Jimmy Wales

And so that was when I realized, okay, look, this is never going to work.

This is not something that people are really going to want to do.

So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees, had brought and showed me the wiki concept in December.

And then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, what about this wiki idea?

And so in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren't sure.

So the original project was called Newpedia.

And even though it wasn't successful, we did have quite a group of academics and like really serious people.

And we were concerned that, oh, maybe these academics are going to really hate this idea.

And we shouldn't just convert the project immediately.

We should launch this as a side project, the idea of here's a wiki where we can start playing around.

But actually, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff.

And it was actually a very exciting time.

Back then, you could be the first person who typed Africa is a continent and hit save, which isn't much of an encyclopedia entry.

But it's true, and it's a start, and it's kind of fun.

You put your name down.

Actually, a funny story was several years later, I just happened to be online, and I saw when –

His name is Robert Allman, won the Nobel Prize in economics.

And we didn't have an entry on him at all, which was surprising, but it wasn't that surprising.

This was still early days, you know?

And so I got to be the first person to type, Robert Allman won the Nobel Prize in economics and hit save, which again, wasn't a very good article.