Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

If you're reading a blog, the chances are that you're familiar with Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia whose entries are written by a global community of users. Despite the doubters who cast aspersions on the project from the moment it came online, Wikipedia has grown to become an encyclopedia that's six times as large as Britannica by number of entries and, a fairer comparison, as Wikipedia configures its entries differently, twice the size of Britannica by word count. But the really interesting statistic is traffic — not compared with Britannica, though, but with the major players on the web. Wikipedia, with 400 million pageviews a month, now has more traffic than Paypal, more than USAToday.com (300 million pageviews and 180 online staff), and it's getting close to NYTimes.com. All this with volunteers, by the way.

When Mark Hurst of Good Experience recently spoke to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the following exchange took place:

Hurst: Do you have any plans to sell Wikipedia or make money from it?

Wales: Not Wikipedia. I do have Wikicities, a for-profit venture, on the side. But I'm pretty firm about the big-picture mission about Wikipedia: it's a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet. That's what drives my entire life. I have enough money that I don't need money. I mean, I have a Ferrari. OK, now what? Let's do something cool. It's more cool to think about totally changing the landscape — for example, by radically undercutting the market for proprietary textbooks.

Hurst: Textbooks?

Wales: On Wikibooks, there's a growing community of people working on textbooks: a complete K through 12 curriculum, and on through university level, for all subjects. It's just getting started, and it's a long-term project. But how cool is that?

Hurst: Very cool.

Jimmy Wales is a man with a vision. And they're the ones to watch. Here's Mark Hurst's cool interview with Wikipedia's visionary founder.