Six minute edited version of Jimmy Wales' public lecture to celebrate the tenth birthday of Wikipedia.
Event hosted by, and with the co-operation of, Wikimedia UK, University of Bristol, Bristol Festival of Ideas, BBC Anchor Project, Connecting Bristol, Bristol City Council, The Watershed and Bristol Cathedral Choir School.
Filmed at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol on the 13th January 2011.
Edited at the Digital Village, BBC Broadcasting House, Bristol.
Listen to the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales - as he delivers an insightful talk about Wikipedia, the Wikipedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and Wikia (his other wiki platform). Hear about Wikipedia's history and where he thinks it's going.. also hear about his remarks/thought's about Apple Computers recent Apps Store and Net Neutrality.
This audio is introduced by Guy Orpen, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University.
Elisabeth Winkler from Writing on the Web, writes...
"Do you use Wikipedia?" - That was the first question Jimmy Wales asked the 300 + audience at the Victoria Rooms last Thursday in Bristol. The auditorium was a forest of hands. "How many of you have edited Wikipedia, he asked?" A good third put up their hands. The founder of Wikipedia was in Bristol to celebrate the online encyclopaedia’s 10th anniversary – his only UK public talk.
A modern legend, Jimmy Wales was a witty, warm, engaging and informative speaker.
Internet royalty Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia graced Bristol with his presence today as part of events marking the 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia. Twitter went crazy about it, many expressing how awesome it is that 700 people were there and 3,000 people were watching online. I’m not sure how surprising this is… he is a pretty well-known person, although I can imagine it was pretty exciting for those involved and for Bristol as a city.
The webcast Jimmy Wales talk from The Vic Rooms in Bristol, is now on Youtube! (taken from our original webcast broadcast on Ustream.tv, on the Brrism TV channel)
On the day of the webcast we had over 3,000 online viewers to the webcast!
Wikipedia founder thinks Apple's domination of mobile apps is 'dangerous'
Ben Camm-Jones
Apple's dominance of the mobile application space is a "threat" to the openness of the internet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said.
Wales made his comments while taking part in events to mark the 10th anniversary of the collaborative online encyclopedia at Bristol University. His concerns stem from the way Apple controls the distribution of apps for the iOS platform, which he believes constitutes a "closed system".
"The concern is that in order to make software and distribute it for free, you have to get permission from Apple so that chokepoint is very dangerous and something I’m concerned about. When you own a device and you want to give someone that software, you should not have to get permission from someone else and I think that is a very important thing," said Wales.
“People talk about net neutrality as an issue but the real action is in thinking about whether apps are a threat to the openness of the system," he continued.
Wales seemed to play down the importance of the net neutrality debate, saying that many of the arguments involved purely hypothetical dangers that in reality pose no immediate threat. He also admitted to the BBC in a separate interview that Wikipedia, though in theory open to anyone who wishes to contribute, is too complicated for many people to edit and modify.
It isn't just Wales that has raised objections to the App Store this week - Microsoft has raised objections to Apple's trademarking of the term 'App Store', arguing that it is too generic to be trademarked.
When I was 8 I remember walking down the corridor at school on the way to the hall where we would all watch an Apollo landing on the TV. At the time it seemed like we were going to the moon every year and it wasn't really something that I was going to get worked up about. But, as it turned out, it wasn't a "once a year" thing and we've never been back to the moon since. Perhaps I should have paid more attention?This morning I went to Bristol's Cathedral School to see Jimmy Wales, father of Wikipedia, deliver a morning assembly address to school children. I wondered if they, like me, were a bit blase about the whole thing. Perhaps Wikipedia, to them, was just a quick way of getting the homework done?If they were indeed blase then they can be forgiven, the real question is "do the population at large realise what a monumental achievement Wikipedia is. It is now the eighth most trafficked websitein the world and the English language version has more than 3.5 million entries. It also supports 257 other languages. Not bad for an organisation that employs less than 50 employees. Talk about drawing on the power of crowdsourcing.Obviously there's a cast of thousands working behind the scenes but the point is that this "thing" called Wikpedia has mobilised those thousands and allowed them to self-organise. What a powerful thing that is. If only governments could tap into that sort of crowd-sourcing-mobilisation. Perhaps Wikipedia is an example of "The Big Society" done right?Anyway, back to the Cathedral.Jimmy Wales has given so many interviews and presentations that I'm sure he could do them in his sleep. But, despite him leaving on the 05:25 from Paddington, he gave a remarkably lively presentation and one that was tailor made for the kids. You can see it here. (Apologies for the poor quality video, it was hand held in poor light and my camera can only handle 10 minutes of video at a time.)
