This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 9th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Wikipedia is an incredible resource that runs on a relative shoestring, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy

Wales credits

F. A Hayek with the central insight that gave life

to the user-run website.

Wales spoke at the inaugural Joseph K McLaughlin Lecture Series

at the Cato Institute, but first he sat down and talked with

Cato's Jim Harper.

Most people know of Wikipedia because it's one of the top search results for just about

anything you're looking for, but tell us a little bit about Wikipedia at the back end,

for those who don't know, who don't edit it.

Well, I guess there's different ways of thinking about the back end.

So the back end server infrastructure is pretty normal.

You know, it's a farm of web servers with database back end and we have some caching servers around the world. The back in terms of how the

editing works and how the community works is actually very, very different. If you have in

your mind that somewhere there must be a big building with 3,000 people who are busily

working away writing Wikipedia, you've got the wrong idea.

Virtually everything you see on the website from even the choice of what goes on the front page, what's the

article of the day, what's the photo of the day, all of that is in the hands of

the editing community and in fact of the people who work at the wiki Foundation, which is the charity that I set up that owns and operates Wikipedia,

you know virtually no one has any job responsibilities around the actual content itself.

I mean, we help the community, but mostly the foundation is doing software,

...