captioning funded by cbs and ford >> out of what happened right here came the department of homeland security. >> stahl: jeh johnson is now in charge of the department of homeland security, protecting the country from another terrorist attack, especially now with the rise of homegrown terrorism. now, as i understand it, of the 180 americans who have gone overseas to fight in iraq and syria, 40 have come back. >> we have, in fact, kept close tabs on those who we believe have left and those who've come back. but you can't know everything. >> pelley: easter time marks a 17-year truce between catholics and protestants in northern ireland. gerry adams was a central figure

in that civil war known as "the troubles." now, he's a leading contender for irish prime minister, and he's under investigation in connection with the murder of a mother of ten at the height of the war. so you were at the top of republicanism and your hands are clean. >> well, it depends. that's an evocative term, "your hands are clean." >> pelley: no blood on your hands is what we mean. >> well, we all have our responsibility, all of us. >> safer: over 200 times a second, half a billion times a month, somebody clicks on wikipedia. it's the greatest argument- settler wrought by man, or at least the fastest, perfectly suited to our era of instant gratification. you've created one of the most successful websites in the world, and yet you chose to make it the least profitable. >> ( laughs ) it just felt right that we should be a charity, free knowledge for everyone.

so that's always been our philosophy. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm bill whitaker. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes." et... ...served my country... ...carried the weight of a family... ...and walked a daughter down the aisle. but i couldn't bear my diabetic nerve pain any longer. so i talked to my doctor and he prescribed lyrica. nerve damage from diabetes causes diabetic nerve pain. lyrica is fda-approved to treat this pain. lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new, or worsening depression or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don't drink alcohol while taking

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i remember a woman and she said the accuweather app woke me up in the night with a severe weather alert, and i got my family to safety and you literally saved me from a tornado. and to us that feels really good. >> stahl: the man running the department of homeland security, jeh johnson, has a lot on his shoulders, protecting the

country from another terrorist attack, especially now with the rise of homegrown terrorism. just this past week, two women-- both americans and both allegedly inspired by jihadist propaganda-- were arrested and charged with planning to detonate a bomb in the united states. the department of homeland security is a collection of federal agencies, including t.s.a.'s airport security, border control, and cargo inspection, that have long been charged with stopping terrorists from abroad slipping into the country. now, jeh johnson is scrambling to adapt to the new threat of lone wolves that he admits is more difficult to detect and stop. before coming to homeland security, johnson served as the general counsel of the defense department, where he was a legal architect of the obama administration's use of lethal drone strikes. there, at the pentagon, he was on offense, taking the fight to

the enemy. now, at homeland security, he is on defense, trying to prevent another terrorist attack from happening here on the streets of america. the f.b.i. says it has homegrown extremist investigations going on in every, single state. how serious... how serious is this threat? is it hair on fire? every state... >> jeh johnson: i certainly don't believe in the hair on fire phenomenon. >> stahl: but every state. i mean, that means it's percolating everywhere. >> johnson: the fact that we have investigations in every state does not surprise me. we are very concerned about young people romanticizing a group like isil. and so we've got to keep tabs on it all. >> stahl: this kid is sitting in his basement, or her basement, and reading the web and being radicalized. how on earth can you keep a tab on that person? >> johnson: that's the

challenge, isn't it? and that's one of the things that, frankly, keeps me up at night. because we would have little or no notice if somebody decides to commit an act of violence. so if the family member, the religious leader, the teacher trusts us enough to inform us, we're in a position to make a difference. >> stahl: the department of homeland security wants you, the public, to call in. it's part of a new push to deal with the lone wolf threat, with johnson himself reaching out to build trust with local leaders. >> johnson: jeh johnson. how are you? nice to see you. >> stahl: and he's shifting the department's resources to cops on the beat, as the war on terrorism has evolved. >> johnson: how are you? >> stahl: that's why d.h.s. has funded 78 fusion centers around the country, like this one in phoenix set up for the super bowl-- to get all levels of law

