contributed to democratizing knowledge. —The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, awarding the 2011 Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales I saw the Beavis and Butt-Head episode that had Hogan’s “Real American” music on there.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

By the time the encyclopedia had 50 million users daily, the foundation had a payroll of eighteen people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia, and one lawyer, and everyone else was a volunteer: the millions of contributors, the thousand or more designated “administrators,” and, always a looming presence, the founder and self-described “spiritual leader,” Jimmy Wales. Wales did not plan initially the scrappy, chaotic, dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all that Wikipedia quickly became. The would-be encyclopedia began with a roster of experts, academic credentials, verification, and peer review. But the wiki idea took over, willy-nilly. A “wiki,” from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” was a web site that could be not just viewed but edited, by anyone.

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Under Folklore: “(If you want to write about folklore, please come up with a list of folklore topics that are actually recognized as distinct, significant topics in folklore, a subject that you are not likely to know much about if all you’ve done along these lines is play Dungeons and Dragons, q.v.).”♦ Dungeons and Dragons was already well covered. Wikipedia was not looking for flotsam and jetsam but did not scorn them. Years later, in Alexandria, Jimmy Wales said: “All those people who are obsessively writing about Britney Spears or the Simpsons or Pokémon—it’s just not true that we should try to redirect them into writing about obscure concepts in physics. Wiki is not paper, and their time is not owned by us. We can’t say, ‘Why do we have these employees doing stuff that’s so useless?’

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Some are familiar with a debate carried out by the German branch about the screw on the left rear brake pad of Ulrich Fuchs’s bicycle. Fuchs, as a Wikipedia editor, proposed the question, Does this item in the universe of objects merit its own Wikipedia entry? The screw was agreed to be small but real and specifiable. “This is an object in space, and I’ve seen it,”♦ said Jimmy Wales. Indeed, an article appeared in the German Meta-Wiki (that is, the Wikipedia about Wikipedia) titled “Die Schraube an der hinteren linken Bremsbacke am Fahrrad von Ulrich Fuchs.”♦ As Wales noted, the very existence of this article was “a meta-irony.” It was written by the very people who were arguing against its suitability.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

This free, volunteer-created encyclopaedia is revered and denounced in equal measure: worshipped with fervour by its admirers as a wonder of collaborative creativity and pilloried by critics as a licence for anarchy, a platform for half-truths and a free ticket for ill-informed amateurs to gain credence they do not deserve at the expense of knowledgeable professionals. Wikipedia is the offspring of an ultimately ill-fated collaboration. In 2000, Jimmy Wales, a former options trader, employed Larry Sanger to create a free online encyclopaedia, Nupedia, which would allow anyone to submit an article to be reviewed by expert editors before being published.4 The seven-stage editorial review Sanger designed proved cumbersome and, as a result, Nupedia grew slowly.

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Wikipedia is creating a global, public platform of useful knowledge that will be freely available to any school, college or family in the world, in their own language. In Africa, even where communities do not have access to the Internet, teachers are using copies of Wikipedia downloaded onto CDs. Wikipedia may get the odd thing wrong, but that misses the bigger picture. Jimmy Wales and his community have created a new way for us to share knowledge and ideas at scale, en masse, across the world. Wikipedia’s message is: the more we share, the richer we are. As Wikipedia spreads around the world not only does it carry knowledge, it teaches habits of participation, responsibility and sharing.

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Without effective self-governance idealistic web communities, like so many communes and co-operatives before them, will collapse into an avalanche of diverse perspectives, rants, lies, gossip, falsehoods, truths and hearsay. It is also critical that the contributors do not immerse themselves so fully into the collective that they stop thinking individually. Wikipedia is not a cult. People do not have to read the collected works of Jimmy Wales and attend local cells to be educated in the Wikipedia way. We-Think emerges when diverse groups of independent individuals collaborate effectively. It is not group-think: submersion in a homogeneous, unthinking mass. Crowds and mobs are stupid as often as they are wise. It all depends on how the individual members combine participation and collaboration, diversity and shared values, independence of thought and community.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

If Wales pursued the second option, he would be expropriating for himself and his three daughters all of the wealth that was created collectively by the Wikipedian community. Now let’s assume a counterfactual scenario in which Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia had actually hired and paid content editors and fact-checkers from the beginning. Let’s assume that editors got paid a certain hourly wage, but that at the end of the day, Jimmy Wales still makes billions of dollars in profit above and beyond what he pays the Wikipedia editors, the costs necessary for maintaining the site, and other associated business expenses. Would this be considered fair?

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On its fifteenth anniversary in 2016, Wikipedia was averaging more than 18 billion page views per month.24 Wikipedia is completely free from advertising and is maintained by an army of volunteer Wikipedians who create, edit, and update the articles on the site, donating their labor to what they see as a worthy cause. Users also donate to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the infrastructural costs associated with its maintenance. Now imagine if Wikimedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, had decided in 2016 to paywall all Wikipedia pages for two cents per page viewed. In that case, Wikipedia would earn $360 million per month, or $4.3 billion per year. With the revenue earned, Wales could pursue two options: to pay all of the Wikipedia editors a sum in proportion to their contributions to the site or to keep all of the money for himself because it was his idea in the first place.

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Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince who became an anarchist, argued that humanity’s progress toward a more advanced and harmonious state of collective living, where everyone could have their basic needs met, was impeded by the state’s violent protection of private property rights. If the dispossessed Wikipedians in my counterfactual example marched to Jimmy Wales’s home with pitchforks, it would be the local, taxpayer-funded police who would protect his private property. Similarly, it is taxpayer-funded courts and judges whose dedication to upholding the law often also uphold the property interests of economic elites. Kropotkin proposed that in order to ensure the well-being of all people in society, and not just those clever (or dishonest) enough to come up with schemes to accrue to themselves the value produced by the labors of others, the state—and its monopoly of legitimate violence—must be abolished.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this. The core tenet of cyberlibertarianism—the insistence that “governments should not regulate the internet”—appears to be compatible with a wide range of political viewpoints.

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Advocates are right that it is difficult to grasp the potential uses of such networks without seeing them in action, but on the surface they seem structured around promises that appeal to and reinforce rightist political ideologies. These are almost exclusively ideologies that are broadly libertarian in character. They follow Friedrich Hayek and his disciple Jimmy Wales in believing that markets (see Mirowski 2014, 82–83), not formal political structures, are the only valid means for power to be wielded, and that “the good will out” if we impose competitive market structures over parts of society, like the issuance of money, that governments have claimed as part of their domain.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers.

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It has spawned a for-profit search service called Wikia, where users are creating even the algorithms that power it. It has commercial competitors, such as Mahalo, a human-powered search and guide created by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who pays his writers. At the 2008 Burda DLD conference in Munich, Calacanis tweaked Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, for not paying for content. Wales responded that nobody works for free. “What people do for free is have fun…. We don’t look at basketball games and people playing on the weekends and say these people are really suckers doing this for free.” People will contribute their intelligence and time if they know they can build something, have influence, gain control, help a fellow customer (more than a company), and claim ownership.

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In no time, the quality of discourse around the first wikitorial descended to the level of that on a prison yard during a riot because the Times had made a fundamental error: A wiki is a tool used for collaboration, but there was no collaborating to be done on the topic of the Times’ wikitorial—the Iraq war. I saw things going to hell and blogged that the Times would have been wiser to have created two wikis—one pro and one con—structured like an Oxford debate. The challenge to the opposing crowds would have been: Give us your best shots and let readers judge. It so happened that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, saw my post and agreed. He headed to the Times to propose “forking” the wikitorial into two, but by then it was too late. The Times put a stake through the heart of the wikitorial. Since then, when newspaper people talk about interactivity, somebody will point to the danger of the wikitorial.

Stephen Fry in America
by Stephen Fry
Published 1 Jan 2008

The last diner I try hasn’t heard of the dish either, but I notice they offer a free wi-fi internet service, so I turn to trusty old Wikipedia: Chicken Maryland or Maryland Chicken is a dish with various interpretations, depending on the country of origin. It is not necessarily known in the U.S. state of Maryland, and is not considered a native dish thereof. Well, that explains it. Curse those school-dinner ladies. But thank you, internet. Which reminds me, I am late for an appointment with Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. We are due to meet in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, Washington DC. WASHINGTON D.C. The Willard The Willard Hotel is a grand Washington institution. Martin Luther King wrote his ‘I have a dream’ speech in one of its bedrooms, in 1963. Abraham Lincoln stayed here before his inauguration and Ulysses S.

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Grant used to retreat to the hotel lobby for tea and nibbles when he was President. He is said to have grown so annoyed with those hanging around and begging him for favours that he cursed them as ‘those damned lobbyists’. Now I happen to know that this explanation of the origin of the word ‘lobbyist’ is untrue, but I arrive for a meeting with Jimmy Wales hoping to catch out his remarkable creation. * * * WASHINGTON D.C. KEY FACTS Abbreviation: DC Nickname: The District Motto: Justitia omnibus (‘Justice for all’) Well-known residents and natives: Helen Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Chita Rivera, Frank Rich, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Kate Smith, John Philip Sousa, John Foster Dulles, Al Gore, Edward Albee, Pat Buchanan, J.

