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"Recently, Digital Spy was lucky enough to catch up with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The website founder had been asked to present the Lifetime Achievement Award to Vic Hayes at last week&amp;#039;s Lovie Awards. For those not in the know, the Lovie awards aims to honour just about anything created from the internet, including apps, websites and video. Vic Hayes is described as the &amp;#039;Father of Wi-Fi&amp;#039; and was the chairman of the committee that created the 802.11 standard radio frequency - or in other words, Wi-Fi.   While our initial conversation was, predictably, about what Wi-Fi means to the world, Wales went on to talk frankly about Wikipedia, the importance of accuracy and even what he sees as the next big thing in technology. Read on to find out what he had to say... How do you think Wi-Fi has changed the way people interact with Wikipedia? Has it revolutionised the way we use the internet? &amp;quot;Definitely, when you think about the basic move from wired access to wireless - so that would be going from, back in the old days, dial-up, which was pretty slow. But even then, you move to DSL and faster technologies. &amp;quot;Still, you&amp;#039;re physically tethered to a certain thing, so a laptop is somewhat convenient, but not awesome for the internet because you&amp;#039;ve got to get somewhere and plug in.  &amp;quot;Once Wi-Fi came out and started becoming ubiquitous, suddenly the Internet starts being a little bit everywhere. Only a little bit everywhere in the early days. Now we&amp;#039;re moving even further with 3G and 4G and so on.  &amp;quot;Even now, Wi-Fi isn&amp;#039;t out of date. It&amp;#039;s still ubiquitous. I do think it means that there are things we take for granted - for example at a coffee shop, there will be the internet. &amp;quot;If you didn&amp;#039;t have Wi-Fi, then that wouldn&amp;#039;t be true. At best you might have little ethernet jacks in coffee shops if anybody took the expense to put them there. So it&amp;#039;s such a cheap and easy way to get Internet to everybody.&amp;quot; Do you think we take it for granted that we have a fundamental access to information instantly, because the internet is everywhere? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s quite easy to begin to take it for granted, just because it is everywhere. I think not everybody takes it for granted, but it&amp;#039;s easy to do on a daily basis. &amp;quot;I do sometimes, and if you really sit back and reflect, I think it&amp;#039;s good to talk to children sometimes because their view of the world reminds you, &amp;#039;Oh right, I remember when there was no internet&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; I can just about remember a time before the internet, and I&amp;#039;m 26. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll feel old when you think about how Wikipedia is now 12 years old. When you were 14, Wikipedia was just starting. &amp;quot;Think about a kid who&amp;#039;s 16 today - I chose 16 because that means when that kid was 4, Wikipedia was just starting - from the time that person starts to learn to read, Wikipedia existed. &amp;quot;More importantly in the last five years - between the age of 11 or so when you start going to the internet to do your homework or look up popstars or whatever you might be doing - Wikipedia was ubiquitous. It was huge by then.  &amp;quot;So for that generation, they can barely remember what it would be like to not have any access to the internet, to have it at your fingertips. It&amp;#039;s really remarkable to think about.&amp;quot;  Do you think things on the Internet have a moral obligation to be accurate, because in time people will see it as a reference point for how society was? &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one of the reasons. The other reason is because the people of today use [Wikipedia and the internet] all the time, and we rely on it... there is a heavy burden to try and do our best. So I think that&amp;#039;s quite important. &amp;quot;When we first started, there was a suggestion that we maybe should take a look at the 1911 edition of Britannica and just import it as a starting point. &amp;quot;Initially you&amp;#039;d think, &amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s interesting, that&amp;#039;d be a full comprehensive encyclopedia \u2013 a bit out of date&amp;#039;. But, why not? It was out of copyright. Somebody tried to do just that and imported some articles, and the truth is they were horrible. They were not very good. Way out of date.  &amp;quot;How much could have possibly changed about Julius Caesar since 1911? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. We look back and chuckle about the benighted earlier airheads and how stupid people were. But frankly, they&amp;#039;re just as smart as we are, right? In 100 years or 200 years it will be quite interesting for people to look back and see what kind of bonkers things we believed.&amp;quot; I think what&amp;#039;s also interesting is that Wikipedia is almost future proofed, as it&amp;#039;s always evolving. &amp;quot;Hopefully Wikipedia will stay up to date. Because we keep all of the past history, I think we&amp;#039;re almost, 12 and a half years on, at a point where certain things have changed. Not just simple things, but things that also have a sort of cultural component to them, what people believe and so on.  &amp;quot;The example I always like to think about is the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If you go back pre-War, even amongst people who were very opposed to the War \u2013 war protesters and so on \u2013 it was a general acceptance - maybe a few people said, &amp;#039;We don&amp;#039;t even know if Iraq has them&amp;#039; - that they had [WMDs]. The general argument was, &amp;#039;They have them, but they can&amp;#039;t hit Europe with them, they can&amp;#039;t hit America, so what&amp;#039;s the point? It&amp;#039;s not our fight&amp;#039;. &amp;quot;Then of course it&amp;#039;s emerged over time that beliefs shifted, so now most people say, &amp;#039;No, they didn&amp;#039;t have weapons of mass destruction, or if they did, they were so minimal that we can&amp;#039;t find them or any evidence of it&amp;#039;. So what&amp;#039;s interesting for future sociologists and anthropologists and historians is to go back and say, &amp;#039;How did that view shift?&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Because it wasn&amp;#039;t sort of one day \u2013 it took a few weeks. But it was still acquired in a short period of time. &amp;quot;When I was your age, Pluto was a planet. Pluto, as an example, is still Pluto. It doesn&amp;#039;t care what we think. But we&amp;#039;ve decided that it is something else, and that&amp;#039;s a big shift.&amp;quot; Changing topic, what is the next big thing that no one has spotted yet? &amp;quot;There were people \u2013 I wasn&amp;#039;t one of them \u2013 who were talking about tablets for years, and even when the iPad came out, I was like, &amp;#039;I don&amp;#039;t really get it. What is it for?&amp;#039; I have a computer, and it&amp;#039;s perfectly good. I have a perfectly nice phone in my pocket, so if I need Internet on the go, it&amp;#039;s here.  &amp;quot;Then I got an iPad, and thought it was amazing, it&amp;#039;s changed my life. So I think some of these things are hard to grasp until you use them.  &amp;quot;One area that I think is really, really ripe for dramatic change is televisions, and the interface of televisions.  &amp;quot;A year and a half, two years ago, I bought a new TV, 3D - which was a massive mistake - Sony, at the same time I was buying a Blu-ray player. I thought I should get the same brand, so everything will kind of work. It&amp;#039;s completely ridiculous \u2013 the user interface is as hopeless as ever, the remote control has 900 buttons. I don&amp;#039;t know how to use it.  &amp;quot;I feel like \u2013 my mom used me to hook up the VCR back in the day - and now I ask my 12-year-old daughter, &amp;#039;Could you please just make the sound system work?&amp;#039; She knows all the buttons and so on. It&amp;#039;s completely ridiculous.  &amp;quot;Then you think of things like the interface of the iPad. It&amp;#039;s so intuitive that a 2-year-old can operate it. Why is it that me - by all accounts someone who knows something about technology - can barely operate a television? I think it&amp;#039;s just going to be swept away very quickly.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m surprised that Apple haven&amp;#039;t really come big time into this market. Samsung is apparently doing interesting things. Google has got their eye on it.  &amp;quot;If you ask people about bits of technology in their life that don&amp;#039;t really work that well or they find annoying, everybody will say they want to get their DVD player to work and their Sky box to work seamlessly. &amp;quot;On a computer you don&amp;#039;t have this problem - you hook it up to a printer and it basically works. So I think that&amp;#039;s ripe for change.&amp;quot;  Wikipedia is a site that hasn&amp;#039;t changed that much in terms of looks throughout its lifetime, yet everyone still uses it. Is web design becoming overly complicated? &amp;quot;I think there&amp;#039;s a couple of ways at looking at that. So for the reader, Wikipedia works perfectly well. I mean, you can quibble about the placement of certain links or very detailed user experience. &amp;quot;But in terms of the overall function and the look, I think it&amp;#039;s fine. It&amp;#039;s really good for reading and it works. &amp;quot;For editors though, it&amp;#039;s not so easy. Even something as simple as [editing] something on Facebook, you edit in place, and you hit save, and you never reload the entire page. We don&amp;#039;t have that. When you want to edit a paragraph of an article, you don&amp;#039;t just click &amp;#039;edit&amp;#039; and it changes to an edit box, and you change it and you hit &amp;#039;save&amp;#039;.  &amp;quot;Instead, even if you click on just one section, it loads a whole new page. It&amp;#039;s quite old school and slower than it should be. Also, when you click &amp;#039;edit&amp;#039; you get the Wiki mark-up language, so that&amp;#039;s a real barrier for a lot of people. If you&amp;#039;re not a techie, it&amp;#039;s a bit of a challenge to do that. So I think that needs to change.  &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s other things like [adding] a photo to an article. We did a focus group study on it, but that was quite some time ago. That process has improved to some extent, but I suspect that you wouldn&amp;#039;t get that much better results. &amp;#039;Hi, you&amp;#039;ve never edited a Wikipedia. Here&amp;#039;s an article we want you to add a photo to, here&amp;#039;s the photo on your hard drive&amp;#039;. It just ended in tears, it&amp;#039;s impossible for any normal person to figure out.  &amp;quot;Now there&amp;#039;s a photo wizard, and it&amp;#039;s better. Why can&amp;#039;t it be as simple as dragging your photo on to the page, resize it and text moves, and it&amp;#039;s just there? That&amp;#039;s why you&amp;#039;d expect in the modern environment. And we&amp;#039;re just not there yet. So we&amp;#039;re trying to invest a lot in that.  &amp;quot;There are aspects of our user interface that are old-fashioned, but not for any good reason. And there are aspects that are old-fashioned because, you know, it&amp;#039;s an encyclopedia. It&amp;#039;s not supposed to be whizzing or anything like that.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/internet/news/a531591/interview-wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-on-the-future-of-the-internet/>