Jimmy Wales

“ But we actually find even in the Wikipedia context, which is written by human beings, that there are some websites that even when you type in the right thing and you submit and you get the information you want, you cannot link directly to that. And so someone who is writing something, trying to explain something, and they want to link to a particular statute or a particular regulation or a particular piece of information that has been published by the government, if they are not able to cut and paste that URL and put it into Wikipedia, then even with a human involved it is very frustrating. ”

“ This brings us back to what might be called the lesson of Wikipedia, that an open flat forum allowing many stakeholders to participate can facilitate information sharing in an extremely cost-efficient manner and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information sharing processes do.
Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to citizen's needs. In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public and also to allow the public to communicate with the government. ”

“ And the point being made here is that not every citizen realizes when they are looking into their health, their business, education, or housing, that government provides a service that is relevant. And that is why it is critical that all of the information of the Federal Government that is public be in all search engines possible and not simply through USA.gov, where a user is consciously looking for information from its government. ”

“ So within Wikipedia, the software, the Mediawiki software that we use puts several tools into the hands of the community so that they can manage the quality of the content. Within the community, there are administrators who are elected from the community and they are generally chosen after they have proven their worth over a period of time in terms of being good writers, thoughtful editors, kind and helpful to others, the kinds of values that we look for in an administrator. ”

“ When people need to work together to produce some document, the only option in the old days would be to email around a text file or word processing document. The wiki represents a crucial innovation allowing for much greater speed. The most basic idea of a wiki is a website that can be easily edited by the readers, but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work. ”

“ But I also think that the American people are smart and they know how to use search engines. While it may be frustrating a few people, we do not want to block information from the vast majority of people who would be able to figure out the context and use that information. For the minority of people that cannot figure it out, that might be frustrating, but at least they have an opportunity for access. ”

“ Now what we need to do is work in partnership, which is what your reauthorization allows us to do, is that there is a balance between us trying to streamline our backline and making sure that the citizen really knows what they are eligible for and also making the information commercially available to the search engines, because it is all out there. We just want to make sure that we are providing it in a context so that we do not create more frustration. ”

“ And so it is hard to do any damage at Wikipedia. Whenever you come in and make a change, you are actually just creating a new version. And if you have done some harm, someone can quickly come behind you and fix it. ”

“ That is not the kind of open society we want to live in. But unfortunately, when people are engaging in web design, this is often exactly the kind of thinking that they have. They think of all of the bad things that people might do and design everything around those worst case scenarios rather than saying, oh you know what, let us keep things as open as we can and wait until we see the bad behavior and then think about what to do about it. We call the police. We get an ambulance. Or in a digital context we simply change it back to the old version. ”

“ People can be very simplistic and say well they, should allow the public to comment on regulations. Well, sure. But how are we going to help the public to come in as a part of a responsible community and do that in a way that everyone finds useful. ”

“ And because, as we have experienced in our communication with agencies, they tend not to think as much about how citizens are going about finding information but rather about how their website is presented to citizens, they have not taken, by and large, this step of providing us a means of finding those records behind that search form. ”

“ You can easily have people who disagree and someone will say you made these edits to this article, but I do not feel that it really improved it. I am going to go back to the previous version and then let us go to the talk page and hash this out.
So these kinds of tools are applicable for internal wikis and external, but a lot of the concepts may be valuable outside even the wiki framework. The idea of understanding that if you can generate a thoughtful community, you can have that community do a lot of the policing that otherwise it would not be cost effective to do. ”

“ We get a common set of answers because USA.gov is tied into every agency, so they handle all of the misdirected e-mail. So if anybody does write directly to a department or an agency, it is automatically routed to their set of agents so that they can answer the questions on a consistent basis. ”

“ The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideas of individual responsibility. Under U.S. law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as it is true of everyone speaking in any public forum. ”

“ Tom Fingar has gone on record describing one of Intellipedia's intelligence successes. Mr. Fingar told DefenseNews.com that a worldwide group of intelligence collectors and analysts used Intellipedia to describe how Iraqi insurgents are using chlorine in IEDs, improvised explosive devices. They developed it in a couple days interacting in Intellipedia, Mr. Fingar said: No bureaucracy, no "mother may I," no convening meetings. They did it and it came out pretty good. That is going to grow. ”

“ I therefore also recommend that U.S. agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face. ”

“ And the staff at Craig's List is really too small to really supervise and monitor everything. But their community can simply, if you see something that is spam or is somehow inappropriate, they can simply flag it and if it gets flagged a certain number of times it just disappears. ”

“ And that is what needs to be looked at. We are in partnership, we jointly manage that with the OIRA Administrator, Susan Dudley. And these are things that she is embracing because she does want more transparency, she does want more openness in the regulation process. And so we are working with that.
There is an ongoing study right now with the American Bar Association that we have been meeting with them of improvements and requirements, some things that we can do to Regulations.gov that would just make it easier to use so that more people would want to put comments in there, as well. ”

“ And the pages that they present to users, indeed may not be utterly clear to the user on first blush, but they did so. They opened these databases. And as we indicated in a report we published or a case study we published yesterday on this website I referenced, Google.com/publicsector, the administrators of these agencies, whose databases were opened, are very pleased with the results of citizens for the first time learning about, for example, license record of contractors and of real estate developers, and so forth. So we know it can work because we have seen it work. ”

“ They are used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security related organizations including combat and commands and Federal departments. These wikis are not open to the general public.
The Intellipedia uses Mediawiki, which is the same software used by Wikipedia, and the officials who have set up the project say that it will change the culture of U.S. intelligence community which have been widely blamed for failing to connect the dots before the attacks of September 11, 2001. ”

“ So they are constantly looking at customer satisfaction. All of the E-Government initiatives are measuring customer satisfaction usage. And then as well as how we can go back and really deploy it and improve it and we make all of those metrics publicly available. ”

“ And since we are serving steak, the customers will have access to knives. And when people have access to knives, they might stab each other. So to design our restaurant, we are going to put everybody inside a cage. ”