I want to argue to you that in fact, politics and religion, which are the two primary factors -- not the sole, but overwhelmingly, the primary factors -- which are driving towards a war which looks extremely likely -- bordering on the inevitable at this point, whether one is in favor of that or not -- that politics and religion are, in fact, themselves better conceptualized as kinds of technology, and subject to kinds of questions that we regularly consider in the space of conceptual design.
Here's what I mean.
Politics and -- let's focus on the political system in particular question here, which is the system of democracy.
Democracy, as a type of politics, is a technology for the control and deployment of power.
You can deploy power in a wide range of ways.
The famous ones -- despotism is a good one; anarchy is a way to not deploy the power in any organized way, to do it in a radically diffused fashion; and democracy is a set of technologies, which have the effect of, in principle, diffusing the power source to a large number of people and then re-concentrating it in a smaller group of people who govern, and who themselves are, in principle, authorized to govern by virtue of what the broader public has done.
Now, consider religion -- in this case Islam, which is the religion that, in some direct sense, can be said to be precipitating what we're about to enter.
Let me say parenthetically why I think that's the case, because I think it's a potentially controversial statement.
I would put it in the following equation: no 9/11, no war.
At the beginning of the Bush administration, when President Bush, now President Bush, was running for president, he made it very clear that he was not interested in intervening broadly in the world.
In fact, the trend was for disengagement with the rest of the world.
That's why we heard about the backing away from the Kyoto protocol, for example.
After 9/11, the tables were turned.
And the president decided, with his advisors, to undertake some kind of an active intervention in the world around us.
That began with Afghanistan, and when Afghanistan went extremely smoothly and quickly, a decision was made through the technology of democracy -- again, notice, not a perfect technology -- but through the technology of democracy that this administration was going to push in the direction of another war -- this time, a war in Iraq.
Now, the reason I begin by saying "no 9/11, no war" is that we have to acknowledge that Islam, as interpreted by a very, very small, extremely radical group of people, was a precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks -- the precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks -- and as a consequence, at one degree of remove, the precipitating cause of the coming war that we're about to be engaged in.
And I would add that bin Laden and his followers are consciously devoted to the goal of creating a conflict between democracy, or at least capitalist democracy, on the one hand, and the world of Islam as they see and define it.
Now, how is Islam a technology in this conceptual apparatus?
Well, it's a technology for, first, salvation in its most basic sense.
It's meant to be a mechanism for construing the universe in a way that will bring about the salvation of the individual believer, but it's also meant by the Islamists -- and I use that term to mean people who believe that Islam -- they follow the slogan, Islam is the answer to a wide range of questions, whether they're social, or political, or personal, or spiritual.
Within the sphere of people who have that view, and it's a large number of people in the Muslim world who disagree with bin Laden in his application, but agree that Islam is the answer.
Islam represents a way of engaging the world through which one can achieve certain desirable goals.
And the goals from the perspective of Muslims are, in principle, peace, justice and equality, but on terms that correspond to traditional Muslim teachings.
Now, I don't want to leave a misimpression by identifying either of these propositions -- rather, either of these phenomena, democracy or Islam -- as technologies.
I don't want to suggest that they are a single thing that you can point to.
And I think a good way to prove this is simply to demonstrate to you what my thought process was when deciding what to put on the wall behind me when I spoke.
And I ran immediately into a conceptual problem: you can't show a picture of democracy.
You can show a slogan, or a symbol, or a sign that stands for democracy.
You can show the Capitol -- I had the same problem when I was designing the cover of my forthcoming book, in fact -- what do you put on the cover to show democracy?
And the same problem with respect to Islam.
You can show a mosque, or you can show worshippers, but there's not a straightforward way of depicting Islam.
That's because these are the kinds of concepts that are not susceptible to easy representation.
Now, it follows from that, that they're deeply contestable.
It follows from that that all of the people in the world who say that they are Muslims can, in principle, subscribe to a wide range of different interpretations of what Islam really is, and the same is true of democracy.
In other words, unlike the word hope, which one could look up in a dictionary and derive origins for, and, perhaps, reach some kind of a consensual use analysis, these are essentially contested concepts.
