Jimmy Wales Announces Launching Wikia Search from the BA
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Alexandria—
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikimedia Foundation, gave a lecture at the BA on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 entitled: “Wikipedia, Wikia, and the Future of Free Culture”. He talked about his role in founding Wikipedia, which is an online free content encyclopedia. He also talked about Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization aiming at collecting and developing the educational content and disseminating it globally.
At the beginning of the lecture, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the BA described Jimmy Wales as a 21st Century inventor with a visionary mind. He said that the BA is proud to celebrate the 100th lecture of the Dialogue Forum and this is a celebration of a hundred lectures symbolizing freedom of expression and accessibility of knowledge. He said that Wikipedia is a paradigm of the new form of knowledge.
In his presentation, Wales focused on three main themes: Where Wikipedia is today, Wikia Philosophy, and Wikia Search, the new search engine. Wales said that we should imagine a world, through which we can access the entire gamut of human knowledge. This was the main idea behind the establishment of Wikipedia, which became one of the most visited sites in the world; in Germany, it is the 6th most visited site, in America and Japan, it ranked 8th, in India, it ranked 10th, and in Egypt it came in the 40th place”.
He also mentioned that the site has articles in 155 languages. The English section has 2.5 million articles in comparison to the Arabic section which contains only 64.504 articles.
He mentioned that Wikipedia was founded with a little budget, with total expenditure of 200,000 $US and expenses due to the development of the encyclopedia increased to reach 2.9 million $US.
About Wikimania, which the BA hosts its fourth round, he said that organizers are keen to hold the Conference in a different part of the world every year to spread their ideas over as many parts of the world as possible, and to reply to the queries volunteers from different parts of the world have. He also said that he expected Wikimania 2009 to be held in South America.
Wales defined Wikia as the largest project of the largest media company in the world which deals with free content and aims to create, disseminate, and find electronic programs to help internet users access information easily, and to help the 21st century youth play a role in the process of making information accessible to all.
Wales, then moved to introduce the principles of Wikia which are: transparency, cooperation, quality, and privacy. He stated that it is expected that “Wikia Search” will be launched in a year and a half, a search engine that will enable internet users to locate the most relevant websites and eliminate all other less accurate ones. The team is currently working on laying the search tools and finding the participants, noting that in order to launch the search engine in Arabic linguistic support will be needed.
At the end of the presentation, Wales answered several questions about the new “Wikia Search”.