You must have know at this point in 2001 or 2003. Wikipedia was growing really fast.
You decide, I guess around 2003. What was the thinking behind that? Why did you do that?
The community of volunteers very much wanted it to be a non-profit.
Finally for me, it just made sense. Aesthetically, my ambitions for Wikipedia.
really make a nonprofit option more senseible. I think if we had gone a different route it would be very different today.
Imagine a world in which every person on the planet were given access to the sum of all human knowledge.
(23:10 min)
But I wonder why you could not have done that same thing and still have put ads on Wikipedia, like banner ads and stuff.
So here’s the thing — think about the DNA of an organization.
It is very difficult to have an organization from following the money. So Wikipedia is a non-profit, we could run ads. There is no prohibition of non-profits running ads.
Suddenly, people would start to care a lot more about our traffic in highly developed advertising markets. We would begin to care more about which pages you’re reading.
If you’re reading about Queen Victoria.
If you’re reading about Tesla cars or vacations in Las Vegas, we would have an incentive to
We an encyclopedia. We don’t think about adding page views.
We just think about how we make the encyclopedia better and how do we reach more people in the developing world. That’s just fundamental to what this is all about.
How do you even fund that. How do you even get the money to even fund the servers.
The main reason why we started the non-profit is exactly thinking about that for the future but I had no idea whether it was going to be possible. So we setup the non-profit in June.
Then we had this disaster on Christmas day and I had to scramble to get the site running on 1 server and it was painfully slow. And it was painfully obvious because the traffic was doubling.
That was the first time I decieded to do a fundraising campaign.
These days we call that crowd funding.
I remember very clearly that had hoped to raise $20,000 in a month’s time. But in about 2 weeks time we had raised $30,000.
A lot of small donors. And that is today the model for Wikipedia. People who believe in Wikipedia, who think it is useful for their lives.
Hey I should chip in.
(35:45 min)
When you think about this thing that you built and your role in the history of the internet, how much of the success of Wikipedia do you think was because of your brilliance and your hard work and how much was luck?A huge amount due to luck.
A huge amount of luck
I do think a component of the success of Wikipedia is that I’m a very friendly and nice person and I’m very laid back and so therefore I was able to work in a community environment where people basically yell at you and just have to kind of roll with it and you’re in some sense a leader but you can’t tell anyone what to do. They’re volunteers, so you have to work with love and reason and move people on in a useful way.
So I do think that I’m not irrelevant to the process, but I also think that the community is amazing and the luck of the timing of really hitting that moment when it was possible to build Wikipedia.
Jimmy, you’ve seen the estimates that if Wikipedia were a for-profit, it could be worth at least $5 billion dollars, maybe more.
Yeah.
Does mean anything to you?
Not really. I mean. It’s you know.
People, they love to write about how Jimmy Wales is not a billionaire.
I think that there are actually articles with the headline. Jimmy Wales in not an internet billionaire.
Exactly. And for that’s a bit odd. My life is unbeelivable interensting. amazing. I have the ability to meet almost anyone in the world. And usually I introduce myself an say I’m Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia. And usually they say “Oh Wow”. And if I say: “I’m Jimmy Wales. I own the largest group of car dealers across the southern part of America.” Not that interesting.
At least in that regard, no one will remember me in 500 years, but they will definitely remember Wikipedia.
That’s something that you can hardly get your head around.
There have been comparisons to the Gutenberg Press. This is the biggest dissemination of human knowledge in modern world history.
But its a bit embarrassing to talk about it that way. I just try to have fun.
Anonymous Creator: Bjarne Stroustrup: Creator of C++
29:55
talk I put up a little curtain so I can
have a big reveal as to what the
language is So this is Bjarne Stroustrup
anyone know who this gentleman is?
okay yes so III have a spoiler right
here on the slide he’s the creator of
C++ but he’s also the creator of another
programming language which he created
before C++ anyone know what that was
called C with classes this language had
a very specific goal it was to have C
but with classes and actually it’s not
it’s not quite true it was C with
30:26
classes but also like a stronger type
30:28
system he wanted like to make the type
30:29
checker a little bit stronger so he gave
30:32
this interview where he kind of explains
30:33
it is like his thought process is while
30:35
he was doing and he was like why did I
30:36
want to add classes to C well Strasbourg
30:38
had actually used Simula personally in a
30:40
previous job when he was working at this
30:42
company where he’s like I want to UC and
30:44
I want to use like something nicer than
30:47
then see for like modeling my domain I
30:49
just like want to be able to get more
30:50
organized and he was like yeah you know
30:52
what I thought classes were pretty good
30:53
when I was using them in the simulated
30:54
A’s I really liked that
30:56
um and so I’m just gonna try and bring
30:58
that in so he does he makes scene with
31:00
classes and then he runs into a problem
31:01
which is that see with classes is what
31:04
he calls a medium success and the
31:07
problem with being a medium success as
31:08
he explains is that it’s like okay so
31:10
this works I got a few people using it
31:12
couple of users it’s pretty nice
31:14
they’re happy with it the problem is
31:16
that I’m the only maintainer and there’s
31:18
too few of us to spread the maintenance
31:20
burden around and so I’m kind of in a
31:22
pickle like on the one hand I could just
31:23
say well I don’t want to maintain this
31:25
for the rest of my life I’m just gonna
31:26
walk away and abandon it but then all
31:28
the people who are using it are my
31:29
friends so I don’t want to do that names
31:31
like so what do I do
31:32
he’s like well the only other option
31:33
seems to be maybe I’ll just like add
31:35
more features so it’ll be more useful to
31:37
more people and then may be able to get
31:38
popular enough that I can find some
31:39
other maintainer ‘he’s so he does that
31:41
he adds the additional non
31:42
object-oriented features and renames the
31:44
language to C++ and it became slightly
31:47
more popular and and it still maintained
31:50
this whole like drop-in C replacement
31:52
thing right that that upgrade path
31:53
that’s really smooth but this is really
31:56
interesting because again we have
31:57
actually a pretty direct experiment of
31:59
like does object orientation cause
32:01
success and he was like well I added
32:03
object orientation and a stronger type
32:05
checker as a bonus that was not enough
32:07
to cause success then I added a bunch
32:09
more features and success so we have a
32:12
very direct experiments like whether or
32:13
not object orientation caused the
32:15
success of C++ it’s like no because when
32:17
it just had object orientation it was
32:18
called C with classes which nobody in
32:19
this room had heard of so clearly not
32:21
not not a causal relationship there
32:24
between the OO stuff and the success of
32:26
C++ you wanna see this whole interview
32:28
again here’s the link to this really
32:30
interesting stuff this is from the 80s
32:32
when Strauss Tripp was interviewed about
32:33
C++ okay so to kind of sum up this like
32:36
family of languages we have like a lot
32:37
of people are going to write C code for
32:39
UNIX like great systems programming
32:41
language they find you know what the the
32:42
ergonomics are not great or maybe like I
32:44
just need some modularity in the case of
32:47
C++ adding over features to it did make
32:50
his life better he was happier with it
32:51
but it wasn’t enough to make it be like
32:53
the rocket ship that jumped into the top
32:55
10 like it altum Utley did until he