Aaron Wright (LA '02) was a star student at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. He was editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Law Review and graduated with the Dean's Merit Scholarship. But after he was finished, the New Jersey native went in a different direction.
About two months ago, Wright decided to "do something creative."
"I was reading about Wikipedia - the 'wiki' technology - and I found it fascinating, the idea that people could collaborate" he said. "That led me and a buddy of mine, Andrew Gibbs - also a Tufts graduate - to think about creative endeavors. We started with movie-script writing."
Wright founded WikiScripts, a Web site that allows users to post their scripts online in a collaborative setting. Users visit www.wikiscripts.org and click on a genre, within which they can post their own script or edit another.
"Moving up to the city last year, a lot of people were talking about writing a script, but it takes so much time," Wright said. "It's a 100-plus page document, and people are scared because there are all of these limitations - like the fear of rejection."
The Web site's mantra is that there is no risk attached to the process. People can edit scripts without time constraints, logging on during work breaks or while in bed.
There are a few problems. Theater people are notoriously dramatic, and script writers are infamously protective of their ideas. "Ego is a huge part of the creative process," Wright said. "There comes a point where if you can't put it aside, you need to know that you can't come to a site like this."
A bigger problem is copyright: Placing creative works online can lead to stolen ideas. Wright said that one has to be aware of that possibility prior to posting scripts. "By going on the site, you're admitting your ideas to the community," he said. "Any given script can have about a thousand edits. Who owns it at that point?"
Though none of the scripts that have been fine-tuned on the site have currently been sold, Wright hypothesized a possible scenario for splitting the profits: The site would get a share, and then the rest of the money would be divided among everyone who edited the script, based on how many times they edited.
"Say, if 'John' made 100 edits out of 1,000, he gets that percentage of the money," Wright said. "We're debating giving the person who thought of the original idea a bonus. It makes sense."
Though WikiScripts is Wright's current passion, he was uninvolved in script-writing during his collegiate years. "I didn't do any film stuff at Tufts, but it's the whole idea of community," he said. "I think that just carried over."
Wright did quite a bit of Web site design. "I did the Bio 14 Web site, the child development Web sites, and I worked out the Experimental College Web sites," he said.
While at Tufts, Wright studied economics, something he said was also important in devising WikiScripts. "You're going in and providing your services," he said. "A lot of people are going in and hammering at one idea - it's the whole point: A crowd is smarter than an individual, because everybody has their own background."
Wright has not yet decided whether to pursue WikiScripts as a potential career path or to just keep it as his pet project. "Right now, it's a project, because I have to pay back my law school loan," he said, chuckling.
He's currently exploring a new project, WikiMusic. "Say somebody adds a drum track, and then somebody in Idaho adds another music track and then somebody somewhere else puts something else on," he said. "There are a lot of different concepts."
Wright was president of Concert Board from Sept. 2001 to May 2002. One of his most memorable moments of college was during his junior year, when the Concert Board brought Guster to campus.
"I had to wake them up in the morning, and the lead singer asks me to drive him to his sister's house to meet his nephew for the first time," Wright said. "He introduced me to his nephew the first time I met him, which was the first time he met him!"
WikiScripts devotees can thank Tufts for steering Wright away from medicine. "My least favorite class was definitely Chem 2," he said. "It destroyed my dreams of being a doctor."
For now, Wright wants WikiScripts will continue to its expansion. "I'm hoping that it [Wiki Scripts] will become more as people start to put more onto it - as it becomes more collaborative," he said.
