PeterMangialardi

Humble Beginnings

Jimmy Wales looks at Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia initially created by Jimmy Wales as a side project, now it contains millions of articles, and thousands of editors daily. Jimmy Wales has always been interested in computers and reading or gaining information from books. He was very good at complex mathematics during his post-secondary years but dropped out to become a full-time options trader. He used his knowledge of mathematics to his advantage when trading to scout potential buy opportunities. He originally created a web browser through the knowledge he gained in grad school. He used advertisements on his websites to get money in order to play around with web development. This is when he created Nupedia, this was a more slimmed down version of Wikipedia where people were not able to quickly edit changes, and rather each article had to go through a whole publishing process. He then saw the problems he had with Nupedia and focused on improving it, then Wikipedia was born. Jimmy created the name Wikipedia from its latin derivation of the word "quick", and "pedia" coming from encyclopedia.

Development

Wikipedia was launched in 2001.

When the internet first started blooming, he realized that it was going to be something that will change the way of living. So he put everything aside and focused on web development. When he first launched Nupedia there was plagiarism issues, this is because he used other people to write information on topics. Because Nupedia was community based, people helped him check for plagiarism. He realized people weren't making many articles on the website so he decided to create one and realized the issues with it. It was not very user-friendly, and you would have a strong feeling that there is someone more knowledgeable than you judging your article. He became more aware of how he could improve Nupedia. He decided to change the name from Nupedia to Wikipedia and included some major changes to the architecture of the website. When he changed the name to Wikipedia it got more articles in 2 months than Nupedia did in 2 years. The change worked because he was aware of how he could really improve the website, and other people saw a positive visible change as well. Then the dot com crash occured and the main reason Wikipedia was able to flourish during it is because of the community and the volunteers, and Jimmy was able to have very low fees on the website. He decided to make Wikipedia a nonprofit, although he is still able to put advertisements on the website. Although they did not include any ads that will increase traffic on the website. Then he added a funding campaign on the website because he realized he needed money in order to get more servers because of the number of people visiting it. Many people donated and he received $30,000 in 2 weeks.

Where They Are Now

- 10th most visited website on the internet.

- Over 6 million articles.

- Tens of thousands of people all over the world helping contribute to the website.

- $85 million+ in donations.

- Available in over 300 languages.

- Over 250 edits per minute.

Outside Research

Wikipedia was created from its predecessor, Nupedia. Nupedia was partnered with a web-advertising firm called Bomis, which was owned by Jimmy Wales. Wales new that there was issues with Nupedia with the main one being the slow process for an article to be produced. Within the first year it was reported that Nupedia only had 12 articles. Instead of Jimmy Wales accepting defeat, he was aware of the issues present and made a change. This would be creating Wikipedia in 2001. The first words ever written in the new and improved Wikipedia were "Hello World!". This is a common phrase used by programmers when they initially test their product, or are starting a new project. Just after the first year after Wikipedia was created there was over 20,000 articles present on the website. In 2002 when the dot-com bubble burst, Bomis stopped funding this project, and one of Wales' friends left Wikipedia as well because of differed views. This would make it so that Jimmy Wales had to restructure the workspace. He opted to a more community style workplace and this ended paying off in the coming years.

What I Can Learn

Jimmy Wales never lost sight of what he believed in, he always thought his business would be something, he knew he just had to make changes and get it down. This can be related to the one of the teachings in the book I read for the Independant book Report Summative. In the novel Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill talks about how having a good vision is crucial in order to achieve success. Jimmy Wales was the perfect example of this, in the podcast he stated that even when Wikipedia wasnt doing very well he never lost sight of his idea.

Another concept I learned was that you need other people in order to succeed. Jimmy Wales claimed that the whole reason why the website was able to do well during the dot com crash is because of the community. The community allowed it so that the website was cheaper to maintain. He said that one time there was someone trying to vandalize the website late at night, but a community member in Australia was awake and able to take action against that person.

Something else I learned is that in a community workspace, you cant use authority to “boss” other people around. Instead, you have to speak nicer to people and treat everyone equally in order to keep the relations in the community strong. Although this concept seems fairly straightforward, business leaders can often get caught up in the control they have. This will lead to a less motivated work space. This can be related to our course when we learned about different types of management theories. One of the theories looked over says that it can be more beneficial to a work structure if words are used more positively to the employees. This can lead to different pros and cons, the pros being that the employees will be more motivated, and one of the cons being that the employees may be more lazy or work less because there is no strong authority figure watching over them.