Of newark, new jersey. We have to unite with other people, to win. The object is just to win. We dont want to struggle just for struggles sake. There are thousands of people in our committee, hundreds jailed, dead. We are not activists and revolutionaries because it is fun. My mother and father did not participate in the movement for medals, awards, twitter, instagram, for all of these things, to be praised. 10 00, nebraska senator ben sasse on the Founding Fathers and the purpose of government. It turns out the meaning of america is persuasion. The meaning of america is love. Is meaning of america building a better product or creating a Better Service or persuading some of each of mary you or persuading someone persuading somebody to marry you or presenting summary to join your church or synagogue. At 6 30, Newt Gingrich, van jones, former congressman Patrick Kennedy discuss opioid addiction and treatment. People have to change their minds, have willpower, but they also have to change their brains back. This is a biological thing. Your brain is an organ. Octors handed these pills and say, take these pills, for a lot of people, these pills damage that organ. Watch on cspan and cspan. Org anderson on the free cspan radio app. Founder jimmydia wales on the importance of wikipedia being an online encyclopedia that offers access on a global scale. This is about an hour and 10 minutes. Good evening. Make things difficult for him. Good evening. Thanks for being here. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Cato Institute and also to welcome those viewing on cspan. Im the president of cato. Before we start, i want to tell you a little bit about this is our first in the mclachlan lecture series. I would like to tell you a little bit about joseph mclachlan. Dr. Mclachlan was a worldrenowned cancer epidemiologist. He received his doctorate from the university of minnesota in 1981. He works for a number of years he worked for a number of years at the National Cancer institute, and in 1994 was the cofounder of the International Epidemiology institute, where he served as president. He was also an adjunct professor at johns hopkins. Joe was a worldrenowned epidemiologist and he believed in the rigorous application of the scientific method. He was occasionally known to bemoan the state of the field of of his field of science. I think he had a strong ability, unlike some of his peers and unlike most of us, who occasionally fall prey to the bias that correlation can be causality, i think he resisted that impulse. Although he was a scientist of the first rank, that is not the only reason we are honoring him. He was a great friend of the Cato Institute, a generous sponsor of ours for over two decades. But he also had the broad and accomplished intellect to which so many of us aspire and fail to reach. Joe had a library of thousands of volumes. He had an incredibly wide range of academic interests, ranging from economics to genetics to film noir. I have been told that he was interested in everything. He was particularly interested in the correlation between geography and achievement for civilization. Questions like why is Silicon Valley the center of technological innovation . Why did hollywood become home to the Film Industry . Why was ancient athens the center of advanced thought at the time . We are delighted to honor his memory. I only met him once, it was before i joined cato. We both attended a lunch here where he was seated next to an equally impressive intellect, harvard psychologist and cognitive scientist steven pinker. That was unfortunately just a few weeks before josephs untimely passing. But we are delighted that through the generosity of his tonight, is with us along with their daughter, this lecture series has been made possible. For those [applause] for those of you who are not as familiar with the Cato Institute, we view our mission very broadly as the defense and advancement of the critical human and American Values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. At a time when those values feel under assault our way or when the political process is giving us choices we find unpalatable, we sometimes get discouraged. But i think it is important to not get discouraged and to open the aperture a little bit and recognize all of the things that human freedom has given us. It has given us the environment in which innovation can take place. As a result, i often say, people who know me, this will be a bit of a broken record, there is no better time to be alive as a human being than today because of the great innovations that have made our lives very interesting. The leisure, recreation opportunities we enjoy here in the united states. But most importantly, the great level of prosperity that has increased as poverty has decreased substantially. I think we do liberty a disservice when we dont fully appreciate or take for granted these things. I think it is Walter Williams who told a story about how to appreciate the miracle of Free Enterprise and the markets. When you have to go to the grocery store, you dont call them up and tell them you are coming or what you want, but when you get there, the dozens and dozens of things you want are there at highquality and modest cost. And hundreds and hundreds of things you dont want. The choice is incredible. It is miracles like that that remind me of the person we are going to hear from tonight. If i had told you 20 years ago when you were first trundling on to what we then called the information superhighway on your dialup modem, if i had told you at that point there was going to be an encyclopedia available and it was going to be published in 295 different languages, you would stop me and say you didnt even know there were 295 different languages. But unlike that stack of books on your shelf, it would be completely Available Online. The largest version, the english version, is going to have 5. 2 million articles, and i believe 3. 