enforcement down to the county sheriff to work together. >> we're connected through that command and control system-- federal, tribal, state, county local, even political subdivisions. so we have the ability to reach out in real time and coordinate information, public information or intelligence. >> stahl: any information about suspicious activity, whether fbi intelligence in washington or something somebody sees on the streets of phoenix, is all shared right in this room. >> johnson: that's downtown? >> that's downtown phoenix. >> stahl: johnson's department has never been more central to the war on terror. but it has come under almost constant criticism for, over the years, weak management and low morale, and recently a senate oversight committee went after the quality of its intelligence. this report is current. it was a 2015 study of the department. it says that intelligence is stale. >> johnson: well, i'd have to

disagree with that. every morning, when i read intelligence, it's real time it's valuable. >> stahl: it said that the department's primary counter- terrorism programs are yielding "little value for the nation's counter-terrorism efforts." >> johnson: it also said that we're moving in the right direction. >> stahl: to be fair, johnson has been on the job for only 14 months. he was brought in to fix all the problems that have long hobbled the department. when you took the job, people said it was the worst job in washington. you walked right into it. >> johnson: as they say in the place i used to work, the pentagon, it's an opportunity to excel. >> stahl: and so far he's gotten high marks, even from the republicans in congress. when he came on board, nearly half the senior management jobs were vacant-- he's filled all but one. he's boosted morale, and improved the coordination and dissemination of threat information throughout the government, which is done here

at the national operations center, where planes flying over the country and ships sailing off the coasts are monitored 24/7. can you quantify how much success you have had? >> johnson: almost daily certainly weekly, somebody's not allowed to get on an airplane or somebody is arrested and charged with material support to terrorism. >> stahl: johnson starts his day before the sun comes up, when a secret service detail drops him off at his office at 6:15. his first task-- reviewing the top-secret daily brief on the latest threats against the united states, including information on people who've answered the call to fight for isis. now, as i understand it, of the 180 americans who have gone overseas to fight in iraq and syria, 40 have come back. i assume that you're keeping close tabs on those 40? >> johnson: we have, in fact kept close tabs on those who we

believe have left and those who've come back. a number have been arrested or investigated, and we have systems in place to track these individuals. but you can't know everything. >> stahl: more than 3,000 europeans have gone to iraq and syria to fight with isis. one reason so few young people from the united states have gone, he says, is geography. >> johnson: we are separated from the hot spots by an ocean which does make it more difficult. >> stahl: so, do you think, if it were easier for these kids to get there, that there would be more of them going? >> johnson: probably. and so, border security is not simply preventing people from getting in, but very often preventing somebody from leaving for the wrong reasons. >> stahl: the homegrown movement, with its internet recruiting videos, was largely inspired by this man, an american turned terrorist in yemen named anwar al-awlaki.

he was killed by a drone strike like this one, one of many johnson green-lighted when he was general counsel at the pentagon. >> johnson: if it was a strike off what we call the "hot battlefield"-- in other words, outside of iraq and afghanistan- - by the military, then i would have to give the legal sign-off first. and so, i did that. >> stahl: at one point, you had to decide whether it was okay to kill an american, al-awlaki. >> johnson: in any use of targeted lethal force, we'd have to conclude that it was consistent with domestic law and international law. >> stahl: did you say it was not legal many times? >> johnson: occasionally, i would have to conclude that the legal authority was not there. and quickly found out that it was actually easier to say yes than it was to say no. >> stahl: why was it easier to say yes? >> johnson: very often, when

we're asked to approve the use of targeted lethal force, it can only be in a matter of minutes. and so there's a lot of momentum to that. so, to say no is like stepping in front of a 90-car freight train. >> stahl: the first time you said yes, you have said that you were very uncomfortable. >> johnson: how could somebody be comfortable with authorizing legally the use of lethal force? my view is, if you become comfortable with it, then you should get out of the job. >> stahl: what you actually said was, "if i were catholic, i would have to go to confession." >> johnson: yes. >> stahl: did it get easier? >> johnson: no. >> stahl: it never got easier? >> johnson: no. >> stahl: but there has been so often collateral... what they call collateral damage, meaning

