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The man behind the Wiki

James Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, talks about future of the online encyclopaedia

Jimmy Wales

Much like the revolutionary product he helped create, Jimmy Wales has a disarming charm about him. In many ways, he is a reflection of the ethos of mutual growth that underlines efforts behind Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopaedia he founded. "We found that Nupedia, our first attempt at an encyclopaedia, was too top down, and not much fun for anyone," says Wales, who delivered a lecture on the success of Wikipedia at the British Library. "We tried out the Wiki software as just a test, but we got more work done in two weeks than in two years. And so we launched Wikipedia."

Says Wales, Wikipedia wasn't much of a technical innovation. Although the in-house programmers at Wikipedia have made significant customisations to the software involved, the basic technology is quite straightforward.

And what an innovation it is. The encyclopaedia today boasts over five million entries in various languages, with the English edition alone notching up close to 1.5 million articles. With editions in over 200 languages, of which more than a dozen have 50,000 articles each, Wikipedia is today one of the most frequently visited sites around the world. What is most fascinating about this venture, however, is that this gigantic system is almost wholly maintained and run by a growing group of volunteers, including Wales himself.

has no real basis in truth. While the core community is always excited to have expertise on board, he argues, they do not accept anything based simply on the credentials of the expert doing the talking. "At Wikipedia, we defend ideas based on the merit of those ideas. So you could say that we are anti-credentialist. In a lot of cases, we have failed to retain the experts. But normally, experts are respected in the community."

Another sore point for many is what they see as a lack of credible sources of reference. Based as Wikipedia is on the Internet, much of the reference material for its entries also comes from online sources, sources many people still do not attribute credibility to. Wales contends that although Wikipedia's sources are online, the parameters used to ensure reliability are the same as those used in print.

As unusual a growth path as Wikipedia has taken, predicting its future is a difficult task for Wales. "It's easier to predict the course of the other language editions than the English Wikipedia. We know the course of evolution, and it's easy to extrapolate what the Kannada Wikipedia, for instance, will look like in five years. With the English Wikipedia, we are on the cutting edge, facing all the new problems first. So there are now moves within the community to concentrate less on growth and more on quality. I refuse to predict how big Wikipedia will be in the future because any number I give now will seem silly in five years."

Besides Wikipedia, Wales also runs Wikia, a for-profit venture that hosts sites built around specific interests, "like encyclopaedias of pop culture", one of the most popular of which is Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia.

"That site opened my eyes to the possibilities of collaborative work. Encyclopaedias are designed for collaborative work, but this shows that even humour writing can be done collaboratively."

RAKESH MEHER

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