I don't think that most adults realise what a world-changer Wikipedia is and I'm sure that the kids only dimly realised it, if it all. But it was quite refreshing and funny when one of them thanked Jimmy for helping him with his Biology homework. Huh, I never got that sort of help. All I had when I was a kid was moon landings.
Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the birth of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopaedia launched as an experiment on 15 January 2001 and now hosting 17 million pages across 271 languages.
Yesterday, I spent most of my day in the company of Wikipedia's founder,Jimmy Wales, as he spoke at the Bristol Festival of Ideas (his only public outing of this visit) and then on the journey back to London, where he hosted a party to thank the army of British Wikipedia volunteers, under the umbrella ofWikimedia UK.
So I asked Wales: do you feel guilty about breeding a generation of lazy journalists? His answer:
I think they were always lazy, now they're just a little better informed [laughs].
No, actually I think oftentimes journalists who are lazy and using Wikipedia get caught out; and there are lots more journalists who understand how to use Wikipedia correctly. [As a journalist] you go out to interview the head of a company, or a certain politician and you don't know much about them. So this way you can quickly get some background and, also, read the discussion pages to find out what are the things the public don't quite know.
During the rest of our interview – conducted mainly on the 14.30 from Bristol Temple Meads to London Paddington (carriage D) – he talked about a broad range of subjects, from the neutrality of Wikipedia and internet censorship, to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, to David Cameron and the "big society", to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He also offered a fascinating answer when I asked him whether he votes.
The interview will form part of a piece for a future issue of the New Statesman
For a couple of hours earlier today, Bristol’s Victoria Rooms, a part of the University of Bristol, today became the Wikitoria Rooms, courtesy of the presence of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, who was in Bristol as part of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary celebrations (aka WP10). Wikipedia was actually launched on 15th January 2001.
photo by: @dan_martin
Jimmy’s talk started with the genesis of Wikipedia and how it grew out of the open source and free software movement and how it has grown over the years to become the fifth most visited site on the internet, based on the premise of providing free knowledge for all.During the talk some fascinating facts emerged regarding the profile of the average ‘Wikipedian’, as contributors and authors are known. They are predominantly male (87%), with an average age of 26 and they have twice the general population’s average percentage of PhDs. National differences in content reading also emerged from Jimmy’s talk. For instance, Germans read lots about geography (this caused a ripple of laughter from the audience), whilst the French and Spanish read less about sex than other nations, a point on which Jimmy opined that they were probably busier indulging in it than reading about it. Looking at recent developments, Jimmy turned to such projects as Wikia – a community site to which anyone can contribute their knowledge on specific topics (or indeed start a wiki on a new topic). As an example, he quoted Lostpedia, a wiki devoted to the US TV series, Lost.Jimmy’s talk concluded with future directions and prospects and these were reflected in the questions from the floor and those submitted online. Perhaps the most interesting of these was one about the knotty subject of net neutrality. Jimmy conceded his position on this was “complicated”, but concluded by inferring that the control exerted on access to information, such as the Apple Apps model for smartphones represented more of a threat to “diverse and open ecosystems”.The event was streamed live and attracted an online audience of some 3,000 people, understood to be the second largest audience ever for a webcast from Bristol.All in all, an enjoyable and inspiring event and one which will live in his memory for a long time by your ‘umble scribe, who was conscripted with others to assist with covering the event in brief bursts of 140 characters on Twitter.
Looking at recent developments, Jimmy turned to such projects as 
