Jimmy Wales on Smart Censorship | Big Think

Jimmy Wales on Smart Censorship

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Keywords, keywords, keywords.

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Jimmy Wales:

Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia launched in 2001. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, holding the board-appointed "community founder" seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately owned, free Web-hosting service, along with Angela Beesley.

Together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped lay the foundation for Wikipedia, which subsequently enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Wikipedia expanded and its public profile grew, Wales took on the role of the project's spokesman and promoter through speaking engagements and media appearances. Wales has been historically cited as the co-founder of Wikipedia but he disputes the "co-" designation, asserting that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia. Wales' work developing Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.

Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Wales attended a small private school, then a university preparation school, eventually attaining a bachelor's degree and master's degree in finance. During his graduate studies he taught at two universities.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Is there a smart way to censor content?

Jimmy Wales: Well, yeah, I mean, not that I would encourage this, or support this, but China is increasingly able to filter on keywords. Filter just the page they don’t like. And you know, without supporting that, I would still oppose it. I would still say that’s a lot better than what they’re doing right now, in being completely ham-handed and blocking whole swathes of the internet, because you don’t like one page is really not good for China. It’s not good for the economy of China, for the people of china. And so that’s a very sort of bureaucratic or technical criticism of the current regime, as opposed to a human rights-type criticism. But I always want to emphasize when I say this that I would still make the human rights criticism. Well, they could improve things a lot. It’s actually an interesting question, I think, is what are the ethics around this for Western companies, for US companies? Because China’s not the only one. There’re lots of countries around the world who filter the internet and filter certain keywords, certain pages. And for me, it’s very questionable when we see US companies who are collaborating with that kind of thing. So just to sort of address the big one, which is Google is in China, Yahoo! is in China, so what do we say about that? Well, what I say about that is going in and dealing with information in China right now is very similar to doing business in apartheid in South Africa. There’s something really wrong. There’re human rights violations going on. And people used to argue back and forth about whether it was better to boycott or to constructively engage. In other words, to be there, but operate under a certain set of principles that would encourage change and positive things to happen. I think that both sides of that argument can be made by reasonable people. I tend more to the boycott side of things, but I accept and understand that, of course, there are legitimate points on the other side, and it actually can help in a lot of cases. So Google basically makes that constructive engagement argument. To say, “Well, look. The Chinese people are better off with us being there trying to be a positive force for change than if we simply boycotted the country.” Okay, I accept that, right? That’s a legitimate thing to say. But I think what we should do is hold Google’s feet to the fire and say, “Well, what are you doing there? What’re you doing to help?” And Google has some answers for that. I mean, one of the things that they do is they don’t store any user data within China. They keep all user data. They don’t have Gmail servers in China, things like that. That’s so that they can’t be compelled to cough up people’s information in China. Well, that’s very important. There’re people in jail in China because Yahoo! has coughed up information about them. Yahoo!’s answer is, “Well, we have to follow the law in China.” My answer is, “Yeah. Sorry, that doesn’t cut it with me.”

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