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On the one hand we have a man who did a master’s degree in finance and copped a bundle in the raw capitalist world of options trading and then repeated the trick with, if not pornography, certainly a trade which no one could regard as idealistic and on the other, we have a philanthropist the third act of whose career involves the creation of something wholly new, idealistic and (allowing for the natural flaws all human creations are likely suffer from) good. I sit with laptop perched atop lap as tea is brought. ‘Did you know,’ I say, ‘that “laptop machines” is an anagram of “Apple Macintosh”?’ ‘Yes,’ says Jimmy Wales. ‘Oh. Anyway. Hope you don’t mind, but I thought we’d test your creation?’ ‘Go right ahead.’ Wikipedia leaps the first hurdle straight away. Did the terms ‘lobbyist’ and ‘to lobby’ originate here? …this is probably false, as the verb to lobby is found decades earlier and did not originally refer to Washington politics.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/kickstarter-expects-to-provide-more-funding-to-the-arts-than-nea.php 222 Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization, Marcin Jakubowski. TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html 223 Jimmy Wales interviewed by Miller, Rob ‘Roblimo’. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds, 2004. Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-responds 224 Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, Clay Shirky, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-10-16. http://replay.web.archive.org/20101016111844/http://www.herecomeseverybody.org//2008//04//looking-for-the-mouse.html 225 21 hours Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century, Anna Coote, Jane Franklin and Andrew Simms, 2010. new economics foundation.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

This more personal approach (backed up with near real-time updates on the death toll) is much more likely to hit home with passing hikers. Back in the tech world, Jimmy Wales’ “personal appeal” to raise funds for Wikipedia has a positive effect on donations. Wikipedia runs annual fund raising drives, and in 2011 the banner ads it used to accompany the fund raising were crafted through a series of A/B comparison tests to ensure maximum click through, followed by appeal pages designed to tell a story that would maximize conversion and donation amounts. Wikipedia’s A/B tests allowed them to work out that the most effective messages came from Jimmy Wales (the founder and public face of Wikipedia) and included a trustable explanation as to why the donations were needed.

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LightspeedResearch (lightspeedresearch.com). April 11, 2011. Retrieved December 2012. FTC guidelines: FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION 16 CFR Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Oct 2009. Personal messages hit home Hanakapiai Beach sign photos credit: Chris Nodder. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia appeal stats: “Fundraising 2011.” Wikimedia meta-wiki (meta.wikimedia.org). Retrieved November 2012. Facebook Sponsored Stories graphic: “Sponsored Stories in Marketplace” (PDF). Facebook for Business site (facebook.com/business). Retrieved November 2012. Gain public commitment to a decision Failing resolutions: John C.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

The web’s decentralized architecture has become intensely centralized. What was created to enrich democracy is enabling a tyranny of virulent trolls and other antidemocratic forces. “The internet is broken”: thus conclude digital pioneers such as Twitter cofounder Evan Williams and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales.5 Like Williams and Wales, more and more technologists are recognizing that today’s networked transformation is writing us out of our own story. The internet might have been described as the “people’s platform,”6 these critics say, but in fact it has a people problem. Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality and Silicon Valley’s most poignant thinker, even admits to a nostalgia for that halcyon time in the last century when technology did, indeed, put people first.

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Private Superpowers: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse In 2015, I published my third book, The Internet Is Not the Answer,15 a work that addressed the skewed distribution of power and wealth in the network age. The tragedy of today’s digital revolution, I argued, is that the ideals of digital pioneers like Norbert Wiener, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, and Jimmy Wales—democracy, equality, enlightenment, freedom, universality, transparency, accountability, above all public space—have not, so far at least, been realized. Instead of Berners-Lee’s public World Wide Web, the online revolution has been appropriated by Garton Ash’s private Silicon Valley superpowers.

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Times, December 23, 2016. 4. “‘Irresistible’ by Design: It’s No Accident You Can’t Stop Looking at the Screen,” All Tech Considered, NPR, March 13, 2017. 5. See David Streitfield, “ ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It,” New York Times, May 20, 2017. Also Anthony Cuthbertson, “Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Believes He Can Fix Fake News with Wikitribune Product,” Newsweek, April 25, 2017. 6. Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014). 7. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2013), 336. 8. Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer, 27–28. 9.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

The progressive watchdog Media Matters noted in mid-January 2012 that none of the major broadcast or cable news networks ever produced a segment on the SOPA/PIPA fight in their primetime coverage. That’s because ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN all supported the bill. Tiffiniy Cheng The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with Jimmy Wales going public about his position in support of a SOPA protest: more and more people understood that SOPA would’ve been narrowly destructive of Wikipedia, but also would have undermined other efforts to use the Internet to broaden access to information. (One of the most extraordinary artifacts from the blackout would be the stream of tweets from jilted middle and high school students whose lack of access to the site stymied schoolwork for a day and provided a fleeting glimpse of what life was like in the prehistoric 1990s.)

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Mozilla helped connect us to WordPress—a top 30 site—and we got a commitment from them that they’d participate. We heard that Craigslist—a top ten site—wanted to get involved. The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales going public about his position in support of a SOPA protest: more and more people understood that SOPA would’ve been narrowly destructive of Wikipedia, but also would have undermined other efforts to use the Internet to broaden access to information. (One of the most extraordinary artifacts from the blackout would be the stream of tweets from jilted middle and high school students whose lack of access to the site stymied schoolwork for a day and provided a fleeting glimpse of what life was like in the prehistoric 1990s.)

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On June 30th, 2010 United States law enforcement agencies seized TVShack.net and several other domains that were accused of violating United States copyright laws. In May of 2011, O’Dwyer was charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and criminal infringement of copyright, and the United States government initiated the extradition process. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales initiated a series of public petitions in support of O’Dwyer’s cause. They were signed by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, including more than eighty thousand Demand Progress members. As of late fall of 2012, just after this interview was conducted, O’Dwyer had agreed to a “deferred prosecution” agreement that will let him avoid jail time.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

As if to confirm it, a voice asks me from the shadows – “can I help you?” “Sorry, I’m in the wrong place,” I stutter, and head back to the crowd outside. * * * Chapter 2: Courage is contagious “Somehow,” Rop tells me, “the Chaos Computer Club has managed to attract new debates and it’s been able to capture the new things that are going on. Jimmy Wales was here when Wikipedia was really young. Everybody understands that this club tries to find the new issues. And the people coming to the club are those interested in thinking five years ahead. What’s going to happen next?” What indeed. It’s day two of the conference, and I’m pretty sure that the talk I’m waiting to watch is the main event this year.

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When information can be reproduced at zero marginal cost, and spread around the world in an instant, it would seem sensible to hope that more knowledge will be put in the hands of more people, and that as a consequence, those who have benefitted from an education might be that bit wiser, and those who have not might be able to remedy their situation. As Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, puts it, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Thats what were doing.” When information is distributed not by an ever-shrinking group of global corporations guarding access to a one-way pipe, but by everyone, to everyone, so that it bursts like sunlight into every nook and cranny of the intellectual landscape, it would seem sensible to hope for a level of political and corporate transparency that might purge the world’s elites of their most unsavoury elements.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

. § 512 (2000); see also Wikipedia, Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability _Limitation_Act (providing a summary of the § 512 provisions of the DMCA) (as of June 1, 2007, 09:00 GMT); supra Ch. 5, note 83 and accompanying text. 70. RU Sirius, Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google, 10 Zen Monkeys (Jan. 29, 2007), http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/29/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-rusirius-google-objectivism/. 71. Communitarianism is a social theory that rejects the devaluation of community. In asserting that family, friends, and social groups are important to the good life, communitarians focus on three themes: the importance of social context and tradition for meaning-making, the self’s social nature, and the community’s normative value.

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The History Place, The Rise of Adolf Hitler, http://wwwhistoryplace.com/worldwar2/ riseofhitler/ (last visited June 1, 2007). 18. Cats That Look Like Hitler!, http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/ (last visited June 1, 2007) (using the term “kitlers” to describe cats that look like Hitler). 19. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales underscores that Bomis, his dot-com search engine business, was not directly involved in pornography, pointing out that its content was R-rated rather than X-rated, like Maxim magazine rather than Playboy. This came to light when Wired reported that he had edited his own Wikipedia entry to make it more precise on the matter.

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See generally JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS (2004). 55. Centiare, Directory: MyWikiBiz, http://www.centiare.eom/Directory:MyWikiBiz (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 56. Id. 57. Wikipedia, User Talk:MyWikiBiz, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wild/User_talk:MyWikiBiz/Archive_1 (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 58. E-mail from Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia, to WikiEN-1 mailing list, about My WikiBiz (Aug. 9, 2006, 02:58 PM), http://www.nabble.com/MyWikiBiz-tf2080660.html 59. Wikipedia, User:Essjay/RFC, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/User:Essjay/RFC (as of June 1, 2007, 09:00 GMT). 60. See Noam Cohen, After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees, N.Y.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

But is the current structure of digital media the only structure? Not necessarily. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to sketch glimmers of alternatives. Much of what has gone wrong is the result of antisocial system design. Better designs are possible. We know this, because such a design exists. In March 2000 a couple of entrepreneurs named Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a radical new kind of encyclopedia, one which would harness digital technology to put knowledge of practically everything at practically everyone’s fingertips. The visionary experiment flopped. The articles in Nupedia, as it was called, were written, edited, and peer-reviewed by experts and professionals, as with any conventional encyclopedia, except that the experts and professionals were asked to work for free.

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“Wikipedia succeeded even in the face of dire predictions that a knowledge source based on volunteers would be rife with errors and held hostage to those with an agenda,” writes the philosopher Lee McIntyre.25 “What actually happened, however, is that the many eyes looking at each entry soon sniffed out error and bias, resulting in a knowledge source that is astonishingly reliable, for what it is.” How? First, Wikipedia built a community, not just a platform. “Wikipedia isn’t a technological innovation at all; it’s a social innovation,” its co-founder and guiding spirit, Jimmy Wales, has written. “We discovered the basic idea of how to organize a community.” He continued: “We’re actually talking about very old-fashioned types of references. Good writing. Neutrality. Reliable sources. Verifiability. We’re talking about people’s behavior in the community. We’re not talking about some kind of magic process.