that innocents get killed. >> johnson: that happens. that happens in war. >> stahl: that happens. does it haunt you? >> johnson: i don't know if i like the word "haunt," but we have to be sensitive to the notion that the judgments we make today could be condemned on the pages of history years from now. >> stahl: we went with johnson on a cold morning to look out at the tip of manhattan. he was in new york on 9/11 and witnessed the destruction of the world trade center. >> johnson: it was a moment for me when i realized that our homeland security could be shattered in an instant, unexpectedly and quite dramatically. >> stahl: out of this came the department of homeland security. >> johnson: out of what happened right here came the department of homeland security. >> stahl: it's a department that brought under one roof an array of 22 federal agencies including fema, the secret service, the coast guard. >> johnson: then, last but not

least, you have the lady right here-- citizenship and immigration services. >> stahl: he oversees a huge bureaucracy with 240,000 employees. >> johnson: how's everybody doing? >> stahl: it's a management nightmare because the various agencies have disparate functions, some critics say, with little or nothing to do with terrorism. fema deals with natural disasters, and now with widespread claims of fraud against flood insurance companies following hurricane sandy. immigration dealt with the waves of unaccompanied children from central america last summer. >> clark ervin: this department is a disparate amalgam of things that don't fit together very well. >> stahl: clark ervin, the former inspector general of d.h.s., says jeh johnson is essentially managing chaos. the threat is more complicated and look what we created to deal with it, the most complicated

set-up you can imagine. that doesn't make any sense. >> ervin: well, partly, the reason why the department is a mishmash of different things is because it's a washington product, and as a washington product, it's a political product. making the department work making it more effective and efficient, economical, is a security issue. to the extent the department isn't optimally performing, that is a security deficiency. >> stahl: also in this department is the secret service. >> ervin: yes. >> stahl: and they're having terrible problems even just guarding the white house. >> ervin: there are more threats against this president, for obvious reasons, than any president in history. there's that. against that backdrop, of course, there is this complicated terrorist threat picture that we've been talking about. there is zero room for error here, and there's been a lot of error. >> stahl: johnson's challenge is to fix a dysfunctional agency at the same time he's dealing with a terrorist threat that's becoming ever more complex and hard to detect. now, you've been here 14 months.

>> johnson: yes. >> stahl: and you've answered a lot of my questions with, "well, it's a work in progress." >> johnson: because it is a work in progress. correct. are we large? yes, we are very large. do we have some inefficiencies that need to be eliminated? absolutely. and i believe we're moving in the right direction in that regard. >> stahl: but do you think that, under your leadership so far that things have moved fast enough? >> johnson: things cannot move fast enough for me. >> stahl: johnson realizes he can't fix all that's wrong with the department before he leaves in 2016. but he's confident it is working well enough to do the job. for instance, agencies in his department-- t.s.a. and border protection-- screen and vet nearly three million travelers every day. >> johnson: the nature of homeland security is that no news is good news. and no news sometimes means somebody got interdicted at the

border, somebody got interdicted before they could get on an airplane, somebody was arrested providing material support to terrorism. homeland security means very often something you never hear about. and that's what we do. you don't get a lot of "thank you's" for that. >> cbs money watch update sponsored by lincoln financial. calling all chief life officers. >> glor: good evening. the nuclear agreement with iran has rallied tehran's stock market to its highest level in 18 months. americans spent abestimated $16.4 billion on easter, up 500,000 from last year. and at the masters the prize pool is $9 million. the winner gets $1.6 million. i'm jeff glor. cbs news.

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>> pelley: easter time marks the end of one of the longest wars of the 20th century. it was known as "the troubles." for 30 years, catholics and protestants murdered one another in northern ireland until the good friday agreement resurrected the peace. that truce has held for 17 years, but it's tested every day because forgiveness was never part of the deal. recently, old wounds split open when a history project by boston college uncovered accusations of murder against the man who could be ireland's next prime minster. gerry adams heads a leading political party called sinn fein. but he was also a central figure in the civil war. now, just as the truce was beginning to look bulletproof, the boston college project threatens both adams and the peace he helped create.

do you think you will see a united ireland? >> gerry adams: if i live long enough, yes. >> pelley: about gerry adams this much is agreed-- in the 1960s, he was a young revolutionary bound closely to the irish republican army, the i.r.a.-- a catholic militia at war with the protestant majority in northern ireland. the next part is what his enemies find so hard to believe. some say that you were a leader in the i.r.a. >> adams: my position has been very, very clear for a very, very long time. i don't dissociate myself from the i.r.a. i... i think the i.r.a. was a legitimate response to what was happening here. >> pelley: i want to make sure i understood you clearly. you don't associate yourself or don't disassociate yourself? >> adams: no. i don't dissociate myself from the i.r.a. and i never will. but i was not a member of the i.r.a. >> pelley: did you ever pull a trigger?

