World is a Wiki place

Curiosity is defined by Wikipedia as `an unknown number of behavioural and psychological mechanisms, which have the effect of impelling beings to seek information'.

For simplicity's sake, the online encyclopaedia could replace that rather wordy interpretation with the name of its founder, Jimmy Wales, for he is the embodiment of the term.

"Look at this tree over here," the bearded 42-year-old says as he bounds across the unkempt lawn of his back garden in suburban St Petersburg, Florida.

"Do you think these are oranges or grapefruit? Maybe lemons," he adds as he bends to peer at the large, yellowish fruit on his tree. "They are too big and round for lemons, too yellow for oranges and too small for grapefruit."

And with that, he's off towards his modest, single-storey house, unidentified fruit in hand. From the geeks who call him their "God-King", to industry leaders such as Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive, and musical artists such as Peter Gabriel, Wales is admired for his dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.

He is best known as the founder of Wikipedia, a project he began as a hobby in 2001 with a former friend, Larry Sanger, which has now ballooned into the largest encyclopaedia in human history.

But the vast internet reference work is just one element of Wales's vocation, which is to give everyone on the planet with an internet connection free access to all the accumulated knowledge in human history and to give them the tools to exploit it. "Imagine a free college education for everyone anywhere in the world with all the resources that you could ever need online," he says. "The implications for the Third World are astounding."

Wiki up the White House

His grand ambitions are not as far-fetched as they seem, for Wales has recently been in discussions with various officials close to the White House about helping to formulate new policy for a technological age.

He hopes that the Obama administration will open new horizons for the technocrats in Silicon Valley and beyond, and the signs are already there. Just a few days after the inauguration President Obama announced that he would become the first US President to own and operate a Blackberry personal digital assistant (PDA) in office.

Wales says he was perplexed about the fanfare surrounding giving the President a piece of kit millions of people all over the world take for granted, but sees hidden significance in the event.

The reason past leaders have not used Blackberry's or other text messaging devices is because they are easy to hack while records of all conversations in either text or voice format are kept in perpetuity.

"I think one thing that we may want to re-examine here is the rules surrounding record keeping and disclosure," says Wales. "I'm a big proponent of transparency in government, but it's really worth considering that the best way to get that might not be to require the storage of every single digital record that can be stored.

"This may seem counter-intuitive, but if White House staffers are forbidden to use Instant Messenger (IM) programs because the records have to be kept and are subject to subpoena, and the people at the top fear this because we all know that people speak very casually in IM, then something is wrong.

"It might be better to recognise that if we don't allow staffers to use IM, they will simply have conversations by phone or in the hallway that we will never know about anyway."

But the use of everyday communications devices is just one of the myriad technological issues facing the new Obama administration. There are many more that, Wales believes, can be solved using his Wiki technology.

The Wiki phenomenon is based on a set of rules and principles and some fairly simple open-source publishing software. The rules and principles govern what Wales describes as a `rag tag band of volunteers' tens of thousands strong and known as `Wikipedians'. They create and edit the more than 1.5 million entries in the English language Wikipedia and the many millions more in its 200 foreign language versions.

"It is a user-mediated community," Wales says. "The users decide what is right and wrong in a process that usually leads to the right thing being published."

The website has seen controversial debate, but Wales says this is healthy and is in effect the engine of productivity within the Wiki world.

In the past few weeks there was much ado about several serious errors in the Wikipedia entries of US senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy, who Wikipedia claimed, were both dead.

They are not, or at least were not at the time of writing this.

The errors may bring about the most radical change in the encyclopaedia's history as Wales is proposing a hierarchical system of approving entries and additions to the online tome.

He wants the wiki users to adopt a system of so called "flagged revision", which requires all changes to be "flagged" by an approved editor. But the community is divided.

As with all things Wiki, Wales believes the community will eventually work out the best way forward and sense will prevail.

The expanding Wiki empire

The online encyclopedia is one element of the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity containing all of Wales's not-for-profit ventures. These include a dictionary, a directory of species and a free library of textbooks and manuals called Wikibooks.

"Wikibooks is a very exciting area and I think key to the idea of free education," he says, adding that the ultimate ambition is to offer a set of textbooks on just about every university course in the world.

To achieve this, however, Wales says that governments around the world must rewrite copyright law. He believes that all material should be copyrighted for 14 years - as was the case in the US. Once this period expires the copyright holder should be allowed to reapply for another 14-year period by registering with the Government and paying a fee.

His name has been bandied about in Washington circles as a potential candidate for the role of "technology Czar", should there ever be need for one. But his personal views may exclude him from the running.

"I'm really opposed to the terminology of `Czar' across all aspects of government," he says.†"It gives the wrong idea, and is offensive to the ideals of liberty that are what we should be about. I hope that we are now returning to those more traditional values of a serious respect for individual human rights.

"Having said that, I do think that we need a "CTO" - Chief Technology Officer - for the US government. †In my view, this job title does not suggest a role in interfering with private industry or setting some kind of top-down technology policy for the nation. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgment that the government is an enormous enterprise, and that it needs to be managed responsibly."

Such a figure should immediately "Undertake a comprehensive top-to-bottom assessment of the technology failures of the US government, with an eye towards implementing the kinds of solutions that have worked for thousands of other large enterprises," Wales believes.

While Wales believes that the Obama administration can, and should, do a lot more than the previous administration to promote new technology, he is wary of proposals to spend billions of dollars on government backed infrastructure projects to reverse the recession and kick start growth.

Will Wiki bring broadband to the masses?

Projects such as universal broadband internet connections, and laptops for every school age child have been mentioned as possibilities as Obama prepares to spend around $1 trillion of tax payer's money on economic stimuli.

"It is deeply inappropriate for the government to hand out contracts for politically popular initiatives like this," says Wales.

"The government has no ability to pick winners, and if the American economy is to get back on track, the last thing we need is a distortion of the economy by bureaucrats.

"We are now very strongly feeling the pain of a disastrous set of politically popular interventions into the economy in the form of a long term policy of encouraging excessive borrowing. Why do we imagine that more government is going to get us out of the mess that government got us into?"

A better approach, suggests Wales, would be to encourage modernisation in every aspect of commercial endeavour, to make it easier for companies to operate in an environmentally friendly manner and to improve technology and communication. In short, to rewrite the economic plan for a technologically green future.

But America's vastly underfunded education system may have left the country's workforce ill equipped to provide the level of innovation

it needs.

Education in the US, particularly in maths and sciences, lags behind many parts of the world - like India and China.

"One can't look at the statistics without feeling some dismay," says Wales. "But on the other hand, having had some experience with engineers in many parts of the world, I think it is very difficult to overstate the importance of creativity and an entrepreneurial culture, as against sheer rote learning.

"I recently spent some time in Bangalore, India visiting IT and professional services outsourcing firms, and the number one concern they mentioned to me is the problem of graduates who are skilled by school measures but who are unable to think for themselves. A school system which produces high test scores may not be a school system which delivers innovation."

The rigours of running Wikipedia and the publicity surrounding his quasi-celebrity lifestyle have taken their toll on Wales's personal life. He no longer lives with his wife Christine and daughter Kira at the modest suburban house in Florida where I first met him.

He had a brief relationship last year with Rachel Marsden, a Canadian journalist who contacted him while researching a Wikipedia entry. The relationship sparked controversy, however, and he ended it as quickly as it had begun.

As my visit to Wales's home drew to a close he finally took a knife to the unidentified fruit from his back yard and sucked out some of the juice. "It's a lemon," he yelped, puckering his lips and sucking in his cheeks at the bitterness. "Let's make lemonade."