The great encyclopaedia of the network could not be represented by a better profile: a young American businessman of Indian descent and Japanese scholar, visionary and philanthropic.
Takanao Kul Wadhwa, head of Wikimedia, came to Barcelona on February 22 with the commissioning of a conference at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), looking askance at the international mobile macro-meeting recently held in the city. He speaks many languages, probably because he likes to talk. His Asian manners lead him to meditate everything he says with a gentle smile, and to concisely answer each formulated question.
Jordi Montaner | 2 March 2010
Your industriousness causes vertigo…
It's what happens when you do what you like, on a voluntary basis. Since 2001, we created 13 million articles in 271 languages. We have filled 17 million pages with 325 million entries. We received 350 million visits per month, with 100,000 active partners who provide us with data on average five times every 30 days... And we just have 35 full time employees.
Efficient company ever there, but it seems to me that the issue of expanding knowledge beyond pure entertainment does not generate many dividends. We must not forget that the service they provide is for free.
We work for the community, a community that requires the use of technologies to benefit from our offerings. These technologies incorporate ongoing novelties in the market and there is great desire to consume in this direction ... Here in Barcelona we have recently attended a major meeting of experts in mobile telephony avid of content with which to exploit their technologies. Wikimedia in this sense operates as a suitable platform.
Besides Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, we have a universal Wiktionary, Wikitext (a library of documents), Wikidisayings (a collection of universal sayings and quotations), Wikibooks (we have published fifty-books until now), Wikispecies (a collection of natural species, with their description, biological data, etc.), Wikinews, Wikimedia Commons (a media repository), Wikiversity (a virtual university) and Meta-Wiki (Multilingual coordination service) ... We'll see what else we can think of in the future.
Wikipedia's detractors blame you for being too lenient. The information is not well contrasted or monitored by experts...
The initial idea of the project was to work only with experts to substantiate the value of the uploaded information, especially in science, but we discovered that in an open and interactive work of this nature, the information bias are corrected with great immediacy and almost spontaneously... Everyone is free to contribute with their views and their data. There may be a ball of initial facts or figures, but eventually we learned that it stabilizes in its most commonly accepted way. However, I admit that 30% of the data may contain data that has not yet been verified. The speed with which things are said is superior to the one to contrast it with.
The great discovery of Wikimedia is the power of Internet users around the world to freely and spontaneously agree on procedural grounds.
Internet is in this sense, a democratic revolution without precedent.
Infused science for all…
And not only science. Only a third of the entries in the web in Spanish relate to scientific issues. People also like to look for curiosities, current issues, cultural references or the true identity of characters in the sport, film or television.
They may seem minor issues, frivolous, but it is the stuff which our society is fed with, and ours is a free social encyclopaedia.
Among your many projects is the one of building a virtual university... That may be the end of the major university institutions, the deans will be left without work.
I do not think so. It is about these universities, without underestimating their past or tradition, to remain open, exposed to the future. And the future is on the network.
I had the opportunity to learn the intricacies with which the UOC operate and I believe it to be a good example of an efficient university for the future... An anecdote: the first wikipedia written in a language other than English was the Catalan Viquipèdia.
Apart of some universities, the publishing industry is also trembling…
We are living a spontaneous revolution, not a directed one, a free one. Internet challenges many old rules of how to disseminate knowledge and do business with culture... One only needs to see what is happening. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, all these companies have started to operate as publishers of books, music and movies. One will need to agree on legal matters and competition, but the dice has already been cast.
Do you think that all the cultures that today survive on this planet can compete on the Internet with equal opportunities?
It is one of our main concerns. It will not be easy without all of these cultures beginning to have a platform of expression.
In Wikimedia we turned multiculturalism into one of our first purposes. The definitions of everything may vary depending on what culture interprets them. Thus our data is neither unique nor unambiguous, we admit multiple aspects of a common reality; we either reach our goal together, or nobody does.
I recognize, however, that this is the hardest part of our work.
You have quoted the big companies of the sector. Are you worried that they end up devouring one another for the management of common interests?
The network does not admit monopolies, but also, things happen here as if we would all be dependent from each other. Many multinationals are required to make transfer patents and technologies' agreements with others... Let's say there's more willingness to sit down and talk than to inaugurate a trade war.
DIDEROT'S DREAM Encyclopaedia is a word of Greek origin and refers to a club or circle of knowledge. Since the French aristocrat Denis Diderot coined this term in the eighteenth century to summarize human knowledge and to muster the specialized or dispersed data collection that could not be found easily anywhere else, the adventure has seemed very revolutionary and therefore difficult to control; the same revolution that many of the first encyclopaedists had served, eventually finished by putting them into jail or under the guillotine.
The modern Wikipedia is set to serve 10 years of disseminating knowledge freely and without hierarchy. A complex computer system allows data to be updated or corrected anonymously, preventing abuse by hackers and, yes, paying the price of a relative accuracy in terms of concepts. It is managed by a foundation (Wikimedia) that feeds on private funds, independently of political and economic groups. Wadhwa's prophecy that large operators can be more open to collaborate than compete, is exemplified by a donation of two million dollars that Wikimedia has received a few days ago by the giant Google.
