Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/55470
Technology Wales on Wikis Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discusses the potential of wikis to build communities. by Tricia Bisoux Wikis—online, open-source documents that anyone can review or revise—have become go-to tools for collabora- tion. Wikipedia, the online user-gen- erated encyclopedia run by nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, is the force that put wikis on the map. Jimmy Wales created the first wiki with Larry Sanger in 2001. They founded a peer-reviewed online ency- clopedia called Nupedia in 2002, a venture that evolved into Wikipedia. Wales' work on the project would prompt Time magazine to include him on its list of the "world's most influential people" in 2006. Today, Wikipedia includes 13 mil- lion articles written in more than 30 languages. Its open-source nature has spurred some critics to question the accuracy of Wikipedia. However, Wales points to the collective over- sight of its legion of user-editors, who spot and correct wrong or malicious insertions. That process, he notes, makes Wikipedia a self-correcting "living document." In many ways, he adds, its ongoing revision may make it more up-to-date and accurate than many printed resources. In a conversation with BizEd, Wales discusses his plans to bring Wikipedia into the world's emergent markets, and his belief in the poten- tial of wikis to educate, inform, con- nect, and inspire. Does the openness of wikis concern you, in terms of the accuracy—or inaccuracy—of user-generated content? Not really. The point is having a 58 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 strong and healthy com- munity. Wikis are far bet- ter than other Internet media in terms of protect- ing people's privacy and generating good, quality work. When there are errors in a wiki, people find and correct them over time. Is it difficult to convince people of the value of wikis as a resource— in the way they value more tradi- tional sources of information? That's a good question. But I would suggest that if people think that the Encyclopedia Britannica is fact, they actually mis- understand traditional media. I think it's impor- tant to recognize that we now have new tools avail- able that are generating higher quality informa- tion than we've ever had before. It's completely false to say that this new medium isn't as good as the old medium. It's much better. I think that many peo- ple just fail to grasp how bad things were before. How bad were things before wikis? When you take a look at a good book, it's been written by one per- son and checked by one or two edi- tors. But when you look at a good wiki entry, it's been carefully crafted by dozens of people. It always remains open to revision if an error is found. That's a completely new process that I think is vastly superior to the old process. Do you think wikis have the potential to change how people think and work? In the languages of many parts of the developing world, a new infor- mation source is often the first information source. For example, last September we launched Swahili ALEX McKNIGHT