Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales

What was the um what was the first Wikipedia entry? The earliest article that anyone has found uh was an article Hm. And in in those early days it was very exciting. You could just be the first person to say, Africa is a continent and hit save.

And well it's not very good. But it's not wrong, and It's a start. From NPR? That's how I built this.

show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They don't. I'm Guy Raz and on today's show, the story of how Jimmy Wales started an online encyclopedia as a side project. Watched it grow into one of the pillars. Internet.

Okay, I'm gonna read you the list of the top five most viewed websites in the world. So number one, of course, is Google. Then comes YouTube. And then Facebook, and then Baidu, which is China's biggest search engine. And finally, coming in at number five. Wikipedia. So imagine for a moment that you are the founder of one of these big websites.

How much are you worth? Well, Forbes puts out annual lists, and here's what we found. Larry Page, founder of Google, sits on about$50 billion. Mark Zuckerberg edges him out with about 70 billion. Each of the founders of Baidu are worth around 15 billion, and the founders of YouTube walked away with half a billion each when they sold to Google back in 2006. And the founder of Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales, the fifth most visited website in the world. His personal fortune is estimated to be not much more than one million dollars. He is quite possibly The least rich internet titan in the world. But unlike a lot of famous founders or entrepreneurs.

Jimmy Whale's legacy is likely to live on for centuries because he is in some ways Like a modern day Johannes Gutenberg. And just like Gutenberg's press made it possible to spread knowledge beyond a village or a town. Wikipedia made it possible for every single person on Earth with an internet connection to gain access to probably the biggest collection of knowledge ever assembled.

And like a lot of the entrepreneurs we interview on the show. Jimmy Wales' story starts with influential people and important events that happened pretty early in life. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where his uncle owned a shop that sold early personal computers, and his two big hobbies were tinkering with computers, And reading. Reading just about

Anything he found interesting. I read basically anything I could get my hands on. Including Spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia. Um you know, you hear about something and you wanna learn more and you go to the encyclopedia and find the article and read that. And yeah, uh it was it was a beloved thing in our house that we had the encyclopedia and we would all use it. Did you buy it in the store or did did somebody like come to your house and door to door? Somebody came to the house, door to door. Um when I was a baby, as the family legend goes, that uh somebody came to the house and sold it to my mother.

And um every year they would send out an annual update. Yeah. For example, the article on the moon was updated when someone landed on the moon. And so they they were all these stickers and you would take the sticker out and you would go to look up M Moon and you would find the old article on the moon and you put in the sticker saying there's an update. My mom and I would do that every year when the stickers came in. My first editing in encyclopedia.

Jimmy eventually went to college in his home state of Alabama. And he was really good at complex mathematics. So good, in fact, that he went on to do a PhD in finance. But around nineteen ninety two, Jimmy decided that academia really wasn't the place for him. So he left to take a job as an options trader

In Chicago. Mm. What I was doing is really just trading, like buying and selling every day, arbitrage. So there's a lot of mathematical modeling to relate the prices of different things to each other, to look for opportunities to Find imperfections in in the market in pricing. So while you were in Chicago in the early nineties, this was also around the time the internet starts to become something that ordinary people are using. Netscape comes out and people are like browsing the internet. Did you get into that?

Yeah, completely. Yeah. I was I was really So even when I was before I came to Chicago, I was really getting into the internet. So what I was doing, I had no life, I was I just traded in the day and then I would go home at night. And I was working on my own uh web browser. Wait, you were making

Your own web browser, like on the side, like in your apartment? Yeah. How did you n know how to do that? Did you were just like sort of self taught? Yeah, yeah. I mean I In grad school, obviously if I'm doing very quantitative data analysis, things like that, I learned to program. Uh I was a bad programmer, but I you know, I can code. I just remember very clearly. The day that Netscape went public and was worth, as I recall, four point three billion dollars on the first day of training. Wow.

And I had the uh I had been convinced for a few years time that the internet was gonna be really big and really important and really kind of fundamentally changed the world. And this was the the moment when I felt like okay, look, the market is validating that, like other people are seeing it and people are really investing money here. And so there was a bit of a transition period, but it was really in ninety I'd say about ninety eight is when I left Chicago. Uh, and I moved to San Diego and that was when I really decided you know, I'm just gonna I'm gonna focus full time on my internet ideas and projects.

