Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/17

 And I believe that experience can the same for government agencies and operations, as well.

The method of production for Wikipedia is highly innovative. And in keeping with the old adage, necessity is the mother of invention, the story of how Wikipedia came to be is, I hope, both instructive and entertaining.

Wikipedia was born of the famous dot-com crash. In the early days of the project, we worked together as a community with only a shoestring budget. If the financial climate had been better, then I would have likely turned to hiring employees to fill some critical functions. But because investment money and advertising revenue had completely dried up, we were pushed to find new solutions, solutions of community institutions to manage processes that would have been traditionally handled in a top-down manner.

As a result, we pushed the limits of the new Internet medium to create a new kind of community and a new kind of encyclopedia, one controlled by volunteer administrators and editors working together in a grand global conversation to create something new.

According to firms that measure Internet usage, Wikipedia is now the eighth most popular website in the world. And yet despite competing in some sense with companies with billions of dollars to invest, Wikipedia survives on an incredibly modest budget. Last year we spent around $1 million and although this year we are spending a bit more, our budget is still minuscule compared to that of most other tech enterprises, even if you limit the comparison to other top websites.

The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideas of individual responsibility. Under U.S. law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as it is true of everyone speaking in any public forum. The maintainer of this forum, the Wikimedia Foundation has set down some fundamental codes of conduct including, but not limited to what constitutional scholars call time, place, and manner restrictions. And I have personally imposed policies which strive toward respect for others, quality writing and the citing of sources.

It is counterintuitive to some that an open discussion with virtually no top-down command and control structures can generate a high quality encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it does.

To illustrate our success improving the quality of Wikipedia, we are currently celebrating a study published in the German weekly news magazine, Stern. According to this study, which just came out last week, Wikipedia scored higher in all but one categories than the standard German encyclopedia Brockhaus. The one standard we fell a little bit short on was readability. I promise, we are working on that one every day.

Now given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including set ups that do not involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, and a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate information sharing up and down the hierarchy for in-