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PEN America, Losing the News: The Decimation of Local Journalism and the Search for Solutions, November 20, 2019. 24. Richard Cooke, “Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet,” Wired, February 17, 2020. 25. Lee McIntyre, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age (Routledge, 2015), p. 126. 26. Jimmy Wales, foreword to Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia (Hyperion, 2009), p. xvii. 27. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, p. 111. 28. Alex Pasternack, “Twitter Wants Your Help Fighting Falsehoods. It’s Risky, but It Just Might Work,” Fast Company, January 28, 2021. 29.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

What this means in terms of designing systems is that even if some rules or norms must be introduced or set from above, one should still try to build in as many mechanisms for self-governance, and offer as many opportunities for people to participate in reviewing and revising these rules, as possible. Circling back to Wikipedia, we see that this is exactly what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Wales’s then employee and early cofounder) did; they set an initial policy but allowed people to discuss, debate, reinterpret, and enforce it on their own. In the 1990s, there was a surge of interest among legal scholars such as Larry Lessig and Dan Kahan in the question of just how norms can become so ingrained in a culture that people will voluntarily follow them without official regulation or enforcement.

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Much more radical than the fact that it is free to consumers is the fact that Wikipedia, unlike television and radio, doesn’t pay a penny for its content; its content is produced by volunteers who write and edit it without wanting or seeking compensation, simply for the pleasure of writing, for the camaraderie of the community of Wikipedians. In short, for all the reasons we have been exploring in this book. The fruits of their collective authorship efforts is a process, not a product. A collaboration that incrementally and imperfectly improves itself over time. In February 2001, when Jimmy Wales first came up with this crazy idea for a web platform that relied entirely on volunteer contributions, anyone who predicted that the result would one day equal or surpass the hallowed Britannica would have been laughed out of the room. Critics claim that Wikipedia is less accurate and authoritative than Britannica and other published encyclopedias.

The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles
by Astronaut Ron Garan and Muhammad Yunus
Published 2 Feb 2015

“If you look at some of the most successful initiatives in the last twenty-five to thirty years,” Cole said, “historically they are open systems.” She pointed out that the Internet began as a free, open network that people could build on, and that applications such as Wikipedia probably owe their success to their open source nature. “I think the success of cooperative models has been shown to be right.” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes that the gift economy is something that we’re just starting to understand. He pointed to the numerous websites and businesses that are built upon open source software and how this is transforming the world. “And we’ve just begun to scratch the surface, because of the tools we have today to bring people together.

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Also, a big thanks to retired astronaut General Kevin Chilton for the expert lesson in geopolitics. Thanks to everyone who has added their voice to this book, including Al Holland, John McBrine, Bill Gerstenmaier, George Abbey, Mike O’Brien, Jeff Manber, Joan Johnson-Freese, Samantha Snabes, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, Marcelo Aliaga, Gopi Kallayil, Vic Gundotra, Jimmy Wales, Luis von Ahn, Willow Brugh, Wasfia Nazreen, Elena Maroko, Lily Cole, Evan Thomas, Daria Musk, Nick Skytland, Chris Gerty, Ali Llewellyn, Patrick Svenburg, Stu Gill, Rebecca Wright, Emmanuel Jal, Elizabeth Thompson, Amanda Lindhout, and Dan Irwin. Thanks to everyone who has provided moral support through my writing journey, including Chris and Nicole Stott, Ness Knight, Dom Dauster, Hans Reitz, Leland Melvin, Amy Moore-Benson, Maraia Hoffman, and Clay Morgan.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr. Regina Benjamin, Frank Perez, Al Gore, Zack Exley and Judith Freeman, Ben Goldhirsh, Adam Grant, David Javerbaum, Dr. Jon Kingsdale, Jane Jacobs, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Jorge Montalvo, Judge Jonathan Lippman, Justin Hall, Molla S. Donaldson, Karl D. Yordy, Kathleen N. Lohr, and Neal A. Vanselow, Peter Block INTRODUCTION I am 39 years old. As an American male, my life expectancy is 76. I’m already in the second half of my life, though I’m often still referred to as a “young leader.”

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And as the dot-com sector regained its footing after the crash, we saw whole industries transformed, as well as the way most Americans communicated and engaged in society. So many of the pioneers in social entrepreneurship, social media, and sustainability are from Generation X and were in some way engaged with the dot-com boom. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger of Wikipedia, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, and Chris Anderson of Wired and now 3DRobotics are just a few examples. The core leadership of the Purpose Economy today is from this often forgotten generation, who in many ways produced the architects and catalysts of the new economy. 4.

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor
by Glyn Moody
Published 26 Sep 2022

uri=CELEX%3A32000L0031&amp;from=en 460 https://web.archive.org/web/20220603094009/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-11/cp110126en.pdf 461 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618190328/http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/08/09/youtube-and-cyando-injunctions-against-intermediaries-and-general-monitoring-obligations-any-movement/ 462 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701134156/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation 463 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618190351/https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ 464 https://web.archive.org/web/20180713064910/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/20/eu-votes-for-copyright-law-that-would-make-internet-a-tool-for-control 465 https://web.archive.org/web/20220402115757/https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/copyright-email-to-MEPs.docx 466 https://web.archive.org/web/20220402115757/https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/copyright-email-to-MEPs.docx 467 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203153/https://copybuzz.com/copyright/meps-email-says-article-13-will-not-filter-the-internet-juri-meps-tweet-says-it-will/ 468 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701134919/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Music_Companies_Association 469 https://web.archive.org/web/20180704010146/http://impalamusic.org/content/copyright-say-no-scaremongering-and-yes-creators-getting-paid 470 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701135001/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kaye_%28academic%29 471 https://web.archive.org/web/20220428083157/https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Opinion/Legislation/OL-OTH-41-2018.pdf 472 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203237/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf 473 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203338/https://internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf 474 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203358/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee 475 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203414/https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ 476 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203428/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales 477 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620000819/https://twitter.com/Jimmy_wales 478 https://web.archive.org/web/20180708003333/https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf 479 https://web.archive.org/web/20180708003333/https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf 480 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618213154/https://felixreda.eu/2018/09/ep-endorses-upload-filters/ 481 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618213222/https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180906IPR12103/parliament-adopts-its-position-on-digital-copyright-rules 482 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214015/https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/legacy-copyright-industries-lobbying-hard-eu-copyright-directive-while-pretending-that-only-google-is-lobbying/ 483 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214015/https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/legacy-copyright-industries-lobbying-hard-eu-copyright-directive-while-pretending-that-only-google-is-lobbying/ 484 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214041/https://corporateeurope.org/en/2018/12/copyright-directive-how-competing-big-business-lobbies-drowned-out-critical-voices 485 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214059/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Stihler 486 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214120/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons 487 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704134108/https://walledculture.org/interview-catherine-stihler-creative-commons-the-eu-copyright-directive-and-civil-societys-role/ 488 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214136/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting 489 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214155/https://felixreda.eu/2018/11/eu-council-upload-filters/ 490 https://web.archive.org/web/20190320092740/https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/copyright-hits_wall/ 491 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214225/https://www.techdirt.com/2019/03/25/new-report-germany-caved-to-france-copyright-deal-russian-gas/ 492 https://web.archive.org/web/20190320092739/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/german-government-abandons-small-businesses-worst-parts-eu-copyright-directive 493 https://web.archive.org/web/20190321012132/https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet 494 https://web.archive.org/web/20190220103450/https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/diginomics/tausende-menschen-demonstrieren-gegen-urheberrechtsreform-16045816.html 495 https://web.archive.org/web/20190321104438/https://www.dw.com/en/thousands-in-berlin-protest-eus-online-copyright-plans/a-47753399 496 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620092750/https://twitter.com/AralePyon/status/1096714251153092609 497 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701135233/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Schulze 498 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618224045/https://www.techdirt.com/2019/02/19/german-politician-thinks-gmail-constituent-messages-are-all-faked-google/ 499 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618224104/https://edri.org/our-work/join-the-ultimate-action-week-against-article-13/ 500 https://web.archive.org/web/20190216094123/https://medium.com/@EuropeanCommission/the-copyright-directive-how-the-mob-was-told-to-save-the-dragon-and-slay-the-knight-b35876008f16 501 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618224855/https://europeancommission.medium.com/the-copyright-directive-how-the-mob-was-told-to-save-the-dragon-and-slay-the-knight-b35876008f16 502 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618224933/https://www.techdirt.com/2019/03/01/why-is-eu-parliament-pushing-fake-propaganda-hollywood/ 503 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618225007/http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/02/germanys-federal-data-protection.html 504 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704114049/https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2019/03/eu-must-align-copyright-reform-international-human-rights-standards-says-expert 505 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704114049/https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2019/03/eu-must-align-copyright-reform-international-human-rights-standards-says-expert 506 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618225049/https://nextcloud.com/blog/130-eu-businesses-sign-open-letter-against-copyright-directive-art-11-13/ 507 https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

It is even probable than those comprising this assembly will on many matters combine great ignorance with many prejudices. . . . It follows that the more numerous the assembly, the more it will be exposed to the risk of making false decisions. —Condorcet, Selected Writings Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing. —Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia Contents / Introduction Dreams and Nightmares 3 Chapter 1 The (Occasional) Power of Numbers 21 Chapter 2 The Surprising Failures of Deliberating Groups 45 Chapter 3 Four Big Problems 75 Chapter 4 Money, Prices, and Prediction Markets 103 Chapter 5 Many Working Minds: Wikis, Open Source Software, and Blogs 147 Chapter 6 Implications and Reforms 197 Conclusion Realizing Promises 217 Appendix Prediction Markets 227 Notes 231 Index 259 !"

