SLJ.com Talks to Jimmy Wales

Eric Oatman -- School Library Journal, 10/27/2005

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, a freeonline encyclopedia. Launched in 2001, it contains more than 2 million entries in 200 languages, and it's still growing. It's written and updated entirely by volunteers—everyone from subject-area experts to high school students. (For an in-depth examination of wikis, see "Make Way for Wikis" in the November issue of SLJ.)

SLJ.com: Is your goal to make educational publishing houses dinosaurs?

We don't really think of it in those terms. A lot of people thought that IBM would die with the PC revolution. I definitely think that community-generated peer production is going to have a huge impact on the educational publishing industry, but it's too new for them to react to.

SLJ. com: Many librarians and teachers don't like to recommend Wikipedia and other open-source encyclopedias. How would you respond to them?

I don't hear it so much. I travel around and give talks, and the people who come to my talks [are generally enthusiastic]. Afterwards librarians and school teachers come up to me, and they are gushing with praise. Among academics, there's a lot of excitement about my work, a lot of favorable responses. But a lot of people are cautious, as they should be about any new technology. Wikipedia provides a teaching opportunity for people to talk to students about reliability and to teach them about being critical of sources and where information comes from. The same should go on if they're using Britannica. Britannica is chock-full of errors.

SLJ.com: Some say that the major benefit of Wikipedia is that it democratizes the creation of reference materials. Would you agree?

I think the major benefit really comes from the free licensing, a method of production that makes it possible for people to take our work and modify it. A lot of online environments really foster an argumentative mindset. But in a wiki, the software drives you toward a collaborative mindset.

SLJ.com: What do you see as the future of wikis?

One of the things we're going to see is easier editing methods for wikis. The technology is still a little intimidating for some. But people are developing wiki engines that will be easier to use, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs that will be as easy to use as Microsoft Word. This will bring in a lot of people who are really smart but not computer-oriented.

SLJ.com: Some say that it will take a generation before wikis become integrated into school curriculums. They say that we'll have to wait till tech-averse teachers retire and are replaced by digital natives.

That long? I hope not.