... a software company has working on that. Imagine that multiplied by 10 or 100 or 1,000 under the management of experts, biologists, geologists, astronomers and so forth. And developing a model of not just the digital Earth, but a digital universe down to the most detailed levels.
What is your role in Digital Universe?
My title is director of distributed content programs. I was brought on board to work on a collaborative expert encyclopaedia or expert-led encyclopaedia. But I was surprised to learn they had a larger idea in mind for me in that I would be also articulating some of their conceptual underpinnings of the whole enterprise. So I'm working on a very long monograph about the Digital Universe.
What was your interest in getting involved?
It started with an article I wrote, which is now infamous, at least among Wikipedia's defenders — of which I am one, actually. It was called "Why Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism". Joe Firmage and Bernie Haisch, Digital Universe's founders, saw it and agreed with it. At the time they were thinking about developing the content for the Digital Universe. And they thought my notion — that a radically collaborative open encyclopaedia project like Wikipedia could actually be run by experts with stronger community standards of civility — was essentially what they were looking for.
And Joe presented me with the opportunity to be a key part of something that was not just coherent with the idea that I had with Nupedia and Wikipedia working together. It took that general idea of an outrageously productive, but extremely reliable resource and extended it.
Tell me about this idea that the Digital Universe is like the PBS of the Web?
The idea is that it is a single reliable source of non-commercial and ad-free information. Obviously, we don't mean that it's merely a broadcast medium, but if you can think of Yahoo, Google and MSN as equivalent to the big three broadcast networks of ABC, NBC and CBS, isn't it odd that there doesn't exist anything like the equivalent of a Web PBS or BBC?
Jimmy Wales said that he thought Digital Universe was a nice idea, but that it reminded him of Nupedia and in that sense he was a little bit pessimistic about it. What's your reaction to that?
Well, there's a couple of important ways that Digital Universe is different from Nupedia, but there's also a few ways it's similar. It's different in that it's a much bigger idea. It's not just an encyclopaedia. It is intended to become, over the next few decades, an exhaustive information resource, and Nupedia was going to be just an encyclopaedia. Second, the Digital Universe is post-Nupedia and post-Wikipedia. We are not going to have an enormous seven-step process that no one wants to go through. Moreover, we have a business model that has a much better chance of actually producing money to pay our stewards.
The Digital Universe Web site has a line on it that says it'll be the largest reliable information source on the Web. Is that a direct reference to Wikipedia?
You could view it that way I suppose. It's a perfectly valid point of view. There are...
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