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Such vandals can eventually be blocked by Wikipedia’s technology (allowing IP blocking or username blocking). Wikipedia works because the vandals are hopelessly outnumbered by those who want to make the project work. Why Wikis Work (or Not) / It is tempting and helpful to explain the success of Wikipedia through Hayek’s distinctive lens. Jimmy Wales himself has drawn the connection, saying, “Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. Possibly one can understand Wikipedia 156 / Infotopia without understanding Hayek. . . . But one can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”9 Certainly, Wikipedia entries often aggregate the information held by numerous people in a way that connects closely to Hayek’s claims about the price system.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

‘There are plenty of people who have given up, which is too bad. That’s my job, to try to convince people that giving up isn’t that great a thing.’ IF CINDY COHN represents a school of activism which operates by tackling the ills of the internet head-on, through activism and through litigation, Jimmy Wales exemplifies another kind of resistance – of building something that works very differently. Wales is one of the founders of Wikipedia, the fifth-most visited site on the internet,21 whose English-language version gets more than 8.2 billion page views per month.22 In English alone, Wikipedia’s encyclopedia now comprises more than 5.8 million articles, edited more than 880 million times, by more than 35 million registered users.23 It has reached this scale without raising any money from venture capital, without showing any adverts, and without making any money – it is a registered non-profit, it has encyclopedias in 301 different languages, and gets by on less than $100 million a year, which it raises through donations – for which it advertises for just a few weeks every few months.24 Wales, then, is a dotcom founder with many similarities to the others – a site operating on a global scale, with huge audience and numbers – and many differences.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This section can only open thanking all the people who gave generously of their time for interviews, whether on or off the record. That includes Albert Wenger, Ben Cos, Brian O’Kelley, Cindy Cohn, Emily Bell, Frank Eliason, Göran Marby, Jeff Greene, Jeff Jarvis – special thanks to him for his generosity with his contacts book – Jimmy Wales, John Borthwick, Steve Crocker, everyone at Symantec, Tom Daly, Tom Wheeler and Wael Ghonim. Bonus thanks to Brad White at ICANN for all his help, and Julia Powles for her wisdom. From my perspective – and hopefully from theirs – this book’s been a joy from a publishing side, thanks to great support from my agent Tracy Bohan at Wylie, and a great editing team at Bloomsbury in the shape of Alexis Kirschbaum, Jasmine Horsey, Katherine Fry and Lauren Whybrow.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Founded in 2001, its business model and editorial strategy seem like nineties cyberspace holdovers, inheriting that generation’s optimism along with its blind spots. It carries the torch of John Perry Barlow’s principles in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and in addition to what it is not, Wikipedia isn’t anticapitalist. The founder, Jimmy Wales, like many cyber-utopians, was a libertarian (albeit his Twitter feed now suggests that, like a lot of libertarians in the Clinton years, he’s since moved to the left). In the nineties, he organized a forum on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, and he was interested in Austrian economics. His online encyclopedia experiment is libertarian without corruption, libertarianism as libertarians imagine liberty—an endeavor that is impossible to sustain as anything other than a thought experiment, except for this rare exception in internetland, and a massively imperfect one at that.

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As Audrey Watters has remarked about the place where Barlow wrote his groundbreaking manifesto—Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum—“that’s neither a site nor an institution I’ve ever really associated with utopia” (“Invisible Labor and Digital Utopias,” Hack Education, May 4, 2018). An early profile of Wikipedia in The Atlantic, written by Marshall Poe, provided context (“The Hive,” September 1, 2006). “Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire,” according to a story by Amy Chozick in The New York Times (June 27, 2013). On her personal website, Sue Gardner’s blog post “Why Wikimedia’s New Revenue Strategy Makes Me Happy” explains the revenue model (July 25, 2010). According to The Boy Kings, Mark Zuckerberg first imagined building a Wikipedia for all people when he was at Harvard; except for-profit, probably, and—just as crucially—without Wikipedia’s editing and culling, for notability or otherwise (88).

One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 12 Feb 2012

Its aim must be to map the process by which we, #outsiders, defeat that enemy. Together. As one people, but not one network. As a federation, with radical differences among us, committed nonetheless to the one end we all must achieve: a government that we could have reason to trust. Our age has given us many different leaders, from Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) to Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) to Meckler and Martin (Tea Party Patriots). They reflect a diversity of networks, working on every important issue. They sometimes represent power enough to make the insiders listen. Let us learn how this diversity can act now as one network, as an inter-network, as a cooperating crowd, embracing the open-source principles that define our age, and using them to restore this Republic.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Although the Linux kernel benefited from the contributions of thousands of programmers and had the outside appearance of democratic engagement, for many years it was Torvalds alone who signed off on the formal “commits” to the code. Linux was nominally open, but in its formative stages it was tightly controlled. In the early stages of Wikipedia’s development, the debate over the right amount of founder control split up co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Although Sanger couldn’t afford to continue working without funding, he and Wales also disagreed about how to handle the real-world challenges that arise when anyone, regardless of expertise, can edit anything; Sanger wanted to be more restrictive and limit the ability to author articles to people formally vetted as authorities.

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“In economics,” according to the website Investopedia, “the free rider problem refers to a situation where some individuals in a population either consume more than their fair share of a common resource, or pay less than their fair share of the cost of a common resource.”6 But Nicholas Gruen, an economist who has worked closely with the Australian federal government—most recently on two task forces on innovation and Government 2.0—figured out that for this new class of companies, free rider opportunities were much larger than the cost of free rider problems. Wikipedia succeeded because Jimmy Wales believed that more people would contribute valuable articles to Wikipedia than would vandalize them. This is the Peers Inc paradigm at work: Opening assets up delivers more value and more innovation than keeping them under lockdown. New ways to address bad actors—reputation and trust systems—do change behavior and minimize negative contributions, as they did for eBay sellers, Airbnb hosts, and Uber drivers, who become more conscientious and professional in response to the potential for bad ratings.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Under the bill, ISPs would have to route data via a “black box” that will separate “content” from “header data” and also have the capability to decrypt encrypted communications (such as transmissions over encrypted SSL – Secure Sockets Layer – channels). The bill has been widely criticized across the private sector, civil society, and inside the government itself. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales threatened to encrypt all communications to the U.K., and stated: “It is not the sort of thing I’d expect from a Western democracy. It is the kind of thing I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese.” Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP, said: “The use of data mining and black boxes to monitor everyone’s phone, email and web-based communications is a sobering thought that would give Britain the most intrusive surveillance regime in the West.”

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Weber, “The Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 18, no.1 (2003). 10 would require ISPs and other telecommunication companies to store: The proposed Communications Data Bill has been profiled in “UK’s Data Communication Bill Faces Tough Criticism,” BBC, June 14, 2012, http​://www.​bbc.com​/news/t​echnolo​gy​-1843​9226; “Jimmy Wales, Tim Berners-Lee Slam UK’s Internet Snooping Plans,” ZDNet, September 6, 2012, http:/​/www.z​dnet.​com​/uk​/jimm​y-wales-timb​erne​rs-lee-slam-uks-​inter​net-snoo​ping-plan​s-70000​03829; “UK’s Web Monitoring Draft Bill Revealed: What You Need to Know,” ZDNet, June 14, 2012, http​://www.zdnet.com/​blog/lon​don/uks-we​b-monito​ring-draf​t-bill-reve​aled-what-you-n​eed-to-know​/5183; and Mark Townsend, “Security Services to Get More Access to Monitor Emails and Social Media,” Guardian, July 28, 2012, h​ttp://www.guar​dian.co.​uk/techn​ology/2012​/jul/28/​isecurity-ser​vices-emails-socia​l-media. 11 From documents released under federal access to information laws: See Christopher Parsons, “Canadian Social Media Surveillance: Today and Tomorrow,” Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets, May 28, 2012, http://www.c​hristo​pher-par​sons.c​om/blog​/tech​nology​/canad​ian-social-media-surve​illan​ce-today-and-tom​orrow/. 8: MEET KOOBFACE: A CYBER CRIME SNAPSHOT 1 Meet Koobface: A Cyber Crime Snapshot: Between April and November 2010, the Information Warfare Monitor, led by Nart Villeneuve, conducted an investigation into the operations and monetization strategies of the Koobface botnet.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

And in the unusual cases where this mostly amicable process doesn’t lead to a decision everyone accepts, some rarely used higher-level dispute resolution processes are also available. Wikipedia’s software also maintains records of what each contributor has done, an important part of building and recognizing reputations in this community. And, in some cases, Wikipedia bots make some of the simple editorial decisions automatically. Even though hardly anyone (including Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder) expected this online consensus process to really work, the combination of Wikipedia’s software and culture has somehow allowed it to work remarkably well.3 Could this process work in a face-to-face environment with large numbers of editors? I suspect not. Imagine, for instance, a football stadium with 70,000 people in it.

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http://cci.mit.edu/superminds Praise for Superminds “Superminds is the first book I have seen that deeply explores the power of information technology to enable truly new forms of human organization. I really love the premise and thoughtfulness of the book, and I highly recommend it if you want to understand and make sense of what we are likely to see in the next few years!” —Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder “From the father of collective intelligence, a refreshingly realistic view of how computers will supercharge collective intelligence and how these superminds can help us tackle the most complex problems that face the world today.” —Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab “Thomas Malone was a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in thinking about the future of work.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

Perhaps we could redesign curricula around discovery and experiment; move away from ticking boxes, and towards imagination and the free play of ideas. Look at the successes of Finnish education, now an exemplar, and its principles based on teaching things like transversal thinking. Schools could aim to incorporate more insights from Montessori Schools, which educated entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jimmy Wales.38 Their success hints at the potential in self- and peer-directed learning. In India a research programme showed how effectively school children learned on their own, unaided, when using and programming a computer. But the power of peer learning applies at university level as well. The Nobel laureate Carl Weiman was shocked to find that after seventeen years of education in which they had excelled, his graduate students were still clueless about how to run a research project.39 What happens next?

