Wikipedia according to Jimmy Wales (How I Built This)

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Joe Corneli

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Mar 2, 2020, 8:59:56 AM3/2/20

to Peeragogy

I listened to this podcast yesterday (recommended by my stepmom):

It's an interview with Jimmy Wales. Probably familiar territory to many here, but it's interesting to hear Jimmy himself tell the story.

A few related points of reflection:

- JW says that community is inherently scalable. Maybe that's so, but the peeragogy project hasn't scaled like Wikipedia -- if anything it's been more like NuPedia, i.e., growing slow. Are there any obvious obstacles to the growth of our project that we should rethink? Is 'growth' what we want?

- JW talks about how people in projects tend to "follow the money" and gives hypothetical examples like banner ads on Wikipedia changing the way people think about content (e.g. Queen Victoria vs Tesla Motors). I think time has borne out the perspecuity of his judgement + intuition.

- That said, things would (naturally) be different in a kind of "WIkipedia for Entrepreneurship" that was all about helping people create businesses (or other projects) and test them. There would still be a source of ground truth, but it would be different from the kind of truth that exists in a encyclopedic knowledge base rooted in trustworthy references. I'm not suggesting that we *should* go this route, just thinking that there may be some circumstances in which we could *use* the tendency to follow money to advantage, rather than setting it aside.