Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, was due to come and speak at the last London Wiki Wednesday. Sadly he cried off at the last minute saying he was under the weather, but he sent Alison Wheeler and Sue Gardner to speak on his behalf, and they did a great job (my late report coming soon). However, while he was in London he made time to face some HARDtalk from Stephen Sackur on BBC News24. You've got 5 more days to follow the link and watch the 23 minute interview, which covers the kind of questions I'd hoped Jimmy would answer. Stephen wasn't as vociferous as he can be in his questioning, or maybe it's just the Jimmy is quite skilled at answering those questions accuracy and trust by now.

Jimmy tells us that after almost 7 years Wikipedia, which he intended to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge for every person on the planet in their own language, has pretty much achieved a lot of what he had in mind. However, he agrees there is a long way to go in many languages, and talks about focusing on India and Africa in particular. Sackur questioned him about the small number of contributors compared to the enormous readership, and Jimmy argued that there weren't just hundreds, but 3-4,000 active contributors. Still not that many compared to the millions of readers.

When asked if Wikipedia's entries are true, Jimmy's answer of "mostly" made Sackur respond "that's rather worrying", but Jimmy defended the position explaining their aim on quality to be at least as good if not better than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and comparing their problem with the normal issues in mainstream journalism. Since Britannica has 60-70,000 articles, and Wikipedia has more than 10 times that, Sackur described what they are doing as absurdly ambitious, and quizzed him over the editorial approach on things like the George Bush entry, with its emphasis on Hurricane Katrina. He suggested that this went against the site's stated objective of having a neutral point of view, and anyway that ambition is misleading as there is no such thing. Wales' defence was to say that the ultimate arbiter is not himself, or a single editor, but the community of contributors. Every page has a discussion section, and so with discussion, collaboration, and further references, they can refine entries and get closer to the truth, and again compared the problem to journalism. They discussed the John Seigenthaler incident, where a false Wikipedia entry suggested he had been involved in Robert F. Kennedy's assassination and had been on the site for 132 days before it was corrected. Jimmy explained the way this had slipped through, and that they've changed their processes so new contributors are disallowed from creating new articles from scratch. Stephen pressed him, citing an inaccuracy on his education in his own Wikipedia entry, or the way Jimmy had changed his biography over who founded Wikipedia. Jimmy wasn't fazed and said their solution is to have as many eyes and as many people participating as possible, and recommend adding to the discussion page, explaining the perceived bias, and giving another source. There followed a discussion where they compared Wikipedia to a public toilet, where you are never sure of who has cleaned it before you got there, and that there were good toilets and bad - very wholesome!

Wales was also questioned about his commercial venture of Wikia. This is where the wiki concept has been applied to particular communities, like the World of Warcraft wiki. Wales is happy to segregate this from the non-profit Wikipedia site, and sees no issue in generating revenue from advertising, or doing a YouTube style revenue sharing approach with content providers for this other style of community.

Finally they touched on their search engine initiative, where Wales explained that this was partly political, and all about openness. With engines like Google you have no idea why a particular ranking has been awarded, and so having the code and algorithms open would mean everybody knows where they stand. All in all it was a good introduction to the guy's thinking, for those of you that haven't seen him speak before.