Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joins journalist Christopher Lydon to address the direction of web 2.0 and how Objectivist philosophy guides his vision.
Across the globe we are building, editing, and contributing to a growing body of knowledge and tools at everyone's fingertips. Volunteers in leaderless organizations contribute to online initiatives and articles. Software developers spend their free time collaborating with complete strangers.
Amazingly, these efforts are creating products of extraordinary quality, sometimes better than that of large for-profit organizations.
Why do we do it? Why does it work?- Ford Hall Forum
Bio
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity which operates Wikipedia.org, and as the co-founder of Wikia.com.
Wales received his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his Master's in finance from University of Alabama. He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2005 and in 2006, he joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
In January of 2001, Wales started Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and today Wikipedia and its sister projects are among the top-five most visited sites on the web. In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Wikipedia.org. The Foundation, now based in downtown San Francisco, boasts a staff of close to thirty focusing on fundraising, technology, and programming relating to the expansion of Wikipedia. Wales now sits on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and as founder continues to act as a key spokesperson.
In 2004, Wales co-founded Wikia.com, a completely separate company that enables groups of people to share information and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Wikia's community-created wikis range from video games and movies to finance and environmental issues. Wikia's network is now ranked in the top 75 of all websites according to Quantcast.com, and strong growth continues.
Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize in 2011, the Monaco Media Prize, the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist, The 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award,and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment. In 2007, The World Economic Forum recognized Wales as one of the 'Young Global Leaders.' This prestigious award acknowledges the top 250 young leaders for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. In addition, Wales received the 'Time 100 Award' in 2006, as he was named one of the world's most influential people in the 'Scientists & Thinkers' category.
It seems to me that a few years ago Google would come up with results so relevent that I thought they were reading my mind. The difference today is obvious. Commercialism (money) dominates and has won out in the search engine world. Any algorithm or encryption, for that matter, has been proven fallible time after time. One thing that has not, however, been conquered by wisdom is fortune, a.k.a. Randomness.
There should be a search engine whose results are purely random as long as it contains only one of the search terms. That is, if you type in "Mets" a blog containing the typagraphically wrong sentence "She mets me at the restaurant and we had a wonderful meal" has the same weight of being in the top ten hits as would mets.mlb.com.
With the amount of information available on the internet today, randomness might be more enlightening than relevance.
I'm not sure if your complaint is with the subject or the presentation, but according to his logic the Mzoli's article is legitimate. Just because "you" (meaning anyone) don't care about Mzoli's or Pokemon does not negate the fact they are verifiable entities. I would also argue their cultural relevance as being reason for keeping them up; what some random guy ate for breakfast is not relevant to anyone or anything, whereas even though I could care less about Pokemon, it has a cultural significance far beyond the average Wiki users daily activities.
I wonder what Jimbo would have said about the verifiability of "Mzoli's" -- the horrid stub of an article that he created, only to be "saved" to the level of verifiability by his many sycophants on the project? Places like Mzoli's are ROUTINELY deleted from Wikipedia, but since Mzoli's had the mark of Jimbo, it stayed.
member. 
