Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales (Video: Interview) and Jon Hall
January 29th, 2008 by Annkur
OnlyGizmos Exclusive:
The most awaited lecture of the TechFest’08 was the lecture by Mr. Jimmy Wales (Founder Wikipedia). Before the lecture started a trophy was presented to the best performing college of the TechFest. Jimmy Wales arrived just an hour before the lecture in the IIT campus. Even with that minimum amount of time, he was all ready for the presentation. What didn’t come to us as a surprise was the long (really long) Q for the lecture (seemed even longer than the Q for Technoholix)
Jimmy spoke about himself and gave a history and brief introduction about Wikipedia, Wikipedia in India and his concentration in the present day ‘Wikia’. He spoke about Wikia Search in detail during the interview (see video). He gave interesting fact like there are over 200,000 articles in English on Wikipedia, but still that is not even ¼ of all the articles on the site. And Wikipedia in Indian languages.
Indian Languages @ WikiPedia and no. of articles in it
Upon being asked: “When will Wikipedia be saturated”. Mr.Wales replied candidly saying: “Maybe this Tuesday or Wednesday, actually I don’t know”. He explained that although finding new topics in Wikipedia is very difficult, it might never saturate, until the world stops creating new things. Also Wikipedia is available in almost all the Languages in the world. So the content keeps on transferring in different languages with a long way to go. The growth is still very fast.
During the personal interview Jimmy told us that what he looks up on Wikipedia is remote and unheard things, because if it’s something common he would have probably know it already. He also informed us that they pre-render a lot of common page content when a user is logged on and cache popular searches on Wikipedia (the cache hit ratio is 75%).
Wikipedia and Google:
It seems like Jimmy expected to be quizzed by the audience about competition from Google, and he covered that topic during his lecture itself. He said that neither Google feared him nor did he fear them. To make the situation more clear, he informed the audience that he was with Larry and Sergey (along with family) just 2 days back and they all had a great laugh over the media reports about Google eating up Wikipedia or the other way around.
For Google’s Knol, he repeated what we have already read, all we have seen is a blog entry and a screenshot. He believed that its more of users creating their personal pages instead of a collaborated effort like Wikipedia. Still he said, if Google can get an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, manages to match the content, and keep it FREE – It will be Great!
Translation Tools (also see video):
He also answered that translation tools cannot be used to translate the English articles in other languages for 2 reasons (Same question repeated in video below during the interview):
- The tools present today can only manage to give a gist of the article, but not a perfect, meaningful translation.
- These tools are available for popular combinations (eg English>Spanish), however you wont find help to convert English to Zulu.
Although many questions about WEB 2.0+ came up from people… we believe Eric Schmidt answers it well!
Jon Hall at IIT Bombay TechFest 2008
We got a chance to personally interview Jimmy Wales. We also met Jon Hall (Executive Director of Linux International) along with Jimmy and had a small chat with him. Here is the video and the transcript.
Though we didn’t really know what to talk about to Jon (being informed about his presence just a couple of minutes back), we managed to ask him about Viruses / Malware on Mac and Linux as they grow and increase their market share.
He said that the security of a system depends on the basic design and the basic kernel of the Linux is very strong, but the only way you can make a system 100% secure is by disconnecting it, shutting it down and burying it somewhere deep…. (With an axe over it).
So will there be a Virus for Linux some day? He said YES (we feel he was being humble by accepting that), someone might surely find a way to get through, but the quality lies in how fast can we patch it. Comparing with Windows he said that Windows was made when there was no Internet. Where as the TCP was developed over UNIX and its basic architecture is made to handle multiple users.
We also managed to ask him about the research in Japan to replace the Internet. And he said that with the kind of growth, Internet surely leaves a lot of issues to be addressed…
Noticing that Jimmy was left alone waiting for Jon, We threw the question again to him about Google Gears (don’t know why Ankur pushed the question so much, but Jon helped to explain the concept to Jimmy this time), and this time we explained him what it really was. His initial reaction was ‘Wow, I would like to have something like that… especially while flying’. He planned to check that out.
So if in the coming months you find a Google Gears plugin for Wikipedia, you know whom to credit! 
(As there was no voice recording for the conversation with John and Jimmy, the actual quotes might be slightly different)
More pics of Jimmy Wales and Jon Hall coming up @ Gallery
By Ankur Agarwal and Tassavur Shaikh
