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CalacanisCastBeta22

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on June 26, 2007 at 7:06:12 am
 

J.C: Okay everybody, welcome to another episode of CalacanisCast. I believe this is the old “22”. We are cooking with oil. We are moving quick. Let me tell you something, the greatest thing I ever did in my entire life was get a producer. Tyler, you are doing an amazing job! I can’t believe the level of guests that are on the program. How are we getting this level of guests that are on the program? Is it your hustle or my reputation? What is the story here?

 

Tyler: It’s the money I’m putting into this out of my own…

 

J.C: Oh really? So you’re spending a little cash on the side. You have a producer for the producer? You hired a second producer?

 

Tyler: Yeah.

 

J.C: I can’t believe the level of people we are getting on the show. CEO of Revver. Then the co-founder of Tell Me…

 

Tyler: The day after they sold the company…

 

J.C: For $900 Million dollars. Then we get Ev Williams brilliant entrepreneur, great guy, doing Twitter and all this stuff. We had the CEO of PayPerPost.com. I’m not going to say he’s a “high caliber” guest, but the guy did write CalacanisCast on his forehead! The fall out from that’s going to be felt for years, but even still the fact that he came into studio for a show was incredible. Jason Chan show was great. He’s like one of the most influential Bloggers over there in China. The guests just keep rolling and today’s guest I have to tell you out of all of these guests, I have to say I’m more excited to have him on the program then I think. Maybe he’s up there with Ev Williams for me because Twitter’s obviously exposed a lot of questions there that need to be answered, but I mean I’m really excited to have this guy on the program because he’s doing a lot of interesting stuff. He’s done interesting stuff, I mean he’s really in the Zeitgeist and has a lot of contrarian views and there’s a lot to talk about. A lot.

 

J.C.: But let me start by thanking our sponsors: Go Daddy, go buy a domain and use it to decode Jason 1* and Pod Tech*, I love you guys at Pod Tech* doing great work over there and everybody knows that we don’t make any money off of this. This whole show, all the revenue from it goes to the Bay Ridge Preparatory schools opportunity fund. That scholarship fund is for, and that’s why they call it an opportunity fund and not an achievement fund it goes to disadvantaged kids basically in Brooklyn where I grew up foster kids get to go to a private school education, it’s pretty cool. No downsides, it’s huge. They already have one that’s going to go for five years and with the money we’ve raised almost over $100,000 dollars from the show will be able to put a second kid into private school. Some people have a thing with private school “oh you know whatever”, but all we’re trying to do here is help like two people. If we could help like two people have a better life isn’t it worth it?

 

Tyler: Yeah

 

J.C: Somebody got in my face about it’s like why don’t you just give all the money to the public school system and you know make it one percent better for all these other and it’s like You know what? You find one or two people, try to change their life, make their life a lot better then they will go on and do the same, really try to create a big impact. So that’s my interpretation but if people disagree with that, some people disagree with it and they’re giving me a hard time. You’re welcome to go do you’re other…sponsor the show, that’s actually true, if someone wants to sponsor the show I’ll thank they every show, we’ve done 22, you get thank you on the next 800. And they can be praised for helping people out, but you do your own show give to the charity that you like. You don’t have to hate on my charity. Everybody’s go their own charity.

 

J.C: Anyway, so today’s guest is Larry Sanger. Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia, although some people don’t like to give him credit for that and we’re going to get into that issue. But more importantly. More important than even that is that he is the founder of Citizendium*. And you have to write Citizendium here, put the logo and everything on the video because I can’t spell it and people are going to have a little bit of a hard time with the name, but Citizendium, I believe, is going to become a viable Wikipedia co-exister. That’s a nice way of saying “Competitor”. And Larry’s laughing… but welcome to the Program Larry! I’m really excited to have you.

 

L.S: Well thanks for having me on.

 

J.C: So Larry, lets get the first piece of business out of the way. I’m researching having you on the show and I wanna talk about Citezendium we’re gonna spend our time on that, I don’t wanna do this back history thing but there’s one piece we have to settle right up front. There’s a group of people that say you’re not the co-founder of Wikipedia. I looked through all the history and the records and it seems like you pretty much are. And I was having dinner with Jimmy Wales at the Wikimania or no I was talking to him on e-mail and I say “Oh yeah you know” and I said something like I wrote on my Blog co-founder of Wikipedia and he flew off the handle and told me “Larry is not the co-founder he was just the guy who did this” whatever, and sending me links. I’m like, Jimmy, calm down, you’re supposed to be Jimmy “Jesus” Wales, you’re supposed to not be angry about anything like he walks around like this guy whose going to save the world why are you getting so angry about sharing credit? What is the story? Larry?

