ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, this month marks 15 years of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.  In that time it has become the most linked to site on the planet with about 7000 new articles created every single day.  Well I spoke to its founder, Jimmy Wales, about its anniversary, Investigatory Powers Bill and why he thinks politicians are a bit scared of technology.  I started by asking him how things have changed since the site was founded.  

JIMMY WALES: In the early days we just had one server, a very basic bit of software, open source software and a handful of us working away on the website.  I remember in the early days the number of changes coming in were low enough that I was able to check every change personally as they came in.  That became impossible pretty quickly as it started to grow but now today we are up to 400 million readers every month, we’ve got people all around the world, 80,000 regular editors and a lot more people just occasionally make a change here and there, it’s quite amazing really.

DM: Just back in those early days you and your friends were the repository of all the knowledge, it was a bit like Dr Johnson’s Diary, it was the words he knew at the time.

JIMMY WALES: We didn’t have very much and I sort of miss that, I miss the days when you could be the first person to write ‘Africa is a continent’ and you could say ah, I’ve discovered Africa!  

DM: It’s moved on a bit from there.  

JIMMY WALES: It’s moved on a bit, yes.  

DM: People have often remarked on that you’ve stayed true to the funding.  You don’t want to make money out of it, you are not going to monetise it as the word is, you rely solely on donations.  

JIMMY WALES: Yes, we’re a charity so a charity with a goal of a free encyclopaedia for everyone in the world in their own language, that’s always been our mission.  We like our model of donations particularly because the vast majority of money that funds Wikipedia is from the small donors so it really is a community supported project and that gives the community lots of independence, we are not beholden to one big donor’s whims or what have you.

DM: But you must have had endless Wall Street bankers and others coming along to you and saying ‘just the odd little advert here and there’.  Just think what you could make, you could be a billionaire.  

JIMMY WALES: No, no one’s really asked and because Wikipedia is in the non-profit structure, that means I don’t own it, it’s a charity so in some ways it’s like hey, the Red Cross is a really great brand, they should monetise it, turn it into a for-profit but it doesn’t really work.

DM: What about the information on there?  As you say, there is so much there, I’m a journalist, we obviously use Wikipedia quite a lot but we have to treat some of the entries with a degree of caution.  People get there, I particularly remember when it comes to obituaries of people who have passed on and quite quickly some rather malicious people get into those web pages and write silly things that they hope then get broadcast.  

JIMMY WALES: Yes, exactly.  What I would say to journalists is that Wikipedia is the best place for journalists to go to find out the questions, maybe not to find out the answers.  Particularly if you go to the discussion page, it’s always very interesting to read what is the Wikipedia community puzzled about?  They will say this source says this but that says the opposite, let’s dig around and try and find out. So okay, there’s your question as a journalist, let’s clarify it.

DM: Okay, thank you for the advice, from the man himself.  What about the issue of high profile people self-editing?  You know there is this statistic I’m sure you’re aware of in the UK that of British MPs, 650 of them, one in six of their entries have been edited from within parliament.  Should we be suspicious?

JIMMY WALES: Well that’s interesting although I’m not so sure it is them editing or their opponents, you are never quite sure.  It is something that we very much discourage and usually if people come in and try to puff themselves up or whatever, it doesn’t last for very long because if they don’t have good sources and so on. It is not actually your best strategy, if you see some problem with your Wikipedia entry and there is something you’d like to be covered that isn’t, the best thing to do is send us an email.  We have a great community of volunteers who are interested in making it right so people will get themselves into more trouble by underhanded tactics than they should.

DM: Having mentioned parliament there are things going on there, given Wikipedia and its devotion to freedom of speech and indeed knowledge, I am thinking of the so-called Snooper’s Charter that is going through the House of Commons at the  moment and may well become law, what is your view on things like that?

JIMMY WALES: These kind of things, the typical problem that we have is that the legislators don’t really understand technology very well and so sometimes they …

DM: Do you think they are feared of it, they’re scared of it?

JIMMY WALES: Sometimes they are a bit scared of it, yes and sometimes they pass laws that sound good to them on paper but we know they won’t work, it won’t work/it puts a lot of people’s data at risk, it is doing all kinds of things.  My view is that cyber-security is incredibly important, we need to be encouraging businesses and everybody else to be more secure, to use encryption everywhere, to save our data from criminals and portions of governments agree with that but then other portions say, yes but then we can’t spy on people.  But you know, also the criminals can’t so we have to strike a balance.

DM: There’s another issue of course, the Freedom of Information Bill in the UK which has obviously been around for quite a while now and they are trying or thinking about bringing in more restrictions on that.

JIMMY WALES: Yes, that’s a broader issue, impacts journalism, it impacts any of us who think the operations of government should be quite transparent.  Obviously there are some things that aren’t appropriate to release right away but I for one have a lot of concerns when I see politicians saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be telling everything to the public’.  Well maybe you should, so I think we should be very cautious about that.

DM: And what about, we mentioned social media there, what about the increasing use of social media?  We’ve seen it in this country and I’m keeping it in the political sphere, lots within the Labour party and I know you followed the leadership campaign, within the Labour party people are saying some MPs are getting an awful lot of abuse, friendly fire from within their own party.

JIMMY WALES: Yes, yes, yes.  I do think one of the things that’s easier for us at Wikipedia is we’ve always said we’re a project to build an encyclopaedia so we’re not a place to come and rant and post random opinions, not even in the discussion pages.  If you come to a discussion page of an MP and you just start ranting about how much you hate them, people say what has that got to do with improving the article which is what we’re here for?  I do think Twitter obviously gets singled out quite a lot, they have got a very difficult problem because they want to be a place where people can express opinions freely and that’s a value of Twitter, on the other hand they have not been a proactive as I think they should have been, particularly in the past.  They seem to be trying to shape up now about giving people the tools to deal with actual threats and abuse and things like that, it can get pretty ugly.

DM: And lastly, do you still think Jeremy Corbyn – let’s talk about Labour, do you still think that Jeremy Corbyn is bonkers?  You tweeted that didn’t you?  

JIMMY WALES: I did, in a moment of emotion.  I try to stay out of politics generally speaking but I’ll just put it this way, I think that the chances of a Labour government in the next election are as close to zero as you can get and that’s where it stands today.  

DM: Because of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership?

JIMMY WALES: Because of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, yes.  

DM: Okay, Jimmy Wales, it’s good to see you, thank you very much indeed.   The Wikipedia founder there.