Jimmy Wales

share their work.

I realized that could be extended beyond just software to all kinds of products.

And so, you know, it makes sense that it would start with software because programmers could create the tools they needed to share code and so forth.

But the rest of us needed sort of to have the tools built in order to be able to share.

So that was my initial thinking.

And realize that the encyclopedia would be something that people could collaborate on simply because everybody understands what an encyclopedia article should be like.

Like if I say encyclopedia article about the Eiffel Tower, everybody instantly knows more or less what that's going to be.

So it makes it possible to collaborate.

That's one of the reasons that you do see some collaboration on fiction and things like that.

But it's much harder because fiction could be anything.

Yeah.

There's a few techniques that we use that make sense to me, you know, early on, which is we call it going meta, stepping up one level.

So rather than trying to decide in a controversial area, what is the truth with a capital T, instead you characterize the debate.

You explain like, oh, you know, this is one view.

Here's another view.

I always give the example, if you imagine a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist, they're never going to agree about abortion.

But because I've said they're kind and thoughtful, they can work together to say, well, let's explain the debate to people.

And so let's sort of talk about it in a way that different people can understand.

And in fact, the Wikipedia entry on this is quite good, and it's very balanced.

And you can sort of say, oh, okay, like, here's the different perspectives.