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42 · P JW PRACTITIONER

"The Wikipedia Commons"

Jimmy Wales

CHAPTER
ch05 · Human-Systems Intelligence Interaction
TIER
Practitioner
STATUS
Living · Active
ACTIVE
1966 – present
AFFILIATION
Wikimedia Foundation · Wikipedia
JURISDICTION
Collaborative Knowledge / Open Information / Collective Intelligence
COLD OPEN
"Every fact on Wikipedia is the result of a negotiation — not between two people, but between a person, a community, and a standard. The truth is the coordination, not the conclusion."
OVERVIEW

Co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, building the largest coordinated knowledge-construction project in history — 60 million articles in 300+ languages, maintained by volunteers under a system of rules, talk pages, and norms rather than hierarchy. Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy is a coordination protocol: a commitment to represent the space between competing epistemologies rather than enforce one.

WHY THIS VOICE MATTERS TO KNOWWARE
Wales built working coordination intelligence at planetary scale before anyone had a name for it. Wikipedia is a three-body system: the article, the editor, and the community's evolving standards. Remove any element and it collapses into propaganda or noise. His project is the largest empirical proof that distributed coordination produces reliable knowledge.
OUTSTANDING NOTES
  • ◦Dan David Prize
  • ◦Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize
  • ◦Honorary doctorates from Knox College and Amherst College
CLASSIFICATION
JW
PRACTITIONER · TIER P
ch05
METHODS & FRAMEWORKS
5 entries
WikipediaNeutral point of viewOpen-source knowledge coordinationCollaborative fact constructionWiki governance
KEY WORKS
  1. 01 Wikipedia (2001–present)
  2. 02 Wikimedia Foundation
  3. 03 WT Social
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