How did Jimmy Wales get the world to help him write an encyclopedia? And what could YOU learn from his experiences to help you build a business that leaves a legacy?

I invited Jimmy to Mixergy and I asked him to talk about the business side of his non-profit, Wikipedia.  He told us how the idea for Wikipedia evolved, how he got people to contribute to it, why people promoted the site, and more. My goal was to help you learn how to build a startup that leaves a legacy, from the man whose work changed the world.

The FULL program

Prefer audio? Great! “Right click” here for the MP3 format.

(Can’t see videos? Go to Mixergy.com)

Video excerpts

About Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the free, non-profit encyclopedia that anyone can edit. He is also the co-founder of Wikia, a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and his blog.

Edited Excerpts From The Wikipedia Story

He was inspired by the open source movement

I was looking at the growth of the free software movement and I was seeing how communities of programmers were coming together online to create software.  So it wasn’t so much about wanting the end result (the encyclopedia) to be different, although the end result is quite different, but more about realizing that were was a new model for collaboration going on online and that there would be a lot of cool stuff that should go along with that.

There wasn’t a business plan

The best businesses are not cooked up by MBA’s with reams of data and business plans.  That’s never been true.  The best businesses are meeting the needs of the customer in an innovative way. It really was more about seeing an opportunity and an idea and knowing it needs to be done, and that’s what I think really makes something work.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking about the market need and so forth.  I’m just saying that shouldn’t be the primary.  Because if it is the primary you end up with a very tedious, uninspiring business that tends to not to go anywhere.

It started as Nupedia, an idea that failed

The original concept of Nupedia was to create a free encyclopedia written by volunteers — you know, people from all over the internet. So the same vision as Wikipedia, but we didn’t have a understanding of the social model needed to create Wikipedia.  Basically, it was a very top down system: a seven stage review process; people had to submit their proposals for what they were going to write and so on and so forth. As a result it was a very slow and not much fun system for people, and so it failed because it didn’t meet the need of the people who wanted to help with the project.

But Nupedia helped advance the cause

There was a large community that we brought together who spent a lot of time talking about what it means to build an encyclopedia.  What should be in it, what it should be like, what kind of technology we should use. So although I say that Nupedia failed, in another sense it obviously didn’t fail. I mean it was a group of people who got together and for two years we talked about how to make an encyclopedia before we actually managed to get started.

He persisted because he was on a mission

I was incredibly passionate about the concept. The idea that we could create a free encyclopedia for everybody — as a humanitarian goal and as a concept of the purpose of what the internet it for — really seized hold of me and really I just decided to make it my life’s work in one way or another.  So there was doubt but never any serious question of, of quitting, it was a question of what do we change to make this happen.

[Andrew's note: be sure to listen to this section of the program to hear how he felt when Nupedia was failing, and more importantly HOW he sharpened his ideas and grew his motivation by listening to others.]

Wikipedia was born, an encyclopedia that anyone can edit

Because we had such a rigid system at Nupedia, it was really hard to change anything, and we didn’t have a lot of developers and so forth. So the only possible change was really to just over throw the whole thing and install the wiki software and go in a much more simple way.

HOW they got their first volunteer writers

Because we came out of the open source software movement we really had a bit of a following from the beginning from software programmers and so forth.

There’s a whole community of activists in that area.  So we got a lot of early press coverage from slashdot, for example, which drove a lot of traffic to the site, got a lot of people excited and interested in the concept.  So that was really the first thing.

Beyond that it really just grew by word of mouth, you know and especially once we got Wikipedia running we were able to actually produce content that would get picked up by the search engines and so forth.  You know we really realized that if you make good quality content then people will come and so we just kept focused on that.

WHY people wrote and edited the encyclopedia

We can’t avoid looking at the big picture vision and recognizing that people think that this is a worthwhile project.  It’s something that’s just big picture worth doing, and that should exist in the world and that people enjoy helping to make that happen.

Why people did all that work for FREE

If you think people are willing to work for free, you’re really confused.  Instead, what the people do for free is have fun. They do stuff they find entertaining.

That can be intellectually entertaining, it can be a feeling of warmth towards the community, it can hanging out with friends. There’s lots and lots of things that people do for free.

I always say that we can imagine it being something similar to a bowling alley — a bowling alley where sometimes there are tournaments, and sometimes people get paid a million dollars to bowl.  So what are all these other people doing bowling for free?  They must seem silly, right?  Well no actually, they’re not silly.  They’re having fun bowling, and that’s something that they like to do. And you don’t think of that as, “wow we’re suckers,” because some guy gets paid a million dollars a year to bowl.

He’s leaving a legacy

My dream really is that there will exist a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet, in their own language.

So I’m really focused a lot on the growth of Wikipedia in the developing world — trying to promote that, trying to support that, trying to think about how we can extend that.

Because right now there are about a billion people online, and pretty soon there will be be 2-, 3-, 4-billion people online. As they come online they’re going to want their own Wikipedia, they’ll want their own tools, they’ll want to make sure everything works for them. So we want to be there for them.

Full program includes

- How Jimmy Wales plans out his businesses. If he doesn’t use a business plan, what does he use?

- See how & WHY people told their friends about Wikipedia. You can (and you SHOULD) use it in your business too.

- Why Jimmy made Wikipedia into a non-profit.

- What it was like inside the company when they decided to close Wikisearch, the search engine that some said might overtake Google.

- Why it wasn’t easy for people to edit pages on Wikipedia and, until recently, on Wikia. (It’s not what you think.)

- A comparison of business as it’s done today, in Thomas Edison’s time and in Ray Kroc’s time. What’s different? What’s the same?

Suggested comments

- Was this excerpt long enough? Or do you want longer transcripts?

- Why do YOU think Wikipedia succeeded?

- This interview will be in the Mixergy book. Who else should I interview for it?

[Thank you Francisco Dao of Twiistup for helping me meet Jimmy Wales.]