The Saturday interview: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales

Viewed by 400m people a month all over the world, Wikipedia has become the go-to website for anybody wanting to find out anything. Its founder Jimmy Wales talks to Aida EdemariamJimmy Wales seems distracted. He checks his phone, stares at the ceiling, at the table, and checks his phone again. I assume, initially, that this is how he generally conducts meetings, but it turns out there’s a reason: his second child is late arriving, and “we’re pacing the floors.” “We” is he and Kate Garvey, late of Number 10, where she was Tony Blair’s diary secretary (as he reminds me, proudly) and now a director at Freud communications; they met at Davos a couple of years ago, and now he’s moving to Britain to be with her. He will still commute to Florida, where his first daughter lives with her mother, every second week, as well as taking frequent trips all over the world, especially to India, where he is setting up Wikipedia’s first office outside the US.It’s a surprise, in a way, that this is the company’s first outpost. Wikipedia, which turned 10 last month, often seems completely ubiquitous. Plug any word into the internet – pylon, griffin, moonwalk – and there Wikipedia is, eagerly offering its services. And not just in English: the encyclopedia currently exists in 278 languages, from Kalmyk to Crimean Tatar, Sanskrit to Inuktitut. It is viewed by more than 400 million people a month, and 11.6m edits are made on its articles every month (it is, after all, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”). And all of them will now know exactly what the co-founder (or founder – it’s disputed territory) of Wikipedia looks like: the not-for-profit concern has just come to the end of its annual fundraising drive. Tests had shown that if they put Wales’s face on the appeals, as opposed to anyone else, or nothing at all, they got twice the response. So there he was, any time you looked anything up – pensive, smiling, matey, gazing into the distance, or some combination of the above – and asking for money.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/feb/19/interview-jimmy-wales-wikipedia