Free the 'Net

Free the 'Net

Entrepreneurs by Janet Leiser | Senior Editor

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the free online dictionary, written by volunteer editors, is a radical idea. It's part of a 'free culture movement' spreading through the Internet.

Jimmy Wales' free online dictionary, called Wikipedia, is among the 10 most popular Web sites on the Internet with millions of entries, some in as many as 200 languages.

So one might be surprised to see Wikipedia's headquarters in St. Petersburg.

"If you're imagining a fancy building with 200 employees coming in and out, it's completely the wrong idea," Wales told a crowd at the Jan. 25 University of Tampa business network symposium. "We have three or four people in the office. Everything we do is essentially online, all virtual. ... It's really a very tiny and efficient organization."

Most of Wikipedia's $1.5 million annual budget pays for 300 servers and bandwidth, Wales says. About 250 of those servers are housed in downtown Tampa. "We're very much a locally based organization despite the fact that the work is actually done by thousands of volunteers around the world," he adds.

Wales, a Huntsville, Ala., native who lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and daughter, started Wikipedia after his first online dictionary, Nupedia, failed to take off because it placed multiple barriers to its use.

He plans to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge to everyone on the planet, he says.

"We are focused very much on every single person on the planet," Wales says. "The project is inherently global."

All of Wikipedia's content, including photos and software, can be downloaded and used or modified for free. It's all part of the growing trend, called free access.

"We consider this integral to our mission," Wales says.

He tells of a group of volunteers in South Africa that downloads Wikipedia onto CD roms so students at schools with older computers and no Internet access can use the encyclopedia. The group doesn't need Wikipedia's permission to copy its entries.

Less than one-third of Wikipedia's articles, about 1.5 million, are in English, Wales says. Another 11 languages have at least 100,000 articles each, another 54 languages have at least 10,000 entries each and another 125 languages have about 1,000 articles each.

Wales would like Wikipedia to eventually have 250,000 articles in every language spoken natively by at least 1 million people. That's about 347 languages.

"There's another couple hundred languages where we haven't even broke the 1,000 barrier," he says. "It's not like we're completely hopelessly behind, but this is the goal and we have a lot of work to do."

Wales doesn't consider a language to be fully active on Wikipedia until it has at least 1,000 articles, he says, adding: "That's the point at which there's a small community. There's normally five to 10 people working there and they've formed friendships and they've started to do outreach to other people."

Wales is no longer chair of the Wikipedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the online dictionary and several other projects.

He remains a board member, but he's now focusing his attention on Wikia Inc., a for-profit profit company based in San Mateo, Calif., that plans to offer a search engine to rival Google.

(And, no, he says, he doesn't plan to move out of the Tampa Bay area despite reports to the contrary).

Wikia deals with "every other kind of book work or community that people might build [on the Internet]," Wales says.

"I spend most of my time these days designing and thinking and programming the search engine project," Wales says. "Obviously I can't write the search engine all by myself so we're gathering together open source developers from all over the world to chip in and help with the projects."

He was surprised by the public's positive reaction to his plans for the search engine.

"There is this ideology we have about transparency, which is really important," he says. "Everything that we do at Wikipedia is open and transparent. And in the traditional search engines, there's nothing that's transparent. You don't know how Google links things. You have some vague ideas, but you really don't know. So people have been very excited about the whole process."

He also points out that "everything we do at Wikia, just like everything we do at Wikipedia, is under free licensing."

Free access is why Wikipedia is successful, says Wales, who describes himself as an objectivist and libertarian who follows Ayn Rand's philosophy.

"I've heard people say, 'When I'm working here at Wikipedia I know everything I do will be free forever, and that's really, really important ... That's what really makes all this possible."

Free licensing is becoming quite popular with the public, he says. For instance, Flickr, an online photo management site, has more than 1 million objects that are free-licensed.

"This is providing a base layer of raw culture materials. We're at the point that open-source software was at maybe 20 years ago when there was a base layer of various components being put together, but we didn't have a full operating system yet.

"So now in the cultural realm, we have a base layer of things like the encyclopedia, we have photos, we have some video. All these things are being put down and now people are being able to start creatively remixing and building things on top of them. People are coming together through cultural sharing based on intellectual exchange rather than market exchange."

Review summary

Entrepreneur. Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia Foundation and Wikia Inc.

Businesses. Wikipedia, a free online dictionary; and Wiki, a for-profit company that's developing a transparent search engine to rival Google.

Key. Wales believes in open source software and free access to what's on the Internet to stimulate cultural sharing based on intellectual exchange.

Skirting china's firewalls

doesn't appreciate Wikpedia. Officials there have blocked access to the online dictionary's Web site off-and-on since October 2005.

The site was first briefly blocked around the time of the anniversary of Tiananamen Square in 2005, says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder. It was lifted and then blocked again.

"We hoped it would be temporary so we didn't do anything or say much about it," Wales says. "Weeks stretched into months and so on."

Last October, the site became accessible for about two weeks before it was blocked again.

"We don't really know why," he says. "It's very difficult to find out, and we were trying to do it in the right way. In the right way you have to get introductions to the right people."

A lawyer told Wales that Wikipedia could not successfully petition the court in China since the company doesn't have an office there.

"It's a political matter," Wales says.

But savvy Internet techies can still access the Web site if they know how to get around the firewall, put up by internet service providers at the government's request.

Censorship in China is implemented as an industrial regulation, he says. The burden is on Internet service providers to put up firewalls, but it's not illegal for individuals to access the site.

"It's similar to the way we regulate television broadcasters," he says. "You don't get in trouble for watching something on television, they get in trouble for broadcasting it."

"It's a brilliant move on the part of the Chinese," he adds. "It gets them the censorship that they want, but it also deprives the international media of a lot of bad stories about teenagers being hauled off to jail for reading Wikipedia."

About 99% of those who live in the communist country don't have access to Wikipedia because they don't know how to get around the firewall. Still, there are Chinese-speaking people in other countries who are still editing entries.

"We have no intentions of compromise," Wales says. "Everything we do is about the fundamental human right of access to knowledge. There's just no way we're going to compromise on that. It actually became even more important that we not compromise after Google compromised, which disappointed a lot of people.

"Google got in a lot of trouble about that. Mostly because they have the motto: don't be evil. Microsoft does much worse things in China. But as we all know their motto is be evil."

Wales then jokingly says he must straighten up: He's meeting with Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, the following night for dinner.