They're ideas about which people disagree in the deepest possible sense.
And as a consequence of this disagreement, it's very, very difficult for anyone to say, "I have the right version of Islam."
You know, post-9/11, we were treated to the amazing phenomenon of George W. Bush saying, "Islam means peace."
Well, so says George W. Bush.
Other people would say it means something else.
Some people would say that Islam means submission.
Other people would say it means an acknowledgement or recognition of God's sovereignty.
There are a wide range of different things that Islam can mean.
And ostensibly, the same is true of democracy.
Some people say that democracy consists basically in elections.
Other people say no, that's not enough, there have to be basic liberal rights: free speech, free press, equality of citizens.
These are contested points, and it's impossible to answer them by saying, "Ah ha, I looked in the right place, and I found out what these concepts mean."
Now, if Islam and democracy are at present in a moment of great confrontation, what does that mean?
Well, you could fit it into a range of different interpretative frameworks.
You could begin with the one that we began with a couple of days ago, which was fear.
Fear is not an implausible reaction with a war just around the corner and with a very, very high likelihood that many, many people are going to die as a consequence of this confrontation -- a confrontation which many, many people in the Muslim world do not want, many, many people in the American democracy do not want, many people elsewhere in the world do not want, but which nonetheless is favored by a large enough number of people -- at least in the relevant space, which is the United States -- to actually go forward.
So fear is not a crazy gonzalezmaria@example.com.
And I think that that's, in fact, probably the first appropriate response.
What I want to suggest to you, though, in the next couple of minutes is that there's also a hopeful response to this.
And the hopeful response derives from recognizing that Islam and democracy are technologies.
And by virtue of being technologies, they're manipulable.
And they're manipulable in ways that can produce some extremely positive outcomes.
What do I have in mind?
Well, all over the Muslim world there are people who take Islam deeply seriously, people who care about Islam, for whom it's a source either of faith, or of civilization, or of deep values, or just a source of powerful personal identity, who think and are saying loudly that Islam and democracy are in fact not in conflict, but are in fact deeply compatible.
And these Muslims -- and it's the vast majority of Muslims -- disagree profoundly with bin Laden's approach, profoundly.
And they furthermore think overwhelmingly -- again one can't speak of every person, but overwhelmingly, and one can find this by reading any of the sources that they have produced, and they're all over the Internet and in all sorts of languages -- one can see that they're saying that their concern in their own countries is primarily to free up themselves to have choice in the spheres of personal life, in the sphere of economics, in the sphere of politics, and, yes, in the sphere of religion, which is itself closely regulated in most of the Muslim world.
And many of these Muslims further say that their disagreement with the United States is that it, in the past and still in the present, has sided with autocratic rulers in the Muslim world in order to promote America's short-term interests.
Now, during the Cold War, that may have been a defensible position for the United States to take.
That's an academic question.
It may be that there was a great war to be fought between West and East, and it was necessary on the axis of democracy against communism.
And it was necessary in some way for these to contradict each other, and as a consequence you have to make friends wherever you can get them.
But now that the Cold War is over, there's nearly universal consensus in the Muslim world -- and pretty close to the same here in the United States, if you talk to people and ask them -- that in principle, there's no reason that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist.
And we see this among activist, practical Muslims, like the Muslims who are presently the elected, parliamentary, democratic government of Turkey, who are behaving pragmatically, not ideologically, who are promoting their own religious values, who are elected by their own people because they were perceived as honest and sincere because of their religious values, but who do not think that Islam and a democratic system of governance are fundamentally incompatible.
Now, you may say, but surely, what we've seen on television about Saudi Islam convinces us that it can't possibly be compatible with what we consider the core of democracy -- namely, free political choice, basic liberty and basic equality.
But I'm here to tell you that technologies are more malleable than that.
I'm here to tell you that many, many Muslims believe -- the vast majority, in fact -- in fact I think I would go so far as to say that many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice.
And there are Muslims, many Muslims out there, who are saying precisely this.
And they're making this argument wherever they're permitted to make it.
But their governments, needless to say, are relatively threatened by this.
And for the most part try to stop them from making this argument.
