Wikipedia founder's speech at Iowa to focus on democracy

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is optimistic about what the growth of the Internet around the world will mean for the spread of democracy and information.

Millions of people who will get online in the next five or 10 years will be from countries where people haven't had much of a public voice or access to free-flowing information, Wales said. That will change the landscape, he said.

“The Internet by its nature makes censorship very, very difficult to enforce,” Wales said in a phone conference call Friday. “It becomes a lot trickier to (oppress) when you can't keep your people in the dark about what's going on.”

Wales will lecture at the University of Iowa at 7:30 p.m. March 8 on “Democracy and the Internet.” The speech in the Main Lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union is free and open to the public. His appearance is presented by the UI Lecture Committee through the spring 2011 F. Wendell Miller Fund.

Wikipedia has worked hard on the issue of freedom of speech around the world, Wales said. The website has been blocked in the past in China, Wales said, and the company has fought censorship there.

The Internet's role in democracy depends on the people who are using the technology to organize for good or to spark political protests, Wales said. He encourages young people to think about how tools such as Facebook and Wikipedia can be used in the broader context of society.

“Use them to do things that are important and meaningful,” he said.

The origins of Wikipedia, an international, collaborative free-content encyclopedia on the Internet, began in March 2000, when Wales started Nupedia, which was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to professional encyclopedias. With the addition of wikis - a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content - the project was dubbed Wikipedia.