 

L.S: Well, gee, the story as far as the credit goes, I mean there’s a huge amount of story to tell so I’m going to have to be focused... I think the issue began sometime in 2004 or 2005 when I started speaking out publicly. I won’t say against, but in some mild criticisms of Wikipedia. And at about the same time Jimmy stopped including me in the story or the origin of Wikipedia. It just went downhill from there. The fact in the matter is that I was credited in Wikipedia’s first press release as a founder with Jimmy and also in the second and third press releases for which I wasn’t responsible at all after I left the organization in 2003 and 2004 I was also accredited as co-founder or founder in all kinds of press coverage beginning in September 2001 in a story in the New York Times.

 

J.C: I mean all this stuff is on the Wikipedia. There are thousands of citations with you as the co-founder! And, in fact, not only are you the co-founder... you probably are the most important person! If it wasn’t for you there would not be a Wikipedia. Many people have argued you played a more important role in the creation of Wikipedia because you’re the one who put the Wiki in Wikipedia you cam up with the idea of getting off whatever dumb ass content system Wikipedia was running on out of frustration and say lets use Wiki software correct?

 

L.S.: Well, that’s one story anyway. What I would say is that the new Pedia wasn’t quite as bad as you described but Jimmy and I both agreed quite well that we needed another source of content that was easier to contribute to because I mean I was personally worried at the slow pace of production that newPedia had in 2000 so it was my full time job to lead Bomis* encyclopedia efforts and so it was my job to solve newPedias slow production problem and so yeah I proposed a number of different things and it was eventually the proposal that I made for a Wiki encyclopedia that lead to Wikipedia and it was my job in the first year to actually organize the project.

 

J.C: Let me stop you there for a second Larry. You just said - and this is well documented - You were the person. You were working for Bomis*, which was Jimmy Wells commercial company. Was involved in a couple of different things and one of them was Newpedia which was a four profit encyclopedia and you were charged with coming up with a better publishing system and you came up with the idea of a Wiki plus an encyclopedia. Jimmy had come up with the idea of an online encyclopedia. You were the one who burned the connection; the synapse was burned in your mind to put a Wiki and an encyclopedia together, that’s the fact.

 

L.S: Yep.

 

J.C: And how anybody could argue that he is not a co-founder, I would argue that he is the person who is responsible for the Wikipedia. Wiki plus encyclopedia burned in Larry’s brain, you are responsible for the Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales should have no problem giving you credit, in fact he should tell the world it was your idea cause it was. I am disgusted by the fact that you don’t get credit for this. I am outraged by it in fact and I don’t know who but I feel like the Wikipedia community has a grudge against you because you were honest about some of the short fallings and they just are after you. I am on the English Wikipedia list and the launch of Citizendium, these guys have been criticizing, I don’t know if you read the list.

 

L.S: I don’t bother at all.

 

J.C: They are so critical of you.

 

L.S.: Oh yeah I know. They have been for a long time.

 

J.C: And the hatred is so deep. And you have to wonder because these Wikipedia guys you know we had Andrew one whose a great guy Andrew Lee and he’s on and all these Wikipedia guys act so pias and high and mighty that we’re doing this whole thing and you cant give the guy who came up with the idea credit for the fact that he started whole ball in motion and if it wasn’t done with the Wiki software, Wikipedia would not be ten percent of what it is today. That’s the bottom line, I’m telling you the world right now, Larry Sanger is responsible for the Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales role was secondary to Larry’s. That’s what I’m saying. Jason Calacanis is saying that.

 

L.S: Well, I appreciate that Jason.

 

J.C: It’s really outrageous I mean are you not outraged by this? It must hurt your feeling tremendously.

 

L.S.: I’ve had many years right now to be outraged - I guess so I don’t really have the desire to…

 

J.C: Yeah, you’re a cool guy; I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I researched this because when Jimmy Wales got all upset at me I quoted the Wikipedia cause it said co-founded and so I wrote co-founder, it’s his thing, he’s claiming his response for Wikipedia so Jimmy says I’m responsible for Wikipedia, the Wikipedia says he’s the co-founder and that Larry came up with the idea of Wiki plus encyclopedia and Jimmy Wales gets upset for quoting the Wikipedia which he claims it was his idea when in fact it was not. Look at the levels of intellectual dishonesty in that, Tyler. I’m talking to my producer here for a second and he’s nodding. Jimmy Wales is being intellectually dishonest and it’s not the first time he’s been intellectually dishonest with me. We had a massive intellectual you know when he came to human bio pages, living bio pages and some other things as well as the advertising discussion which I had with him he outright lied that he didn’t remember having dinner with me so I don’t know.

 

J.C.: This is two strikes against Jimmy Wales, and he acts so…I’m sorry to go on a rant here Larry I know you’re on the program to talk about Citizendium we’re gonna get into it in a second, but I have to say Jimmy Wales should be on this program and Jimmy Wales is giving me a hard time saying he had a conflict of interest of Wikia competing with Wikipedia you know what that’s three strikes against Jimmy Whale’s number one he lied that he didn’t remember having dinner with me because he asked me at least ten fifteen questions about advertising on the internet so either he lied or he’s got no memory which I don’t believe cause this guys pretty fricken’ smart.

