Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 9th, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. Wikipedia is an incredible resource that runs on a relative shoestring and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales credits F.A. Hayek with the central insight that gave life to the user-run website. Wales spoke at the inaugural Joseph K. McLaughlin Lecture Series at the Cato Institute. But first he sat down and talked with Cato’s Jim Harper.

Jim Harper: Most people know Wikipedia because it is one of the top search results for just about anything you are looking for, but tell us about Wikipedia at the backend for those of us who don’t know, who don’t edit it.

Jimmy Wales: Well I guess there’s different ways of thinking about the backend. So, the backend server infrastructure is pretty normal. You know, it’s a farm of web servers with database backend and we have some caching servers around the world. The backend in terms of how the editing works and how the community works is actually very, very different. If you have in your mind that somewhere there must be a big building with 3,000 people who are busily working away writing Wikipedia, you’ve got the wrong idea. Virtually everything you see on the website, from even the choice of what goes on the front page, what is the article of the day, what is the photo of the day, all of that is in the hands of the editing community. And in fact of the people who work at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the charity that I set up that owns and operated Wikipedia, virtually no one has any job responsibilities around the actual content itself. I mean we help the community but mostly the foundation is doing software you know, accounting, finance, legal, infrastructure stuff. But all of the editorial decisions are really out in that community.

Jim Harper: It is a curious community and it’s hard to get into it. If you jump into pages, particularly in Washington D.C., you edit a page about some controversial issue or controversial person you are going to hear about it from other editors. Tell me a little bit about the community itself, some of the challenges that have rotated around accuracy, for example. How has that been and how is it going?

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so it’s not supposed to be hard to get involved. In some ways, it is actually very easy but of course if you jump into a controversial topic, particularly if you don’t have experience with the Wikipedia way of doing things, then yes, you can have some difficulties fairly quickly, particularly if you come in with an ideological agenda, because that can be quite tricky. And fortunately, that’s quite tricky no matter what your ideological agenda is and so that’s you know, that’s a piece of it. But you know, the challenges around accuracy have to do with the balance between you know, the openness and the control. And the solution to accuracy, in our experience, is seldom more control. It’s actually often more openness. But this is very difficult, then, for the general public to understand. Wikipedia presents itself in a style that’s very authoritative and very matter-of-fact and it sounds correct, even when it’s not, just by the style of it, and so when we know that it’s kind of a work in progress at least we do tend to put up a notice saying you know, the neutrality of this article has been disputed, or the following section doesn’t site any sources, or citation needed, all these famous expressions people have heard of from Wikipedia because we want to be able to preserve that fluidity, the ability for people to come and update and to change it without having to go through some enormous onerous procedure to change something that’s wrong but also then that allows people to inadvertently, hopefully inadvertently, change something so that something that was right is wrong now. And so it’s always a balance. Wikipedia is always a work in progress. But it’s really important, and I think this is the core, is that there’s nothing about the software that is magic, that it really depends on having a community who is very passionate about the facts. About getting it right, about fairly characterizing the facts. And that’s, in many cases, a learned skill. It’s a skill that certainly our media doesn’t teach very well these days. A lot of people you know, they get all ramped up from watching too much TV debate news and they think that is how you do discussions of public affairs rather than saying no, actually let’s just slow down a little bit. We are not going to start our discussion of Obamacare as to whether it is a good or bad policy. Let’s first just say what the hell is it? Like what is the policy? What exactly does it involve, so that we can describe it. And that’s something that people of good will, no matter what their ideological view, if they can just relax a little bit they can actually say okay, look, actually we can put out a factual statement about what this is. And then we can begin to describe what experts have said about the pros and the cons and so forth.

Jim Harper: And it’s a huge information collection ranging across issue areas across topics quite widely. Anyone who is interested in one issue area might think Wikipedia is really good on just their thing, but there’s just lots and lots of information. It’s a gigantic collection of information that is built up around outside of traditional business models, not reliant on copyright. You don’t come across as an anti-capitalist, but it’s sometimes seen as a fellow traveler in a community of open source and collaboration that sometimes can tweak the pro-capitalist side of things. What is your take on open source and the relationship to business models and intellectual property protection?

