About two years before I founded Wikipedia I had founded another project called Nupedia. It was based upon the same concept as Wikipedia, which was that it was a freely licensed encyclopedia that was written by volunteers. Unfortunately, we didn’t use the Wiki software and it was a very top down model, which ultimately wasn’t very successful. It was difficult to manage and when all was said and done, it wasn’t very much fun for the volunteers. We found the Wiki editing software and began using that, which turned out to be quite a success.

An employee of mine showed me a Wiki he was working on. He mentioned that he knew we were having problems getting people involved in Nupedia and that it was a lot of trouble and a lot work for people. He suggested we give the Wiki approach to open collaboration a try.

There are a few things that are going on within the Wiki world. One of those is that people are really looking at making Wiki editing easier. Part of the design philosophy of wikis is that the editing should be easier. This is in comparison to an HTML page. It isn’t as easy as it should be, which is why we are starting to see services such as Wikiwig from SocialText. I also see people trying to expand into structured data and possibly into applications, rather than simple preformed text.

The mass market is clearly interested, as you can see from the large number of wikis that are popping up on a daily basis. Large consumer sites such as Wikipedia, Wikicities and others can definitely do a better job with the user experience.

There are several companies within the space and basically there are two distinct models. Ones is the corporate enterprise wikis like SocialText and JotSpot. They are providing the software, consulting and support to corporations. There are then the consumer approaches, along the lines of Wikipedia and Wikicities. Wikipedia is funded by donations and Wikicities is supported by advertising.

That is an unknown at this point. For Wikipedia it is really important that we bring in all kinds of smart people, not just smart people that know how to edit wikis. It is important for improving our listings within areas such as Fine Arts, Sciences, etc. I think that is one of the main ways to grow this group. There is a concern that if editing the site is made easier, whether it will bring unqualified people to the site. Personally, that is not a concern of mine.

Mostly it is the social structure and community that is available on the site. People are trusted, and can get involved. It is a pretty geeky hobby to write an encyclopedia for fun. I like to think that means that we are a pretty smart group of people. With Nupedia, we had gathered a large group of talented individuals who were simply frustrated by the software. When we started the Wiki, we were starting off with a large number of people, which was a tremendous advantage.

It really unleashed the power of our volunteers.

The foundation serves legal vehicle for owning the websites and all the associated servers. The focus of the foundation is to offer freely available educational and research resources. There is a significant overlap in the different communities as well as quite a bit of cross linking which helps to promote the different site.

Absolutely, I know Craig and have talked to him a number of times. In this case they were excited about what we offered and put up those links on their own. We get a lot of support from people who simply like the idea of Wikipedia. People are on board with the world needing a free encyclopedia and have done a phenomenal job in supporting it.

There were a whole series of recent articles that have been very interesting, at least to me. They have spun off a story that was in the Register, which isn’t the most reputable source. It was a really overblown quote that was taken out of context from me.

There is a constant ongoing discussion within the Wikipedia community looking at every aspect of the content to try and figure out where we can do a better job. We are always exploring issues around quality control. This includes making all the content better and more applicable to our audience. We are currently looking at adding the ability to flag certain articles as being ‘good enough’ in some sense. This could mean that the content is good enough to go to print or whatever we decide.

Our goal is to create a high quality encyclopedia and the way we do this is with a crazy, wide open wiki. When we make decisions within the core community, it is on that basis. The key question we ask ourselves when we are looking at making any changes is to determine whether it helps the encyclopedia or not.

That is absolutely true. There are quite a few good examples of that. There is a small scandal going on in Germany. One of the questions on the German version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ was wrong. The show had referenced an answer on the German version of Britannica, which was wrong. It was wrong on Wikipedia as well, but we were able to update it immediately.

The site is managed on a day to day basis by our volunteers. Almost all changes flow from the volunteers.

Everybody loves the Heavy Metal umlaut article. It covers the history of how heavy metal bands use umlauts in their names, sometimes quite incorrectly and inappropriately. It is really fantastic article. My guess is that it started out pretty much as a joke, but turned out to be a really good article.

Current events articles receive quite a bit of traffic. They tend to spike with the overall news cycle. So if there is something big going on in the general media, it tends to spike on our site as well. The perennial top areas are those relating to adult matters.

Seeing that high level of interest was the main thing that inspired us start Wikinews. Having seen the great job that Wikipedia does with current news events, we felt that should be expanded into its own area.

They are all a bit different. Wikiquotes was launched because we noticed that people were putting too many quotes into our articles. It made a lot of sense to separate them out into their separate sites. Typically, it has been social pressure within the community that lead us to launch a new area.

I am simply a volunteer like everyone else on the site.