The geek who made good

Wikipedia, derived from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning ‘fast’ (it’s also the name of the software used to run Wikipedia) and pedia (‘to educate’), is a phenomenon of our age.

In just a few short years, it has become the main internet tool of choice for people wishing to quickly research any given subject or person. Since its inception in 2001, this free multilingual encyclopaedia – which has over 12 million entries and growing – has become one of the most influential websites in the world. In fact, it is now the fourth most visited website of ‘em all, with at least a third of all internet users visiting Wikipedia on a daily basis.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales who’d managed to set himself up for life back in the mid-’90s, working in the finance sector as a research director at Chicago Options Associates. Soon afterwards, he set-up a soft porn web portal called ‘Bomis’. While this venture didn’t take off, Wales then set-up Nupedia, a free encyclopaedia, which was the genesis of the Wikipedia project.
The 42-year-old internet entrepreneur also helped to found a spin-off commercial internet company called Wikia, Inc, which is based in San Francisco. It was at the Wikia offices that I met Jimmy Wales, who devoted almost three hours to this exclusive Hot Press interview.
Giving Hot Press a guided tour of the office, Wales explained that he is rarely in San Francisco these days.
“I don’t even have a desk here. I sit somewhere different every time I come to the office. But really, as a company, we are very distributed. We have people in different offices all over the world. We have a development team in Poland and so forth. In fact, I think we have more people in Poznan than we have here.”
What is Wikia?
“We’ve got some 12,000 different projects. We say we are building the rest of the library – that is, everything that doesn’t belong in a non-profit education and research context. It includes, for example, a lot of gaming and entertainment. We just launched a questions and answer site, which is doing very well. Basically, this whole group of Wikis is doing about a half of billion pages a month now and growing really quickly. So, that’s very successful.”
Critics of Wikipedia have accused it of often being inaccurate. They also point out that, as a result of the open editing policy adopted by Wikipedia, there have been significant instances of vandalism, with grudge bearing users deliberately editing inaccuracies into Wiki profiles; for a time, the former Ireland soccer manager Steve Staunton, for one, was the butt of a savage and vindictive campaign of character assassination, executed via his Wikipedia profile.
While these criticisms are generally rejected by Wikipedia, it is clear that Jimmy Wales wants to see the errors and inaccuracies eliminated. He argues that when you weigh the positives of the site against the negatives, there is no contest. He has a point: Wikipedia is a huge and enormously worthwhile facility, a knowledge and information bank which offers instant enlightenment to people at the click of a mouse. So to begin at the beginning...

JASON O’TOOLE: How did you come up with the idea of Wikipedia?
JIMMY WALES: I was watching the growth of ‘free software’ – open source software – and seeing large groups of programmers coming together to build really great software – the software that runs the internet. The thing that really made it work was the free licensing model, the idea that everything you contribute is available for free. And then, what we call ‘Copyleft’ – meaning if I release something under a Copyleft license it says, ‘Well, it’s free for anyone to use and you can take it and modify it, but if you modify it and release it you also have to release it for free’. It made sense that this type of collaboration would start with programmers because if programmers want to share code, or work together, they can make their own tools to do that – and they did. But for everybody else – to collaborate you really need to email around work documents or something and that’s a nightmare if you’ve ever emailed out a work document to eight people asking for revisions. The horrifying thing is when you get eight versions back and now you’ve got to somehow merge them all. It’s a huge nightmare. So, I realised that we need to develop some tools for people to be able to collaborate and that was really the core of the idea: to expand this kind of revolution I was seeing happening, away from just software into other cultural products on the internet.
Why was Wikipedia set up as a non-profit organisation?
In the early days, this was a project that I was working on – just a hobby. There were two things really: Wikipedia was born in the depths of the dotcom crash, so there wasn’t any obvious business model: ad revenues were completely fallen apart; the boom days were over. Since we had no way of getting investment, there was no way to hire people so we got volunteers involved who wanted it to be non-profit. I was able to get a lot of people excited and motivated to work on it. People were volunteering for the kinds of things they wouldn’t volunteer for in a profit scenario. Today, it’s really a great thing because it gives Wikipedia a very special place in the culture. It doesn’t belong to anyone. It is an institution and therefore certain pillars of Wikipedia – like the neutrality policy – become very, very important. Wikipedia is a central place for everyone in the world to share knowledge and improve understanding.