2 billion words. And that you were going to be able to access this as well free access this ad will free of charge whenever you want to do through the generosity of donors to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of which come i think it is interesting to note Joe Mclachlan was one of them. Thanks to the generosity of him and his fellow sponsors, they allow me to go to wikipedia time and again during the day. Wikipedia, as i believe you all know if i had told you that such a facility was going to exist, and i made that prediction, you would have thought i was crazy. You would have thought i was particularly insane or under the influence if i told you that this vast encyclopedia was going to be written without compensation by registered users, of which there are now almost 30 million. We would have thought this could not be possible. But it is the genius of friedrich hayek, the namesake of this auditorium, that explains how things like wikipedia can how emerging orders like wikipedia can come to pass, and it was the genius of jimmy wales that brought wikipedia into existence. Jimmy was born in alabama. He attended until eighthgrade a oneroom school that was run by his mother and grandmother, which i believe was based on the montessori approach. I suppose it would not have to be this way, but it should not surprise us that he really enjoyed poring through encyclopedias as a child. He credits this upbringing as the source of his inspiration. Source of his creativity. He got a bachelors degree at Auburn University and a masters at the university of alabama, which i imagine means that iron bowl day must be very difficult for him. That is when auburn plays the university of alabama. Or maybe it is easy because he doesnt care who went. Who wins. But he went to work as a researcher at a chicago Financial Options firm, where he worked from 19942000. In 2000, he left his job because he was becoming increasingly interested in the internet and he started an Internet Company which did not succeed. But then founded wikipedias forerunner actually, i dont think it is technically a forerunner, but it was his first attempt at an online encyclopedia. And then in 2001, he launched wikipedia, and the rest, as they say, is history. I will let him more aptly describe for us. Please join me in welcoming jimmy wales. [applause] mr. Wales thank you very much. It is really great to be here. I actually did visit the Cato Institute about 150 years ago, i think it was. I am joking, it was maybe 20 years ago. Something like that. I had a girlfriend at the time who was an intern here and i popped by one day. That was kind of fun. Im going to talk about wikipedia and reasoned discourse , because for me this is one of the most important features of wikipedia, which is something that is sorely lacking in the world today, and one of the reasons for the popularity of wikipedia is that it is a place people can turn for this. Going back to the beginning here , is the original vision statement for wikipedia, and that is for all of us to imagine a world in which every Single Person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we are doing. I think one of the reasons wikipedia has been so successful is that we have managed to gather this Incredible Group of volunteers, people who are very passionate about wikipedia, about getting it right, about sharing knowledge. One of the reasons they are so passionate is that we have a really big vision. I think if i had started with a smaller vision, lets all get together and write an entry for every u. S. President , people would wonder what the point was. This was really grand. Every Single Person with the access to the sum of knowledge. Community hasis created more than 40 million entries, we have monthly over 400 million unique visitors. This is a pretty Staggering Number to get your head around. Actually, our internal server log suggests even higher traffic, these are the official numbers from comscore. But we know they are very good at measuring traffic in the u. S. And europe, but basically, the developed world their metric is to measure for advertising. Even they admit they are not as good at measuring in the developing world and mobile traffic. They are improving all the time. But we believe this number is probably a little low, but is still a big enough number. We are happy about that. Wikipedia is in 284 languages. I always think this number is a little bit unfair, i dont actually claim 284 languages, because a fair number of the languages are very small. There are 284 websites set up that have a very Tiny Community working. They have often translated interface and so on. If we really want to get an idea of the scope of wikipedia and scale of wikipedia, some of the key statistics. We have 10 languages with over entries. One millioni am excluding 2 languages primarily written by bots, a whole other topic we could talk about. In terms of human written, primarily human written languages, 48 languages have at least 100,000 entries, 28 have at least 10,000, and 234 have at least 1000. 1000 entries is quite small. Not a useful are functional and cyclopedia. But i know there is a Small Community there. Another10 active users, 20 to 30 they know a little bit. Started to them themselves as a community and they start to think about how to get more volunteers. One of the things to think about is that wikipedia is not evenly distributed around the world. The distribution of where wikipedia is big or not big, in many ways you could predict it quite easily. What are some of the factors . Degree of education is really important. Access to broadband. There are various other cultural factors. One of the things that is interesting to look at, if you look at the top entries per capita, some of the top languages per capita, the number of entries versus the number of speakers of the language would be icelandic, estonian, swedish, danish. Why is that . We dont know for sure. I have a theory. [laughter] mr. Wales it is really cold up there. They like to type a lot. It tieins to go out in the evenings for