The dream of free knowledge for all
Encyclopaedias should be radical, the sum of all human knowledge free to use and reuse.
The Wikipedia foundation is the charity that runs Wikipedia with 50 employees and 100,000 volunteers.
Wikipedia has 270 languages, 200 with over 1000 articles and 60 million articles.
Global content comparison – Wikipedia is very similar across all languages but reading interest differs: Japan most interested in pop culture, geography in Germany, sex in all languages except in French and Spanish (perhaps because they are busy doing it, joked a friend to Jimmy).
Wikipedia receives 400 million visits each month. But the database of contributors must diversify, says Jimmy. You can see why because currently it is 87% male, average age is 26, mainly geeky with double percentage of PHDs.
Wikipedians are at the intersection of intelligence, obsession and free time.
We are Moving from the age of broadcast to a more interactive age. The writers of Lost use Lostpedia which is written by the users, to write new editions because it is so complex. This shows incredible sophistication in our culture.
As someone just tweeted, that 40 minutes went quickly.
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