Once Jimmy settled down in San Diego, he founded a small internet search company called Bomas. And because this was the late nineteen nineties, During the dot com boom. Companies were paying top rates to advertise on these new things called websites. And so for the next few years, those ad dollars made it possible for Jimmy to hire a small staff of programmers. And they had the money to just

Kind of experiment. So the idea was really at that time, this is pre Google, remember? The best web directory around was Yahoo. And Yahoo hired, I don't know, hundreds of people to go around and index manually by hand index topics and categories on the web. Yeah. And then I said, Well look, maybe the community can do that. Maybe other people can help out and if you could get

thousands of people involved, it could be really bigger than And that was really the thought. So we allowed people to come in and build an index to any topic that they were interested in. And we call it a web ring. I remember one of the first community members

came in and built a web ring about Jupiter. And so they had gathered a bunch of links about the planet Jupiter and they put it in and we're like, Okay, that's cool, that's great. Now of course We doubled in all kinds of things. We had a a few blogs and uh I remember my uh business partner at the time was talking about Building what

Today I would say what he his idea was sounded a lot like Facebook, but it was really more about people reconnecting with people from their schools and universities. It was a classmates.com kind of idea. But I mean keep in mind that This was also where we started um new Pedia. The predecessor to Wikipedia. What what what was it? Uh so you know, as I said at at Bomas we were always experimenting. We were thinking of new ideas and new possibilities, new things to do.

And I was looking at the model of open source software, seeing that that worked. I was also looking at, you know, at Bomus we had community members who were building indexes to content that they were interested in. Uh so the idea of newpedia was to basically replicate that to say well let's build an encyclopedia And have volunteers contribute to it. And I just thought, you know, this This seems like

Uh low hanging fruit. Actually I remember I was in a quite a panic when I had the idea to hurry up and get started because I thought it was so obvious. So when I started New Pedia, um, I really thought that other competitors were gonna be out there, but after Maybe wasn't as obvious as I thought. And the idea was basically to just put a

Yeah, but of course at the time I didn't really understand Wiki, uh the concept of a website anyone can edit. And also We had um

You know, a seven stage review process to get anything published. So how would it work? You would you would write an article for New Pia and then it went through. Like seven stages before it was published? Seven stages, but I mean some of the stages had to do with first you had to propose the article. Uh you have to prove your qualifications to write it. We had

hired some staff, so Larry Sanger was the editor in chief, and he would There was a whole process uh whereby you could apply to submit something and so forth and then There would be copy editing uh reviewers much like an academic review where you send it out to experts in the field for review. And actually one of the things that was really a light bulb moment in my mind was One of the first few articles that

got through that process and was published, we had it up on the web for Just a few days, I would say, and suddenly it came to our attention, somebody said, Hey, this is really plagiarized. Oh and we checked into it and it's like ouch. So Like somebody just copied the encyclopedia? No, it wasn't from another encyclopedia. It was from other sources, but it was it was just it was not good. And I realized even with all this process we built up to prevent this There was still plagiarism and that was a huge problem. And in fact the only thing that revealed it was more people reading it and people seeing it and saying, Hey, this is actually a problem.

And that There's an old saying in the open source software world, uh that Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. And what that means is oftentimes when you're programming there's some kind of bug in your code and you just cannot find it. And if you get another set of eyes on it or ten sets of eyes, it becomes very obvious. Somebody will spot it. Yeah. And so that concept does actually apply in lots of areas of life that if you get a lot of people looking at something

People can say, Hey, there's actually a problem here that maybe nobody else noticed, and then sometimes after it's been pointed out, you say, Oh yeah, that's kind of obvious. So I I read that within a year after launching New Pedia. you the site produced a sum total of twenty one articles, which doesn't sound like it was churning burning. No, it was not good. And in fact, um as we proceeded through that year And I was very frustrated with the slow Pace of progress.

I decided to write an entry myself. I thought I just need to go through this process myself to see what's wrong with it or how can we improve it. And so I decided to write An article about Robert Merton. Because

I had read all of his professional work on option pricing theory, which was my specialty. Back in academia. So I was qualified enough to write a basic biography of him. But I found it very intimidating because I knew that they were gonna take my draft and send it out to the most prestigious finance professors they could find to agree to review it and I was gonna get feedback and it felt really a lot like grad school. Yeah. Uh and that was really the the moment when I said, Okay, look this isn't gonna work. Like this isn't fun

We really have to make this a lot easier and a lot more open. Uh and so that was a a really crucial moment, the the moment that I tried to get something through the system. So when you were uh working on New Pedia and and you were like sending these draft articles around uh I guess probably like all over the country Uh w how are you collaborating with people?