Is Wikipedia expensive to finance?
No, not really. Every year on the website we do a campaign asking the public to donate money. This year we had a goal of raising $6million dollars from grants, large donors and from the general public. We met that goal quite easily, which we were really pleased about because, with the financial crisis and all the bad news, we were concerned that people were going to withhold giving this year because they’re concerned about the economy. But we didn’t see any (negative) impact at all.
Has Wikipedia ever faced any financial difficulties?
Sometimes we see reports in the media that say things about Wikipedia lurching from one financial crisis to the next, but we’ve never actually had any kind of a financial crisis. It’s silly. We have a very organised and scheduled fundraising campaign, but every time we put it up people are like, ‘Oh, my God! Wikipedia is panicking’. No, we’re not panicking, it’s Christmas time – you’re supposed to give us money now. It’s what we do every year. I think in a couple of years it will sink in a little bit: ‘Oh, yeah, this is the season when Wikipedia ask for money’. But so far so good. We do have to take fundraising very seriously. $6 million is not a lot of money to run the fourth most popular website in the world. At the same time, $6 million is a lot of money.
Will Wikipedia need to fundraise every year?
Yeah. I wouldn’t anticipate deviating from the cycle. We would like in the long run to start to think about an endowment; in other words, a separate fund – a large fund – that is there and is stable – and Wikipedia spends out of the interest or earnings on that account. Ideally, we would love to have that. But that’s nowhere near.
Do you draw down a salary from Wikipedia?
No. I don’t get any salary. In fact, I don’t even get reimbursed for my expenses. It’s my charity work. I’m pretty insistent about that.
I read an article online that said you tried to get expenses paid for a dinner?
You should assume everything in valleywag is a complete fabrication.
How many people use Wikipedia?
Right now, we reach about one-third of everyone who is on the internet. It’s higher or lower in different countries but it’s in the ballpark of around 33% per month. That’s kind of astonishing to me. I’m puzzled by who are those two out of three people, on the internet for the entire month, that don’t end up on Wikipedia! I don’t know how you do that. One of our developers a few years ago calculated if the growth we were experiencing at that time was to continue in seven years every person on the planet would need to spend 24 hours a day editing Wikipedia. So, obviously you can’t sustain that kind of growth forever. I expect eventually that traffic growth will slow down – and it already has slowed down some. It’s inevitable.
Wikipedia has several spin off websites. Does it annoy you that none of these are as successful as Wikipedia itself?
The lack of traffic and participation in Wikinews has been a bit of a disappointment. The others are fine – they are more scholarly resources, so you wouldn’t expect them to be top websites.
Can you envisage Wikipedia ever allowing adverts on the site?
It’s a possibility. I wouldn’t rule it out. We’ve always said, ‘Look, I don’t want to have advertisements in Wikipedia’. Nobody really thinks it’s a good idea. On the other hand, if the very survivability of Wikipedia were at risk, of course we would do whatever we have to do to keep Wikipedia safe. A lot of people assume that when they talk to me that I’m going to be some kind of raving type of anti-commercial guy. I’m actually very pro-Capitalism and pro-commerce. For me it’s an aesthetic point – to say, ‘This is a place where you go to where it’s you communing with knowledge and learning – it’s not the place or time for commercial activity’.
What was the situation with Larry Sanger? He says he was co-founder of Wikipedia, but you dispute this, insisting rather that he wasn’t a co-founder – just an employee.
Right. Yes. He worked for me. He was the first Editor-In-Chief. That was his title. I actually think it’s ironic. Unfortunately, due to that conflict, which is really about terminology more than anything else, I feel that Larry’s work is often under-appreciated. He really did a lot in the first year to think through editorial policy. But the media always loves a good fight. People love to trump that up and it gets reported over and over. I wish there was a juicier story but there isn’t (laughs). I would actually love to have it on the record that I said: I think Larry’s work should be more appreciated. He’s a really brilliant guy.
Sanger said that proof of his being co-founder is on the initial press releases. Are you saying that he basically just put himself down as co-founder on these press releases?
Yes.
Why did Larry leave Wikipedia?
Basically, because I didn’t want to pay him any more and he didn’t want to continue as a volunteer.