So, for example, a group of young activists in Egypt try to form a party known as the Center Party, which advocated the compatibility of Islam and democracy.
They weren't even allowed to form a party.
They were actually blocked from even forming a party under the political system there.
Why?
Because they would have done extraordinarily well.
In the most recent elections in the Muslim world -- which are those in Pakistan, those in Morocco and those in Turkey -- in each case, people who present themselves to the electorate as Islamic democrats were far and away the most successful vote-getters every place they were allowed to run freely.
So in Morocco, for example, they finished third in the political race but they were only allowed to contest half the seats.
So had they contested a larger number of the seats, they would have done even better.
Now what I want to suggest to you is that the reason for hope in this case is that we are on the edge of a real transformation in the Muslim world.
And that's a transformation in which many sincerely believing Muslims -- who care very, very deeply about their traditions, who do not want to compromise those values -- believe, through the malleability of the technology of democracy and the malleability and synthetic capability of the technology of Islam, that these two ideas can work together.
Now what would that look like?
What does it mean to say that there's an Islamic democracy?
Well, one thing is, it's not going to look identical to democracy as we know it in the United States.
That may be a good thing, in light of some of the criticisms we've heard today -- for example, in the regulatory context -- of what democracy produces.
It will also not look exactly the way either the people in this room, or Muslims out in the rest of the world -- I don't mean to imply there aren't Muslims here, there probably are -- conceptualize Islam.
It will be transformative of Islam as well.
And as a result of this convergence, this synthetic attempt to make sense of these two ideas together, there's a real possibility that, instead of a clash of Islamic civilization -- if there is such a thing -- and democratic civilization -- if there is such a thing -- we'll in fact have close compatibility.
Now, I began with the war because it's the elephant in the room, and you can't pretend that there isn't about to be a war if you're talking about these issues.
The war has tremendous risks for the model that I'm describing because it's very possible that as a consequence of a war, many Muslims will conclude that the United States is not the kind of place that they want to emulate with respect to its forms of political government.
On the other hand, there's a further possibility that many Americans, swept up in the fever of a war, will say, and feel, and think that Islam is the enemy somehow -- that Islam ought to be construed as the enemy.
And even though, for political tactical reasons, the president has been very, very good about saying that Islam is not the enemy, nonetheless, there's a natural impulse when one enters war to think of the other side as an enemy.
And one furthermore has the impulse to generalize, as much as possible, in defining who that enemy is.
So the risks are very great.
On the other hand, the capacities for positive results in the aftermath of a war are also not to be underestimated, even by, and I would say especially by, people who are deeply skeptical about whether we should go to war in the first place.
Those who oppose the war ought to realize that if a war happens, it cannot be the right strategy, either pragmatically, or spiritually, or morally, to say after the war, "Well, let's let it all run itself out, and play out however it wants to play out, because we opposed the war in the first place."
That's not the way human circumstances operate.
You face the circumstances you have in front of you and you go forward.
Well, what I'm here to say then is, for people who are skeptical about the war, it's especially important to recognize that in the aftermath of the war there is a possibility for the government of the United States and the Muslim peoples with whom it interacts to create real forms of government that are truly democratic and also truly Islamic.
And it is crucial -- it is crucial in a practical, activist way -- for people who care about these issues to make sure that within the technology of democracy, in this system, they exercise their preferences, their choices and their voices to encourage that outcome.
That's a hopeful message, but it's a message that's hopeful only if you understand it as incurring serious obligation for all of us.
And I think that we are capable of taking on that obligation, but only if we put what we can into it.
And if we do, then I don't think that the hope will be unwarranted altogether.
Thanks.
Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe.
But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
And that's what we're doing.
So Wikipedia -- you just saw the little demonstration of it -- it's a freely licensed encyclopedia.
It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages.
It's written using wiki software -- which is the type of software he just demonstrated -- so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately.
And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff.
So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia.
And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside.
So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization.
And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
And so, if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website.
We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions.
And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet.
And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to -- they can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it -- and you can do it commercially or non-commercially.
So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world.
We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia.
So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was.
And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is.
But first, I'll show you how big it is.
So we've got over 600,000 articles in English.
