Creator of the world's biggest encyclopedia
Thursday November 26 2009
HAVING created what is the world's largest reference work - an online encyclopedia that is apparently more trusted than Encyclopedia Britannica - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says his next project is all about people creating their own mini-reference sites or Wikis.
Wales, who will be in Dublin this Friday night to give a lecture at Trinity College Dublin, is the driving force behind what can be considered one of the biggest phenomena on the web. Wikipedia, which he started with Larry Sanger in 2001, has more than 14 million articles - 3.1 million of them in English.
What is unique about Wikipedia is that it is an almost entire construct of the internet and is edited publicly. Built on open source software, it was spawned out of a project Wales called Nupedia, and it eventually grew as volunteers, writers and editors contributed articles. By 2007 it had passed the two-million article mark - eclipsing the 1407 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.
Today, Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second and gets an estimated 330 million unique visitors per month.
Because of the public nature of Wikipedia, and the fact that articles can be edited by anyone, the site has attracted much criticism. However, a dedicated global network of editors work to ensure that any vandalism is short lived.
To prove a point, the Wikipedia entry of infamous French goal scorer Thierry Henry was vandalised last week and today is 'protected from editing due to vandalism'.
Speaking to Wales, a self-confessed internet entrepreneur since 1996, it is clear that his mission is about creating a more liberal and open planet where knowledge is the passport to better lives. "We started Wikipedia in 2001 with the goal of creating a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language. We built it using open source as a language and today we are now in over 175 languages."
Wales believes there is an imbalance in the distribution of information in the world today. "The reason an encyclopedia exists is to give people basic facts. But if I speak Swahili and no encyclopedia exists for me, then I lack the basic facts that others benefit from. Here's a statistic: the number of books translated every year into Arabic is smaller than the number of books translated into German every day.
"I believe that citizens will become more empowered through knowledge. If you live in a democracy, you can cast your vote more intelligently. Because there's much more information in the world, people who live under authoritarian rule can organise and raise reasonable complaints."
If Wikipedia is perhaps the most open experiment in human knowledge ever, I put it to Wales that the idea of Wikipedia could be mired by criticism of vandalism. He disagrees. "One of the things I like to talk about is how openness is not the enemy of quality and we can have an open system without it being anarchy or chaos. As a result, if we can think about how to generate open communities with quality work, the rewards are potentially very high."
Wikipedia is run as a non-profit organisation under the Wikimedia Foundation. The decision to do so is described by Wales as both "the smartest and dumbest" decision he has ever made. Wikipedia relies on donations to keep running, yet he estimates it could have been worth $3bn at one point.
Wales is, however, running a for-profit enterprise called Wikia to capitalise on the success of the platform he has created. Wikipedia has spawned numerous spin-off versions such as WikiHow and WikiTravel, to name a few.
His idea with Wikia is to spread knowledge sharing to the people. "People have created amazing things such as Recipes.wiki.com and there's WoWWiki, a Wiki dedicated to World of Warcraft that has generated over 70,000 articles."
Returning to Wikipedia and its reliance on donations - the site needs to raise $7.5m and has raised $1.25m in donations - Wales is confident. "The public is enthusiastic about Wikipedia - fundraising has never been an issue - and while I'm not totally relaxed about it, it's not a crisis."
Looking to the future, he says the internet is blossoming in ways we haven't imagined. "We're at the beginning of an era of community and collaboration - a lot more is going to come from that. I think we're going to have many surprises."
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