This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 27, 2011 - "How many of you have used Wikipedia before?" Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, asked the audience gathered in Washington University's Graham Chapel on Friday. Of the more than 500 people who came to hear his speech on "Democracy and the Internet," just about everyone in the room raised their hands – the response, Wales said, he fully expected.
Using a PowerPoint presentation filled with informational graphics and statistics, he explained his rationale: Over the past decade, Wikipediahas grown to become one of the most popular websites in the world. The "free access, freely licensed" Internet encyclopedia features more than 60 million articles written in 270 languages, attracting more than 408 million unique visitors every month.
"Who are the 'Wikipedians'? They're everyone," he said.
Wales came to St. Louis as the keynote speaker for the campus Global Leadership Conference, as part of its two-day speaker and event series on international affairs. His message focused on the potential value of an Internet platform spanning countries and continents. Wales believes studying Wikipedia articles for content offers insight into broader cultural dynamics and trends, citing, for example lower usage rates in China as a result of governmental censorship, or criticisms of articles written in less-common dialects as reflective of prejudice.
"It was a natural choice for what we were going for," Conference member Jason Tarre said. "What he started is a cultural phenomenon. He mentioned in his speech that kids growing up now will consider Wikipedia the best form of looking up information, that it has changed the behavior of kids growing up all over the world."
As he sketched out his vision for the future of the Wikimedia enterprise, he called participation key to the expansion of global democracy. However, Wales also anticipated the response to a question he raised later in the talk: When he asked how many people had ever edited or authored a Wikipedia post, far fewer hands went up.
Wales said only 30-40 percent of Wikipedia visitors write or edit. Of that sampling, demographic surveys that show 87 percent of active contributors are men. To counter these trends, the Wikimedia foundation is trying to recruit more people as authors and editors through outreach to galleries, museums and libraries, as well as geographic expansion to countries with lower participation rates. Wales says they are investigating ways to make the editing process easier for those who do not identify as "tech-geeks."
According to the Wikipedia article on Wales, who also founded the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and the new web-hosting site Wikia, he was not always so confident about the value of "open editing, where anyone can edit the encyclopedia." Indeed, he said "he would awake during the night and monitor what was being added."
But Wales made it clear that a decade of expansion had convinced him to let go of any remaining anxieties about what he calls the "free access, free license collection of human knowledge." In the question and answer portion of the speech, he was adamant on the point that Wikipedia is meant to reflect the interests and expertise of its users.
"On the English Wikipedia, we have I don't know how many hundreds of articles on Pokémon. I don't know we want to try to convince those authors to join the pages on chromosomal biology. But one of the oldest sayings we have is 'Wiki is not paper.' We're not going to run out of room," Wales said.
Ariana Tobin, a senior at Washington University, is a Beacon intern.