This is a great talk from Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Here are some of the points that I thought were amazing: 600,000 articles in English, 2 million total articles (very global community), more popular than the New York Times, one employee and then many volunteers, 1.4 billion page views monthly, 90 servers, three locations, bandwidth is the only real cost ($5,000) besides the employee, excels in quality tests, only 18% of activity is done by anonymous users, there are 600-2000 registered community members, and people can use Wikipedia content for freely (even commercially.)

Another interesting point that Wales made was in relation to the Bush and Kerry articles. The articles were locked due to vandalism during 2004 and many people took that to mean that there is a lot of controversy in the Wikipedia community. The truth is that the articles were only lock for 1% of the time in 2004 and no controversy was involved. it was just done to prevent vandalism. He made a great quote that “the real struggle is not between the right and the left…it’s between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.” They are able to dispel controversy by implementing a non-negotiable neutrality policy. Almost anything goes with Wikipedia, but neutrality is a must.

Wales also mentioned the idea of Wiki Books. These would be freely licenced textbooks for the world. He was also recently made a fellow at Harvard which dispels the myth that academics and teachers don’t like Wikipedia.

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