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. I mean I think these are very interesting topics. So certainly I am not anti-capitalist in any way and you know, particularly earlier in my career, journalists would sometimes interview me and they were just really, you could tell they were drooling. They wanted to ask me questions, they’re like stick it to the man and you know. And I would say eh, you know I think it’s great some people are making a lot of money from the internet, there’s nothing wrong with that. But not everything should be that. One of the analogies that I give to sort of explain my views here is you know, if I go to the grocery store and they offer me a free sample of a new chicken product and I say okay I’ll try that. I’m shopping, you know, oh do I like it? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. You know, free sample, that’s nice. And that’s great. That’s perfectly valid place to offer me a free sample of chicken. If I’m at my mom’s house having dinner on a Sunday night and somebody rings the doorbell during family dinner and says hey do you want a free sample of the chicken, I’m like what are you doing here on a Sunday night? This is not the right place for commerce. This is family time, and so forth. For me I think that the same thing about different places and different parts and areas of the internet, that you know, if I’m shopping for a book, great. There are online booksellers and what they do is fantastic and I’m happy about that, but there’s a point in time when I’m just trying to learn. And I think of Wikipedia as kind of a temple for the mind. It’s a place to go and learn and think and reflect. It’s like a public library, something like this. It’s not the place for commerce to be happening while you’re doing it. And that’s just part of life. Like not everything in life is commerce and trading. It doesn’t mean commerce and trading is bad, it’s just a different part of life.

Jim Harper: You’ve made reference, at least your Wikipedia page, the Wikipedia page about you says that you cite F. A. Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society as influential in your formation of the project. Is it true? And expand on it, if it is.

Jimmy Wales: It is true. And so if you’re familiar with Hayek, and in particular The Use of Knowledge in Society from American Economic Review, 1945, if anyone wants to look it up. It’s available on the web. It’s actually a quite accessible read. And when this was written, this was at a period of time when there was a big intellectual debate raging about the question of efficiency around markets versus centrally planned economies. And I would say that at that time it was actually a live and real intellectual issue. And the question was could a band of experts perhaps using you know, in the future using computers, could gather all the data, solve the simultaneous equations and come up with the optimal solution of what should be produced where and when, and Hayek said well hold on a minute. That’s actually not the problem that we face, because there is no way to gather all the information. So the question is, is it more efficient to bring as much information as we can into the center and then make a decision and send it out to the endpoints? Or is it better to push the decision making out to the endpoints, where the information lives? So this is with your you know, the question of how much bread should we produce and where should we distribute it in society, well the idea that was a fantasy that some had at the time that a centrally planned body could organize this and do away with a lot of wasteful competition and so on doesn’t really work because it’s the local market owner who knows how much bread that they need to produce for next week and so on and so forth. So this is - and the price mechanism is the way that we coordinate things and it’s a very powerful way of doing that. Well now so this is an analogy, in a way, to Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia does not have a price mechanism so it’s not a perfect analogy, but the question is should we try to get, communicate all the information of the world into the center to some big office building somewhere and have a band of experts sort of dredge through it and then decide all the interesting questions, or should we rather push all the decision making out to the endpoints, i.e., out to the individual articles and the individual people who are interested in that topic? That’s an analogy, it’s not a perfect one, but for me it’s a very powerful analogy and it does help to explain why Wikipedia can be as good as it is. Because you know, we think about this question of experts versus the general public and I think that really misses the point in some ways. There are certain topics where the experts are widely distributed in the general public and you can’t necessarily even find them. Just recently, completely randomly, just as an ordinary person and ordinary consumer, I’ve gotten really interested in the history of aviation and reading about old, like the early days of jets, and so on. And I read these pages and there’s hundreds of pages of incredibly detailed information including you know, for a particular MD-8 airliner, there’s like fifteen different variations of it that were produced in different years and they’ve cataloged all that information, far more than you could possibly want to know. You could never hire an expert to do that. It wouldn’t really make any economic sense. Nor do you actually need an expert. What you need is a bunch of people who are just complete airplane geeks. And we’ve provided a forum and a place for them to come together and they’ve finally met somebody who cares as much about the MD-8 as they do, so they have a big discussion. Sometimes they have sort of quite huffy debates you know. We are human beings at the end of the day. And what you get by doing that is if you try to communicate all the world’s knowledge to a central body they would never have the expertise or the understanding or even the interest. And so you get, as in an old encyclopedia, quite a snobby sort of selection, a very small body of work. And we never thought of Britannica as a small body of work, but now we see how small it really is. And instead you get local, small groups of people in various interest areas who are truly possibly amateur experts, but possibly expert experts, professional experts, on those topics. And it’s only by pushing the decision making out to the endpoints that that becomes possible.

Jim Harper: Probably not in the area of airplanes, but in others getting information out there might be a challenge to governments. We have strong speech rights in the United States, but those don’t hold elsewhere in the world, never strong enough of course. How is Wikipedia faring internationally? And domestically, in the U.S., with respect to openness and speech?

