Tropicana Magazine May-Jun 2018 #118: Winner Takes All

THE GAME CHANGER
“Wales is concerned
about the collapse
of local journalism
and a click-based
online advertising
model which results
in stories going
unreported.”
bagpipes, the Blairs, David Miliband, Lord
Adonis, Mick Hucknall and Lily Cole were
guests, as was another Siliconminster power
couple: Steve Hilton (David Cameron’s former
advisor) and Rachel Whetstone (currently
vice-president of communications at
Facebook, who formerly held senior lobbyist
roles with Uber and Google). Wales likes to
cook and they regularly hold dinner parties.
Indeed, Wales and Garvey are so at home
among the international elite, they met at
the Piano Bar at the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland. It remains a romantic
place for them both. ‘Now we stay in the same
room in the same hotel every year – it’s like coming home,’ Wales says
between forkfuls. (The eggs are ‘unexpectedly delicious!’ he exclaims.)
His voice is less Alabama and more business American with a few
Anglicisms thrown in. He’s forthright and funny, a little rough around the
edges, like Wikipedia, but this is part of the charm. And no, the other tech
CEOs don’t tease him about not being a billionaire. (An old section of his
Wikipedia page, since revised, pinned his fortune at less than $1 million.)
‘Launching Wikipedia with no ads, no paywall, was a series of bad business
decisions, but that’s how I’ve built my career so far,’ he smiles. ‘I said that
to [Google co-founder] Larry Page and he just laughed and said, “Just keep
doing what you’re doing”.’
Wales is freshly back from Davos, where he spoke about his new site,
WikiTribune, which he hopes will harness Wikipedian principles of
transparency, community and neutrality for the era of misinformation
and alternative facts. ‘I had a stomach bug for the first days so it was kind of
grim,’ he says of this year’s conference. ‘And then the President spoke and
we all had stomach aches. Ha ha...
‘In the event, Donald Trump didn’t declare nuclear war or call anyone
a p***y. ‘He stuck to the script and didn’t say anything new. Here are his
positions, you can agree with some and disagree with others. If he behaved
like that all the time, it would be significantly less frightening.’
It was the rise of Trump – as well as Brexit – that prompted the launch
of WikiTribune in October. Wales is concerned about the collapse of local
journalism and a click-based online advertising model which results in
stories going unreported.
‘In the past, if you were a boat manufacturer and you wanted to sell
boats you’d say: “Well, who buys boats?” It’s men in their early 50s who are
having a midlife crisis. So you’d work out what publications we read. But
now they can just follow that demographic around the internet. I can be on
the spammiest website or message board and I see boats. That means quality
newspapers aren’t just competing with each other, they’re competing with
everything.’ The idea of WikiTribune is to allow a Wikipedian ‘community’
worldwide to suggest stories, collate information, crunch data, write and
edit articles. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, he has taken on 10
journalists full-time. ‘It’s a start,’ he says.
Since Trump’s election, the public mood has turned against the tech
giants: Esquire recently characterised the ‘big four’ tech companies (Google,
Facebook, Amazon and Apple) as a ‘tax-avoiding, job-killing, soul-sucking
machine’. Wales doesn’t appear to disagree with that characterisation, but
isn’t sure what to do about it.
TM | MAY/JUNE 2018
110