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TOC: Afternoon keynotes

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 — posted by Sarah

Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia, talking about free culture and the future of publishing

"Imagine a world in which every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all knowledge."

An encyclopedia is a very big work. A library is much bigger than that.

Wikia is building the rest of the library. Extending the Wikipedia model beyond nonprofit education and research communities.

Collaborative vision:

• Library in 66 languages (67 if you count Klingon!)
• Magazine rack with news and opinion, like a collaborative blog

Wikia is following the same growth trajectory as Wikipedia, but about three years later.

"Second wave of collaborative authoring"

• Wikipedia has 300 articles about the muppets
• The Muppet Wiki on Wikia has over 14,000 articles about the muppets.

The most comprehensive reference guide on the muppets -- EVER. (Example: The Wikipedia entry on Itzhak Perlman neglects to mention that he appeared on Sesame Street at one point. The Muppet Wiki covers this critical event.)

Great coverage of Star Trek and other geek culture. This is starting to change as topics such as travel and health take off.

Vision for Wikia: To become the world's largest sustainable free-content, user-controlled media company.

Wikipedia is sustainable as a charity, but Wikia is for-profit. Wikia sites are ad-supported.

Search Wikia is creating an open source search engine, which Fast Company hailed as Google's Worst Nightmare.

Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber, just hired by Wikia. Shares philosophy of openness and democratic control. Miller invented the XMPP protocol.

Principles:

• Transparency: open source licenses and open content + APIs
• Collaboration: everyone can contribute, strong social and community focus.
• Quality: Significantly improve the relevancy and accuray of search results and the experience
• Privacy: "Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection"

Wikipedia now has 7 million articles in 125 different languages created over the past 6 years.

Wales views his job as the "design of communities, which allow people to come together and work together in a healthy fashion." He advocates against designing for the worst-case scenario. (Amusing analogy about designing a restaurant with cages since patrons could otherwise stab each other with their knives.)

Gratuitous picture of Wales with Bono. I'm missing the relevance of this.

Great speaker, though.

Labels: toc2007

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