I guess it should not have come as a surprise that Jimmy Wales’s keynote at the Creativity World Forum 2011 resembled an entry in his own encyclopedia. In a one-hour presentation crammed with facts, the co-founder of Wikipedia guided us through a highly structured story of the world’s largest and fastest growing (online) encyclopedia. His leitmotif? “Fail, fail, fail” (reminiscent of what the famous playwright Samuel Beckett once said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”). Not exactly an earth-shattering piece of advice, though one that would be repeated onstage throughout the rest of the day.

Interestingly, prior to setting up Wikipedia as we know it today, Wales launched a version which would be written by experts only and generate income through advertising. He thought it a brilliant idea. It turned out otherwise. After spending 250.000 USD on the first 12 articles alone, he then went for the (quote) “dumb idea”, got rid of the ads and allowed everyone to contribute content. Oh, and he did not have a business plan either. This dumb idea turned out to herald the birth of Wikipedia.

The facts and figures are well known: Wikipedia currently has around 420 million visitors per month, and contains over 20 million articles in roughly 270 languages. The average contributor – or wikipedian – is a 26-year-old male geek with too much free time on his hands. More interestingly, Jimmy Wales also gave a number of examples on how nations and specific types of content seem to be connected. The Japanese are mainly interested in pop culture (no surprise). The Germans are in geography (no surprise?). Everyone is interested in sex, except the French and the Spanish (probably too busy doing it). He talked extensively about China, where Wikipedia was banned for 3 years and roughly 0.1% of its content (on touchy subjects such as the Dalai Lama, Tienanmen Square, …) is still censored by the government. Apparently Wikipedia has become so popular there, that it often appears on menus as a side dish or a sauce (“Wikipedia fried in eggs”). Funny aside: this is probably due to the 2008 Olympics in Bejing. Chinese restaurant owners used Google to translate the names of the food they served, and might just have liked the sound of the word “wikipedia” (which, as we know, always shows up high in the search results).

In the organisational structure of Wikimedia (the foundation that owns Wikipedia), Jimmy Wales sees himself as the monarch. By which he means: the one showing up at the parades.  The real work, he says, is done by the millions of volunteers who write, edit and check its entries, so that anyone (with an internet connection) can be given access to “the sum of all human knowledge”. Jimmy Wales wrapped up by saying that none of this success would have been possible if he had not failed miserably and repeatedly in his previous business adventures. An uplifting thought …

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