 

Number two, he lied about Larry Sangers’ role and did it to me directly. I’m not saying this like this is my first person experience; he told me Larry is not the co-founder. That’s a lie. Number three, with his conflict of interest, he told me that, he demanded that I correct myself and do an apology on my Blog because I said he had a conflict of interest between Wikia which has advertising and is doing competitive projects with Wikipedia and is hiring Wikipedians from the Wikipedia project. That competitive and he’s making the decisions about should Wikipedia have advertising or not when he has competitive company, that to me screams of conflict of interest. Now I’m not saying the guy has and ethics problem, I’m saying he has a conflict. That’s two different things. I’m not accusing the man of anything, but when there is a conflict like that you are supposed to recuse yourself. I mean, do you see that conflict Larry about the advertising thing with Wikia and Wikipedia?

 

L.S: I never really thought about it actually, but I guess I do…I think that as far as accusing himself I thought that he, last fall, had stepped down as the chair of the board of directors and that he was essentially leaving the direction of Citizendium up to others. I was surprised to learn that he still possessed the authority to appoint people single-handedly, well, with oversight, but to appoint people to the Wikipedia arbitration committee.

 

J.C: Yeah, that’s bizarre to me. That’s really funny. I think Jimmy, he wants to let Wikipedia go, but then he’s like I’m not in charge but then I’m on the English list he’s appointing people through the arbitration committee. It’s kinda like a Sopranos kind of things where they put Junior in charge of the family and hes the front but then Tony Soprano’s actually running it, it’s a little bit like that it’s like oh I’m not in charge except I put the judges in. It’s a little bit…enough of this Larry we could sit here all day long and criticize Jimmy Wales. That’s not why you’re here, you seem like a guy who doesn’t have an ounce of ego about him in terms of this, you’ve moved on.

 

L.S: That’s total bullshit.

 

J.C: Oh, You do! Oh, there you go. Larry is a little pissed off and I like that.

 

L.S: I’m just saying that I have some ego about this.. It’d be totally intellectually dishonest for me to let you say that on my behalf. But I appreciate it.

 

J.C: I know. But you seem like such a nice guy. Larry left, he started Citizendium. Citizendium his basically is doing the obvious things that Wikipedia should do like maybe credentialing people, like maybe having experts look at things. All of the obvious things that Wikipedia is going to wind up doing. Larry is saying lets do that! And this is the guy who came up with the concept of it. So when you think about who should maybe dictate where this goes, Jimmy Wales, the guy who just employed him or the guy who actually came up with the idea - I go with Larry. Larry please explain to the audience why you created Citizendium and why there is a need for it when the Wikipedia is at scale right now.

 

L.S.: Well. For a long time I thought that Wikipedia was going to take its reliability problems and the problems regarding irresponsibility of its community into hand. I. for a long time I thought. that they would finally make good on their many promises or claims that they would start up new approval systems. We’ve been talking about approval systems for Wikipedia since long before I left actually, since at least the middle of 2001, but it’s never happened! And I have to wonder why, I think I do know why, but I wont try to explain in any detail. I eventually came to the conclusion at the end of 2004 that it might turn out that the Wikipedia community is simply intransigent to be able to make the fundamental changes that would be necessary in order to solve its problems and that a fork might be necessary.

 

J.C: And when you say a fork, just explain to the audience who doesn’t know a fork.

 

L.S: A fork would be a version of Wikipedia - makes use of Wikipedia articles - but puts them on another website under different management and essentially starts the project again from there with a new group of people. In many cases it would involve dividing the community in to two. Well, what happened really was we decided not to fork after all, we decided to start over all together because Wikipedia articles, they encode policy decisions that we want to make for ourselves and it really is just too much trouble and too…

 

J.C: Right. Fixing all the Wikipedia articles over a million and a half of them is more work than starting from zero.

 

L.S: I think you’re probably right.

 

J.C: And your community said, I remember reading about this because I’m on, I think I’m on the mailing list I think I read somewhere on the message board your community said it’s just too frustrating and de-motivating that to fix them you’re better off just starting from scratch and writing something. I mean you can go read it. And you guys launched this week at Citizendium with a thousand articles?

 

L.S: Yeah, eleven hundred, anyway, something like that.

 

J.C: Which is respectable, that was like year two of Wikipedia right?

 

L.S: No, no, no, no. Actually, compared to Wikipedia in terms of months we’re a little bit behind where they were after four or five months, but the difference of course is that the Wikipedia articles were at that time after four or five months were really, I mean you think they’re bad now perhaps, but they were a complete joke back then. And moreover, the project was wide open. It was not only wide open in terms of view, it was open to anyone to contribute to so of course it’s gonna grow.