>> adams: no. >> pelley: set a bomb? >> adams: no. >> pelley: order a death? >> adams: no. >> pelley: so you were at the top of republicanism nearly throughout the troubles, and your hands are clean? >> adams: well, it depends. that's an evocative term, "your hands are clean." >> pelley: no blood on your hands is what we mean. >> adams: well, we all have our responsibility, all of us. >> pelley: answers like that dodging into fog, infuriate his enemies and raise suspicions in others. adams always said that he led the i.r.a.'s political party sinn fein. a diplomat, he says, not a general. the blood of the troubles flowed mainly in the streets of belfast. in the 1960s, catholics, long discriminated against, rebelled against british rule. northern ireland had remained a part of britain after irish independence in 1920. about 3,500 were killed, 50,000 were maimed.

in 1998, the u.s. brokered the truce. adams made the catholic i.r.a. drop its weapons and submit to a still divided ireland. but the language of that peace contract is as ambiguous as a gerry adams interview. it papers over unsolved crimes including an infamous murder in which adams himself is a suspect. the ghost of jean mcconville has been restless since 1972, when the widow and mother of ten was accused of being an informer for the british and was dragged from her apartment by several i.r.a. soldiers. this is her daughter, helen, at the time, with some of her brothers and sisters. >> helen, i believe you're looking after the family. how are you managing to cope? >> helen: okay. >> when do you think you'll see your mommy again? >> helen: don't know. who's that? >> pelley: today, helen-- helen

mckendry-- is a grandmother who can't fully explain the disappearance. you and your siblings went to different orphanages? >> helen mckendry: we did, yeah. we were split up. >> pelley: and the family was really never reunited. >> mckendry: no. we never were. and i always said that the night they took my mother, they should have come in and took the whole family because that's what they did-- they destroyed the whole family. >> pelley: now, helen mckendry is the leading symbol of the good friday agreement's painful compromise. justice for some families was sacrificed to make peace for everyone. a code of silence around unsolved atrocities kept that peace. and it worked, for most, until boston college pried open the past. ( bell ringing ) in 2001, the university did what the good friday agreement tried to avoid. in a secret effort called the belfast project, researchers for boston college recorded the details of the troubles in oral

histories with 40 aging fighters from both sides. >> ricky o'rawe: i thought it was a great idea. it gave us an opportunity to leave a testimony of what happened, personal testimony of what my involvement in the i.r.a. armed struggle. that used to be a police station. >> pelley: ricky o'rawe was among those willing to break the code of silence because, like all the rest, he was told the tapes would remain sealed until he was dead. o'rawe was in the catholic i.r.a., and shortly after he married, he was arrested for robbing a bank to fund the cause. he was among the i.r.a. inmates at long kesh prison, including gerry adams and adam's close friend, brendan hughes. o'rawe ran a hunger strike that led to the deaths of ten i.r.a. prisoners. >> o'rawe: for me: that was the darkest period of my life. >> pelley: how many hours of interviews did you do for the boston college project? >> o'rawe: i would say perhaps about 20.