He has now founded his own online encyclopaedia, called Citizendium, which is basically competition for Wikipedia. Do you see it as a threat?
No. It’s kind of hard to think in terms of competition in that sense. The idea of Citizendium is interesting. Larry was never comfortable with the open-editing model of Wikipedia and he very early on wanted to start locking things down and giving certain people special authority – you know, recruit experts to supervise certain areas of the encyclopaedia and things like that. So, Citizendium is his effort to that. And I don’t know how it’s going actually! I haven’t looked at it in a while. The last I looked it was somewhat active. I hear people say negative things about it sometimes, but I think that’s because they’re such fans of Wikipedia. So, I personally don’t really have an opinion about it.
You got into a spot of controversy for editing your own biographical entry on Wikipedia. You removed references to Sanger as the co-founder. Sanger said that you were trying to rewrite history.
I edited the entry about me. I corrected what I felt to be very simple errors. In doing so, I accidentally created some controversy that I didn’t mean to. The funny thing is how that’s reported sometimes. It says that I edited Wikipedia contrary to the rules of the site. Well, at that time there wasn’t even a guideline against it. Now there’s a guideline that suggests that you probably shouldn’t (edit your own entry). We’ve never made it a firm rule, simply because the last thing we need is for someone to spot an error about themselves, correct it and then get banned from the site. That’s just rude and wrong.
I noticed that you have now left all this criticism about yourself on your entry.
I figure I have to walk the walk.
There was another controversy surrounding you and a so-called conflict of interest about dating a journalist.
I’m not going to talk about that one. Everyone loves a scandal, so...
Is it true that when you broke up you announced it on your Wikipedia entry?
I’m not going to comment.
Have you ever talked about this?
No. I published a statement. My statement is 100% accurate and people don’t always read it.
They were saying there was a conflict of interest because you were dating a journalist who had contacted you because she wanted changes made to her Wikipedia entry. Where’s the conflict of interest?
I can answer this question in the general sense. I think that all people should try to avoid editing any article when they have some personal interest in the subject, outside of very minor fact corrections. For myself, I have always been very, very careful about that. It’s very important – for anybody – to try really hard to say, ‘Look, do I have a conflict of interest in this edit? Am I editing this for any other motive than to improve the encyclopaedia?’ If so, you should back off and post on the talk page as an advocate and just say, ‘Look, I think this change should be made. Here’s my reasons why’. Rather than doing the edit yourself.
Why is editing your own entry frowned on?
The main reason is that it’s very difficult for people to achieve a sense of perspective about themselves. It’s very difficult to be neutral about yourself. One of the main reasons we recommend against it – it’s not actually for the benefit of Wikipedia but actually for the benefit of the person – most people who edit entries about themselves may find it a very unpleasant experience simply because you are naturally an advocate for yourself and you end up in a debate with people who are trying to be neutral or even trying to attack you. You are much better off going to the talk page and giving information.
Your role in Wikipedia has been described as some of the following: benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch, digital evangelist and spiritual leader. Which one describes you best?
Gosh! Do I have to choose one of those? It’s funny – I’m this geek from the internet who happens to be quite friendly and I’m not really comfortable with all of those kinds of titles.
But aren’t they all just backhanded compliments?
In a way, yes they are. Or they are just a little awkward or embarrassing. No one can really look at themselves and say, ‘I’m the visionary of the ages!’ It’s kind of silly.
Time magazine gave you the accolade of being one of the top 10 most influential figures of our time...
That was a lovely article. I gave a copy to my mum. That was nice (laughs). I’m basically just this geeky guy who loves the internet and loves doing fun things.
You don’t come across as geeky to me.
Oh, I am. Believe me.
How do you respond to the argument that Wikipedia is unreliable?
The general question about the quality of Wikipedia is a valid question – especially now that Wikipedia is the number four website in the world; it’s a really key part of our information infrastructure for everybody who’s online. It’s a socially important topic to say, ‘What is the quality of Wikipedia?’ What are the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia? And how might we address the weaknesses? If people have a very simplistic view, they say, ‘Well, because it’s open it’s unreliable’. I’m going to respond and say, ‘Actually, what we have discovered – over time – is that the more open we make it the more reliable it becomes’. We can’t have that simple knee-jerk view. There are elements that are beneficial for reliability and there are elements that are a detrimental to reliability. We need to figure how to slice those out and address the problems without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
How can this be done?