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For a detailed review of the funding of people and not projects see Ricón (2020a). 31 For example Matt Clifford also powerfully made this point, and the organisation he co-founded, Entrepreneur First, is an excellent example in the startup world. 32 Szell, Ma and Sinatra (2018) 33 See for example Mulgan (2018), p. 55 34 Caplan (2018) 35 Ridley (2016), p. 180 36 Cummings (2013) 37 Biasi and Ma (2020). The authors also document the deleterious impact of this gap on those from poorer backgrounds. 38 Jimmy Wales did not attend a Montessori school, but his education was heavily influenced by their principles. 39 Weiman (2017) 40 Ricón (2019) 41 Ibid. 42 Merton (1996) 43 Beck (1992) 44 See for example Armstrong (2020) 45 See for example Bloom, Van Reenen and Williams (2019) or Hvide and Jones (2018).

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

When Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he carved on the hearts of generations of conservative lawmakers a maxim that is the basis of Hayek’s economics. In Hubbard’s class at Columbia, the students discussed Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that central planning can never replace market forces, which reflect the sum total of the “decentralized knowledge” available to a society. Jimmy Wales has said that he read Hayek’s article as an undergraduate and it was central to his decision to create Wikipedia. Hubbard observed that, in the face of this pandemic, Keynes would have proposed vigorous government intervention and deficit spending. He believed that the creation of jobs, even digging holes and filling them in again, is fundamental to getting people back into the economic system, putting money in their pockets, awakening demand, and lifting the “animal spirits” of businesspeople to open their doors and start hiring.

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“We are marshaling”: trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/​briefings-statements/​remarks-president-trump-address-nation/ “When Keynes saw”: R. Glenn Hubbard, “Ideas Are Shaping Responses to the Pandemic and a Business Path Forward,” lecture in the course “Highlights of Modern Political Economy,” Columbia Business School, Aug. 17, 2020. This section also relies on interviews with Hubbard. Jimmy Wales: Katherine Mangu-Warad, “Wikipedia and Beyond,” Reason, June 2007. “We went from”: Interview with Chris Coons. “If we told Alaska”: Kevin Hassett’s remarks come from a recording of Glenn Hubbard’s class, “Ideas Are Shaping Responses to the Pandemic and a Business Path Forward,” lecture in the course “Highlights of Modern Political Economy,” Columbia Business School, Aug. 17, 2020. 9.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Some hints about where to look for other sources of credibility are given by Wikipedia, by far the most well-known case of a peer labour project outside the FOSS scene. Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopaedia edited by the readers. It began with a vision by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to create Nupedia, a freely accessible encyclopaedia on the Internet. They set out with a traditional approach, employing editors and demanding educational qualifications from writers. The project had only gathered a few hundred articles when it ran out of funding. The articles were published on a separate website named Wikipedia, and, since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had abandoned their aspirations for credibility, they invited visitors to edit the texts. Volunteers joined and the content grew exponentially.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

This is according to no less an authority than Lawrence Sanger, the cofounder (with Jimmy Wales) of Wikipedia! The problem, he notes, is that anyone—anyone—can edit a Wikipedia article, regardless of their knowledge or training. There is no central authority of credentialed experts who review the articles to ensure that they are factual or that they are being edited by someone with knowledge on the topic. As a reader of Wikipedia, you have no way to know whether you’re reading something accurate or not. And this isn’t an unwitting side effect; it was part of Wikipedia’s very design. Jimmy Wales has stated that experts should be accorded no more respect than novices, that there should be “no elite, and no hierarchy” of them to get in the way of newcomers who want to participate in Wikipedia.

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Retrieved from http://www.kuro5hin.org To Wikipedia’s credit, it contains an article titled “Criticism of Wikipedia,” although that piece is, perhaps understandably, biased toward Wikipedia. Criticism of Wikipedia. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has stated that experts User: Jimbo Wales. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 30, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales “Why would an expert bother contributing . . .” Dharma. (December 30, 2004). Comment on Sanger, L. (2004, December 31). Why Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism [Online forum comment].

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

This approach works well, by and large, and has allowed the crowd to grow enormously without being sabotaged by its worst members. Not all versions of the crowd are equally successful at this gentle policing. The year 2016 saw challenges to this approach in the form of “fake news” on Facebook and other social media, and large amounts of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other despicable vitriol on Twitter. Jimmy Wales has argued that Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia that he cofounded, is relatively immune to fake news in part because of its governance methods. By adopting the right principles, norms, institutions, and technologies, the crowd can do a great deal to maintain quality standards, though there may be other trade-offs, like how easily or quickly participants can post new items, how quickly they are shared, who gets to see them, and, yes, how much profit can be earned from the content.

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Some Is Not Enough: The Story of a Nearly Failed Experiment What happens when a collaborative online effort follows only some of these principles? How successful will it be? A lot of research would be needed to answer this question definitively, of course, but a fascinating and illuminating experiment occurred in the early years of the web when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started an effort to build a free and open, universally accessible online encyclopedia. Encyclopedias have a long history—one of the first was Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, published in the first century CE—and lofty goals. Ephraim Chambers said that his 1728 Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences contained the “sum of all human knowledge.”# They tended to be very expensive, however, and thus reserved for society’s elites.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
by Ben Goldacre
Published 22 Oct 2014

For example, there was a long-standing debate about which of two competing models of ‘microfinance’ schemes was best at getting people out of poverty in India, whilst ensuring that the money was paid back, so it could be re-used in other villages: a randomised trial compared the two models, and established which was best. At the top of the page at Wikipedia, when it is having a funding drive, you can see the smiling face of Jimmy Wales, the founder, on a fundraising advert. He’s a fairly shy person, and didn’t want his face to be on these banners. But Wikipedia ran a randomised trial, assigning visitors to different adverts: some saw an advert with a child from the developing world (‘She could have access to all of human knowledge if you donate …’); some saw an attractive young intern; some saw Jimmy Wales. The adverts with Wales got more clicks and more donations than the rest, so they were used universally. It’s easy to imagine that there are ways around the inconvenience of randomly assigning people, or schools, to one intervention or another: surely, you might think, we could just look at the people who are already getting one intervention, or another, and simply monitor their outcomes to find out which is the best.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

But unlike Google and others, when Wikipedia came to its own fork in the road, gaining enough traffic to rival or exceed that of nearly any other site, save the search engines, it chose the other path; deciding to remain free of advertising, it effectively forsook billions in potential revenue. The founder, Jimmy Wales, officially explained the decision as follows: “I think of Wikipedia as I do a library or a school—and commercial advertising is not right in that space….Maximizing revenue is not our goal.”8 Subscribing to the same basic philosophy as the bloggers and Wikipedia was a new company named YouTube, which launched in 2005; based on user-generated video along with a fair number of clips borrowed from other sources, its purpose was to facilitate the sharing of such content.

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David Weinberger, “What Blogging Was,” Joho the Blog, January 8, 2014, http://www.hyperorg.com/​blogger/​2014/​01/​08/​what-blogging-was/. 7. Erin Venema developed the word “escribitionist” in 1999 to distinguish between web journal authors and those who kept their diaries on paper. See www.escribitionist.org, a webpage containing a copy of the email in which Venema first used the word. 8. Jimmy Wales, February 7, 2011, answer to “Why does Wikipedia ask for donations rather than having ads?,” Quora, https://www.quora.com/​Why-does-Wikipedia-ask-for-donations-rather-than-having-ads. 9. Virginia Heffernan, The Medium: The Way We Watch Now (blog), http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com//. 10. See Allan J.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

Ease of amendment combined with preservation of previous versions (the key qualities of wikis in general) enable both highly granular levels of participation and an effective selfdefense mechanism against destructive users who defect from the goal. At the core of the project lies a group who actively self-identify themselves as wikipedians, and dedicate time to developing and promoting community norms especially around the arbitration of conflicts. Jimmy Wales, the project’s founder, remains the titular head of wikipedia, and although there have been some conflicts between him and the community, he has in general conceded authority, but the tension remains without conclusive resolution. (8) FLOSSmanuals, the organization that facilitated the writing of this text you are reading, was originally established to produce documentation for free so ware projects, a historically weak point of the FS community.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

Twenty years ago I could easily have found myself sitting around doing nothing, when the question might suddenly come to me: “What is a quasar, anyway?” It is almost certain that at that time I would have quickly abandoned my curiosity, hoping perhaps that I might some day happen upon an answer, but not being quite interested enough, typically, to seek one out. Today it is second nature for me to immediately turn to Jimmy Wales’s infinite encyclopedia. The consequences of this reflexive habit for my general knowledge of the world are profound. I am convinced that I know vastly more than I would have had this resource not been available to me. In this respect, Wikipedia is the full realization of the dream of the authors of the Encyclopédie in the late eighteenth century, who were themselves building upon projects, dating back to the Renaissance, for the schematization and orderly presentation of all of the branches of human knowledge.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Published 5 Oct 2015

