The founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales on Friday said his current focus is India and Africa.
Entries in regional languages in the offing
The founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales on Friday said his current focus is India and Africa.
Wales, who is launching a new company, Wikia, said: “The big focus at the moment is Africa and India, where we’re trying to work with students and professors to contribute entries in local languages,” he said.
Wales has outlined plans for how Wikia, of which Search Wikia is a part, would become profitable.
Wikia — unlike Wikipedia, a charity — is aimed at generating advertising revenue by hosting a range of “wikis” where communities came together to discuss and post entries about select topics, he said.
He also rejected suggestions that contributors now had to be qualified in order to write entries on the site, saying that the recent changes had been designed to deter “vandals”.
Jimmy Wales said that changes to the online encyclopaedia which meant it would now be overseen by a group of “trusted editors” did not mean that ordinary users weren’t free to edit the site, only that they had to have been registered for 4 days before making a change.
This would hopefully lead to a reduction in the number of high profile pages — such as George W Bush’s — that suffered from spontaneous vandalism, he said, as well as improve the reliability of the site, which has been shown to be untrustworthy on several occasions of late.
“There are no plans to restrict anybody’s status,” Mr Wales said. “Anyone can make an edit, but if the user hasn’t been registered for at least 4 days, then it would have to be approved by someone who has been registered before going live.”
Wales acknowledged that Wikipedia’s reliability had come into question following the discovery that some organisations, including political parties, had been tweaking their entries to improve their image.
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