Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…How has the rise of mobile shaped the content of Wikipedia? Take a not-too-controversial article, say the Napoleon Bonaparte one. More and more people are reading it on mobile. More are editing it on mobile. What’s the invisible hand mechanism that connects the rise of mobile to how the actual words on the page might end up being different? That’s a great question, and I define a great question as one that no one’s ever asked me, so very good. I would say that the connection is probably less than it should be. So, Wikipedia editing is still overwhelmingly a desktop phenomenon. Part of that is that mobile editing experience isn’t great. In the past, I would say the mobile editing experience isn’t great because we need to invest more money in making it better. But today I would say, actually, it’s probably about as good as it can be. I’m sure we can still improve it, and there are people who are working on that, but the issue is it’s a small-phone factor. Like, how do you actually make it easy to edit Wikipedia on a mobile device? It’s quite difficult, and we look at things for mobile participation. Like, is there a way for people to quickly do a spelling fix or something like that? Then the content — it’s written largely on the desktop, and therefore there is a divide in a sense between reading and writing, but that probably doesn’t matter so much because I think the reading experience for Wikipedia on mobile is perfectly fine. In some ways it’s better because the scan distance for reading is a little shorter, but it probably could be a little more optimized for reading on mobile devices. Now, you don’t allow paid-for editing, but I’ve known people who are paid editors — on Wikipedia, they write things. They’re not, for the most part, slanting content. They’re trying to fill in gaps or add detail on, maybe, the person they work for. To what extent do you think Wikipedia is actually somewhat parasitic on nontransparent, paid-for editing, and you get rid of the worst manifestations of it, but it’s still a big part of the underlying foundation?…

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