Bootstrap off an existing audience. Find initial evangelists by sharing your mission with complementary communities online and at offline events. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, we want to thank everyone who shared their traction stories and tips with us. Without you this book would not be possible: Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of reddit Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz Noah Kagan, Founder of AppSumo Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Bingo Card Creator Sam Yagan, Cofounder of OkCupid Andrew Chen, Investor in 500 Startups Dharmesh Shah, Founder of HubSpot Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon Colin Nederkoorn, CEO of Customer.io Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Capital Paul English, CEO of Kayak Rob Walling, Founder of MicroConf Brian Riley, Cofounder of SureStop Steve Welch, Cofounder of DreamIt Jason Kincaid, Blogger at TechCrunch Nikhil Sethi, Founder of Adaptly Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce Alex Pachikov, Evernote Founding Team David Skok, Partner at Matrix Ashish Kundra, CEO of myZamana David Hauser, Founder of Grasshopper Matt Monahan, CEO of Inflection Jeff Atwood, Cofounder of Discourse Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity Chris McCann, Founder of Startup Digest Ryan Holiday, Exec at American Apparel Todd Vollmer, Enterprise Sales Veteran Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy Sean Murphy, Founder of SKMurphy Satish Dharmaraj, Partner at Redpoint Ventures Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator Steve Barsh, CEO of PackLate Michael Bodekaer, Cofounder of Smartlaunch Each of you played a critical role in shaping this book and making it a useful resource.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

At the dawn of the digital age, Microsoft had a brilliant idea: it would create a digital encyclopaedia, partly on CD-ROM, partly online, that would exploit the full potential of multimedia. Experts around the globe were enlisted; IT specialists wrote programs; a small fortune was invested in the project; and high hopes were entertained of its success. Things worked out differently, and in 2008 the Encarta project died a death. Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and a handful of volunteers had started up Wikipedia. The rest is history. All over the world, enthusiastic Wikipedians (‘And proud to be one’) work without pay to produce entries whose quality has become extremely high. These days, scientists and academics are as proud as Punch when their work is cited on Wikipedia.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it’s entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades. An Ideology of Violation The internet has come to be saturated with an ideology of violation. For instance, when some of the more charismatic figures in the online world, including Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, and Tim O’Reilly, the coiner of the term “web 2.0,” proposed a voluntary code of conduct in the wake of the bullying of Kathy Sierra, there was a widespread outcry, and the proposals went nowhere. The ideology of violation does not radiate from the lowest depths of trolldom, but from the highest heights of academia.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

At his apartment we made a survey of military contracting businesses, prepping a new business plan for DEFCAD. It was going to be a search engine built as enterprise software and sold to military bases. “Like it or not, we’re talking about Department of Defense here,” Varol said, adding “Dee-oh-Dee. “Otherwise,” he went on, “the best you can be is like the Jimmy Wales of the gun movement,” referring to the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia. “Which is something,” Varol continued. “But come on! That’s not what you’re looking for.” At sometime past nine that night we left his place and walked across a wide intersection to a restaurant in a shopping center.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

“What Game Are You Playing?” Of course, not all engineers and geeks have the views about democracy and freedom that Peter Thiel does—he’s surely an outlier. Craig Newmark, the founder of the free Web site craigslist, spends most of his time arguing for “geek values” that include service and public-spiritedness. Jimmy Wales and the editors at Wikipedia work to make human knowledge free to everyone. The filtering goliaths make huge contributions here as well: The democratic ideal of an enlightened, capable citizenry is well served by the broader set of relationships Facebook allows me to manage and the mountains of formerly hard-to-access research papers and other public information that Google has freed.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

Heilman continued to fight for his own version of the truth, one aligned with the traditional scientific method, and ended up looking for a dodge around Wikipedia’s voting system. Although the vast majority of Wikipedia disputes are settled by popular vote, there is one group that could be called a higher authority: the Arbitration Committee. Two years after founding the Web site, Jimmy Wales invented the committee—he chose a dozen people (there are now fifteen)—to settle intractable disputes among editors. Heilman brought his Transcendental Meditation case before this court of last resort on two occasions. To no effect. “The Arbitration Committee,” explains Heilman, “only judges behavioral issues, not factual issues.”

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. These are serious people. And they wield untold influence. Politicians respond to this influence. It is easy for a politician to attack people on benefits; it is very risky for them to attack wealthy tax-avoiders. It is easy to propose cuts in public spending; it requires enormous courage to propose an increase.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

We are still in the very early days of VRM, but it poses interesting new possibilities for the online social graph and identity management across different web sites and applications. From the Library of Kerri Ross This page intentionally left blank From the Library of Kerri Ross 2 “We help the Internet not suck.” —Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia The Evolution of Digital Media ach digital revolution enables new forms of media. Just look, for example, at how encyclopedias have evolved. In two decades, we have gone from heavy, leather-bound World Book volumes, to the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM, to online, user-generated Wikipedia, to Aardvark.im, a real-time messaging service that connects people seeking information with knowledgeable experts in their network.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

The list of examples of brands and industries that got whipped out by side-winding newbies is long, and it’s only going to get longer. Do you think the market-leader incumbents saw these competitors coming? Wikipedia. It’s clear that Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book would not have seen this coming. No-one did. Not even the founder, Jimmy Wales, whose first email message to friends upon launching Wikipedia asking them to make a wiki entry said, ‘Humour me and please write an entry about something you have some expertise in’. Not only did they do it, it turns out the crowd knows more than the experts. Wikipedia is not only more up to date, but more accurate than encyclopedias.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

Nearly every single one of the most transformational new approaches to coordinating human interaction over the last ten years could not have happened without the Internet: the political organizing and fund-raising of MoveOn, blogs, and Obama for America, just to name a few. Wikipedia provides a genuinely new form of authority during a time when traditional sources of authority have suffered a historic decline in trust. This is no small accomplishment. In his eccentricity and slightly quixotic zeal, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is something of a Francis Townsend for this age. The crucial difference being that while Townsend hoped to have the government implement his vision, Ayn Rand devotee Wales was able to implement his “plan” without having to convince a single legislator of its efficacy. We can imagine and hope that organic, Internet-facilitated cooperation can create new institutions that disrupt and break the monopolies of the old ones.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

If you haven’t tried to contribute to Wikipedia yet, you should! I emphasize Wikipedia in this context because I interpret it broadly as a model for how we might reconstitute expertise and cultural authority in the digital age. It’s not a perfect model, but at least it provides a possible path to authority and knowledge. Jimmy Wales, a cofounder of the collaboratively built online encyclopedia, describes the site’s ethos as “Ignore all rules,” which is further clarified to mean, “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.” The site dramatically ignores hierarchy, keeping every decision as open to the entire community as possible.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling , Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Published 2 Apr 2018

Mattias Lindgren for compiling most of the Gapminder historic time series for the economy and demography. All my students and doctoral students, from whom I learned so much, all the teachers and students who welcomed us to their schools to help us test our materials, all the amazing consultants around the world who have helped us, Jimmy Wales and the voluntary editors on Wikipedia, and all the Dollar Street families and photographers. The previous and current board members of the Gapminder Foundation for their wise and stable support: Hans Wigzell, Christer Gunnarsson, Bo Sundgren, Gun-Britt Andersson, and Helena Nordenstedt (who also helped with fact-checking).

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

This nature of the hyperleader qua founder is a type of authority that is not of the charismatic, but rather of the traditional type, as its legitimacy is based on the past and on the act of foundation. There are obvious similarities between the hyperleader and the figure of the ‘benevolent dictator’ seen in several digital personalities, such as Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, or Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux.278 As is the case with these figures, the hyperleader presents himself as the ultimate guarantor of the party and its founding principles. This type of leadership is informed by a libertarian distrust for any form of authority and intermediation between the individuals and their collective action.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

For implanting the dream of how a digital society and economy might function, I thank Internet cultural pioneers including Howard Rheingold, Mark Pesce, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, John Barlow, Jaron Lanier, RU Sirius, Andrew Mayer, Richard Metzger, Evan Williams, everyone on the Well, Richard Stallman, George P’or, Neal Gorenflo, Marina Gorbis, and Michel Bauwens. For leading digital enterprises in ways worth writing about, thanks to Scott Heiferman, Ben Knight, Zach Sims, Slava Rubin, the Robin Hood Cooperative, Enspiral, and Jimmy Wales. For sharing with me some of the perils of growth-based business and being open to discuss alternative possibilities, I thank Frank Cooper, Gerry Laybourne, Sara Levinson, Bonin Bough, Jon Kinderlerer, William Lohse, Ken Miller, and Judson Green. Thanks to my publisher, Adrian Zackheim, for recognizing the single most important and counterintuitive assertion I’m making here, and to my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, for making sure it comes through loud and clear.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia.24 Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo!25—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey were both Montessori kids,” according to Mayer.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

More recent work that’s been done in Reggio Emilia and Waldorf schools has added to the richness and variety of the education models that exist at the elementary level. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on several of our country’s most successful innovators: Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Julia Child, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. The article suggested the Montessori School experience was the most important aspect of these influencers’ education, setting them on a life path of creativity, passion, self-direction, and comfort with failure and ambiguity. The Google founders were featured on a Barbara Walters/ABC special.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard: Angeline Lillard and Nicole Else-Quest, “The Early Years: Evaluating Montessori Education,” Science, September 29, 2006, 313(5795), pp. 1893–94. When professor Jeffrey Dyer…and Hal Gregersen: The innovators Dyer and Gregersen are referring to include everyone from high-tech pioneers like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SimCity creator Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to culture-shaping creatives like rapper/entrepreneur Sean Combs, chef/entrepreneur Julia Child, and Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez. In 2004, when Barbara Walters interviewed Page and Brin, she asked if the fact that their parents were both college professors was the major reason for their success.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.” As a Wall Street Journal blog post by Peter Sims put it, “the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia.”

