Subscribe
Sectors
Companies
About

Best is yet to come

We are only at the beginning of the online collaboration movement, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
By Dave Glazier, ITWeb journalist
Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2007

Ahead of his visit to SA next week, ITWeb speaks to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia`s founder and one of the Internet era`s best-known business figures.

ITWeb: Where is Web 2.0 heading?

Wales: We`re really just at the beginning of a movement which sees people coming together and collaborating online. So far, this collaboration has been primarily text-based. The next step will be music and video.

ITWeb: How will Wikipedia overcome the credibility issues surrounding erroneous posts?

Wales: The real question is 'how long do those manipulated edits survive?` It is also important that the community be empowered to stop this. So it`s about giving the community the tools needed.

<B>The</B> <B>man behind Wikipedia</B>

* Wales was honoured last year by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
* Wales` early education took place in a one-room schoolhouse in Alabama with just four other children.
* From 1994 to 2000, Wales served as research director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader.
* One of Wales` more controversial projects was the dot-com era erotic search engine, Bomis, which helped to fund Wikipedia.
* He blogs at http://blog.jimmywales.com/.

ITWeb: Tell us a little about your visit to SA.

Wales: Well, together with iCommons, an international organisation [advocating access to knowledge, free software and open access publishing], we`re putting a Wikipedia Academy at the CIDA City Campus. We want to help teach students and teachers to post their own Wikipedia entries. We`re trying to encourage growth in new languages. Twenty or 30 people [posting entries] is a lot better than just one person sitting by themselves - that can be lonely.

ITWeb: What are your thoughts on virtual communities such as Second Life? A temporary fad, or a fundamental change in our sociology?

Wales: Second Life is very interesting, but very primitive at the moment. I do see a hint of something more interesting, but, to be honest, it is very difficult to say.

Second Life is very interesting, but very primitive at the moment.

Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia

ITWeb: Is the idea of the Semantic Web working out as 'Tim Berners-Lee and co` had hoped it would?

Wales: What`s interesting about the Semantic Web is that, in the past, it was spoken about in a very vague way. The direction wasn`t clear. Now we`re finally getting to things like user tagging, finally seeing some practical uses and some practical structures. We`re seeing Wikipedia edits with tags to geographical co-ordinates, for instance. In the future, I think we will see more applications built on this.

Share