Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has contributed to New Media Order Conference on 5th of October’11 which was organized by Dogus Yayin Holding in Lutfi Kirdar Congress Center in Istanbul, Turkey.

Here are some key points from his speech.

• Wikipedia means free access to knowledge.
• Wikipedia is a free licensed encyclopedia.
• Wikipedia is free. Means no license. It is freely distributed in DVD in some schools in Argentina that doesn’t have internet access.
• There are over 16 million articles in Wikipedia. Articles are written in 270 different languages.
• From those, 200 languages have at least 1000 articles.
• 3.5m articles in English. 1m articles in German and French each. In Italian there are more than 850k. For Turkish this number is 170k.
• “Wikipedia was banned in China till the olympic games. It is unblocked now but it is strictly filtered. I am very disapproved with that. Changes are happening but it is very slow.”
• About censorship, “Some Chinese college students haven’t heard Wikipedia it yet.”
• In China there is a bread company called Wekipedia. There are some foods on menus in restaurants such as “Stir fried Wikipedia” and “Stir eggs with Wikipedia”. “At least we are known somehow..” he said.
• Interesting global content comparisons;
– Japanese love pop culture. Most of the articles are about pop culture.
– Germans like to write about geography.
– Spanish love to read science and tech.
• There are 408m unique visitors per month in Wikipedia. This number means more readers than sum of the top 20 newspapers.
• Wikipedia users are %87 male. “It has to be changed. It always had been computer geeky thing. Tech barrier (difficulty in editing pages) may be preventing women editing Wikipedia.” he mentioned.
• Average age of Wikipedia users is 26.
• Here is an interesting info; “Wikipedia pages are mostly edited by PhD’s.” That’s weird.
• Wikipedia users are in intersection of those; “Intelligence, obsession and free time.”
• Basic principles:
– Wikipedia is new encyclopedia.
– Neutral point of view.(NPOV principle)
– Free licensed.
– Civility – No personal attacks. Think about ideas.
– No firm rules.
– Wikipedia is not anarchy.
– Consensus rather than Voting. Majority wins in voting.
– Democracy
– Aristocracy
– Monarchy
• Wikipedia’s money source is “donates”. Some of them from foundation grands and some from small and large donors.
• Wikimedia foundation: It has only 70 employees and 100.000 volunteers.
• Languages of developing countries. “We try to encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia and as a matter of fact, increase the number of articles in developing countries.”
– Hindi – 67k
– Telegu – 47k
– Marathi – 32k
– Tamil – 27k
– Bengali – 22k
• Future? Wikia – New project.
– Recipies wiki. It has only recipies. (46m monthly visitors)
– Lostpedia (Over 70 thousand articles) – “Article about the book Sawyer read on shore in Lost series is included in Lostpedia. Writers read Lostpedia about the theories that were shared by the audience. There was something in Lost series; when characters say Canada it meant they were lying. People found out that in Lostpedia.”