Well, I mean this was the thing. Uh that one of the problems that new Pedia had, uh, is that the only real way to collaborate back then was to email around uh word doc. And If you emailed around a word doc, then The typical case is nobody responds, but the worst case is five people respond and they've all changed the document in different ways and now you've gotta figure out how to integrate that all

But you know, the the concept of a wiki Which is a website anyone can edit. Lovely, great uh programmer. And so the word wiki, uh it's a Hawaiian word. which means quick and the idea was quick collaboration. And so the idea is that there's a document on the web, but anybody can come along and edit it and save it and so forth. We were the first to really say, Hey, let's use that tool to build an encyclopedia.

So the idea was you would y you find out about this uh wiki software and you think, uh yeah, let's democratize this process of writing articles, throw it open to everyone, and then the entire community will Uh we'll kind of cross reference and check it. Well, I mean it it grew a little more organically than that. We had a good sized community of people, uh who were working on new pedium. And so these people were all very eager people who loved the concept of a free encyclopedia for everyone in their own language. That was a a really exciting

And so initially we thought well let's start this as a tool for that community. So It'll still be newpedia, but we're gonna use this uh wiki as a way for that community to begin to work together a little more efficiently. And I made the decision to put it up

Uh the domain name Wikipedia dot com rather than keep it on newpedia because we weren't really sure, like we had a lot of academics and a lot of very serious people on the mailing list and this seemed a bit of a crazy idea and we thought they might find it offensive. And so we said, Okay, let's just set up on a different domain and see what happens. But of course the history is that Wikipedia very, very quickly outstripped newpedia.

uh in terms of the content created and the quality and and everything else. I I should know this, Jimmy, but I don't. What was the um was the first Wikipedia entry? Unfortunately There was no history kept of the very early days. the earliest history was lost. So we don't really know. The the earliest article that anyone has found uh was an article

Hm. And I'm sure that was not the first article in Wikipedia. I know the first words in Wikipedia They were hello world, and I know because I typed them.

And then very quickly we just started doing lists of things, um, states and things like that. So I I guess you launch Wikipedia in January of two thousand one. Um new Pedia is still Still exists. Yeah. But something like in like two weeks you had more articles on Wikipedia than new Pedia had generated in the previous two years. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, as you mentioned earlier, that's was something like twenty one, so it it was a pretty minor achievement in one sense, but it was it was an eye opener. It was like wow, we've got this great community and people just started writing making articles on various random things and uh other people editing them and There's a lot of pent up excitement about

let's just get started building this and the the change from really this huge, very intimidating process that was not very collaborative to being able to say, you know, and in in those early days it was very exciting, you could just be the first person to say Africa is a continent and hit save. And while it's not very good. But it's not wrong and it's a start. And that was very addictive, the the idea that you could actually Uh change something.

This was all being run out of where? Like did you have an office in San Diego or was it just your apartment or what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Small office. Uh we this was during the bombist day, so we had A few programmers and Sort of cheap. office in a warehouse space. Uh

This is the period of time when ad revenue was good. So we were able to just Hire some people and get started. So I I guess you very quickly realize that Wikipedia is gonna be could potentially be huge. Like did it seem clear like within the first Months or year? Yeah, it did. It did. I mean it

You know I Remember looking at a list of the top websites at the time. And there was an encyclopedia reference kind of site at ranked at number fifty and I thought Gee if we do a really good job, we might be

uh number one hundred, or maybe even in the top fifty. But there was always this idea of like This could be a big thing. If we can figure out how to do it. it could have a huge impact.

In just a minute. When Jimmy Wales was faced with the question of how Wikipedia was gonna make money, He decided? That it wasn't. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

Welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So in the early days, Jimmy Wales was able to get Wikipedia up and running, and he was funding it with money from his first internet startup, Bomas. Bomas was running ads, the dot com boom was in high gear. But then of course CameV.com crash.

And all that ad money? Yeah. dried up pretty fast and Bomus would eventually have to shut down completely. But at the same time, Wikipedia was growing, and Jimmy had to figure out how to keep it growing. without a lot of cash.