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Benedict and discovered its author to be a network-savvy, evidence-based social innovator. “Each monastery is a sovereign institution, with no hierarchy among them,” Cottica explained in the Edgeryders’ online discussions. “The Rule acts as a communication protocol across monasteries.” He compared Benedict to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source operating system Linux. “The rule was—still is—good, solid, open-source software.” In Brussels, Cottica learned about Matera’s bid to be declared a European Capital of Culture by the European Union and saw an opportunity for his fellow Edgeryders.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

Wikipedia’s lifeblood is its community of editors, who enable the platform to operate as a nonprofit while providing more than 36 million articles in 291 languages.49 The English version of Wikipedia alone is enough to fill 7,473 encyclopedia-length volumes.50 Even with such a large community, the platform operates without formal rules. In fact, one of Wikipedia’s original pillars was “Wikipedia does not have firm rules.” As the platform grew, its community took over for its founder, Jimmy Wales, who could no longer personally manage all of the activity as a “benevolent dictator.”51 Today, the community on Wikipedia creates and dictates the implicit rules and social mores that govern the network. They also are the ones who enforce these community standards by handling important administrative functions, such as deleting and blocking users who repeatedly make fraudulent or deceitful changes and protecting pages from underhanded editing.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

In this ‘new new world’, the internet could now become a forum for worldwide communities to share information electronically. Enter the ‘people’s encyclopedia.’ Wikipedia marries a Hawaiian word meaning ‘quick’ (wiki) and the classical Greek for ‘education’ (paideia). This project was a creature of the new millennium. It began when Jimmy Wales, the founder of a now-abandoned plan to produce a free encyclopedia, began to discuss with Larry Sanger ways of supplementing his brainchild Nupedia with a more open system of contributions. The upshot was Nupedia’s first wiki, which went online in January 2000. Within three years, Wikipedia was scoring 2–3 billion hits a month.

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)
by William Poundstone
Published 5 Feb 2008

That's CSSD for short. ("Schwartz" refers to another social choice theorist, Thomas Schwartz.) Condorcet voting, often the CSSD variety, has been widely adopted by other online communities. Among them is the online reference Wikipedia, which uses approval voting as well. Wikipedia founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales dealt with issues that do not exist as acutely with Linux. A Linux contributor has to know how to write code. A Wikipedia contributor can be totally ignorant. "Trolls" is the term for Wikipedia contributors who can't accept criticism and keep reversing edits and reposting articles that others have deleted.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

Because human being as such is terrifically mutable— especially on an anti-essentialist, poststructuralist account like the one endorsed here—there is little doubt that the more we imagine ourselves to be like computers, the more computer-like we will become; conversely, the more we imagine computers can take over sociopolitical functions, the more we will give up our own influence over those phenomena—and the more they will pass into the domain of exactly the powerful agents (states, transnational corporations, and capital itself) that already dominate so much of social life. I agree with the efforts of critics like Alex Galloway and McKenzie Wark and digital activists like Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eric Raymond, and Jimmy Wales, that those of us involved in the creation of computer resources need to keep agitating not merely for open source and free software, but also against the development of regimes of corporate ownership not merely of “intellectual property” but of what T The Cultural Logic of Computation p 222 must be understood as simultaneously inventions and discoveries.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

They’re not creating the content they distribute—that’s done by publishers in the case of search engines, or by individual members in the case of social networks. Rather, they’re simply gathering the information and arranging it in a useful form. This view, tirelessly promoted by Google—and used by the company as a defense in the Costeja case—has been embraced by much of the public. It has become the default view. When Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, in criticizing the European court’s decision, said, “Google just helps us to find the things that are online,” he was not only mouthing the company line, he was expressing the popular conception of internet businesses. The court took a different view. Online aggregation is not a neutral act, it ruled, but a transformative one.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

“We both went to Montessori School,” Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of . . . questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a bit differently.” Montessori schools use games to teach children how to discover knowledge. It’s perhaps no accident then that Montessori alums include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Sims video game creator Will Wright, and rap mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Other entrepreneurs with educational backgrounds in art, design, and music where play is intrinsic to learning have founded a whole slew of new companies, including Kickstarter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vimeo, Android, and, of course, Apple.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

I got to thinking that if visual art is largely about space, then writing is largely about time—so then maybe people collect books differently than they do art. Do they? No, they don’t. Book hoarding tends to be just as intense as art hoarding, if not worse. It’s called bibliomania and, like generic hoarding, is also a recognized psychological issue. Enter Wikipedia once again (and thank you, Jimmy Wales [1966–]): “Bibliomania is a disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. It is one of several psychological disorders associated with books, such as bibliophagy (book eating) or bibliokleptomania (book thievery).” Bibliomania, though, is almost universally viewed as quirky and cute, the way kunstmania (my coinage) is seen as glamorous and cool in a Bond villain kind of way.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

Unlike highly theoretical, inconsequential, and esoteric modern academic research that is read by nobody, the 11 pages of this paper continue to be read widely 70 years after its publication, and have had a lasting impact on the lives and businesses of many people worldwide, perhaps none as significant as its role in the founding of one of the most important websites on the Internet, and the largest single body of knowledge assembled in human history. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has stated that the idea for establishing Wikipedia came to him after he read this paper by Hayek and his explanation of knowledge. Hayek explained that contrary to popular and elementary treatments of the topic, the economic problem is not merely the problem of allocating resources and products, but more accurately, the problem of allocating them using knowledge that is not given in its totality to any single individual or entity.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

Throughout their complicated legal ordeal, including one conviction, its overturning by a second court, and another conviction, these self-appointed editors continually revised the page to eliminate any potentially exculpating evidence and to emphasize the likelihood of guilt. The controversy over the entry grew so intense that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales got involved. Wales studied the matter and issued a statement: “I just read the entire article from top to bottom, and I have concerns that most serious criticism of the trial from reliable sources has been excluded or presented in a negative fashion.” Shortly thereafter, he wrote, “I am concerned that, since I raised the issue, even I have been attacked as being something like a ‘conspiracy theorist.’”

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

“All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent,” said Dave Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth. That is a formula for paralysis. (I can imagine Dave responding, “A little paralysis might do a world of good about now.”) • Hear now “The Fable of the Steak Knives,” as told by the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. His software engineers were spending a lot of their time imagining problems that would occur on Wikipedia and then devising software solutions to head off the problems. He explained why that is the wrong approach:You want to design a restaurant, and you think to yourself, “Well, in this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

It turns out that the type of people in the group and the way they interact spell the difference between success and failure. Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous collaborative project. The real secret to its success, though, isn’t merely its millions of volunteers. It is, as communications professor Joseph Reagle dubs it, the culture of “good faith collaboration” that Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales labored to put in place—a commitment to Quaker-level civility. Not long after launching Wikipedia, Wales penned an open letter to all potential contributors (by which he meant the entire planet), arguing that the project would only work if the contributors struggled constantly to remain polite to one another.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

At the start of the twentieth century, Britannica was—ironically, given its name—acquired by an American firm and continued to grow in eminence, with contributing authors including Nobel Prize winners such as Milton Friedman and Albert Einstein. With the advent of the internet, it was only natural that Britannica would go online. In 2012, the print version was discontinued, and now only digital versions are sold. Presaging the demise of Britannica’s print run, in January 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, inspired by the open-source software movement, created Wikipedia, an organically grown online encyclopedia. Wikipedia was meant to provide a free, up-to-date source of information built by the user community and—in contrast to sources such as Britannica—free from the control of a central authority.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Lakhman, ‘Mother Russia does a slow dance with the net’, The New York Times, 7 October 1997, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/euro/100797euro.html 39Soldatov and Borogan, p. 52. 40Soldatov and Borogan, pp. 65–6. 41Soldatov and Borogan, p. 89. Chapter 23 1‘Pavel Durov in conversation with Jimmy Wales’ [video], DLD12, 24 January 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM 2R. Hutt, ‘The world’s most popular social networks, mapped’, World Economic Forum, 20 March 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/most-popular-social-networks-mapped/ 3E. Avriel, ‘The richest Israelis got NIS 10 billion richer in 2013’, Haaretz, 5 June 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-israel-s-super-rich-really-are-different-1.5273638 4C.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

As it is the fifth most visited site on the Internet, that means it leaves about $150 million on the table every year.29 As a believer in Wikipedia, and the values of Wikipedians, this is a hard fact for me to swallow. The good (at least from my perspective) that could be done with $150 million a year is not trivial. So what is the good that the world gets in exchange for Wikipedia’s abstemiousness? As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, described it to me, “[W]e do care that… the general public looks to Wikipedia in all of its glories and all of its flaws, which are numerous of course. But the one thing they don’t say is, ‘Well, I don’t trust Wikipedia because it’s all basically advertising fluff.’ ”30 So the Wikipedia community spends $150 million each year to secure the site’s independence from apparent commercial bias.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

There has been a tremendous burst of nonprofit and noncommercial Internet sites and free or open software and applications—Yochai Benkler puts the number in the thousands—that have become a central part of the digital realm as experienced by many online.49 Wikipedia is the most striking example. As John Naughton puts it, amateurs “have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.”50 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales understood from the outset that it could not be credible and successful if it was commercial, and Wikipedia still has a stance toward advertising that conjures up the Net’s salad days.51 At their best, these noncommercial cooperative ventures hark back to what Internet celebrants have most extolled about the technology’s virtues and potential.52 The most prominent of these developments have found a niche that sits comfortably with the dominant commercial players.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

In the end, CBS News described the number of participants as “staggering”: 4.5 million people signed a petition circulated by Google; 350,000 citizens wrote to their representatives via SopaStrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org; and over 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets were written on January 18.11 An online White House petition garnered 103,785 names; in its response to the petition, the government officially announced the bill’s demise: “Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation.”12 Corporate giants like Google, respected Internet personalities like Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, and civil liberties organizations like the EFF were all integral to the victory. But the grassroots geek and hacker contingent was also present—including, of course, Anonymous. They churned out videos and propaganda posters, and provided constant updates on several prominent Twitter accounts. When the blackout ended, corporate players naturally receded from the limelight.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

