Jimmy Wales
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2015
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales.
He is best known as the co-founder of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and was the eldest child of a grocery store manager and his wife who ran a primary school where Jimmy and his siblings were educated. After acquiring a degree in finance and working as a trader in Chicago, his first serious foray into the online world was with the web portal Bomis, before branching out with a project called Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with entries written by scholars and published after undergoing peer review.
Wikipedia launched in 2001 and now exists in 287 languages and is the 7th most accessed website in the world with over 20 billion page views per month. It can be edited by anyone though relies on a core of around 5,000 volunteers who are responsible for the majority of the content. It is Jimmy's aim to create "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales. The co-founder of Wikipedia, |
| 0:41.0 | his free online invention has been little short of revolutionary, in democratizing |
| 0:46.4 | and energizing the way the world disseminates and access his information. |
| 0:51.0 | He thinks big. His ambition is for a world in which every single person on the planet |
| 0:56.6 | is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. |
| 1:00.0 | It's going pretty well. Wikipedia currently exists in 287 languages, is the fifth most accessed |
| 1:07.5 | website in the world and has 20 billion page views a month. He comes from a well-established line of self-starters. The one-room |
| 1:16.0 | Alabama schoolhouse where he learned to read and write was set up by his mother and grandmother. |
| 1:20.5 | His uncle ran one of the town's first computer stores. He says of |
| 1:25.7 | Wikipedia, I was confident it would work right from the beginning. I have to admit |
| 1:30.6 | though that on that first day I woke up a few times in the night to |
| 1:33.9 | log on and check nobody had wrecked the whole project so welcome Jimmy Wales. |
| 1:38.1 | The beginning then was only about 14 years ago I think of Wikipedia in terms terms of sharing information, in terms of how we access |
| 1:45.2 | information, now that almost seems like the olden days. What do you make of the pace of change |
| 1:50.8 | and the really central role that technology has in the way we understand |
| 1:55.2 | the world we live in. |
| 1:57.0 | Well it's true that if you think about an 18-19 year old so someone who's just on the verge of entering university |
| 2:04.0 | Wikipedia has been there since they were learning how to read and certainly in the |
| 2:08.6 | last five years you know the age when they would have started to go to the |
| 2:11.9 | internet for their homework or for whatever interest them |
... |
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