Sum of all knowledge
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."
Contradiction-free
During Wales’ three-day visit, local media repeatedly picked up on his philosophical views - actress and TV hostess Iskra Anguelova, who invited Wales to Bulgaria, had met him on an online forum dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Wales’ own profile page on Wikipedia says he identifies himself as an objectivist and, with reservations, a libertarian. When asked about Ayn Rand’s influence, Wales is almost apologetic and says he rarely talks that much about his views.
He has no difficulties reconciling objectivism with the often socialist nature of the open-source community, however.
"I think the key to understanding this is that this is about the ethics of voluntary action, of uncoerced people acting for their own interest, out of their own free will, to participate in something they find exciting and valuable," he says.
As for his own rational self-interest in doing that? "I’m having the most fun anybody could possibly have."
Wikipedia for dummies
Wikipedia is a free, open-content, online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "quick" or "fast" and a wiki is a website that uses wiki software, which makes it easy to quickly create and edit webpages. The first wiki software was developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham and called WikiWikiWeb. Lots of different kinds of wiki software have since been developed. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that runs on its own wiki software.
Every page on Wikipedia has a link at the top that says "edit this page". Clicking the link presents the user with an editor that allows him or her to edit the page. Click on save, and the changes are visible for the entire world. It is that simple.
Creating content for Wikipedia is done by its users and volunteers. An often heard criticism is that the content is written by amateurs, equating volunteers with un-knowledgeable. Wikipedia has a set of social rules and understandings, by which volunteers work. These include that no original research can be published on Wikipedia and that all facts have to be sourced, that is, external sources have to be provided. Also, it is considered "not done" for a user to write or edit a Wikipedia page about him or herself.
Currently, Wikipedia is available in 235 languages. The English-language version is by far the largest, with more than 2.9 million pages it makes up just under 20 per cent of all content on Wikipedia. The next largest versions are the German and French, with just under a million pages each.
The Bulgarian-language version has more than 73 000 pages and Bulgarian Wikipedia users have started a campaign to increase that number to 100 000, which is considered a big milestone. Considering that there are an estimated 12 million Bulgarian-language speakers worldwide (according to the Wikipedia entry on the language), the Bulgarian-language section of the Wikipedia is relatively large.
Wales redux
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, US, Jimmy Wales currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. After a career in the finance industry, where he worked for a futures and options firm from which he retired in 2000, Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001.
He currently is the chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organisation that operates Wikipedia, and serves on its board of trustees.
In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned web-hosting service, where users can create separate wikis on any topic they choose. If Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikia intends to create the rest of the online library, Wales said in his lecture in Sofia.
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."
Contradiction-free
During Wales’ three-day visit, local media repeatedly picked up on his philosophical views - actress and TV hostess Iskra Anguelova, who invited Wales to Bulgaria, had met him on an online forum dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Wales’ own profile page on Wikipedia says he identifies himself as an objectivist and, with reservations, a libertarian. When asked about Ayn Rand’s influence, Wales is almost apologetic and says he rarely talks that much about his views.
He has no difficulties reconciling objectivism with the often socialist nature of the open-source community, however.
"I think the key to understanding this is that this is about the ethics of voluntary action, of uncoerced people acting for their own interest, out of their own free will, to participate in something they find exciting and valuable," he says.
As for his own rational self-interest in doing that? "I’m having the most fun anybody could possibly have."
Wikipedia for dummies
Wikipedia is a free, open-content, online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "quick" or "fast" and a wiki is a website that uses wiki software, which makes it easy to quickly create and edit webpages. The first wiki software was developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham and called WikiWikiWeb. Lots of different kinds of wiki software have since been developed. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that runs on its own wiki software.
Every page on Wikipedia has a link at the top that says "edit this page". Clicking the link presents the user with an editor that allows him or her to edit the page. Click on save, and the changes are visible for the entire world. It is that simple.
Creating content for Wikipedia is done by its users and volunteers. An often heard criticism is that the content is written by amateurs, equating volunteers with un-knowledgeable. Wikipedia has a set of social rules and understandings, by which volunteers work. These include that no original research can be published on Wikipedia and that all facts have to be sourced, that is, external sources have to be provided. Also, it is considered "not done" for a user to write or edit a Wikipedia page about him or herself.
Currently, Wikipedia is available in 235 languages. The English-language version is by far the largest, with more than 2.9 million pages it makes up just under 20 per cent of all content on Wikipedia. The next largest versions are the German and French, with just under a million pages each.
The Bulgarian-language version has more than 73 000 pages and Bulgarian Wikipedia users have started a campaign to increase that number to 100 000, which is considered a big milestone. Considering that there are an estimated 12 million Bulgarian-language speakers worldwide (according to the Wikipedia entry on the language), the Bulgarian-language section of the Wikipedia is relatively large.
Wales redux
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, US, Jimmy Wales currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. After a career in the finance industry, where he worked for a futures and options firm from which he retired in 2000, Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001.
He currently is the chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organisation that operates Wikipedia, and serves on its board of trustees.
In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned web-hosting service, where users can create separate wikis on any topic they choose. If Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikia intends to create the rest of the online library, Wales said in his lecture in Sofia.