Wikipedia Interview

For those of you who are contributing to wikipedia, I thought you might like to read this interview with its founder Jimmy Wales. Article found at Collaborative Marketing. Quick excerpt from the article, which gives us some insight into the workings of wikipedia:


LAMB: As I was doing – well, using Wikipedia to do the research for this interview I kept thinking when will Google or Yahoo! put Jimmy Wales out of business. And then I – as I read further, you‘re in business with them in some way.

WALES: Yes, in some way. I think we have – we‘re a non-profit organization that I founded. And we‘ve gotten support from Yahoo! already and Google is very interested in supporting us. We‘re just still talking to them about what to do.

And Yahoo! has donated some servers. And I think what‘s interesting about that is that if you – you know, it‘s almost a joke but it‘s completely true. If you think about well why – why do Yahoo! and Google want to do this and well, their business model depends on the Internet not sucking and we hope the Internet not suck. So it‘s that the Wikipedia for a lot of people hearkens back to what we all thought the Internet was for in the first place which is, you know, when most people first started the Internet they thought oh, this is fantastic, people can communicate from all over the world and build knowledge and share information.

And then we went through the whole dot-com boom and bust and the Internet seemed to be about pop-up ads, and SPAM, and porn and selling dog food over the Internet. And now Wikipedia kind of hearkens back to the original vision of the Internet.

And so it‘s important for the whole business of the entire Internet that there be quality resources that people can turn to and want to turn to. So that‘s – it‘s important to these companies to support us.