We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages.
The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French -- all the Western-European languages are quite big.
But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people.
A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global.
We're in many, many languages.
How popular we've gotten to be -- we're a top-50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times.
So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion.
This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we're the blue line there -- and this is the New York Times over there.
And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with I have no idea how many hundreds of employees.
We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer.
And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that ...
So the servers are managed by a ragtag band of volunteers.
All the editing is done by volunteers.
And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine.
People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?"
or "Who does that?"
And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in.
It's a very unusual and chaotic thing.
We've got over 90 servers now in three locations.
These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online.
I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers.
You could never afford to do this in a company.
You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're gonzalezmaria@example.com.
So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing.
And everything is managed by the volunteers.
And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars.
And that's essentially our main cost.
We could actually do without the employee.
We hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him, so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish?
Why is the website as good as it is?
First of all, how good is it?
Well, it's pretty good.
It isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model.
So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, "Oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish."
But when we've seen quality tests -- and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down.
So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus multimedial, and we won across the board.
They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result.
So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy.
The media has covered this somewhat extensively.
It started out with an article in Red Herring.
The reporters called me up and they -- I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community.
And so they quote me as saying, "They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia."
What I actually said is they're not gonzalezmaria@example.com.
So it's a slight misquote.
(Laughter) The articles were edited quite heavily.
And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions.
Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004."
This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there.
So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really gonzalezmaria@example.com.
Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community.
And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality.
The real struggle is not between the right and the left -- that's where most people assume -- but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.
And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.
The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism -- which happens sometimes even on stage ...
(Laughter) Sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalized Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly.
And I said -- you know, I always say, please don't do that.
That's not a good thing.
So how do we do this?
How do we manage the quality control?
How does it work?
So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software.
So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy.
This is something that I set down, from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable.
It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity.
The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth.
But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue.
We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it.
So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done.
So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds.
By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right.
If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community.
So, real-time peer review.
Every single change on the site goes to the "Recent changes" page.
So as soon as he made his change, it went to the "Recent changes" page.
That recent changes page was also fed into an IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools.
And people can get RSS feeds -- they can get email notifications of changes.
And then users can set up their own personal watch list.
So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized.
And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change.
There's a "new pages feed," for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created.
This is really important because a lot of new pages are just garbage that has to be deleted, you know, "ASDFASDF."
But also, that's some of the most interesting and fun things, some of the new articles.
People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better.
So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia.
So, Chris was able to do his change -- he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change.
But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users.
And that's a really important thing to understand: the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication.
And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists.
All these people know each other.
They communicate.
We have off-line meetings.
These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing.
The standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality.
We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for.
And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met.
It's my job to say that, but it's actually true.
The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people.
The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work.
This is an example of a page history on "flat Earth," and you can see some changes that were made.
What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, "OK, I understand now."
When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page.
That sounds suspicious.
Who is this person?
Somebody looks at it -- they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place -- to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this.
So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page.
Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended.
Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software.
All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages.
And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules.
The example I've got up here is the Votes for Deletion page.
So, I mentioned earlier, people type "ASDFASDF" -- it needs to be deleted.
Cases like that, the administrators just delete it.
There's no reason to have a big argument about it.
But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia?
Is the information verifiable?
Is it a hoax?
Is it true?
Is it what?
So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this.
And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page.
And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, "Twisted Issues," and the first person says, "Now this is supposedly a film.
It fails the Google test miserably."
The Google test is you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't gonzalezmaria@example.com.
It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research.
So somebody says, "Delete it, please.
Delete it -- it's not notable."
And then somebody says, "Wait, I found it.
I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'"
So the next persons says, "Clean it up."
Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB.
Keep, keep, keep."
And what's interesting about this is that the software is -- these votes are just text typed into a page.
This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue.
Now it is true that at the end of the day, an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, "OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it."
But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute.
Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it," then it would survive.
And it also matters who the people are who are voting.
Like I say, it's a tight-knit community.
Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," RickK.
RickK is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion.
His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing.
So how is all this governed?
People really want to know about administrators, things like that.