What we really need is a lot more academic research into this question of the quality of Wikipedia. Partly because I think we will come out well. Anybody who describes it as completely unreliable and crazy has really missed the point that Wikipedia is actually pretty good, it’s one of the reasons why people use it. If we have research that says, ‘Wikipedia is very strong in technology topics but very weak in, say, English poetry,’ or something, that’s valuable information. It’s something our community can say, ‘Ah, look we have this whole category that’s a problem’. Or if we have research that tells us we have certain types of bias in our coverage then that’s great because we can become more self-aware and start to think about what procedures and policies and systems will help to correct that.
Wikipedia has also come under fire over vandalism on entries.
The interesting thing about the debates around the quality of Wikipedia is that what you most often see reported is some goofy vandalism that lasted for a minute. It’s unfortunate of course but, for me, it really doesn’t get at the right things to criticise Wikipedia about. We want to change the software and think through things in the community about how do we minimise vandalism. How do we best deal with it? Vandalism is very obvious stuff – it’s people putting curse words in the middle of articles or blanking it or replacing a picture with some goofy picture and things like that. That’s pretty well known and it’s basically under control. It’s just something that happens from time to time. We need better tools for dealing with it.
About two years ago the then Irish soccer manager Steve Staunton’s entry was being constantly vandalised.
Was that because he was losing games? That’s unfortunate. That’s something we should never see happen. But it does happen. The community is very keen on trying to figure out how we can sort those things out. It’s not trivial.
Is there anything you could introduce to make people reluctant to vandalise?
I would like to have it that when you’re editing as a logged-out user that we show you – just before you click on save – ‘By the way, we see you’re editing from this IP number in’ – let’s just say for example – ‘the White House and you may want to reflect for a moment on whether this edit reflects well upon your organisation’. Just to let people know a little more clearly what’s involved.
What do you think about students relying on Wikipedia?
In some ways it a question we are passed the point of asking, because it doesn’t matter what I think about it, or what you think about it, or what any of your readers think about it. Kids are using Wikipedia. I would venture to say that virtually 100% of all college students use Wikipedia. For me, the real question is: how do we use Wikipedia in education? What’s the right way to help students use it in a way that is effective for them, that helps them to learn faster. Learn in a deeper, more thoughtful way. There’s several points that could be made there. If a college professor says, ‘Don’t use Wikipedia’, that’s really useless. If a college professor says, ‘You can start with Wikipedia, but I don’t really want to see you turning in papers that are just rehash Wikipedia entries. You’ve got to go to the library. In fact, Wikipedia can help you get orientated so you can go to the library with a good knowledge of what it is you’re supposed to be researching’. So, that’s kind of my approach. Let’s teach students the strengths and weakness of Wikipedia so they can understand how to use it correctly.
On the subject of contributors editing anonymously, why not change that? Surely people have a right to know who is writing something on Wikipedia. People do have hidden agendas...
The anonymity factor of Wikipedia is overestimated. What is not generally understood is that nearly all of the core community is not anonymous. They are known. It’s very common for people to write under a username, but on their actual user page they say exactly who they really are. If someone doesn’t log in then all their contributions are recorded under their IP number. The IP number is a number that identifies a computer on the internet. If you wanted to know you could usually find out. There are ways people can mask their IP numbers, but in general you could find out. In fact, it’s an ironic thing that people don’t realise – you actually have more anonymity by logging in than by staying logged out because once you log in people can’t see your IP number.
Is it common for contributors to be banned from Wikipedia?
Oh, yeah. People get banned all the time. People come and they won’t behave, then they can get banned in a number of different ways. This is the part I try to communicate about how Wikipedia functions: if you have this idea of Wikipedia being 10 million people each adding one sentence each – that really isn’t how it works. It really is a core group of people who are supervising, editing, generating new content. Although a lot of new content comes from outsiders who just write four paragraphs and vanish and the community will fact check it and put it in the house style and do all that kind of work. Under a pseudonym you can see the history of someone’s work and I can see where other people who I respect have praised him and checked his work. You begin to see that this is a guy who does very good work; he has a reputation and that reputation is valuable to him; and therefore if he did something bad under his user account he would lose his reputation.
