Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, it’s an interesting thing, and I’m not sure it’s the only, but it’s certainly the most famous and the largest. There’s a few different reasons. I’ve been on a real kick lately to talk a lot about how business model drives outcomes, sometimes in surprising ways. Or they’re not that surprising after the fact, but they were maybe not anticipated. For Wikipedia, it isn’t so much that it’s a nonprofit, although that probably has a certain impact as well, but the fact that Wikipedia does not have an advertising business model means that the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, really faces a different set of incentives. Even as a nonprofit, you have to think in a businesslike way, and you have to say, “Well, how are we going to pay the bills? And how do we achieve our mission?” If you think about advertising-driven social media, the real incentive is to show you as many ads as possible, so they really obsess over time on-site, and it’s driven them to create addictive products. It’s driven them, in many cases, to prioritize agitation and argumentation, in a negative sense, over education and learning and thoughtfulness. If you went to Twitter, and you found out the three things you wanted to know, and you left, they wouldn’t get a chance to show you very many ads. But if you go to Twitter, and you see 18 people who are wrong and you’ve got to [laughs] straighten them out, you might stay for hours doing this very addictive hobby. When we think about things at Wikipedia — for example, we could probably increase engagement if we use some of the very basic machine learning techniques to start showing people random promotional links to other things than Wikipedia and then have the machine learn over time how to show you links that are more interesting so that you end up staying on the site longer. Now, it might turn out that that’s completely normal and thoughtful, in fact, if you go to a well-known economist, that it turns out that the way to keep you on the site longer is to show you other concepts of economics and economic theory. But it might turn out, and probably would turn out, the best thing to do is, when you go to look up Tyler Cowen, to show you on the sidebar links to Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, whatever the hot topic of the day is and so on, which is not really what you want from an encyclopedia. When we think about that, our incentive structure at Wikipedia is not to optimize time on-site. It’s to say, look, every now and then, normally at the end of the year, we say, “Hey, would you donate some money?” Nobody has to donate. The only reason people do donate — and this is what donors tell us — is they think, “This is meaningful. This is important to my life. This should live. d you donate some money?” Nobody has to donate. The only reason people do donate — and this is what donors tell us — is they think, “This is meaningful. This is important to my life. This should live. This should exist.” We got a year between the time we ask you for money to become a part of your life and make it meaningful enough for you to say, “I want to click, and I want to contribute to this.” That’s just a completely different set of incentives in front of us in terms of, how do we optimize that? How contingent do you think is the history of Wikipedia or something like it? If you and the people you were working with had not come along when you did and done what you did, and the field were left open, would Wikipedia be more maximizing engagement to a for-profit company? It wouldn’t be called Wikipedia, but it would be some kind of online encyclopedia, something maybe more like a Facebook model. Or do you think there’s something intrinsic about your enterprise that it was going to be a not-for-profit, no matter who did it?…

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