There was no money really to support Wikipedia, but it didn't cost a lot of money. It was really community driven. And so You know, it really was the volunteers. And in fact one of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically is The lack of funding.

Because If I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to h give me millions of dollars to start this, Then your natural instinct, if you have any problem on the site, is to say, Okay, well we just need to hire some Moderators. And we're gonna make decisions and we're gonna have staff members who decide things.

And instead we there was no money, we couldn't hire anybody. So as a community working together, we had to find our own solutions. And so we had to say you know, what are the software solutions we need to be able to control for vandalism and then Imagine we have a really, really tough editorial decision we have to make. How do we make those decisions? All of those things happened because there was no money to hire anyone because it would have been much easier to just hire people. And that would have actually prevented the rise of a more natural set of solutions. And who was managing it? Was it just you?

And Larry Singer? Was just the two of you? Yeah, yeah, I mean pretty much I mean we had other employees who were helping out uh in this and that, of course, but You know, it's basically we had to think a lot about how to move the community in the right direction. You know, there were a lot of really complicated questions around Okay, when do we ban people? When do we block people from editing? When uh when do we think

They've gone too far and a lot of the editorial policy. You know, you have questions like to what extent do we allow people to write essays or commentary or put jokes in articles and we decided no, you know, neutral point of view is like our core belief and so on. But all those decisions had to be made and they were made

in discussions with community and and so forth. I mean you must have known, Jimmy, at this point, in two thousand one, two thousand two, that Wikipedia was growing super fast and it was going to be could potentially be huge.

You decide I r I guess around two thousand three to m basically create a nonprofit organization to run Wikipedia. What was the the thinking behind that? Why did you do that? So there were a few things going on there. So first of all This was still the depth of the dot com crash, so there was no obvious business model.

Uh The community of volunteers very much wanted it to be in a nonprofit and I thought that had to be Taken into consideration. And then finally for me it just made sense. Like it was aesthetically, uh, it just seemed like the right thing that Wikipedia my ambitions for Wikipedia to become a really important moment in history and a really important cultural contribution

really made a non profit a a much more sensible option. And indeed Yeah, I think if we had gone in a different route. It would be very different today. You gave an interview to Slash Dot, the website slash dot, and you you said Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. That's an amazing idea.

But I wonder. Why you could not have done that same thing? And still put ads on Wikipedia like Banner ads and stuff. Yeah, I mean, so here's the thing. Um, if you think about the

DNA of any organization. It's very difficult to Stop an organization from following the money. So Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and as a nonprofit, we could run ads. No legal prohibition on a nonprofit running ads as a as a means of support. Sure. Because the organization would tend to follow the money, then suddenly inside the organization people would start caring a lot more about our traffic in highly developed

Advertising markets. we would begin to care more about which pages you're reading. Because if you're reading about Que There's probably very little to sell to you and there's probably the ad rates are very poor. If you're reading about

Tesla cars or vacations in Las Vegas or something like that. I mean we would have an incentive to start creating content that would drive higher ed revenues, which is really not what we want to do. We're an encyclopedia. We don't think about adding Features that might drive. page views, for traffic. We just think about how do we make the encyclopedia better and how do we reach more people, particularly in the developing world. That's just like fundamental to

What this is all about. So when you basically said, All right, this is a nonprofit, uh we're not gonna have any advertising, we're gonna it's gonna be user generated content, how do you even f fund that? How how how are you gonna get the money to even fund the the the paying the servers and Yeah. So what happened was the main reason that Uh we went ahead And set up the nonprofit was exactly thinking of that for the future. But I had no idea.

Uh whether it was gonna be possible. So we set up the nonprofit in June and At that time we were running on two or three servers and so Then we had this disaster. It was a Christmas day when

two of our three servers crashed and I had to scramble to get the site running on one server and it was painfully slow and so forth. And it was clearly obvious because the traffic kept doubling that we were gonna have to buy a a bunch of servers. And so that was the first time that I decided to do uh Fundraising campaign.

to ask people on the site to give money and these days we call it crowdfunding and it's you know Everybody knows it, but back then that was not a normal way of doing things. And I remember very clearly that I had hoped to raise about twenty thousand dollars in uh a month's time, but in about two weeks' time we had raised nearly thirty thousand

So it w the first fundraiser was a huge success. I mean people really Hey we're going to be able to do it This is great. We really want to support this. And so a lot of small donors and that Of course, today is the model for Wikipedia that people who believe in Wikipedia, who think it's useful in their lives, say Hey, I should chip in.

