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"  Over the last decade, we have made our institutional admiration for Wikipedia pretty clear. (Just ask George Clooney.) Not that anyone needs to tell you how fantastic it is to have an institutional approach to knowledge in which the institution is... everyone. (Just ask the folks at Encarta.) So quickly has Wikipedia evolved that using it as a verb seems trite, using it to end an argument obvious. (For the fights on string theory, though \u2014 incredible.) So now that it&amp;#039;s everywhere, what does the open-source encyclopedia do for the next ten years? Simple, co-founder Jimmy Wales tells Esquire.com: put everywhere in the encyclopedia. ESQUIRE: We are not the only ones excited to celebrate this occasion. How do you account, beyond numbers, account for the fervor over what you&amp;#039;ve created? JIMMY WALES: It&amp;#039;s because Wikipedia&amp;#039;s cultural. People sense that it&amp;#039;s part of this big change in society. ESQ: Distill it into a Wikipedia-sized byte of knowledge, though. How has this thing literally changed the world?   JW: People now have a very high level of demand for basic information. In the past you&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;I should look that up sometime,&amp;quot; and now you actually do look that up. In the developing world, we&amp;#039;re bringing information to people who never had information at all. There&amp;#039;s never existed an encyclopedia in the Swahili language before. Now? There are 20,000 articles in Swahili Wikipedia and in the next ten years: 250,000, 500,000... ESQ: Have you personally seen palpable changes happening in developing nations because of Wikipedia? JW: Yeah. I&amp;#039;ve had some fun experiences. I was in the Dominican Republic, I went to a computer lab that the First Lady built at a farm. Three years prior to my visit, they didn&amp;#039;t even have electricity. It&amp;#039;s a shack, in a real squatter-colony type of village, and I walked in, and the kids there were doing all the normal things kids do on the Internet. They were on YouTube, they were on Google, on Wikipedia. These kids, three years ago, would have had nothing in terms of access to information. Now they&amp;#039;re online and they&amp;#039;re studying, they&amp;#039;re reading headlines. They can learn about their local politics, they can learn &amp;quot;Why is it that I live in a tin-roof shack? What&amp;#039;s going on in the world? Is it time for me to demand a piece of the action?&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;m excited about India \u2014 Southeast Asia in general. We&amp;#039;re going to see remarkable changes. ESQ: Do you ever worry that access to this kind of information could be dangerous to geopolitical stability? JW: Not really. You look at the cause of the war and the inability that people have to come to solutions for problems, it&amp;#039;s not because they know things. It&amp;#039;s because they don&amp;#039;t know things. People are easily manipulated by propaganda, and they don&amp;#039;t have a solid basis of knowledge. You can look at what happened in Rwanda as really driven by ignorance and propaganda and frightening people. A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information. If they have better access to information they can say &amp;quot;I really disagree with these people but they&amp;#039;re human beings and they&amp;#039;re reasonable and we can have a conversation&amp;quot; as opposed to &amp;quot;Oh my god, they&amp;#039;re Jews, we have to kill them,&amp;quot; for example. ESQ: Where else have you seen this change evident abroad that we wouldn&amp;#039;t necessarily have immediate access to understanding?  JW: I was in a slum in Delhi touring schools there. I met this young man in the street who told me that they had just gotten electricity recently, and his family was a little more well-to-do \u2014 they had dial-up Internet access. He told me he used Wikipedia to pass his eleventh-grade exams. He went on: &amp;quot;I also use it to find pickup lines for girls.&amp;quot; I laughed. His father was growling at him.  ESQ: Pickup lines aside, in America, open-source technology is still sometimes viewed with a hint of distrust. JW: Sure. ESQ: Will people ever fully trust the concept that you can get something substantial for free, from a non-profit entity, and that it can in fact be great?  JW: I think people are starting to get used to it. It&amp;#039;s sort of a blunt fact. Just earlier today I had a pretty tough interview from kind of an older guy: He was peppering me one question after another, super-skeptical about Wikipedia. We get done and the interview&amp;#039;s over and, you know, off-camera he says to me &amp;quot;I love Wikipedia, I use it every day.&amp;quot; [Laughing] It&amp;#039;s like, he can&amp;#039;t quite believe it, so he doesn&amp;#039;t quite get it! And he&amp;#039;s got these objections, but at a deeper level? He knows it&amp;#039;s actually pretty good.  ESQ: Fair enough. What about the lighter side of Wikipedia? Everyone&amp;#039;s got their favorite argument settlers, the pieces they keep going back to, the ones they really just... enjoyed. What are yours?  JW: There&amp;#039;s an article called &amp;quot;Heavy Metal Umlat&amp;quot; about the propensity of many metal bands to put an umlaut over letters in their name, even if it makes no grammatical sense, in any language. I laughed when I read that one. ESQ: Have you ever been watching a show like, say, Lost and used Wikipedia to dig up a reference? JW: Well, Lostpedia is at Wikia, one of my for-profit companies. We have 8,000 entries on Lost. A fun thing about that one: I met [Lost creator] J.J. Abrams. He told me the writers used Lostpedia when they were writing the show. ESQ: There&amp;#039;s also a Muppet Wikipedia, right?  JW: Oh yeah, Muppet Wiki is fabulous. Twenty-two thousand articles about Muppets. Amazing.  ESQ: Christ. Twenty-two thousand? JW: I asked Danny, the founder of the Muppet Wiki: &amp;quot;You guys must be running out of things to write about,&amp;quot; and he said &amp;quot;Oh, no, we&amp;#039;re just getting started.&amp;quot; They have plans for 100,000 entries. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a9210/jimmy-wales-interview-4847748/>