YouSaid · the spoken record

Jimmy Wales

lines on the record: 234
first: 2023-06-18
most recent: 2023-06-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Database of genealogy, having data birth, date of death, you know, certain elements like that of private people. But you couldn't really write a biography. One of the areas this comes up quite often is what we call BLP1A. We've got lots of acronyms. Biography of a living person who's notable for only one event. Is a real sort of danger zone. And the type of example would be a victim of a crime. So someone who's a victim of a famous serial killer, but about whom, like really not much is known.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that can vary depending on the subject matter. One of the areas where we try to be much more careful would be biographies. The reason is a biography of a living person, if you get it wrong, it can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging. And so if someone is a private person and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia, there's no way to update it. There's not much to know. So, for example, an encyclopedia article about my mother, my mother school teacher, later a pharmacist, wonderful woman, but never been in the news. I mean, other than me talking about why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia entry that's probably made in somewhere standard example. But, you know, there's not enough known. And you could sort of imagine a”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very specific instance. And the answer is no, there's not much known about it. I dare say unless it's very special to you and your great-grandmother gave it to you or something, you probably know very little about it. It's a pen. It's just here in the office. So that's just to show there is a limit. I mean, in German Wikipedia, they used to talk about the rear nut of the wheel of uli-fuk's bicycle, Ulifuch's well-known Wikipedian of the time to sort of illustrate, like you can't have an article about literally everything. So then it raises the question, what can you have an article about? What can't you?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a classic, clear Big Pen. So, could we have an entry about that Big Pen? I bet we do, that type of Big Pen, because it's classic. Everybody knows it, and it's got a history. And actually, there's something interesting about the Bit Company. They make pens. They also make kayaks. And there's something else they're framed. So basically, they're sort of a definition by non-essentials company. Anything that's long and plastic, that's what they make. If you want to find the common ground form.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know. Probably not in English Wikipedia, but it probably might be today. But there's so much out there. And of course, what we get into when we're talking about how many entries there are and how many could there be is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, which is the question of, well, how do you draw the limit? How do you draw what is there? Sometimes people say, Oh, there should be no limit, but I think that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny if you really pause and think about it. So I see in your hand there you've got a BIC pen. Pretty standard. Everybody's seen billions of those in life”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know then it seemed quite big. I mean, we knew at that time that it was nowhere near complete. I remember at Wikimania in Harvard when we did our annual conference there in Boston, someone who had come to the conference from Poland had brought along with him a small encyclopedia, a single volume encyclopedia of biographies. So short biographies, normally a paragraph or so, about famous people in Poland. And there were some 22,000 entries. And he pointed out that even then, 2006, Wikipedia felt quite big. And he said, in English Wikipedia, there's only a handful of these, you know, less than 10%, I think he said. And so then you realized, yeah, actually, who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yes, it does. I mean, it doesn't because I know those numbers and see them from time to time. But in another sense, a deeper sense, yeah, it does. I mean, it's really remarkable. I remember when English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles and when German Wikipedia passed 100,000, because I happened to be in Germany with a bunch of Wikipedians that night.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The canonical recipe is kind of difficult to come by because there's so many variants and it's all debatable and interesting. For something like chocolate cake, you could probably say, you know, here's one of the earliest recipes or here's one of the most common recipes. But for many, many things, the variants are as interesting. You know, somebody said to me recently 10 Spaniards, 12 Paella recipes. So, you know, these are all matters of open discussion”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually very complicated. I love to cook. I'm actually quite a good cook. What's interesting is it's very hard to have a neutral recipe. Like a canonical recipe.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say there's chocolate cake recipes. I mean, you might find a sample recipe somewhere. I'm not saying there are none, but in general, no, like we wouldn't have recipes.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not an encyclopedia article, but why not? So Hence was born Wikisource, which is where you put original text and things like that out of copyright text because he said, no, an encyclopedia article about Hamlet, that's a perfectly valid thing. But the actual text of the play is not an encyclopedia article. So most of it's fairly obvious. But there are some interesting quirks and differences. So, for example, as I understand it, French language encyclopedias traditionally, it would be quite common to have recipes, which in English language that would be unusual. You wouldn't find a recipe for chocolate cake in Britannica. And so I actually don't know the current state. I haven't thought about that. Many many years now”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an encyclopedia? So the way I would put it is an encyclopedia or what our goal is, is the sum of all human knowledge, but some meaning summary. And this was an early debate. I mean, somebody started uploading the full text of Hamlet, for example. And we said, hmm, wait, hold on a second.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life to its fullest without a very good question. I'm not really sure. I mean, maybe it does now because keyboard standards have, you know, drifted over time and becomes useful to have a certain character. I mean, it's the same thing. Like, there's not really a W character in Italian. And it wasn't on keyboards, or I think it is now, but in general, W is not a letter in.