 

J.C: Grow faster, but grow more wild. Your garden is a little bit more tended to.

 

L.S: A little bit but I think in the end a lot more people are going to enjoy the quality of the community and are going to want to get more involved that’s actually what we’ve seen this week we’ve had a whole bunch of new people sign up.

 

J.C: So let me just see if I can explain the difference between the projects for the audience just cause some of them are sort of neophytes. You guys require registration to make changes, you require that people use their real names and take ownership of their edits. Is that really the main difference? The authenticity of the user and requiring that people cannot edit unless they because in Wikipedia you can edit if you’re not logged in, you can make up a fake name like S.J. did and lie to the world, lie to New Yorker Magazine, lie to Jimmy Wales and go work for Jimmy Wales’ company even.

 

L.S: Well that’s one of the big differences and the other really big difference is that we have a special role for experts in the community. The work shoulder to shoulder with everyone else. It isn’t experts only, right, but they also have the authority to approve articles and also to make decisions when decisions need to be made - which isn’t very often really.

 

J.C: So when things sort of hit an impasse and expert will come in and say listen I am a P.H.D in Biology, I am going to answer this question about amoeba thank you for this contribution. This is the answer I’m going to give and here’s my rationale?

 

L.S: Something like that… right1

 

J.C: What if there’s two experts who disagree? You just write that they disagree and here’s their two positions?

 

L.S: Well that would be one way forward. So far we haven’t had to confront that problem and that’s going to be a hard one to solve. I think ultimately it’s going to involve the mediation of perhaps a group of people from the relevant editorial work group. See we’ve divided our editors and authors into a number, about two or three dozen different groups, so for example there’s astronomy and biology and philosophy and literature and…

 

J.C: So you have like some taxonomy for all this stuff and then you put people as leaders and experts in those groups. So that means…I’m trying to stay with you here because you move pretty fast and you’re a smart guy. People must use their real names. Totally different then Wikipedia where you can go in anonymously and change stuff and people do all the time with a vengeance, with agendas. You require people to log in with their real name, which to me seems like the biggest no brainer in the world. I said a year ago that Wikipedia should have done this, you probably said it four or five years ago I’m guessing.

 

L.S: Well it was a while ago.

 

J.C: I don’t see why if you shouldn’t want to edit Wikipedia this late stage in the game, I understand early on ok let anyone do it you want to get into critical mass, but now they should make you log in and verify your name through some process and if you want to make edits to these top articles you should have to have credentials and that could be as simple as saying if you want to edit the Wikipedia you need to give us your credit card, make a donation of 10 cents, at least you would know if they had a credit card with their name on it.

 

L.S: I’ll tell ya, the problem is that it’s really pointless to tell the Wikipedia community that they should do such a thing because the chances that they will are zero. There’s absolutely no likelihood whatsoever that they will make any such radical change.

 

J.C: Why?

 

L.S: Moreover there isn’t any process in place where by they could make such a radical change.

 

J.C: What just a second. I mean, I could see them say like okay, for these five hundred pages you need to have this level of account to edit it. Why would that be so difficult to do? There’s some religious reason against it? Philosophical reason? Or there’s some pragmatic technical reason?

 

L.S: Very much a philosophical reason.

 

J.C: And what is that reason?

 

L.S: The idea ultimately is rooted and this is something that I will be arguing in the next couple years probably in a book.

 

L.S.: I think it’s really rooted ultimately in a sort of radical egalitarianism which says that everyone should be equal in their authority to claim that something is known and that taken to its most radical extension requires that people be able to edit the Wiki without other knowing anything at all about them. The idea is that it’s just not supposed to matter WHO you are. It’s just not supposed to matter.

 

J.C: But of course in reality, now that this thing has become such a trusted resource and really the reason it become such a trusted resource is because Google as anointed it, so Google has anointed Wikipedia… They were responsible for sixty percent of their traffic so I understand and probably much more than that in terms of introducing people to the brand. So now they’ve been anointed. Now that they’ve been anointed, I think a different model might be necessary for certain sections. I don’t know. I do kind of like the ideal. I can’t see how anybody wouldn’t like “anybody could contribute it just seems so cool and it doesn’t matter who you are - but it should matter that you are somebody and we can track you.

 

Tyler: It’s too risky. Okay fine anyone can contribute but why do you have to be anonymous.

 

J.C: Right and they mix those two issues? Is that correct? Are we getting it right Larry?

 

L.S: No, I think you are absolutely. I think that generally speaking, I mean, obviously there are people who will acknowledge of course we understand the difference, but the point is that the deep community reason as it were for the commitment to anonymity is this notion as I say that there are no differences among us in our ability to say what is true and what is false.

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