Jimmy Wales

But then I came back two days later and people had improved it and so forth.

So that, that,

second half of the experience where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded because it was just too intimidating.

It was like, oh no, I was able to chip in and help.

Other people jumped in.

Everybody was interested in the topic because it's all in the news at the moment.

And so it's just a completely different model, which worked much, much better.

Well, I think it's, you know, especially in the early days, and this, by the way, has gotten much harder because there are fewer topics that are just greenfield, you know, available.

But, you know, you could say, oh, well, you know, I know a little bit about this and I can get it started.

But then it is fun to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so on and so forth.

And that idea of collaborating, you know, where people can, much like open source software, you know, you put your code out and then people suggest revisions and they change it and it modifies and it grows beyond the original creator.

It's just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby, but people enjoy it.

Yeah, I mean, not as much as there probably should have been, in a way.

During that two years of the failure of Newpedia, where very little work got done,

What was actually productive was there was a huge, long discussion, email discussion, very clever people talking about things like neutrality, talking about what is an encyclopedia, but also talking about more technical ideas, you know, things.

Back then, XML was kind of all the rage and thinking about, ah, could we…

Shouldn't you have certain data that might be in multiple articles that gets updated automatically?

So, for example, the population of New York City, every 10 years there's a new official census.

Couldn't you just update that bit of data in one place and it would update across all languages?

That is a reality today, but back then it was just like, hmm, how do we do that?