>> pelley: 20 hours? >> o'rawe: yeah. >> pelley: and what did you expect to happen to those tapes? >> o'rawe: i expected never to hear from them again. i had absolutely no inclination or no indication that they would ever emerge in my lifetime. >> pelley: but emerge they did after the first interview subject died in 2008. it was brendan hughes, adam's friend and a notorious bomber. >> brendan hughes: there's a woman that went missing... >> pelley: his tapes were made public, and included one last bomb. >> hughes: this woman was taken away and executed by the i.r.a. >> jean mcconville. >> hughes: jean mcconville. there's only one man that gave the order for that woman to be executed. that [no audio] man is now the head of sinn fein." >> pelley: "the head of sinn fein," gerry adams. hughes and adams had had a falling out over the peace agreement. in 2011, northern ireland police subpoenaed the boston college

tapes. and it became known around belfast that some, still living, had talked. >> o'rawe: graffiti appeared all over belfast saying "boston college touts." >> pelley: a tout is an informer? >> o'rawe: is an informer. it's a very emotive term in ireland. >> pelley: ricky o'rawe and his wife bernadette drove us past the threats calling out the boston touts. >> o'rawe: it's tantamount to a death sentence. >> pelley: its tantamount to a death sentence? >> o'rawe: absolutely, yeah. >> pelley: when you saw "boston tout," you thought they meant you? >> o'rawe: i knew they meant me! >> pelley: why would the o'rawes run scared 17 years after the shooting stopped? because, despite the good friday truce, belfast is a city torn by ancient hatreds. these days in the neighborhoods of belfast, the absence of violence is not exactly peace. the city has really never been more segregated. this is a protestant neighborhood here.

and just across the street is a catholic community. and have a look at what separates them. they call these peace walls. there are 48 of them. and since the good friday agreement, the walls have been made taller. there are other kinds of walls in belfast that aren't nearly so visible-- the schools, for example. today, 90% of the children here go to a school that is either all catholic or all protestant. some peace walls run for miles. many have gates that are sealed at night. on the catholic side, memorials to the fallen are tended like grudges and memories of martyrs never fade. over the wall, protestant neighborhoods are colored by loyalty to britain. once a year, in a celebration of a 325-year-old victory over catholics, protestants raise enormous towers topped with the

likenesses of their enemies--the flag of the irish republic catholic politicians, and a symbolic gerry adams... ( cheering ) ...all to be consumed by bitterness that lights belfast like a city at war. >> bernadette o'rawe: people grew up with all of this mistrust and maybe hatred towards other communities. you know, what side of the road you stand on waiting on a bus, "well, we know that's a catholic, we know that's a protestant." >> pelley: i've heard that there's a catholic cab company and a protestant cab company. >> bernadette o'rawe: absolutely. there's parts of the town that catholics don't go into. and there's protestant people just don't come into catholic areas. it's the most saddest place. >> pelley: that sadness, and anger, rose again last year when, based on the boston college tapes, adams was taken in for questioning in the jean mcconville case. catholics wanted to see him free.

protestants wanted to see him hang. was your arrest a dangerous moment for the peace? >> adams: i think so. to be quite honest, i was sick sore and tired of a tsunami of stories based upon these tapes linking me to mrs. mcconville's death. so i contacted the police and said, "look, you want to talk to me, i'm here to talk." >> pelley: he was held for four days with the boston college tapes played back to him. they asked you if you were part of the decision to kill jean mcconville. >> adams: they said that i was a senior member of the i.r.a. at managerial level, so i'm bound to have known. >> pelley: and you told them what? >> adams: i told them i didn't. >> pelley: the disappearance of jean mcconville was a surprise to you? >> adams: i didn't know. >> pelley: it was known to the i.r.a. >> adams: yes. absolutely. >> pelley: and you're saying you didn't know? >> adams: yes.

>> pelley: how do you orphan ten children? what kind of depravity is that? >> adams: that's what happens in wars, scott. that's not minimize it-- that's what american soldiers do, british soldiers do, irish republican soldiers do. that's what happens in every single conflict. >> pelley: he told us in an interview that he wasn't even aware that she had disappeared for a long time. >> mckendry: he likes people to know that. but he's telling lies. he's a liar. i told him to his face he's a liar. he knows. >> pelley: 30 years after she vanished, jean mcconville was discovered on this beach. a hiker found her bones with a bullet hole in the back of her skull. for you, after all these years what would justice be in your mother's case? >> mckendry: i would like to see gerry adams stand up and admit that he played a part. i want the people to see what this man really is.

