Jimmy Wales

for reasons we can get into, but basically it wasn't very fun for the users.

Then pivoted, we didn't say pivot back then, now that's a big Silicon Valley word, but pivoted to the wiki approach.

And, you know, suddenly we had more work done in about two weeks than we had in almost two years.

Tens of millions.

I should know the number.

I just had it on a slide the other day.

I want to say 60, 70, 80 million.

That's across 300 plus languages.

In fact, less than 10% of it's in English, which is kind of amazing to people.

I mean, you don't notice that because you're probably not clicking on Thai, Wikipedia or Swahili.

Occasionally.

german wikipedia oh yeah because it'll be like on germany but not in the united states one especially if it's a europe-based article it's like oh this small village in the former eastern block there's a german entry but there's not that's right yeah yeah yeah no that does happen sometimes it's actually kind of interesting how you know when we think about translating between languages most people assume oh yeah people like english wikipedia is huge they're probably translating it into their own language well no actually translating the other way is also a big thing

Yeah.

You know, there was a big famous edit war in English Wikipedia and a big, huge, enormous discussion because the names of most rivers in Poland are known in English by their German names, which the Poles don't like because the rivers in Poland and they're like, it's got a Polish name.

We might not want to use German words for Polish things as well.

Exactly.

So it was a huge, huge discussion and sort of figuring out compromise.

But yeah.

It is interesting because in the early dates of the project.

So when I started Newpedia and then Wikipedia a couple of years later.