It is held annually in Austin, Texas. Haven’t heard of SXSW? Have you heard of Twitter? Of course . . . Well, Twitter wasn’t launched at SXSW, but its “buzz” and rapid growth are often attributed to its appearance at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare launched at SXSW, along with a bunch of other start-ups and apps. In 2006, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark from Craigslist were the primary speakers. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook took the stage, and in 2010, Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was the primary personality on the interactive stage. Figure 8.11: PanelPicker at SXSW is a great example of structured crowdsourcing (Credit: SXSW) However, SXSW uses crowdsourcing to select most of the topics for its interactive week.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

Steve Jobs launched Apple’s iTunes application, and within seven years, iPod owners had purchased and downloaded five billion songs. Already reeling from piracy, the big four music companies felt compelled to allow individual songs to be sold at a price Apple chose (ninety-nine cents), inevitably undermining the sale of entire CDs, the centerpiece of their business model. That same January, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia. Within seven years this nonprofit effort would contain ten million entries in 253 languages, changing the way people gathered information. Wikipedia and iTunes were reminders, as if any were needed, that we had entered the dawn of a new digital democracy that granted more power to individuals.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Open source is a great organizing principle but it’s not a modus operandi for moving forward. As much as open source has transformed many institutions in society, we still need coordination, organization, and leadership. Open source projects like Wikipedia and Linux, despite their meritocratic principles, still have benevolent dictators in Jimmy Wales and Linus Torvalds. To his credit, Satoshi Nakamoto aligned stakeholder incentives by coding principles of distributed power, networked integrity, indisputable value, stakeholder rights (including privacy, security, and ownership), and inclusiveness into the technology. As a result, the technology has been able to thrive in the early years, blossoming into the ecosystem we know today.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974, Network Working Group, Request for Comments 65 (RFC65), https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675. 2. Most often cited as among these politicians and business elites are Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, and Peter Theil. But even Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is listed as having been interested in Rand. Not all information on Wikipedia is reliable information! “List of People Influenced by Ayn Rand,” Wikipedia, accessed 2 July 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_Ayn_Rand. 3. René Descartes, “Letter to Balzac,” 5 May 1631, in Selected Correspondence, 22, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1619_1.pdf. 4.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and coeditor of Boing Boing “Jane McGonigal’s groundbreaking research offers a surprising solution to how we can build stronger communities and collaborate at extreme scales: by playing bigger and better games. And no one knows more about how to design world-changing games than McGonigal. Reality Is Broken is essential reading for anyone who wants to play a hand in inventing a better future.” —Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia “Wonder why we love games? McGonigal has written the best take yet on the deep joys of play—and how to use that force for good. Reality Is Broken is a rare beast: a book that’s both philosophically rich and completely practical. It will change the way you see the world.”

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

I said no over and over, and as time went by, he became angrier and angrier with me. I was working with an arts organization during those years, and we ended up kicking him out of our machine shop,” she wrote. “Jake had sexually targeted a female friend of mine. Her and I were going to a large tech party in December; I think it was a Wikimedia party, and Jimmy Wales was there. My friend was feeling hunted by Jake, and early in the party she said he was trying to isolate her, and told me she was scared. She is not a big or strong girl, nor is she loud, and he was trying to convince her to go into a stairwell with him. The convincing turned into trying to pull her away physically, grabbing at her hands.”

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

And back in 2008 Britannica had announced that it would begin to accept unsolicited user content, which, upon acceptance by Britannica editors, would be published on a dedicated portion of the Britannica website. Shifting to exist only online and accepting some content from users represented tacit acceptance of the model of what had become the most popular encyclopedia in the world: Wikipedia. Wikipedia (combining the Hawaiian term wiki, meaning “quick,” with encyclopedia) was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. Wikipedia is based almost exclusively on volunteer labor—it is essentially a platform for user writing, reading, and editing. This model facilitated the very low-cost creation of a comprehensive encyclopedia in short order, sharply contrasting with the expensive, multi-decade efforts involved in producing print encyclopedias.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

I’d say Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer are two that actually really do, I think, have impact because they’re both extremely well plugged in, and because everything’s happening in real time.” A former U.S. official who served in the top tier of government for over four decades recalled listening to a panel of tech experts, including Google head Eric Schmidt, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, then chief of Yahoo! Terry Semel, CEO of InterActiveCorp Barry Diller, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. “An amazing panel, and they all were talking about these technologies, and everyone was on the edge of their seats. And I thought this was all irrelevant, that none of these guys were the actual inventors. They’re the CEOs who are administering them. The next generation is being invented now by some nerd, who can’t get a date, in his garage.

The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman
Published 1 Jan 2013

Once again, the technologists—and the technocratic agencies they are enlisted to support—are presented as objective, independent, and free of any ideological leanings. Nowhere do we learn that Tim O’Reilly runs a profitable corporation that might stand to benefit from the government’s embrace of open-data platforms, or that Craig Newmark is a committed cyber-libertarian who used to worship Ayn Rand. Or that Jimmy Wales, who is advising the British government, is so enthralled with Rand and objectivism that he named his daughter after one of the characters in a Rand novel. Nor do the Khannas tell us that the public embrace of “open-data platforms” is often accompanied by an increase in government secrecy or a growing reluctance to fund public journalism.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Steve Jobs remains secure in his perch as an industry icon, his example now posthumous and unimpeachable. The industry’s triumphant individualism has been augmented by the introduction of Ayn Rand as Silicon Valley’s de facto house philosopher; her atavistic arguments for the virtues of selfishness and unfettered enterprise have found supporters from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Unabashed cyber-libertarianism, combined with an avaricious and wholly unconflicted brand of consumerism, permeates America’s digital elite. Evgeny Morozov, a fierce critic of the industry, highlighted two important strains of belief in his recent books: the congenital utopianism of Silicon Valley moguls and their attendant faith in technological solutionism.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

Her novels touted anew by Rush Limbaugh, Rand was once more a foundation of the right-wing worldview.10 Even as she was reclaimed by her most avid fans, Rand’s work transcended contemporary politics. One of the many ironies of Rand’s career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans is Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seem to both embody and defy Rand’s beliefs.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The collision between the two in the 1990s brought the power of the individual computer together with the power of huge networks: people sitting at their desks (or, with the arrival of laptops and smartphones, sitting in Starbucks) could search the world’s information and communicate with other internet users. Entrepreneurs designed new browsers to “read” the web. Jim Clark became the first internet billionaire when he took Netscape public in August 1995. Jimmy Wales created the world’s biggest encyclopedia in the form of Wikipedia: written entirely by volunteers, it constantly evolved as people posted improvements and weeded out errors. Google was the most successful of the new generation of internet companies, and a perfect example of what makes Silicon Valley so special.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

If you vetted material in advance of publication you assumed a greater legal responsibility for the posting because it implied some sort of endorsement. Did we trust 23-year-old mods to make fine judgements about defamation or to be sufficiently attuned to language around Israel/Palestine? It seemed inevitable that we would have to hire more moderators – maybe many of them. At one point – inspired by talking to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia – we toyed with the idea of training an army of Guardian readers to be volunteer (or even paid) moderators. The union wrinkled their noses. There still seemed mileage in a ‘traffic light’ system of ranking users by quality or, alternatively, nuisance value. Reddit had devised a system of notional ‘rewards’ granting greater or lesser visibility.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

One Redditor condemned GoDaddy for lobbying to support the acts, saying he would be transferring his fifty-one domain names and suggesting that other Redditors use December 29 as Move Your Domain Day. GoDaddy withdrew its support for the bills that day. By the turn of the new year, moderators were pondering more significant protests, such as putting up banners over their subreddits or blacking them out. Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia had proposed an official online blackout date. On r/AskReddit, moderator andrewsmith1986 wrote, “Let’s discuss SOPA, Askreddit.” He explained that he’d been discussing with other moderators whether they should shut down for twenty-four hours. “We aren’t admins so we cannot close all of Reddit but we can shut down our respective playgrounds.”

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Communities that are creating things develop their own rules (written and unwritten) that govern issues such as communications, appropriation, and the form and manner of contribution. The Wikipedia community, for example, has so far resisted the idea of advertising, and it has become such a potent force that Jimmy Wales has backed away from adopting an advertising model, despite the potential for a windfall. In the Linux community, Torvalds is careful to respond constructively to criticisms from other developers. This is typical of many open-source communities. Issues are debated publicly on e-mail lists and Web sites, which helps build consensus for final decisions on, for example, which code and features to include in official releases of programs.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Or take Wikipedia, which is easily the solutionists’ favorite template for rebuilding the world; books with titles like Wikinomics and Wiki Government are a testament to the role this one website plays in solutionists’ imaginations. The problem with using Wikipedia as a model is that nobody—not even its founder, Jimmy Wales—really knows how it works. To assume that we can distill life-changing lessons from it and then apply them in completely different fields seems arrogant to say the least. Worst of all, Wikipedia is itself subject to many myths, which might result in Wikipedia-inspired solutions that misrepresent its spirit.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

As we shall see, some of the solutions can themselves be peer produced, and some solutions are emerging as a function of the speed of computation and communication, which enables more efficient technological solutions. 140 Encyclopedic and almanac-type information emerges on the Web out of the coordinate but entirely independent action of millions of users. This type of information also provides the focus on one of the most successful collaborative enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the twenty-first century, Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded by an Internet entrepreneur, Jimmy Wales. Wales had earlier tried to organize an encyclopedia named Nupedia, which was built on a traditional production model, but whose outputs were to be released freely: its contributors were to be PhDs, using a formal, peer-reviewed process. That project appears to have failed to generate a sufficient number of high-quality contributions, but its outputs were used in Wikipedia as the seeds for a radically new form of encyclopedia writing.