Tuesday 4th December
Keynote Speech - Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and Wikia
Web 2.0 in action: Free culture and community on the move
At one point early in his speech Jimmy Wales described the Wikipedia as the “Red Cross” for information because it is a not for profit organisation, and survives primarily on small donations of between $50 and $100 dollars and without large corporate sponsors or advertisers.
The highlight of his speech for librarians - especially for those involved in information skills - was Wales’ belief in information literacy and an acknowledgement of the importance of checking the sources in Wikipedia. He also seemed to suggest that Wikipedia was unsuitable as a source of reference for school projects much beyond year 8 or 9.
One interesting new development which I hadn’t heard of before from the Wiki foundation is Wikia, a separate organisation which aims to “build the rest of the library”, including the types of reference books which probably wouldn’t be considered viable as economic models for commercial publishers. The example he gave was The Muppet Wikia which contains 15,271 about the Muppets written primarily by a core community of 30 people (who like the Muppets - a lot).
Overall, his speech tended to stress the humanitarian, philanthropic intentions of the Wiki foundation, with clips from a film called “truth in democracy” which will be launched next year, showing how Wikipedia is reaching out to technology poor communities around the world. Just in case we missed the humanitarian message the presentation included a picture of Jimmy Wales with Bono (although I have a feeling it might have been his screen saver) as it wasn’t alluded to during the speech.
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