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Wikipedia
| Date: |
08 July 2007 12:00 |
| Producer: |
First Edit
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Derek Watts (Carte Blanche presenter): 'In this country we are used to our Internet whiz kids making loads of money and shooting off into space or even building the rockets to get there. So when you hear that someone has developed one of the most popular websites in the world, you expect them to be relatively well-heeled.'
Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Co-Founder): 'I always joke that putting Wikipedia into the non-profit was either the smartest thing or the dumbest thing that I ever did.'
Instead Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the online free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, lives a humble life, flying economy and driving a Hyundai.
Jimmy: 'The dumbest thing, for the obvious reason that it's probably worth a few billion dollars now, but the smartest thing because I don't think it could have become the same kind of cultural phenomenon and been as successful.'
But before the thought of a story on encyclopaedias sets you yawning, think about this: currently Wikipedia is recording an estimated 1 000 page views per second and seven billion site visits a month.
Jimmy: 'It's really big. In the English language, there are over one-and-a-half million articles. I think it actually is one-and-three-quarter million, but I haven't checked the numbers in the last couple of days.'
Derek: 'Wikipedia's reach is so vast that you imagine it to have a massive infrastructure, but it was started on a shoestring budget. Even now it's only got seven staff and Jimmy's office is wherever he and his laptop may be in the world.'
We recently spent a busy day with Jimmy in Cape Town.
Jimmy: 'Maybe an interesting thing is that I never even went on an airplane until I was, I don't know, 26 or something like that ... well, never had anywhere to go.'
But that's all changed. The ex-futures and options trader is now in demand all over the world.
In the past few months he has been to Japan, India, Australia, and recently South Africa promoting a free internet culture at the Digital Freedom Expo held at the University of the Western Cape.
[Giving a lecture] Jimmy: 'In 1962, Charles van Doran, who was later a senior editor at Britannica said that the ideal encyclopaedia should be radical. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica, It's been anything but radical.
In comparison Jimmy declares that Wikipedia begins with a very radical idea, which is 'to imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all knowledge'.
Derek Keats, is a lecturer in IT at UWC.
Derek Keats (Lecturer: UWC): 'No one would have imagined, 10 years ago, that the best encyclopaedia in the world was one made by everybody and nobody.'
Unlike other online encyclopaedias that demand memberships or subscriptions, not only is Wikipedia available to everybody, it is also uniquely user-generated.
All articles on the site are written and edited by anyone with access to the website via the Internet.
Jimmy: 'It's actually quite simple. You go to the website and on every article on Wikipedia, there's a little link that says 'edit'. And you can just edit this page there. You click that and you'll see the article there in an edit box and you just make a change and you hit save and there your change is live on the Internet.'
Until now Derek says we lived in a 'read only' world, where generations of young minds had the opinions of others forced on them in hard copy. Lets face it, it's pretty hard to challenge a stack of books.
Keats: 'So the students, instead of being mere consumers of what ever we regurgitate for them, they are actually also able to become producers, producers of their own knowledge. That is probably the best way to empower somebody.'
In just six years Wikipedia is already available in 250 languages and is roughly 42 times bigger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Everyday a million users logon to Wikipedia, from nine-year-olds researching school projects to celebrities such as Forest Whitaker, Bono and Richard Branson. All of whom sing the sites praises.
Derek: 'Has this changed you, Jimmy, meeting these famous people and interacting with them?'
Jimmy: 'I was a little intimidated when I first met Branson. It was like, Sir Richard Branson, he must be very fancy. But he's just a regular guy. He's very nice.'
And it seems that the respect is mutual.
Sir Richard Branson (Entrepreneur & Founder of Virgin Group): 'Wikipedia has emerged as one of the most important internet sites in the world.'
Along with Branson, Mark Shuttleworth sent an introduction to Jimmy's lecture at the Digital Freedom Expo. Mark believes Wikipedia forms a part of the world's fourth wave of computing innovation.
Mark Shuttleworth (Entrepreneur & Founder of Mark Shuttleworth Foundation): 'It started back in the 80s with the personal computer, then everything went graphical, then we had the Internet, which suddenly opened doors and expanded horizons. And now we have this participation-oriented era where the Internet is bringing people together and allowing them to collaborate and to create wonderful and amazing things.'