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may have been an option in the software. I'm not sure I thought up Square Broadcast, but anyway, we just did that, which worked really well. It makes nice links. And you can see in its red links or blue links, depending on if the page exists or not. But the thing that didn't occur to me even think about is that, for example, on the German language standard keyboard, there is no square bracket. So, for German Wikipedia to succeed, people had to learn to do some alt codes to get the square bracket. Or a lot of users cut and paste a square bracket when they could find one. They would just cut and paste one in. And yet German Wikipedia has been a massive success. So somehow that didn't slow people down.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're both heading. Now, that never really happened. We didn't have a problem with it, but it was kind of obvious you can't grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody. That's not going to be good for trust and reputation and so forth. So quickly, I had to write a little login store people's passwords and things like that so you could have unique identities. And then another example of something quite you would have never thought would have been a good idea. And it turned out to not be a problem. To make a link in Wikipedia in the early days, you would make a link to a page that may or may not exist by just using camel case, meaning it's like uppercase, lowercase, and you smash the words together. So maybe New York City, you might type any W noSpace capital Y, York City. And that would make a link. But that was ugly. That was clearly not right. And so I was like, okay, well, that's just not going to look nice. Let's just use square brackets, two square brackets makes a link.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interface, there's the yeah, so the interface. So, an example, there was some software called UseModWiki, which we started with. It's quite amusing, actually, because the main reason we launched with UseModWiki is that it was a single Perl script, so it was really easy for me to install it on the server and just get running. But it was some guy's hobby project, it was cool, but it was just a hobby project. And all the data was stored in flat text files so there was no real database behind it. So to search the site, you basically used grab, which is just like basic Unix utility to like look through all the files. So that clearly was never going to scale. But also in the early days, it didn't have real logins. So you could set your username, but there were no passwords. So, you know, I might say Bob Smith and then someone else comes along and says, oh, I'm Bob Smith.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wikidata, you can link from a Wikipedia entry, you can link to that piece of data in Wikidata. I mean, it's a pretty advanced thing, but there are advanced users who are doing that. And then when that gets updated, it updates in all the languages where you've done that.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, shouldn't you have certain data that might be in multiple articles that gets updated automatically? So for example, the population of New York City every 10 years there's a new official census. Couldn't you just update update that bit of data in one place and it would update across all languages? That is a reality today. But back then it was just like, hmm, how do we do that? How do we think about that?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, not as much as there probably should have been, in a way. During that two years of the failure of Newpedia, where very little work got done, what was actually productive was there was a huge long discussion, email discussion, very clever people talking about things like neutrality, talking about what is an encyclopedia, but also talking about more technical ideas, you know, things back then XML was kind of all the rage and thinking about could we”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's, you know, especially in the early days. And this, by the way, has gotten much harder because there are fewer topics that are just greenfield available. But you could say, oh, well, I know a little bit about this and I can get it started. But then it is fun to come back then and see other people have added and improved and so on and so forth. And that idea of collaborating, you know, where people can much like open source software, you put your code out and then people suggest revisions and I change it and it modifies and it grows beyond the original creator. It's just a kind of a fun, wonderful, quite geeky hobby, but people enjoy it.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You put your name down. Actually, a funny story was several years later. I just happened to be online and I saw when his name is Robert Allman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And we didn't have an entry on him at all, which was surprising. But it wasn't that surprising. This was still early days, you know. And so I got to be the first person to type Robert Alman, one Nobel Prize in Economics and hit Save, which again wasn't a very good article. But then I came back two days later and people had improved it and so forth. That second half of the experience where with Robert Merton, I never succeeded because it was just too intimidating. It was like, oh no, I was able to chip in and help other people jumped in. Everybody was interested in the topic because it's all in the news at the moment. And so it's just a completely different model, which worked much, much better.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And showed me the wiki concept in December, and then Larry Sanger brought in the same, said, what about this wiki idea? And so in January, we decided to launch Wikipedia, but we weren't sure. So the original project was called Newpedia. And even though it wasn't successful, we did have quite a group of academics and like really serious people. And we were concerned that, oh, maybe these academics are going to really hate this idea. And we shouldn't just convert the project immediately. We should launch this as a side project, the idea of here's a wiki where we can start playing around. But actually, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff. And it was actually a very exciting time. You know, you could, back then, you could be the first person who typed Africa as a continent and pit safe, you know, which isn't much of an encyclopedia entry, but it's true. And it's a start and it's kind of fun.