Talking about people losing their reputations, have you ever received any death threats?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I am very, very careful with my personal security because there are crazy people in the world. I always joke that there is something about a project to gather all human knowledge which really draws the lunatics out of the woodwork. People who have all kinds of crazy agendas. They are angry – not usually at me, but at some famous person and they want to attack that person through their Wikipedia entry and then they get banned because they’re being ridiculous. And then they’re mad at Wikipedia. And then they’re mad at me and they send me death threats. So, basically nobody knows where I live. I don’t even give that information out to people in the office – not because I don’t trust people in the office, but just because it’s more of a personal discipline for me. I have the sort of public profile of Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google, but they have billions of dollars and security and all that sort of thing (laughs) and I’m just this guy from the internet. So, it is something that I take very seriously.
Have you ever had to get security guards?
There’s one guy who emails me four to eight times a day under different email addresses and different identities and he’ll email me a curse and cc one of his other identities and his other identity will say, ‘Yeah! Fucker!’ Things like this. That’s been going on now for three or four years. It’s mostly incoherent snippets of text. I know where the guy is and when I’m in his city I don’t do public speaking there because I just don’t know. I don’t know who he is...
Did you ever have to call in the FBI to deal with these threats?
I actually have. But the problem is there’s not a whole lot they can do.
Do you find people treat you like a celebrity?
Sometimes I meet college kids and they’re very excited to meet me and that’s great. In general though, not so much. I’ve had a couple of fun experiences. In India they are very excited about Wikipedia. It is a little odd being in the public eye in certain ways. As an example, one of the things I really love on the internet is Twitter, but I’ve also joked with people about how much I hate Twitter. I do have a love/hate relationship with it because – although it’s a really cool service – it’s always a little bizarre for me if I’m walking down the street in San Francisco and later I see somebody twitted on Twitter that they saw me walking down Second Street. One time somebody said, ‘I just saw Jimmy Wales buying a muffin at JFK Airport!’ I was just buying a muffin – please let me have a little privacy.
What’s your thoughts on Facebook?
I am completely addicted to Facebook. I use it all the time. I’m on Facebook several times a day. Yeah, of course, it’s super easy to waste time on Facebook. It can be a complete waste of time. On the other hand, unlike email, I don’t get spam in my inbox there. In email, if some crazy person is sending me messages I can’t stop them. I could filter their email but then I have to proactively work on figuring out filtering. Whereas on Facebook if somebody is being mean or strange I just block them. It’s a safer, quieter environment for me.
Do you think YouTube can survive now that they’re being restricted from airing music videos in the UK?
YouTube belongs to Google and Google can afford to support it for a very long time. Google makes a ton of money from their search business, so I don’t think they really need to make money out of YouTube. Although, obviously, even Google doesn’t want to support it at an infinite price. There’s no question that YouTube will survive. I love YouTube. I love it because I like to sit down with my daughter and watch funny cat videos. Last weekend we sat for a couple of hours and I just thought of all these classic rock ‘n’ roll songs that she had never heard and I showed her the videos. We had a great time. It was sharing part of what I grew up with. If they have to take all that old stuff down I guess that could be a problem. I don’t think it’ll survive only on funny cat videos.
Is there a danger of Google monopolising the internet?
I love Google. I use Google every day like everybody else does. But when I step back and think about it, I would like to see a continuation of a very competitive internet space. It’s a little concerning that Google has become so dominant in search. I don’t have any real answer to what’s going to happen to fix that problem. It’s something we should become vigilant about. We don’t want the internet to become a monoculture. Right now, I don’t think it’s a big issue. Ask me again in five years, maybe I’ll sing a different tune.
What pisses you off most about the internet?
It still sucks when you’re using the internet and there’s all of these times when the web page won’t load, or it’s suddenly slow for no apparent reason. I generally have very good internet connection, but we are still not at the kind of reliability that we should be at. I find that very frustrating. And spam. The whole email situation. The fact that all these years later we have still not made the slightest progress in the total amount of spam I get. There have been periods of time I felt spam was going to totally destroy email and it was going to become unusable.
Do you think there’s too much porn on the internet?