When did you so so Wikipedia really kind of starts to just blow up in the early two thousands. When did you when do you when were you first sort of cognizant of that? When did you realize that Wikipedia was becoming really big, like part of the national conversation? Well I I think there were there were a few moments, but I think one of the most important ones, uh there's a guy, John Siginthaler Junior, who is a very esteemed journalist. And um he had called me up to complain about his entry. When when was this? Um Two thousand five. And

He said, hey, there's a problem because Wikipedia says that I was briefly suspected of having something to do with the Kennedy assassination. Now this is a man who was one of the pallbearers at Robert Kennedy's funeral, if I remember the story correctly. So a big friend of the Kennedy family. And this story was absolutely untrue. And Once he called, uh it was took about ten minutes to get that fixed and and changed and we looked into how it had happened and so forth. And so we thought okay, problem resolved. But then he wrote this scathing editorial uh in USA Today about the site. And it got a lot of traction, that story. So we had this really big thing and they they dragged me on CNN to yell at me and so forth, and um suddenly we're in all the press everywhere. Our traffic really Exploded. because of all the news coverage, so that was the that was the upside, but that's not the way you want your traffic to explode.

But in the end, that was actually a moment that was important for us. Yeah, so this this led in the community to a real reflection on quality on sourcing. This is when we came up with the biography of living persons policy and really started to say, look, if it's a biography of a person Then anything negative in the article really needs to have a good quality source.

Because That's just not acceptable to have negative things about people that aren't true. And so we became quite vigilant about that, um, afterwards. And of course there's always the possibility of this happening and so forth, and it does happen. But the community is very, very vigilant about it and really tries hard to keep anything like that out of the site. I mean it it's amazing because Wikipedia obviously on a day to day basis, everyone uses it I use it, everyone uses it, use it Um but I remember at that time that John Siegenthaler article just two thousand five. You know at NPR, we were not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source and it wasn't just NPR, it was it was all news organizations. Like Wikipedia was not considered a reliable

And I mean it just shows you sort of. think that should still be your policy. Uh Wikipedia is quite good. It is definitely not perfect. And what I always say is Wikipedia is the place to go to get the questions, not the answers. It's the way to get yourself oriented in the context. And I actually always say

Go on the talk page of any article and see what are the Wikipedians struggling with. If they're saying, gee, you know, this source says this and these sources say that and there seems to be a conflict, hey, that might be the most interesting question you can ask is let's get to the bottom of this. There's conflicting information out there. And also, you know, if you want to use Wikipedia as a starting point, then you can always go to the footnotes and go to the actual source and that's what you should do. So Jimmy, I just cannot imagine like running this volunteer organization with hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, today certainly millions, who were voluntarily editing sites and D did that ever just like get you so wound up that you just didn't want to do it anymore? No, not really. And uh you know, the the interesting thing is

I remember in the very early days I would get up at night and check the site'cause I was convinced that somebody was gonna come in and trash it overnight, which never happened, and then quickly I realized like Oh yes, uh a Vandal did show up at three A. M. my time last night. But guess what? Somebody who's a known community member was up in Australia and actually block the person and fix the problem. Um and so you you I began to understand like communities do inherently scale and I think

That is part of What held me not Be overwhelmed by anything. So We're now in this phase in um like the history of the internet.

people call it fake news. I don't like that term for obvious reasons, but mm but so much um information that looks real that's not real. This is not new. I mean this has happened throughout human history, but now because there is so much information available it's sometimes difficult for people to discern what's real and what's not. And I And I wonder whether one of the challenges with Wikipedia is Reasonable people are disagreeing about basic facts. So

How do you reconcile that? How does How does Wikipedia deal with that? I mean a few of the elements. So one Uh when we think about the quality of sources. Uh that's a really core thing in Wikipedia and we have a lot of discussions and debates and I I think a fairly sophisticated approach to thinking about the quality of sources.

I agree with you. I don't like the term fake news, but the original use of the term was really about Clearly. completely made up websites that look like news sites, with no concern for the truth, with outrageous headlines, and so on. And those kinds of sites have had almost zero impact at Wikipedia because Wow.