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, the bad part of grad school, right? And so it's like, oh, this isn't intellectually fun. This is like the bad part of grad school. It's intimidating. And there's a lot of potential embarrassment if I screw something up and so forth. And so that was when I realized, okay, look, this is never going to work. This is not something that people are really going to want to do. So Jeremy Rosenfeld, one of my employees, had brought”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought, okay, I saw that Robert Merton had won Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on option pricing theory. And when I was in academia, that's what I worked on, was option pricing theory, had a published paper. So I'd worked through all of his academic papers, and I knew his work quite well. I thought, oh, I'll write a short biography of Merton. And when I started to do it,”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Implemented this seven stage review process to get anything published. And two things came of that. So one thing, one of the earliest entries that we published after this rigorous process, a few days later, we had to pull it because as soon as it hit the web and the broader community took a look at it, people noticed plagiarism and realized that it wasn't actually that good, even though it had been reviewed by academics and so on. So we had to pull it. So it's like, oh, okay, well, so much for a seven-stage review process. But also I decided that I wanted to try. I was frustrated. And why is this taking so long? Why is it so hard?”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's encyclopedia, you can collaborate on it. There's a few reasons why one, we all pretty much know what an encyclopedia entry on, say, the Eiffel Tower should be like. You know, you should see a picture, a few pictures maybe, history, location, something about the architect, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a shared understanding of what it is we're trying to do, and then we can collaborate, and different people can chip in and find sources and so on and so forth. So set up first Newpedia, which was about two years before Wikipedia. And with Newpedia, we had this idea that in order to be respected, we had to be even more academic than a traditional encyclopedia because a bunch of volunteers on the internet getting out of the right an encyclopedia, you know, you could be made fun of if it's just every random person. So we had.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start at the beginning. What is the origin story of Wikipedia? The origin story of Wikipedia. Well, so I was watching the growth of the free software movement, open source software, and seeing programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, sharing code, doing that under free license, which is really interesting because it empowers an ability to work together that's really hard to do if the code is still proprietary, because then if I chip in and help, we sort of have to figure out how I'm going to be rewarded and what that is. But the idea that everyone can copy it, and it just is part of the commons, really empowered a huge wave of creative software production. And I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works. And the first thing that I thought of was an encyclopedia. And I thought, oh, that seems obvious.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People that have talked about the awesome health benefits of Macadamia Nuz, but listen, it's the deliciousness that matter smallpacks, you know exactly the nutrition involved. I just love it. It's a healthy snack. And it's a delicious snack. And there's so much variety. It just feels like I'm exploring the full landscape of flavor. If you want to do the same, go to house of macadamias dot com slash legs to get a free box of their bestseller Namibian sea salted macadamia nuts plus twenty percent off your entire order. I don't know why, but it's really fun to say that's House of Macadamias dot com slash lex. This is Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes me want to go into all kinds of directions here, but I'm not going to because I'm a classy gentleman, and this is not the kind of show we're running here. So if you would like to put those nuts in your mouth, you know where to go, friends. 30% less carbs than almonds. It's also super healthy because it's rich in omega-7s. There's a lot of...”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have to get their mattress, even though it's great. You can use your own with their pot three cover. Check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by House of Macadamius. They make delicious macadamia not basenacks. I've gotten a lot of them, and I've given it to guests. I've given it to friends, and I have brought joy not only into my life, but into theirs. They got bars, they got nuts, they got chocolate covered nuts. I mean the sexual innuendo that is laden in this very description of this particular snack.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Episode is also brought to you by Aight Sleep in its new pod three mattress. The technological revolution that brings the power of Naps into the twenty first century digital world does all kinds of tracking for you with a huge number of sensors. That's super nice. You know, there's an app, you can track information, great. But you can also control the temperature of the thing and go as low as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees on each side of the bed separately. This is engineering at its best. I love bringing the temperature down with a warm blanket in the Texas heat. It's just heaven. Whether we're talking about a 20 minute nap or a full eight hour sleep, it's the place I go to to escape the complex world outside.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's awesome. This human civilization we have built up. Will we do a thing that we're good at? Would that thing help other people and form this cohesive network of goodness? It's a beautiful thing, really. Anyway, the thing that you also kind of notice is that it's really well engineered. The non-stick works beautifully. It looks badass. The whole thing looks amazing. Go to hexclad.com and use code lex to get 10% off your entire order. That's hexclad. com and use code lex for ten percent off your entire order”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This episode is brought to you by Hexclad, the maker of well engineered and patented hybrid cookware. I just cooked with one of their pans last night and made a delicious steak. Is there anything better than the meditative process of making a steak late at night when you haven't eaten all day, you fasted for twenty two twenty three hours? You take in the smell and the sizzling sounds of deliciousness. And I just think how grateful I am to have shelter, to have food, to have all this amazing things that I can use that other brilliant people have created.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, one of if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Hexclad for Cookware, Acelep for naps, and House of Macadamius for Deliciousness. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring good electsfriedman dot com slash hiring. And now, friends, onto the full adderies. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.”
2023-06-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source