Episode 6: Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Fandom - a podcast by This Is Series A

The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the modern concept of an encyclopedia originated with Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. In this episode of This Is Series A, Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine speak with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Fandom. Jimmy Wales shares his journey building the internet’s encyclopedia, the challenges along the way, and what other entrepreneurs and creators can learn from his experience.

Takeaways:

• Why a focused mission is everything: “Collecting reliable, neutral, and verifiable information is paramount to our project.” says Jimmy. “That purity of mission kind of keeps the organization on the straight and narrow.”


• What it takes for a community to build something for free: “[Contributors are] doing it because they love the topics they write about. And there's a community of people who value their knowledge deeply,” he shares. Jimmy explains that his platform offers a fundamentally different kind of acclaim than Instagram influencers. Prestige in the Wikipedia community is far more localized in a niche. Jimmy explains the Wikipedia contributor mentality like this: "Here's a community of people I want to be respected by because I love this thing. I know a lot about it and I want to share. I know nobody in the world cares except for these thirty people, but these thirty people value me so much."


• What for-profit businesses can learn from the success of Wikipedia: “A lot of for-profit businesses need to think harder how not to piss off their own communities.” He cites the example of Digg, an early precursor to Reddit. When the company made substantial changes to the product to make it more profitable, the community was livid. Jimmy continues: “Even if you do need to figure out your monetization problems, you cannot give up this crown jewel of a fantastic internet community that's really passionate about the site,” he says. “Because if you lose that, you're going to lose the whole thing."

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