You know, they might do well to share on Facebook something that comes from a publication called The Denver Guardian, because it looks like a news site and Denver everybody knows Denver's a city in America and Guardian sounds like a newspaper, so seems plausible enough. The Wikipedians would take one look at it and say I've never heard of that. Paper. That stuff doesn't really get into Wikipedia. A broader problem that I am concerned about is

Right now that the trust in media in the US but also around the world. But in the US is really at an all time low. Uh you know, but It's a tough problem, and I think it's a societal problem to say Look, we really do need quality information. Most people are very passionate about wanting to be told the truth.

Yeah. Authoritarian rule is not to indoctrinate them into an authoritarian philosophy. But to make them believe that there's no such thing as truth. And that's that's a trend that I'm not happy about. How how many do you do you know how many Wikipedia pages there are today in English, for example?

Uh, there's just over five million in English the last I checked. So total probably In all languages to be Forty million. Wow. Close to fifty. Close to fifty, yeah. Do you know do you even know how many people contribute to

Wikipedia. Around the world. It's something around seventy five thousand People every month who make at least five edits. It's probably three to five thousand is

The core community. uh people who are making a hundred or more edits. Uh and so that's quite a lot of people, but it's not as many people as some might think. Uh now of course Making five edits in a month, that's not a huge amount of participation, but you're pretty you know, you're around. Yeah.

Uh and there'll be a lot more people who just make one edit a year. But in terms of the real community, it's probably that Seventy five thousand. Jimmy, what?

motivates seventy five thousand people or m or or a few hundred thousand people to Donate. hundreds of hours of their time every year. For free. To do this.

Yeah, I I think it's two things. So First, you know, the mission. A free encyclopedia for everyone in the world. is meaningful. I mean you could spend your hobby time playing Grand Theft Auto or doing something else and the world wouldn't be any better off when you're done and if you spend a few hours editing Wikipedia.

You can go to sleep and think, Yeah, I it was productive. The world is a little bit better than it was and and someone somewhere will benefit from that, and that's great. And then also just fun. People you get to meet people who are interested in the things you're interested in, no matter how obscure. The ethos of the community is to say Look, no personal attacks. We're here to discuss the

content. Uh if you go on the discussion page for a controversial topic You're not there to just debate that topic. Uh you can do that lots of places on the internet. What you get at Wikipedia is uh debate about how do we improve this article. And that's just a refreshing kind of feeling. And so a lot of people really find it Suits their personality. Do you do you know what the revenue

Is like annual revenue for Wikipedia from donations. Yeah, our our revenue I should know the number exactly off the top of my head, but I don't. Uh but I think last year was around eighty five million dollars. Wow. Just from donations. Just from donations, yeah. Incredible. Yeah. Primarily from small donors. That's important to understand that When the community gets together to debate something about what they want to have Wikipedia say or what a policy should be. There's never a question of well what will the funders think. Yeah. And Over the years we've really tried to run the organization in a very financially conservative way. Every year we try to build our reserves.

A lot of our donors, one of the things that they really want from Wikipedia is that Wikipedia be safe. And so that drives us to say okay. They don't want us to run on a shoe string. They don't want us to run nearly at breakeven and nearly going broke every year. We need to be stable. And that's been a a real value for many years. When you think about this

thing that you built. And your role in the history of The internet. How much of of the success of Wikipedia do you think is because of Your brilliance and your hard work and how much do you think is simply'cause of luck. Um

A huge amount due to luck. Brilliance and hard work. Okay, maybe not so much. Uh I do think a component of the success of Wikipedia is that I'm A very friendly and nice person. And I'm very laid back and so therefore

I was able to work uh in a community environment where people basically yell at you and you just have to kind of roll with it and you're in some sense a leader, but you you can't tell anyone what to do. They're volunteers, so you have to work with uh love and reason to kind of move people along in a in a useful way. So I do think that I I'm not

irrelevant to the process, but I also think that, you know, the community is amazing And the luck of the timing of really hitting that moment when it was possible to build Wikipedia. Jimmy, you've seen uh the estimates that Yeah, that if Wikipedia were a for profit

Yeah. could be worth at least five billion dollars, uh maybe more. Yeah. Does it mean anything to you? No, not really. I mean it's

Ha ha. Uh you know, people uh They love to write about Jimmy Wells is not a Trevor Burrus, I think there's a actually there are articles with that headline. Jimmy has been Internet Billionaire. Exactly. And and for me that's all a bit odd because You know, my life is

Unbelievably interesting. I have the ability to meet almost anyone in the world who I want to meet. And usually I introduce myself, Oh, I'm Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and they go, Oh wow. Right. Uh and if I say Oh, I'm Jimmy Wells. I on the largest chain of car dealers across the southern part of America, people will be like, Oh, okay, uh whatever, like not that interesting. So at least in that regard I do I do think that No one will remember me in five hundred years, but they'll definitely remember Wikipedia.

