Wikipedia has been a household name for years. But when the site announced that it would black out its English-language site earlier this week in support of a Webwide protest against two antipiracy bills, it became a hot topic of conversation.
Jimmy Wales, 45, who helped found the free encyclopedia in 2001, is now president of Wikia, an Internet start-up company, and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia. He said this was the first time Wikipedia had taken a political and public stance on an issue. And he said the community was thrilled at the response — but had no plans to make blackouts a habit.
Here is an edited version of a conversation with Mr. Wales.
What’s your main takeaway from the protests this week?
We got their attention. We found the response very encouraging — people becoming more powerful by the hand of technology.
What did you think about kids complaining on Twitter that they couldn’t do their homework? Do we take Wikipedia for granted?
Wikipedia is now 11 years old. If you are 15 or 16 years old, it’s existed the entire time that you knew how to read. It’s a go-to source. For a whole generation, it’s part of the infrastructure of the world; they use it every day. They think of it as the same way we think about TV, cars and things that we grew up with our whole lives. Tech becomes ingrained in our lives — it becomes part of the background. We regret the impact on student grades and any journalists who were put out. [Laughs.]
Did you ever consider segueing from the success of the blackout to a fund-raising campaign for Wikipedia?
We had a handful of volunteers suggest while doing the blackout that we ask for donations, but that was quickly shot down by many people in Wikipedia, including me. We didn’t want to muddy the message for anyone to think this was a ploy for fund-raising. This was about getting people to call Congress.
But now that people realize how much they depend on Wikipedia, maybe they’d be more likely to pony up the cash to support it.
We appreciate the success that we had, but there are no plans for that. We’re really bad at business, so we do our annual fund-raising campaign, but we never think about optimizing income.
Some people felt that an important information resource like Wikipedia shouldn’t take a political stance.
When you have a broad community like ours, you expect to see dissenting voices. But we stand behind the idea that everyone has a right to learn what they want to learn. We will not cooperate with censorship. That is not controversial. In that situation, we are political. Don’t expect to see us becoming activists — it’s not who we are.
Considering the impact of the blackout, can we expect Wikipedia to flex its political power again anytime soon?
I suspect this is a one-time-only affair.
Minutes after Wikipedia went dark, people immediately foundworkarounds. Was that deliberate?
That was intentional. We left the mobile site up and just put a banner on the site so that if they needed it in an emergency, they could get to it. It wasn’t intended to be a perfect blackout. That would have been easy – we could just refuse service. The real point was to drive as many people as possible to being aware and educated and call their congressperson.
Did you know that Brandon the programmer (one of the Wikimedia Foundation employees used in its recent fund-raising campaign) had become a meme on the Internet? And that there’s a Chrome extension that lets his face pop up occasionally in your browser?
I do. [Laughs.] Brandon is very popular because he’s a heavy metal dude.
Do you use the extension? I do.
I don’t have it installed on my computer but I suppose some people do.