Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales delivers lecture to UIowa students

IOWA CITY - When thinking about how his organization has changed the way knowledge is shared, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recalls a post on Twitter he read from an elementary school teacher

The teacher asked one of her students what an encyclopedia was.

The student replied, “Is that like Wikipedia?”

Wales shared that and other interesting stories with a crowd that packed into the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City on a rainy Tuesday evenig to hear his lecture on Democracy and the Internet as part of the University of Iowa's lecture series.

The mission behind Wikipedia hasn't changed in the decade since it first came onto the Internet, according to Wales.

“My work began with imagining the concept that every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” he said.

Wales spent much of the time sharing how Wikipedia is received in countries with strict censorship controls, such as China. The Chinese government relaxed some Internet censorship prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but began to increase it once again following the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to government critic Liu Xiaobo.

Many Wikipedia pages still are blocked, such as those related to the Dalai Llama and Taiwanese independence, but Wales said he believed that China would abandon censorship eventually.

“Over the next 20 yars, I feel China will decide their current way of regulating the Internet is not worthwhile,” he said.

Wales said he felt Wikipedia was helping to play a role in the current unrest in countries such as Egypt and Libya by helping give people access to the entire history of the world in their own language.

“These popular movements are being organized over the Internet. That's great, but it's not enough,” Wales said. “What's really important is people can get access to the full history of the world, to get access to information about different political systems and see how things are elsewhere in the world.”

In the near future, Wales said that the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit board that runs Wikipedia, plans to open an office in India to help expand the encyclopedia's coverage in the five languages spoken in that nation. Wales said that down the road he'd like to expand into Africa as well, but that access issues were too daunting at present and India presented the better immediate opportunity.

During the question and answer period, Wales took a question regarding the controversial website Wikileaks, which has been both criticized and hailed in different parts of the world for releasing classified U.S. government documents. Wales said he was wary of the site's posting of documents that could possibly endanger innocent people, and that it was not actually a “wiki” where any person could upload anything.

“I wish that they had chosen a different name,” he said, receiving some laughter from the audience.

Wikipedia facts:

16 million articles across 270 languages

200 languages have at least 1,000 articles

408 million unique visitors a month

More than 80 percent of editors are male