No. For me, it’s part of what’s on the internet and that’s fine. I actually think the situation has got a lot better, mostly because searches across the board – not just Google but all the search engines – have gotten better. Nowadays you don’t just randomly come across porn the way you did several years ago. Back in the day when Alta Vista was the primary search engine, you might type in Abraham Lincoln and the third link down says ‘Lincoln in the White House’ and you click on it and it’s porn because some porn scammer had figured out a way to trick Alta Vista. You don’t stumble across that they way you used to.
Prior to starting Wikipedia, you had a web company called Bomis, which according to your own Wikipedia profile, has been described as the ‘Playboy of the internet’.
That’s completely false. It was never described as that. Absolutely false.
Was it a big money spinner for you?
Basically, throughout its entire career it paid my salary for a few years and paid salaries for a few others. In the end, it was not a big money maker.
Are you a libertarian?
I am. I don’t like the term. But yes, very much.
Do you think marijuana should be legalised?
I’m all for it. I think marijuana should be legalized, even though I personally don’t have any interest in marijuana.
But you have tried it.
Oh, sure, yeah. From a political point of view, it (prohibition) seems like a foolish public policy and, so, I would love to see that changed. I’ve every hope that in another 50 years we may get around to that (laughs). In the US there has been a bit of a movement in the direction of decriminalizing marijuana possession in small amounts, and medical marijuana.
Would you draw the line at marijuana or would you philosophy be, ‘Let people do what they want?’*
Pretty much. I’ve a very free market oriented philosophy. Major changes in the law should be undertaken in a very thoughtful and step-by-step fashion. I think it would make a lot of sense to do some control tests. You do have to worry about things like crime associated with certain kinds of drug use. So if you’re going to legalise certain drugs that may cause people to become dangerous to themselves or others, you basically have to think those things through and be very cautious.
So, you would have no objection to acid, coke or heroin being legalised? You’re saying, let people use whatever drugs they like...
Yes, that’s right.
Do you think illegal downloads can be eventually stopped?
They are a fact of life. We have to accept that there’s very little that can be done about it. Anybody’s business model that depends on people not copying stuff has a really big problem going forward. We’re beginning to approach solutions in these areas. If you assumed that you could not sell music online because there’s all these places you can illegally download, you would have never started iTunes. But iTunes is very successful and growing. In order to compete, people selling content will have to make it more convenient and compelling experience than simply copying it for free.
What are your attitude to Microsoft?
Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop is finally beginning to erode to some extent. They still make a lot of money. In recent years, they have been – from a technologically perspective – essentially irrelevant. They haven’t been innovating. It’s a large company so you can’t take that as a completely blanket statement. Obviously, a few innovations have come out. But in terms of being a leader they definitely are not. I haven’t used Windows in 10 years at least. Nowadays they have serious competition from Open Office, which is nearly as good, and free. I’m also very curious to watch what happens next with Apple. I feel they have a real opportunity to compete on the same level, but I don’t know what direction they’ll go in. Apple’s always been very top-down controlling, so they’re not exactly the open saviour (laughs) against Microsoft. On the other hand, competition in that space is a very good thing.
Has anybody ever offered to buy Wikipedia?
There was never any serious offer. I think by the time we got big enough for anybody to care we were already a non-profit organisation and that posses some dilemmas.
How much do you reckon Wikipedia is worth?
Nobody really knows. First of all, if you do any kind of traditional analysis of the cash flow it’s worth nothing because there’s no ads on it. So, what if we put ads on all the pages? Well, we’re in the midst of a financial disaster so I don’t think anybody is buying anything right now. But in the billions of dollars anyway. I don’t think there’s any good way to estimate it.
You’re friendly with Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, which is an investment company Bono co-founded. Do you know Bono?
I met Bono a couple of times. He is a fan of Wikipedia. I like U2. Roger McNamee is really the one we know quite well. He’s been really an amazing guy. He is very supportive of our mission. Basically, he’s done a fabulous job of introducing us to people who are interested in donating money in Silicon Valley. Twisting the arms of all his buddies to donate money. Contrary to what people might speculate, or rumours, there’s no business interest or relationship at all. He’s a guy who has made money from the internet and wants to give back.
Do you think you might get U2 into some kind of Wikipedia project in the future?
I doubt it, but that would be kind of cool. You know Weird Al Yankovic did a Wikipedia song. He did a song called ‘White And Nerdy’. So maybe U2 would do a serious song about editing Wikipedia. It seems like a strange topic for a rock ‘n’ roll band (laughs).