Jimmy Wales

was always a piece of it.

And just that on the side, I was also able to do some of the actual practical tech myself, just made it easier.

The original software for Wikipedia, I downloaded a UseModWiki, which was a great, but very, very simple Perl script.

You could install it very quickly and get it up and running.

But it was so simplistic that you could create a user account and log in, except there were no passwords.

So anybody could create the same name as you.

Like, so we could both be using the same name, which would obviously be a disaster.

You know, like you can't build trust.

You can't build a reputation and all of that without that.

And it was the only reason it was like that is because the guy who is making it was just making a little thing.

Like it was like maybe a group of three people could use it.

Right.

Then it wasn't thinking about big public thing.

And so.

Quickly, I added passwords.

It was a real from scratch process.

And then it was just a couple of years, I'm not sure exactly, when we scrapped that software entirely.

And just like one of our volunteers was actually a biology PhD student at the time, but he programmed the first database driven.

I mean, before that, all the articles were stored in text files on the server.

It was very rudimentary, but it allowed us to get started.