italians tend to go out in the evenings for gelato and norwegians are tapping on the internet. This is just a joke, but it is true that we see that some of the factors are hard to predict. Northern European Countries are very strong in wikipedia. When we talk about the Global Nature of wikipedia, one of the questions people always have is the question of china. Quite famously, china has the most comprehensive program of censorship on the internet, and we had a long history in china. We were blocked in china for many years and then we were unblocked in china. We were for a very long time, we had an uneasy equilibrium. China had developed the capability and were able to block individual pages from wikipedia. They unblocked almost all of wikipedia but they filtered certain pages. The pages they were filtering for the most part were the obvious ones anything having to. Do with tiananmen square. Weiwei, the artist who is very annoying to them. The man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for democracy. These were the things they filtered out, but they let most of wikipedia through. It was an uneasy truce but we made commitment that we would never cooperate, we have never participated in censorship. We cannot stop them from filtering their own network but , we have never made an agreement. There were overtures, they want us to come in to china and they offer that a university could host us and we said no because we believe that fundamentally, the right to an encyclopedia is a fundamental human right. It is the equivalent of freedom of expression. Whatever restrictions you might accept on speech in different societies, the basic facts of the world should not be part of that. Well now, due in no small part to revelations from edward snowden, there was an indication that wikipedia was an easy site to spy on, because it wasnt encrypted. We worked very quickly to encrypt wikipedia. What this has meant for freedom of expression worldwide is actually quite interesting. Is https, that means anybody who is spying cannot see what page you are reading. The policy option of being able to filter out specific pages is no longer available. They have to adopt an all or none approach. Im happy to report that everyone who was filtering out pages is now allowing access to it unfettered. It is too big a price to pay to ban all of wikipedia just to block access to pages you dont like. That has been a big win. That unfortunately has not worked in china. China is now completely blocking wikipedia. We will continue to have dialogue with them. I am very much a believer of having conversations. Trying to bring them along. We are very patient. We have no plans to compromise. Unfortunately, i think they have no plans to compromise, so we are in a bit of a deadlock. I will say, there was something very interesting that has happened over the years. We were blocked in china for several years, and just before the beijing olympics, china had ofthe experienced a period more openness. They knew millions of foreigners were coming from overseas. They open websites that were previously blocked. Someone sent me this interesting image, it is a menu from a restaurant in beijing. You can see that, it says wikipedia fried with eggs. Another one here. Brisket in wikipedia flavor. Someone sent this and asked me, what does this mean . I wrote back and said i have no idea. But i do know who will probably will know. I sent an email to the beijing area wikipedians. I said to them, what does this mean . They conferred among some cells and came back and said, jimbo, we have no idea. [laughter] mr. Wales the best we can figure is that because wikipedia had just been opened up and a ll the foreigners were coming over, a lot of restaurants that they needed to translate the menus and they were just going on google to try and translate. Anything you type into google, what the name of a food what is , the first thing that comes up . Wikipedia. How do you say this in english . Let me check. Must be wikipedia. There are a bunch of these. Stirfried wikipedia. I like it spicy myself. Anyway, we have had a Cultural Impact in china, even though we are currently blocked. Of course, we are a nonprofit and we think a lot about sustainability for the long run, and if things get really tough, we can open up a restaurant chain in china. Im just joking. One of the other things people are always interested in, when we talk about the Global Nature of wikipedia it is important to , understand that wikipedia is not written in english and translated to other languages. It is written organically in these languages. Obviously, a lot of translation goes on, but i would say just as much translation goes into english as out of english. What is interesting to think is how does the content differ across countries . We did this little study, a preliminary small study where we looked at what are the most popular pages in wikipedia . This is not what portion of the content, but what readers are interested in. Mr. Wales if you take a look the graph. For english, japanese, chinese, german, russian, spanish. One of the first thing that pops out at people is if you see the big green bar, for japan, it says pop culture. The japanese love pop culture. It is a big part of life in japan and the japanese internet. For me, this makes sense when i saw it. Another thing that is interesting is the germans are the most interested in geography. [laughter] mr. Wales not sure that is a good thing. I dont make that joke when i am in germany, so [laughter] mr. Wales almost all of the languages, human sexuality. Topics about sex is a topic people are interested in. Spain, they are actually having sex. The rest of us are just reading about it on the internet. [laughter] host this is fun to joke about. One of the interesting things about our community, we have a very diverse immunity. A lot of people around the world. People like to play around with stereotypes and things like this, but one of the great things about the community is a group of p