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Wikipedia describes itself as a free encyclopedia anyone can edit. A portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia Jimmy Wales founded in 2001, Wikipedia has today burgeoned into a project that has over five million articles in many languages, including 1,417,580 in English. It is today the 17th most popular website in the world.
Wales was in Bangalore last week to participate in the Infovision summit and also to meet up with the Wikipedia community in India. Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News caught up with him for an exclusive interview.
Wikipedia is today a model of egalitarianism, democracy, and association on the Internet. Did you intend that it would turn out that way or were you just out to prove something to the world?
I always thought it would grow big, but it has certainly grown very fast. It has been amazing. It started in January 2001 and we started in English and then quickly added on other languages
The basic concept has always been to have a high quality encyclopedia on the Net. We have always been careful to say Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is not just a place to air random opinions. Things need to be carefully sourced and neutrality is really important and those early principles are what made it successful, because if you agree upon presenting things neutrally it helps a lot of people work together.
We are the 17th most popular website in the world. If we look at the active community - it mostly consists of people in their late 20s and 30s. Unfortunately 80 per cent of the community is male. We would like to see more balance. In countries where there is a lot of Internet access, there are many more contributors and if it is low, there are few contributors.
 Isn’t Wikipedia inclusive in the sense that you would be missing out on content from people who have no access to the Internet. What are you doing to bridge this divide?
I agree with that. It is a difficult problem since the poorest people cannot access or benefit from Wikipedia. All our work is free. We would like to see people use Wikipedia commercially, for example, print out volumes of interesting articles and sell it cheaply to people who don’t have access to the Internet but who are literate and can benefit from it. We have no concrete plan but would like this to happen. It is like open source software. Anyone can use this information and send it wherever they like. The digital divide is something that we are acutely aware of. We have this large community of people who are ready to provide huge educational material for free and we have people who are very eager to become more educated and prosperous in the world but don’t have the resources to get started. So hopefully, in our own way we can give them more.
Would Wikipedia go paid in future?
Wikipedia will not go paid. That definitely won’t happen since the model doesn’t make sense for us. We are a charity non-profit organization with a goal to provide a free encyclopedia to the every person on the planet in his or her own language. In that spirit, one of the reasons I’m here in India is to promote the Indian language Wikipedias and to encourage people to contribute in many languages of India. We have active projects in many languages and some are more successful than others. But all could use some encouragement.
What according to you is the real motive that is driving millions of people to take time out of their busy lives to contribute?
The most important thing that motivates people is that it is fun. For very intellectual people, it is an enjoyable activity. You get to meet a lot of interesting people on the project and the community is friendly. If you are the kind of person that insists that your way is the only right way, you won’t find it a friendly environment because anyone can edit what you have written. People have fun working together.
Wikipedia is growing at a rapid scale, how do you fund the growth?
Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit that manages Wikipedia. We accept donations from the public. The project is not that expensive to maintain. Last year, we spent around $750,000. This year it would be between $1 million and $1.5 million. Most of this goes into servers and bandwidth. But we haven’t had trouble raising money from the public since we have such a huge audience. We make funding requests from time to time. We usually have a fund drive every quarter. But this year, we had a successful fund drive in the first quarter and also donations through the website. So we didn’t need another drive.
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