I’m sitting in a packed hall at the Harvard Law School, listening to Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, talk about the past, present and future of the open information movement. Wikipedia’s radical goal, Wales reminds the crowd, is to give all the people of the world free access to the sum of human knowledge. And judging from the milestones he notes–in the past year, the English Wikipedia has topped one million articles, the German one has topped 400,000; the Japanese 200,000; the Polish one 200,000; the Dutch 200,000; and so on.
I bet lots of people first heard of Wikipedia last winter when journalist John Siegenthaler attacked the online encyclopedia for an entry that falsely linked him to the JFK assassination. Wales offered a telling anecdote about that whole episode. “Apparently there was an error in Wikipedia,” he wrily observed to laughter. “Who knew?…And it was a really bad error…They dragged me onto CNN to yell at me.” And then he shows a slide from Alexaholic comparing Wikipedia’s traffic tripling in the past year, compared to CNN.com’s flat traffic. The crowd laughed appreciatively.
Let’s call this getting the camel’s nose under the tent. When old broadcast media goes after new civic media, like bloggers or, in this case, Wikipedia, the result is subversive. More people learn about something that is more participatory and engaging than just sitting on their couches being talked at and marketed to, and they go online to check it out. I saw the same thing happen around the Democratic and Republican conventions of 2004, where the credentialling of bloggers and the subsequent media storm that followed actually had the effect of driving more people to the blogs and away from the TV.
Wales spends most of his talk focusing on the internal development of Wikipedia, and how its most dedicated participants are working to improve its quality as more attention is focused on it. He also touches on his personal initiative in the political arena, Campaigns Wikia. “Wikis can generate a healthy dialogue and mutual understanding, when things go right,” he says. “Unlike other online media we’ve seen, wikis do help lead to consensus and understanding.” Hence his effort to bring a wiki culture to the political arena.
Personally, I am very intrigued by Campaigns Wikia, and frustrated at the same time. Any serious attempt to bring the culture of the free information movement to politics is worth following, and engaging. But so far, the actual output of the conversation that Wales has spawned seems incredibly dispersed, with little sign of any focus emerging. And in a world where all of us have limited time, it seems to me that a completely open approach to bringing open-source thinking to politics perhaps needs a bit more nurturance.
Wales has starting doing local meetups with people interested in the Campaigns Wikia project; a write-up of his remarks in Chicago can be found here.
Tags: wikimedia wikipedia wikimania