Business Daily meets: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We hear how a free online encyclopaedia, run by volunteers, became one of the internet's most popular sites.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales tells about the ideals which helped him build the site, and the challenges its now facing, from AI to political criticism.
Presenter: Chris Vallance Producers: Hannah Bewley and Niamh McDermott
(Image: Jimmy Wales photographed at Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, welcome to Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:11.7 | I'm Chris Valence. |
| 0:13.1 | Today we meet the pioneer of a website that gets billions of visits every month, |
| 0:16.9 | but its co-founder is by no means a billionaire himself. |
| 0:20.6 | Could you have been a tech bro? |
| 0:21.9 | I think that's very unlikely. Why is it unlikely? Well, I am me. I'm just me. I've always |
| 0:28.1 | just been me and I've always just been a geek and I just like making things. |
| 0:31.8 | The American internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia in 2001. The free online encyclopedia features 65 million |
| 0:40.8 | articles in 300 languages, all created by hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors. But as this |
| 0:48.2 | collaborative success story is coming under increasing attacks in a polarized online world, |
| 0:53.7 | can it survive? |
| 0:55.2 | Funding is from the general public, and every time Elon rants about us, we see a surge in donations, |
| 1:01.0 | so, you know, whatever. |
| 1:02.3 | We don't have any funding from the US federal government. |
| 1:05.6 | We don't have funding from any government. |
| 1:07.2 | That's all coming up in today's Business Daily. |
| 1:13.2 | What's it like being Jimmy Wales? I mean, do you get a lot of people who expect you to know |
| 1:17.5 | everything? I always do joke that for a pub quiz or the family's Christmas quiz, there's no |
| 1:24.7 | upside for me because if I, I do well everybody's well, well |
| 1:29.1 | of course he did well. He's the Wikipedia guy and if I do poorly, everybody's like, I beat the |
| 1:32.3 | Wikipedia guy in a quiz. Yeah. So yeah, people do at least jokingly think that. Have you sort |
... |
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