Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…A little bit of the bad part of grad school. Yeah, yeah, the bad part of grad school. So I was like, “Oh, this isn’t intellectually fun, this is like the bad part of grad school. It’s intimidating, and there’s a lot of potential embarrassment if I screw something up and so forth.” So that was when I realized, “Okay, look, this is never going to work. This is not something that people are really going to want to do.” So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees had brought and showed me the Wiki concept in December, and then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, “What about this Wiki idea?” So in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren’t sure. So the original project was called Nupedia. Even though it wasn’t successful, we did have quite a group of academics and really serious people. We were concerned that, “Oh, maybe these academics are going to really hate this idea, and we shouldn’t just convert the project immediately. We should launch this as a side project, the idea of here’s a Wiki where we can start playing around.” But actually, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff, and it was actually a very exciting time. Back then, you could be the first person who typed Africa as a continent and hit Save, which isn’t much of an encyclopedia entry, but it’s true, and it’s a start and it’s kind of fun, like put your name down. Actually, a funny story was several years later, I just happened to be online and I saw when, I think his name is Robert Aumann, won the Nobel Prize in economics. We didn’t have an entry on him at all, which was surprising, but it wasn’t that surprising. This was still early days. So I got to be the first person to type Robert Aumann, won Nobel Prize in economics and hit Save, which again, wasn’t a very good article. But then I came back two days later and people had improved it and so forth. So that second half of the experience where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded because it was just too intimidating. It was like, “Oh, no, I was able to chip in and help, other people jumped in. Everybody was interested in the topic, because it’s all in the news at the moment.” So it’s just a completely different model, which worked much, much better. Well, what is it that made that so accessible, so fun, so natural to just add something?…

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