So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus -- meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral -- some amount of democracy -- all of the administrators -- these are the people who have the ability to delete pages.
That doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages.
They still have to follow all the rules -- but they're elected by the community.
Sometimes people -- random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia.
I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually.
There's a certain amount of aristocracy.
You got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, RickK's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know.
I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it.
And I always embarrass her because I say, "Well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful."
But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever break any rules of Wikipedia.
And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ...
And then there's monarchy, and that's my role on the community, so ...
(Laughter) I was describing this in Berlin once, and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, "I am the Queen of England."
(Laughter) And that's not exactly what I said, but -- (Laughter) the point is my role in the community -- Within the free software world, there's been a long-standing tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model.
So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator.
Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator," and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world.
It just isn't appropriate.
But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes.
So as an example of how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website, and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like.
And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send -- we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted."
Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up.
That's neo-Nazi math for you.
They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18.
But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article.
Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes.
On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do?
I mean, this could happen.
What if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?"
Then I said, "Well, fuck it, we'll just change the rules."
That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content.
And so, as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me.
Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave -- I can't tell anyone what to do.
So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists.
In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.
Thank you.
(Applause) Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders.
Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success.
It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased.
Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers and how do you see Wikipedia changing education?
Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia.
There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false.
It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers.
And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it.
And that turns out to not be true.
The last time I got an email from a journalist saying, "Why do academics hate Wikipedia?"
I sent it from my Harvard email address because I was recently appointed a fellow there.
And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it."
(Laughter) But I think there's going to be huge impacts.
And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wikibooks project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages.
And that's a much bigger project.
It's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition.
But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
We don't mean we're going to Spam them with AOL-style CDs.
We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use.
And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it.
The Wikibooks project is an effort to do that.
And I think that we're going to see -- it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on.
But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement.
And I've done this in three parts.
So first I started with the mind.
And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec."
And here's a little image of that.
And this was an amazing year.
It was really a fascinating journey.
It was painful at times, especially for those around me.
My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation.
So it had its downsides.
But after that, I decided to work on the spirit.
As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no gonzalezmaria@example.com.
I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian.
(Laughter) Not really.
But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it.
So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible.
And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard -- because Leviticus says you cannot shave.
So this is what I looked like by the end.
Thank you for that reaction.
(Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski.
I got both of them.
So there was the topiary there.
And there's the sheep.
Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive.
So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years.
And I just finished a couple of months ago.
And I have to say, thank God.
Because living so healthily was killing me.
(Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling.
I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers.
And they were telling me all the things I had to do.
I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure.
I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book.
I had to put on sunscreen.
This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen.
And you have to reapply it every two to four hours.
So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen.
I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year.
There was the washing of hands.
I had to do that properly.
And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs.
So that took a lot of time.
I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health.
I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council.
They started a public campaign that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet."
So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around.
And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets.
(Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that.
Now it's a little extreme, I admit.
But if you think about this, this is actually -- the "Freakonomics" authors wrote about this -- that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving.
So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple.
So I finished, and it was a success in a sense.
All of the markers went in the right direction.
My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant.
So that was nice.
And it was successful overall.
But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy.
I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family.
And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health.
So I finished.
And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over.
I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself.
It was like something out of Caligula.
(Laughter) Without the sex part.
Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening.
But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely.
And I finally have stabilized.
So now I'm back to adopting many -- not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore -- but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year.
It was really a life-changing project.
And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them.
Let me just tell you two really quickly.
The first is -- and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out -- but I live a much quieter life now.
Because we live in such a noisy world.
There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy.
(Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard -- not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response.
A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going.
And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage.
The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year.
And it was done in Europe.
And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution.
So they think it's actually very deadly.
And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain.
It really impairs cognition.
And our Founding Fathers knew about this.
When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate.
So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist.
So as a patriot, I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.
And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that -- and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED -- that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them.
And just to give you one instance of this: food.
The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable.
But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food.
To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel.
So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes -- throw in some sunflower seeds.
And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos.
(Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.
So that is it.
The book about it comes out in April.
It's called "Drop Dead Healthy."
And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour.
That's my greatest hope.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)