And that's really I mean, it's really something. I mean that's something that you can really hard even get your mind around. There have been comparisons to the Gutenberg press, right? This is the biggest sort of dissemination of knowledge in in modern world history. Well. Yeah. But

I don't know, it's a bit embarrassing to talk about it that way. I'm just trying to have fun. Jimmy Wales. Founder of Wikipedia. By the way, a few years ago, Jimmy got grief for trying to change his own Wikipedia entry, which is a big no-no. His entry showed he was born on August 8th, 1966, which is what his birth certificate also says.

But it was a mistake. Because according to his mother, Jimmy was actually born shortly before midnight on August 7th. So he made the change only to be confronted by angry Wikipedia editors who demanded documentary evidence, which of course he could not furnish because all he had to go on was his mother's version of When it happened. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building.

Thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this story starts almost twenty years ago. When Florence Wederwald was working in fashion. Helping to pick the clothes that models wear at photo shoots, which sounds like a pretty cool gig, right? But I was not happy with the work itself. I really was missing the creative part of things and the designing of things. Florence was missing designing things because, well, she's a designer.

She grew up in France and then moved to Atlanta where she did that fashion job. But you wanted to start something. for herself. You know, I need to create a company or I need to do something that's gonna come for me. I was kind of caught into some kind of a spiral. And Florence was looking around for something to inspire her. And as it happens, Her mom was working in Peru at the time. And when her mom invited Florence and a friend to come visit

They went. We had no idea what we were going there for. But we explore what the locals were making and to see if there was some kind of a business that could be done with that. So Florence and her friend Susan were exploring the local markets in Peru and they came across these finger puppets. You probably have seen them, these little cute animals made out of yarn. People had been doing this for many years. And for some reason they really like we just fell in love with them. So Florence and Suzanne bought a bunch of the puppets and they started to sell them in Atlanta. And they did pretty well. But Florence kept thinking, you know, I don't really want to sell someone else's work.

I wanna design my own thing. I was thinking what is it that children really want? What is it that children like? Like when I was a kid, what is it that was comfort me in my mo Most vulnerable moment. And so it was really This doll, this little companion, and uh I thought I could really turn this thing into a doll.

So Florence designed her own doll. And she took those designs back to Peru where she gave them to artisanal knitters to knit one for her. The first doll was it was a little too traditional, you know, like the neck was narrow and then the arms had different shape to it and I really wanted to do something modern. So after three years of working with different knitters in Peru, Florence and Susan finally had a doll. they were ready to sell. This really cuddly, squishy creature that's knitted and so you get a sense that it could have been done by your grandmother. However, the look of it is really modern. The dolls are stitched with these simple and clean lines and they've got these long arms and legs. It can be a cat, a dog, a frog.

Bunny The dolls went on the market in 2003, and Florence decided to name them Blah blah dolls. And it's just so playful and it just really works for a kids' company. And as soon as I said it, you can say that's it, that's it. Pretty soon after they launched boutiques across the US became interested. And blah blah dolls even started to appear on TV shows like Homeland. and in celebrity magazines. They became so popular they inspired copycats. And while blah blah is still relatively small, Florence and Susan say they are now considering bringing in an outside investor to help scale the brand. And they're in talks about doing a possible TV show. They have a life of their own that we uh

we infuse in them. It's uh it's a really beautiful story. By the way. Totally coincidentally. During a recent slumber party at the Raz household Several of the boys happened to bring along their favorite stuffed animals, including

At least three Bla bla dolls. If you want to find out more about blah blah, check out our Facebook page and of course If you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing about the things you're building.

And thanks so much for listening to our show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuilthis.npr.org. Please also subscribe to our show at Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us our email address is hibt at npr.org. Our Twitter address is at how I built this. Our show is produced this week by Casey Herman, from Teen Era Bluey Compose the Music.

Thanks also to Neva Grant, Samas Meshkinpur, Thomas Liu, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Noor Kutsi. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This? From NPR.

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