In Search of an Online Utopia

Jimmy Wales describes himself as a pathological optimist. He’d have to be. The 40-year-old former options trader is the founder of Wikipedia , the free online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit any entry—a by-the-people-for-the-people approach that Wales describes as a bid to give everyone free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

The Wikipedia phenom currently has more than 5 million entries in multiple languages and draws an estimated 7 billion page views a month. Now Wales—known to Wikipedians worldwide as the “God King”—is embarking on a new venture: a new wiki-inspired search engine than plans to rely on human intelligence “to do what algorithms cannot.” Wales spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Arlene Getz about his work, his Bono connection, the money he hasn’t made from Wikipedia and what Microsoft’s Bill Gates said to him when they met at last week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos . Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How did you come up with Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales: I had the idea for a freely licensed [online] encyclopedia written by people in various languages in 1999, and I had a philosophy student design it. The problem was that it had a top-down design and was way too slow. Then we discovered the wiki software concept, invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995. It was a place where programmers stored their ideas—and a Web site that anyone can edit. So we started Wikipedia in January 2001.

Weren’t you worried about what would be put up there?

Yes, when I first started I would actually wake up at night to go down and check what was being posted.