Big Think

Question: What do you make of Intellipedia?

Jimmy Wales:  It’s really interesting.  I mean, I actually talked to some of the people who were involved in the Intellipedia project, and you know, a big part of what they face is, again, quite boring and mundane, right?  If you’re an intelligence agency, and your job is to gather information so that the leadership of the government can make good decisions, it’s really a bad thing if you give bad information because your internal structures are broken.  Because they’re not taking advantage of normal, modern technologies, and that’s a big part of what apparently happens, and has happened in the past is that, because they have very rigid information flow structures.  The right people don’t get the right information at the right time, and errors are made, and that’s just terrible.  Certainly, you know, I think wherever you stand on certain questions like military action in various places, right, I think almost everybody on all sides of the question would certainly agree that, “Gee, before we take any military action, we better make absolutely damn sure we have good information, right?  So that we avoid it when we need to, and we only do it when we have to, and need to, and it makes sense.”  Almost no one would disagree with that and say, “Actually I hope the government bumbles around blindly with no idea what’s going on,” right?  So for me, it’s a positive sign to see that at least some people are starting to take seriously that, gee, there’s a huge information problem that needs to be solved.

Recorded on: 04/30/2008