At the tail end of his three-day whirlwind tour of Bulgaria, James Wales starts his presentation at Sofia’s Modern Theater with the mission statement of Wikipedia; nothing less than "to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge".

An hour earlier, Wales, dressed in plain all-black clothes, with a thin beard - one of the older audience members later presented him with a razor, saying "you need a shave, you look like a homeless person" - arrived at the theatre, his laptop tucked away in a plain backpack, rather than a snazzy travel bag.

In between taking on several interviews in quick succession, setting up his laptop and testing the network link, whenever he is left to his own devices for a minute or two, Wales quietly flips open his mobile and disappears online.

When asked if Wikipedia presented a paradigm shift in knowledge distribution comparable to the introduction of the printing press in Europe, Wales starts talking in an unpretentious manner that he will maintain until the end of question-time after his lecture, three hours later.

According to Wales, it is not Wikipedia but the internet as a whole that is at the core of a paradigm shift. "Anyone can publish and have an audience. My daughter has a blog about her cat, which has two readers: her mother and I," he says.

The internet, in Wales’ view, is nothing less than "a whole new mode of conversation on a global publishing platform".

Not only is it collaborative and provides lasting value, it also cuts out a lot of the old hierarchy that controlled the flow of information.

"Now, whatever people are interested in, they can directly access. It is a pretty big shift and I don’t think we have really seen all of the impact of this shift yet," Wales says.
"One of the things that I’m really focused on is the growth of the internet and the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world. There are a lot of places where people have had very limited access to information."

That has been changing in recent decades, long-distance communication becoming cheaper and faster. Over the same period of time, the cost of food has declined much slower. "You know these people that are starving in Africa? Pretty soon they’re going to call us to complain about it," Wales says.

"It is a joke, but is it really? We’re going to see people communicating with us who are very different and have a whole set of concerns that we would never be able to directly hear from them. I think this is going to have some cultural impact."

Wiki empire?
Wikipedia is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, along with almost a dozen other, lesser-known projects. All these projects are user-driven, that is, all content is created and maintained by the users of the projects.

Some have been more successful that others. "At Wikia we have thousands of wikis now, we are getting a better sense of what helps people make a better wiki," Wales says.
"We have Wikiversity, which has not been very successful, mostly because, I think, people show up and they are not really sure what they are supposed to do.

"Wiktionary is interesting because the nature of a dictionary as a reference work is that it only becomes a useful resource for you after it is already quite large. If it is too small, if you have a good vocabulary, probably the word that you don’t know is the word they don’t have.

"Wikinews has struggled [...] because they are trying to do original reporting and that is not an easy thing for volunteers to do."

Privacy
Wikipedia has had its share of legal skirmishes over the years. User privacy and freedom of writing are concerns that none of the big internet-based companies could avoid.
"We always make a distinction within the wiki-world between reading and writing," Wales says. "In a wiki, writing is a public act; if you don’t log in, your IP address is shown, if you do log in, everything is connected to your username. And you are making an impact on the world, that can have a negative influence on some people. So if you libel someone, they can subpoena your IP number and track you down. We think that is fine.

On the other hand, what you are reading is really your own business. That is really something that is fundamental. [...] We really want to respect that kind of privacy.

"One of the concerns that I have more broadly about data-retention laws is; what is it going to cost, what are the regulatory paperwork requirements, and how does that impact on an organisation? Not on Wikipedia; we are a large organisation, we have donors and we will figure out what to do about it. The real concern is, what happens to the next Wikipedia?

"Some guy out there that wants to open a public website and a public service and start doing things. If he is burdened with a lot of regulations about what he has to do, it just makes it that much harder for people to get started."