Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Jimmy, welcome to

Econ Talk. Very good, thank you. What was the original conception of Wikipedia? How did it get started?

Well, the original concept of Wikipedia was actually, it came about in 1999 when I first had the

idea of a free encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in all the languages of the world,

and founded a project called Newpedia, which was the first effort, which was ultimately not successful.

And Newpedia was a very top-down project, a very complex review system. People actually had to

make an application to be allowed to write an article on a particular subject and they had to

prove that they were qualified and so forth. And that was a failure primarily because it was

much fun for the volunteers with a quite an intimidating process. So in 2001 was the launch of

Wikipedia, which of course is a very open system, very different from the original concept. And

well, we got more work done in two weeks and we had gotten done in nearly two years, so it was

pretty exciting. And what was the leap of faith that got you to think about trying a bottom-up

approach rather than a top-down approach? Well, I have been complaining for quite some time about

the top-down approach and that it wasn't, it didn't seem to be working very well and it was costing

a lot of money and progress was very slow. I really realized it wasn't going to work when I

personally tried to write an article for Newpedia. I had been an academic in finance,

working on a PhD in finance and I had published a paper on Option Pricing Theory, so I thought I could

write an entry about Robert Merton who had recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his

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