he likes to think he's god. he's not. this man has blood on his hands and i want him to pay for what he did. >> pelley: after days of questioning last year, adams was released without charges. the police say their investigation continues and they're pursuing all of the boston college tapes. the university is offering to return the recordings to the participants, and ricky o'rawe took them up on it. what did you do with the tapes? >> o'rawe: i burnt them. >> pelley: you burned them? >> o'rawe: yeah, i lit a big fire, i had a bottle of burgundy. i toasted them as i burnt them. >> pelley: memories smolder 17 years after that good friday, an exception to the famous irish warning about forgetting the past. maybe in belfast, those who remember history are doomed to repeat it. do you apologize for all the pain and suffering and injury it was caused? >> adams: of course.

for those civilians, for those people who were caught up in this, who were victims of the i.r.a., of course i apologize. that i'm a republican leader, i accept my responsibilities in all of those matters. i don't apologize for the i.r.a., for its existence, for its right to engage as it did. but surely, you wouldn't be a thinking person if you didn't regret all that happened here. aww, this audit will take days. what a headache! actually...i... don't have a headache anymore! excedrin really does work fast. quiet! mom has a headache! had a headache! but now, i...don't. with 2 pain fighters, plus a booster, excedrin ends headaches fast. in fact for some relief starts in just 15 minutes. wow, my headache is gone. not gonna happen.

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>> safer: over 200 times a second, half a billion times a month, somebody clicks on

wikipedia. it's the greatest argument- settler wrought by man, or at least the fastest, perfectly suited to our era of instant gratification. when it debuted 14 years ago the online encyclopedia was a novelty, its accuracy hit or miss. now, it's one of the world's busiest websites, its reliability vastly improved, but not quite perfect. what's more, it's a charity, a non-profit where a devoted army of unpaid authors collaborate-- articles about everything you can imagine. who are they? and how does it all work? ask mister wikipedia himself jimmy wales. >> jimmy wales: in general, i would say we're a lot of geeks a lot of tech geeks, a lot of people who are really passionate about information. >> safer: what on earth is "wiki"? >> wales: "wiki"-- the word is from "wikiwiki," which is a hawaiian word.

if you go to maui, at the airport, you take the wikiwiki bus. and the word wikiwiki means "quick." so, the idea of wiki software is quick collaboration. it's a tool to allow people to come together and quickly edit things. >> safer: and once a year, a band of hard core contributors to wikipedia come together from the four corners of the earth for what you might call the dance of the geeks-- meeting this time, in london. the entertainment is, shall we say, eclectic. and so is the crowd. >> hello! ( applause ) >> safer: they call it "wikimania." 2,000 showed up for the event-- some are buttoned-down, some are rock 'n roll. the articles they write and edit cover everything from aardvarks to zz top. and they're all true believers in wikipedia's power. >> it's a fantastic attempt to

really be the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy of the real world. >> safer: wikipedians take to these pages in a never-ending, worldwide cyber conversation-- to write articles, add or subtract from the work of others, post comments, and argue about what's worthy of notice and what needs fixing. there are 12,000 new pages created every day. a grand total of 35 million articles in 288 different languages. >> sue gardner: the end result of that is really rich, really complex, and mostly reliable and credible. >> safer: sue gardner spent seven years as jimmy wales's lieutenant, running the website day to day, and sizing up the people who do the writing. >> gardner: it's about 100,000 people around the world-- every political persuasion, every religion, no religion, you know, from seven years old to 75 years old. the one characteristic all

wikipedians have in common is that they are all incredibly smart. they are really, really smart. >> safer: smart and passionate. >> gardner: yeah, and persnickety, right? they're fussy people. they are a little o.c.d. they're careful and they're cautious and they're serious. and it matters to them that things are right. they're persnickety people. >> safer: and how does it work? we enlisted the help of amanda levendowski, a recent law school graduate who's worked on dozens of articles. >> amanda levandowski: i do the editing because i love it, particularly with regard to articles about the law. >> safer: well, what is the reward? >> levandowski: you have the satisfaction of feeling like you've participated in something. but for wikipedia in particular, there's another whole benefit because you have the opportunity to help other people find information about stuff you're into. now, one of the other neat things you can do is... >> safer: anybody can do it. >> we'll go to "edit." >> safer: you hit the "edit" button and you type. but your information has to have

