English subtitles for clip: File:Wikimania - the Wikimentary.webm

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Last August, I flew to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, for my first encounter with Wikimania.

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Here at a local youth hostel, hundreds of people from dozens of countries gathered

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for a week's worth of conferences, conversation, and conviviality.

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All united by one goal: creating a free on-line encyclopedia in every language on Earth.

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Wikipedia.org, the web site where this encyclopedia can be found, now ranks among the

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most visited and valuable in the world. It was created at virtually no cost by volunteers,

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these self-styled Wikipedians, using an innovative computer program called a wiki,

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which enables anyone to write and edit on a web page.

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(Wales:) "I originally had the idea for a free encyclopedia two years prior to Wikipedia."

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Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales: "I hired a PhD in philosophy who helped me and we organized

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a very top-down, old-fashioned project with a seven-stage review process for articles.

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And this was really a dismal failure. The main reason it was a failure I think is that

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it wasn't very much fun for contributors."

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Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, or writable web page program, a decade ago.

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Would it be fair to say, you are the father of the wiki?

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I'm certainly the father of the name. I was borrowing heavily from all the hypertext systems

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that preceded it. But I think there was a promise for the writable Web when the Web was

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first conceived. The word wiki came from my brief experience with Hawaiian:

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the Hawaiian word for quick was wiki. I learned the word at the Hawaiian airport

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when they told me to catch the Wiki Wiki bus. I'm glad I chose that word because it's managed

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to stick and bring with it a lot of good vibes from a lot of people.

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We've started using that and then that was almost immediately a big success.

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So we had more work done in two weeks than we'd done in two years!

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But what exactly is a wiki?

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It's a site where anybody can add to or correct information they find there,

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that's done by adding a button to every page that says, Edit this page.

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And when you're done editing you can press Save and it's there!

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Somewhat unwittingly, Cunningham had created a fantastic social networking tool.

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But it took the vision of Wales and what rapidly turned into a global volunteer on-line army

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to take wikis to the next level. Offered the chance to create their own content

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and handed a tool that made doing so easy and fun, the community soon began to coalesce.

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The wiki is an empowering thing.

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It lets people who might not otherwise have a voice, have a voice.

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In rapid order, thousands, then tens of thousands, then literally hundreds of thousands

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of articles, photographs, illustrations, and maps were contributed, corrected, improved

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and posted on-line. The English- and German-language Wikipedias took off first,

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followed by French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Esperanto, and

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to the dismay of some, even Klingon!

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(Wales:) I think in the dot-com era, the Internet started to seem like it was mostly

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about pop-up ads and porn spam and buying dog food on the Internet and things like that.

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And now I think people are starting to realize it really is about a global conversation

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and a global community.

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I think what's important is that people have experienced that they know the Net can

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be more than a shopping mall. It can be a place where they create as well as consume.

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The wiki way is to, you leave everything open and you just say, hey I trust you.

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And that gives people the opportunity to do good and it's a way

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of building trust among the people.

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Wikipedians have also begun exploring other uses of the wiki: Need an on-line dictionary?

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Enter the Wiktionary. A better Bartlett's? Wikiquote.

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A repository of source text in any language? Wikisource.

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A citizen-powered solution to the crisis in journalism? Bingo, Wikinews.

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All available via the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its mission:

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to promote the creation of educational content and to make it available

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to the public free of charge.

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The more you give away, the more you get! We wouldn't have 1.4 million page views a month

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if we didn't give it all away. So it's a very interesting phenomenon.

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We're only now beginning to understand what the impact of a large-scale wiki could be.

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And the wiki way continues its rapid spread around the globe. The latest next big thing in IT.

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I think Wikipedia is the most interesting thing I know of in all of information technology.

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Mitch Kapor designed Lotus 1-2-3, which made PCs ubiquitous in the business world of the 1980s.

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So is this the Big Bang of the next information revolution?

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Yeah, I actually think it is, this is the Big Bang. Because (of) the economics:

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It's very interesting. I don't think, even if you had a hundred million dollars or

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a billion dollars and five years, you could have paid people to create a Wikipedia.

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I think it is something which is just beyond money. You couldn't organize it, you

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couldn't hire them, you couldn't do it. And so when you have that kind of a radical shift

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in economics, you have to ask, where else is this going to happen? How far is it going to go?

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The Wiki Bang is so big it even got my attention! I'd gone to Frankfurt to make

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a documentary. I came back imbued with a new spirit of collaboration, and instead began

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editing the world's first wikimentary, a collaborative experiment in filmmaking

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that will play out on-line over the next several months.

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You do have to submerge your ego a little bit, so it is not for everyone.

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Andrew Lee is a researcher at the University of Hong Kong.

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"Wikipedia is not for everyone, you have to believe in some kind of community spirit

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or the fact that you are building part of a greater whole and that you can actually

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hand off your work to someone who can run with that and make it better and better and better.

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And this is very different than someone who says, this is my newspaper column, this is my article,

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and my name is at the bottom of it and no one should touch this. It's a very different concept."

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And why not, after all it's a wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki world!