Jimmy Wales: So pretty well. In the U.S. we don’t really have any serious problems. And in other places we often face fewer problems than other types of projects might. So what do I mean by that? In many places, so for example in Germany, in Germany it’s not allowed to advocate for Nazi ideas, it’s not allowed to use the swastika as a political symbol of advocacy, and on a certain philosophical level, while I understand why the Germans do this, it’s sort of one of the more forgivable examples of censorship in the world, but I still think you know that’s probably not good public policy. I wouldn’t advocate that they continue that forever. But it doesn’t bother Wikipedia because we don’t advocate for anything, and we’re perfectly allowed to have an entry in German Wikipedia about the swastika, and the history, and the meaning, and so forth and so on. So the kind of work that we do, in many places the limitations on speech just don’t happen to intersect with what we’re doing. If you’re a blogging company you face a much more difficult sort of policy issue internally about what do you do about censorship in other places where normal political advocacy is often very much subject to censorship, we kind of get around that because we don’t do advocacy. Now obviously, that varies in different places around the world. I would say currently the only major problem we have at the moment is China. China does block all of Wikipedia and we’ve had an up and down sort of situation in China for a long, long time. We’re very patient but they are very patient as well. And in fact one of the interesting developments regarding censorship and freedom of speech that has been a really, on the whole, worldwide, been a very positive development is when we moved to being fully encrypted. So when you visit Wikipedia, you go up at the top, it says H-T-T-P-S, instead of H-T-T-P. So it’s just like when you visit your bank. Anyone who is spying on your connection, whether it’s your employer, or your ISP, or your government, they can only see that you are talking to Wikipedia, they can’t see which page you’re reading. And what that means is that what was formally a viable, if unwise, public policy option which is to say oh we’ll allow Wikipedia through but we’ll just filter certain pages is no longer possible. So when we implemented this we weren’t really sure what the reaction would be in different places around the world. Would they just choose to block Wikipedia entirely or what would they do? Well, everywhere except China they’ve decided that it’s just worth it to have Wikipedia, so countries that used to filter certain pages are not filtering Wikipedia at all now because the costs of filtering a few pages out of Wikipedia is blocking all of Wikipedia, which, given that it is incredibly useful and incredibly popular, is a step too far. A lot of governments are happy to sort of poke away at people with no power and no popularity, but to actually mess with Wikipedia is kind of a big deal, because the public goes crazy if you block Wikipedia. So, but China is a different story. So China has blocked Wikipedia.

Jim Harper: We’ve talked a little bit about free speech, a little of encryption which has lots of ramifications for tech policy. What are the tech policy issues that matter to you going forward and, more generally, what do you see coming after election 2016?

Jimmy Wales: Well there’s a few. I mean one of the big concerns that I’ve had, that we’ve had, is not a U.S. issue and I think would be impossible to implement in the U.S. I can’t imagine any court finding it within the scope of the First Amendment to allow for the right to be forgotten. But this is really gaining a lot of traction in Europe. We’ve spoken out against it quite a lot. We’ve been very active on the issue. And it’s really problematic. And so the concept here in Europe is that people have a right to delete links from Google and other search engines, but it’s primarily Google that they are worried about because Google in Europe particularly has a very, like ninety-plus percent market share, to entries, well, entries on Wikipedia or anything on the web, including newspaper articles, etc., that are say irrelevant, outdated, incomplete, there’s no need for a finding that it is libelous, for example. And in fact the case that really kicked all this off was no one at all denied the truth of the matter. So it was a lawyer in Spain who had lost his house in a lawsuit kind of situation. I think he didn’t pay his taxes on the house and then they took the house and auctioned it. And there had been a public notice filed by the government, printed in a newspaper which was then accessible via Google and found it, and it was ten years ago. And he argued that it was damaging to him, that this irrelevant, outdated information was still there. Well, but he didn’t say that it wasn’t true. There was no question that it was, could be libelous. It wasn’t libelous. The question of whether it is relevant or not I really wouldn’t say. To me it seems very relevant but you know, and I actually thought you know he could have turned this into a marketing ploy to say look, look what happened to me ten years ago because I didn’t deal with my taxes properly. I learned a lot from that. I can help you. Don’t lose your house, you know? I don’t know what kind of law he does, but in any event the concern that we have is that now my biggest concern about it, so you can’t really in Europe sort of go in gung ho all First Amendment-y because that really doesn’t play that well, although people are sympathetic to the notion of freedom of expression, freedom of speech, but it’s really more about the process. That the current process is that Google has been required to become judge, jury, and executioner. Like if they don’t take down links they can be fined, etc. They have to make a decision. And they do make decisions, sort of reluctantly, but they you know, they have business interests. They can’t just shut down so they have to do this. And the problem is for the publishers, if you are a newspaper or if you are Wikipedia, there’s no obvious avenue of appeal. Google has decided not to link to you because somebody has complained about something, Google feels obligated to do it because the law might fine them if they don’t, it’s not the kind of situation where you know, at the very least we would say, in the U.S., some kind of concept of strict scrutiny or something like this, but at the very least if you are going to require the suppression of some speech, you better get a judge involved. Like that’s the minimum thing. There better be a course of appeal for the speaker to say no, this is not right. What I’m speaking is in the public interest. And so we’re not there yet. And so we’re still pushing on that. We’re hoping that the European Parliament will revisit the issue, but who knows.

Caleb Brown: Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.