a legitimate source and some degree of notability. no love letters to yourself. three times a second, 12,000 times an hour, someone somewhere makes an edit, small or large. and the articles keep piling up. there is no limit, in a certain way, correct? >> levandowski: i think the growth could be infinite, yes. >> safer: billions upon billions of areas. >> levandowski: possibly, yes. >> safer: there are wikipedians in residence at places like the national archives, a gold mine of historical detail. at the frick museum in new york, these wikipedians get their kicks studying antique clocks. >> wales: you know roughly, what is it? what is it about? >> safer: it's truly an international movement. there were egyptian wikipedians at this year's gathering. a delegation of school kids from kazakhstan, in central asia, where the website has over 200,000 articles in the kazakh language.

>> wales: you're the real bright spot in your region. you know, all your neighboring countries are maybe not so good. >> safer: and in south africa, this man is mr. wikipedia-- dumi ndubane. >> dumi ndubane: just remember that voltage drops... >> safer: back home in johannesburg, when he's not at his real job as an electrical engineer, ndubane and his colleagues work overtime to get south africa into the wikipedia world. >> it was built in 1905... >> safer: they contribute entries about notable landmarks- - this catholic school originally a convent. >> ndubane: do we have the history of the school? yes, so that becomes a section. >> safer: he's written about the house in johannesburg where mahatma gandhi once lived. the idea of tolerance and passive resistance was born here, in this house. he's written about the soweto uprising by high school students in 1976, the spark for the eventual downfall of apartheid.

and he encourages today's students to translate wikipedia articles into their native languages. >> ndubane: what language are you? and we need all those, all those languages, on wikipedia. we need them. >> safer: the website's headquarters are in san francisco. there's a staff of about 200 working in typically laid-back techie style. >> and then you can do function.... >> safer: of prime importance-- developing rules and computer code to eliminate as many errors as possible. executive director lila tretikov. >> lila tretikov: we've had numerous studies that showed that, as a body of knowledge it's more accurate than other encyclopedias in existence in the past. so it's not... it's never 100% but it's very high quality. >> safer: there are computer programs that scour the site for vandalism and vulgarities,

striking them out almost instantly. wikipedians worldwide also act as fact checkers, looking for personal attacks and manipulation by p.r. people. but wales admits, you can't catch them all. >> wales: our biggest problem with bias, and things that are wrong that stay for a long time, are actually on very obscure topics. you know, a topic that not many people are interested in and not many people are looking at. and so if something's wrong, it can persist for quite some time. that's brilliant... >> safer: and because it's a non-profit, unlike virtually every other major website, there's one thing you won't find at wikipedia central, internet zillion-aires. you created one of the most successful websites in the world, and yet you chose to make it the least profitable. >> wales: ( laughs ) yeah. it just felt right that we should be a charity-- free knowledge for everyone. so that's always been our

philosophy. >> safer: the money to pay the staff and keep the site up and running comes from donations large and mostly small. last year, people from around the world gave $51 million in 70 different currencies. >> gardner: i think they give to wikipedia out of affection. i think it's that simple. >> safer: which means, the main preoccupation at other websites, advertising, isn't even on the radar. >> wales: if we were ad- supported, we would always be thinking about, "well, gee, look at all these people reading about elizabethan poetry. there's nothing to sell them. let's try to get them to read about hotels in las vegas or something like this." and we don't. we just don't care. >> safer: in a sense, it was probably in the stars that jimmy wales, the kid from huntsville alabama, would become the internet's most famous knowledge broker. his mother taught school, and the world book encyclopedia in the living room was a constant presence. he was a first-generation geek

ten years old when personal computers hit the market in the mid '70s. his first internet site was bomis, a place where guys could compare notes on guy things-- cars, sports, and babes. bomis failed, but it got wales thinking about the possibilities of mass collaboration on the internet, which led, eventually, to wikipedia. >> how does wikipedia fundamentally work? >> safer: rank and file wikipedians today are still mainly men, reflecting the tech world at large. >> gardner: women are less likely to kind of geek out at their computer for ten, 20, 40 hours. i mean, there's a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy t-shirt eating doritos, right? like, that's hard. a woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty t-shirt eating doritos. >> safer: the gender imbalance was at the heart of a significant internal dispute at wikipedia. >> wales: when william and kate got married, the royal wedding

