This morning, I went see a talk by Jimmy Wales, President of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation, and creator of the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

The event was produced by Forum One Communications, Center for Global Development, and the Brookings Institution, and held at the Institute for International Economics.

Here are my raw thumbtyped notes somewhat cleaned up with links added:

* English version of Wikipedia (WP) approaching 1 billion words, 800,000 articles. * 2.5 million articles across primarily 30 languages. * Wikinews is newest of their sister projects that has done a good job of filling in background information around breaking news events such as the London bombings. * Alexa.com says WP has a broader reach that the NYT, LA Times, WSJ, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune COMBINED. * 2.4 billion page views monthly. * WP Foundation has three employees! All the rest is done by volunteers. * Over 120 servers, which are mostly in Florida. Showed WP web server architecture. * Two Models ... Emergent model - needs reputation mechanisms, users are tiny, have no power ("anthill") Community Model - reputation is a natural outgrowth of human interactions, users are powerful and should be respected. * Over half of all edits to English WP are done by O.7% or 615 users! * Realtime peer review model as opposed to gatekeeper model. Tools to track recent changes, watchlists. * Complete page history for almost all articles. * Organization is managed by the community. The software makes no assumptions about how the editing process should work. * WP Governance: confusing but workable mix of concensus, democracy, artistocracy, monarchy; Wikipedians are flexible about social methodology: results over process. * Working on a WSYWYG UI for WP so more experts who not techy can join in. * Fundamental philosophies of neutrality, open inquiry, open debate, free information--it's morally good and ethical to give information to people. * Wikipedia for non- internet users: Affinity to Negroponte's $100 laptop idea as a possible way to deliver the Wikipedia. Supports Brewster Kahle's mobile book project. * JW's upcoming Newsweek article on copyright issues. * WPs attraction is its very low barrier to entry (software and community norms) to build a common ground for a group of practitioners. * WPF is pretty swamped at their org level. * SocialText building WIKIWYG UI, which should be ready for wide release in January. Will be giving this component away. It will be the default UI for MediaWIKI. * WPF has early plans to open their API. KDE adding native calls to WP. Problem with open API is cost to dynamically render pages and bandwidth required to deliver content that then is embedded by non-supporting sites in their own pages.

After the talk, I was invited by Forum One to join a private lunch discussion with Jimmy and about 20 others (pic 2 above shows Jim Cashel of Forum One on left with Jimmy at the lunch).

Most of what Jimmy talked about can be heard on a 58-minute C-SPAN Q&A interview podcast.

- mike lee - washington, dc