Derek: 'An encyclopaedia for the people, by the people, now it sounds like the epitome of democracy and the much vaunted 'global village'. But just how accurate and reliable is it?'
Articles are also not checked before being added to the site, giving users the freedom to say exactly what they want.
Barry Ronge (Movie Crtitic): 'There is a lot of un-attributed in-text comment in there, which quite annoys me.'
Movie guru, Barry Ronge rates the blockbusters movies, so we asked him to turn his critical eye to the website.
Barry: 'You find that a lot of articles written by people who have an axe to grind. They are either pushing a political agenda, or a racial agenda, or a cultural agenda or just a fan agenda.'
Despite this Barry admits that other than Google, Wikipedia is one the first sites he visits when researching a new movie.
Barry: 'It's a love-hate relationship.'
Barry used the new 'Jesse James' movie staring Brad Pitt as an example. The 'Jesse James' entry on Wikipedia paints the bank robber as freedom fighter and a southern loyalist.
Barry: 'He may have been in the first five years of his career, but after that all the money that was stolen by the James Gang went straight back to the James Gang.'
Another critic of Wikipedia is South African media specialist, Anton Harber. In 2005, he rated it as disappointing with a lowly two out of ten.
Anton Harber (Media Analyst): 'It really was bad. It was inaccurate. It was incomplete.'
But two years later, he says, the sight has improved dramatically
Anton:'Considerably better. In fact, it was quite a good entry. And I think that's the point about Wikipedia, is that it improves all the time.'
Derek: 'When Wikipedia was launched some six years ago, Jimmy admits that entries weren't all that extensive. The entry for Africa, for example was something like: 'Africa is a continent.''
Jimmy: 'If you go to visit an article you could find that someone might have edited it just before you and put in some rubbish. The community normally catches that quite quickly. But you can have a period of time when there are errors and sometimes quite bad errors that do persist for a short period of time.'
But that raises another complaint.
Derek: 'Jimmy, just explain to me, in this process of the nations of the world editing, who has the final say?'
Jimmy: 'I would say ultimately it is the community, the core community that looks after the website.'
But that 'core community' of self-appointed editors stands at only a few thousand people.
And Jimmy is quick to defend his invention, saying that no encyclopaedia will ever be complete, even Britannica constantly release new editions.
Jimmy: 'Even on topics that you would think, you know Julius Caesar ... what could have possibly changed in the last hundred years? Well actually, quite a bit. There's been a lot of research and archaeology has been really quite revolutionary in the last hundred years. Therefore for any article on Wikipedia, one of the great strengths is, it's always open to new information being discovered.'
So how it is that Wikipedia has never been taken to court in the US, which is a hugely litigious society?
Jimmy: 'There is a case right now in the US, a prominent golfer is suing, not us, but the person who wrote something malicious about him on Wikipedia. Under US Law currently, people are responsible for their own activities online. The idea is someone who is hosting an internet resource ... they're like the host of a bar or a house or something. If somebody stands up in a bar and libels someone else they aren't directly responsible for the actions of their patrons.'
Barry suggests that always compare articles on Wikipedia to other sources.
Barry: 'I'd call it a sensible seven. Sensible for the user. The sensible user reads it and uses it as a pathway to other places.'
Anton: 'What the Internet does is it allows for a dialogue, a communication, a conversation.'
And with the site drawing millions of visitors a day Jimmy says Wikipedia has more than met his wildest expectations.
But says he is determined to keep his feet on the ground and Wikipedia in the hands of those that need it most.
Wherever he goes he visits schools, such as the one we visited with him in Samora Machel Township. His mission, to better understand how Wikipedia can help put 'the sum of all knowledge' at their disposal.
Jimmy: 'A lot of bright kids there, a lot of bright kid's minds being lost because they don't have enough access to the resources that they need.'
And with his new celebrity connections, he says he hopes to change the lives of the people he meets, and who need it the most.
Jimmy: 'One of the rewards of what I've done is that it's attracted a lot of attention from very interesting people around the world, who do have an interest in doing social good and finding ways of using their influence. We are trying to help the world.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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