someone created an entry about kate middleton's dress. and somebody nominated it for deletion, and some of the arguments were, you know effectively, "this is stupid. it's just a dress. how can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress?" >> safer: wales intervened pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs. >> wales: and we don't think anything about that, because we're a bunch of computer geeks. so we decided to keep it. but there was an interesting moment in that debate, where people were saying, "oh, i don't know about this, therefore it's not important." and that is bias and that is something we have to be careful about. >> safer: when he's not on the road, wales lives mainly in london. his wife kate worked for former british prime minister tony blair. and wales himself is already an elder statesman in the internet world... >> bill clinton: we're talking about the limits of the social... >> safer: ...moving in influential circles, making a comfortable living from speaking engagements.

>> wales: we're really, really powerful.... >> safer: but though he passed up billions by making wikipedia a non-profit, he clearly doesn't suffer from that silicon valley condition known as "zuckerberg envy." do you ever wonder or get wistful about, "gosh, if i only had a billion, think of all the good things i could do." >> wales: ( laughs ) no, not really. i mean, how many bankers are there in the world who earn fabulous salaries, but whose lives are incredibly boring compared to mine? i mean, i have a fantastic amazing life where, you know, my work feels meaningful to me in a way that almost nothing else could. so, yeah, it's great. don't worry about me. ( laughs ) >> ♪ happy birthday to you... >> safer: a final burning question wikipedians have debated over the years-- what day is jimmy wales's birthday? >> wales: i have this really funny situation where the reliable source, my birth certificate, is wrong. >> safer: it says august 8.

but his mother says that's an error-- he was born august 7. >> wales: i trust my mother. she was there. >> safer: so, his wikipedia entry says the seventh. but just to be safe, his persnickety followers sang "happy birthday" twice. >> ♪ happy birthday to you. ( cheers and applause ) >> for more on wikipedia, and to see easter sunday stories from andy rooney, harry reasoner, and morley safer, go to 60minutesovertime.com. sponsored by pfizer. feet...tiptoeing. better things than the pain stiffness, and joint damage of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. before you and your rheumatologist decide on a biologic ask if xeljanz is right for you. xeljanz (tofacitinib) is a small pill not an injection or infusion, for adults with moderate to severe ra for whom methotrexate

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>> pelley: we were flooded with mail this week about the story we called "killing cancer." a clinical trial at duke university is using a modified form of the polio virus to treat glioblastoma brain tumors with remarkable results. many writers told us their families had been touched by this nearly always fatal cancer. "my husband died of a glioblastoma in 2005. the news about the polio treatment left me in tears. too late for my howard, but a real miracle." "to the families of those who passed away in the course of

these clinical trials, all of america joins in to say 'thank you.'" and then there was this-- "so interesting that a disease my parents so feared for their children is now helping cure a different disease." i'm scott pelley. we'll be back next week with another edition of "60 minutes." tomorrow, be sure to watch "cbs this morning" and the "cbs evening news." the promise of the cloud is that every organization has unlimited access to information, no matter where they are. the microsoft cloud gives our team the power to instantly deliver critical information to people, whenever they need it. here at accuweather we get up to 10 billion data requests every day. the cloud allows us to scale up so we can handle that volume. we can help keep people safe and to us that feels really good. my name is pam and this is my aha moment. my brother died

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captioning funded by cbs and ford captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org well, there's a sight that never gets old. you know, if men knew how sexy they looked fixing stuff they'd never stop. i can't feel my hands. well, why don't you bring them down here and let me do something about it? where are the kids? they're out riding... till dark. i should really finish up here. okay. i'll go riding, too. coming down. oh, man, it's so silent here. i'd forgotten what that sounded like. are you thinking what i'm thinking? we shouldn't sell. we so shouldn't sell! but wait you're the one that tried to convince me that we should. well, it's hard keeping up two homes. and we hardly even ever get back here. yeah, upkeep on the property the horses, th