Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure 164
Hugh Pickens writes "The Tampa Tribune reports that Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Tampa about the three big failures he had before he started Wikipedia, and what he learned from them. In 1996 Wales started an Internet service to connect downtown lunchers with area restaurants. 'The result was failure,' says Wales. 'In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars.' Next Wales started a search engine company called 3Apes. In three months, it was taken over by Chinese hackers and the project failed. Third was an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. Wales spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles, and it failed. Finally, Wales had a 'really dumb idea,' a free encyclopedia written by anyone who wanted to contribute. That became Wikipedia, which is now one of the top 10 most-popular Web sites in the world. This leads to Wales' theories of failure: fail faster — if a project is doomed, shut it down quickly; don't tie your ego to any one project — if it stumbles, you'll be unable to move forward; real entrepreneurs fail; fail a lot but enjoy yourself along the way; if you handle these things well, 'you will succeed.'"
Re:'Fail Often, Fail Early' Is Not Just Wales' Man (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:5, Informative)
People have a lot of misconceptions on the 20% time from Google.
- The 20% is not time to do whatever the heck you want. Basically it is time to spend on things that the company has not specifically directed you to work on. You have to justify the time with (what I believe are monthly( reports with your peers and supervisors on what you were working on.
- The project is not necessarily anything that would ever be customer facing. I would wager, given the type of employee Google hires, most of them would be actually internally directed projects - optimizations to search algorithms, research into new computer learning techniques or advertising techniques, improvements to storage mechanisms, etc. For all you know, nearly all 20% projects actually get used - only thing is only a small number of them are visible to end users.
Re:'Fail Often, Fail Early' Is Not Just Wales' Man (Score:4, Informative)
...I don't know who said it: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
Seems it was Benjamin Franklin, in the guise of Poor Richard. [wikiquote.org]
Re:You know... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and no ...
There's plenty of reasons to be suspect of WikiPedia, not least that officially it doesn't even strive for the truth - just for verifiyability (basically a published source).
However, there have been studies done showing that WikiPedia articles are on average just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica ones - both have similar average numbers of errors per article.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html [cnet.com]
Re:You know... (Score:1, Informative)
I disagree.
Yes, if you use it in the wrong way, it isn't as useful as you would expect. What else is new?
Wikipedia doesn't need to spread the 'universal truth' to everyone out there who might be interested. It is not meant as a source for citation, even if people tend to because it's so informative.
It fulfills the role it is meant to play, namely to provide a portal to information for people interested in a subject. When I seek information about a subject I didn't know about, Wikipedia is often the most accessible and useful source for an introduction into the subject. Using Wikipedia a person can gain a general understanding of what the subject is about and learn from it, and move on to source links for more information.
Wikipedia Science articles accurate as Britannica (Score:4, Informative)