Innovation talk series launches with Jimmy Wales

Wales was named by Time magazine last year as one of the top most influential people in the world and by Forbes magazine as twelfth in its first annual “The Web Celebs 25“.

According to Time, “Wales, 39, is a former options trader who in 1999 set out to reinvent the encyclopedia for the Internet age—free, up-to-date and available to all. He started the way most encyclopedists start, by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review. After 18 months, he had a pitiful 12 entries; at that rate, it would take a few millenniums to equal Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Wales created a free-form companion site based on a little-known software program called a wiki (the Hawaiian term means quick) that makes it easy—with the “edit this page” button—to enter and track changes to Web pages. The effect was explosive. That simple button turned readers into contributors and contributors into evangelists. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, nearly 10 times as many as in Britannica. That number nearly doubles each year. And most extraordinarily, the site has not been defaced by vandals or hijacked by zealots. Or more precisely, it is vandalized every day but is usually repaired within minutes by any one of the millions of users who are motivated to protect and nurture the site.”

Wales will talk about Wikipedia and the launch of the South African Wikipedias that will move us one step closer to Wales' greatest goal: “to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language”.

He will also talk about his latest venture, Wikia, which aims take the powerful principles that have informed Wikipedia's success and apply these to create potentially profitable business models. It's a bold step which has captured the attention of pioneers within both the online and corporate worlds.

Details

When: Tuesday, 13 November at 4pm
Where: The Grace Hotel, 54 Bath Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg
How much: R500 per person (all profits go towards Wikipedia Academies in South Africa)

Limited seats are available, so register now at http://icommons.org/inns_registration. For more information, tel +27 (0)11 327 3155 or email .

• iCommons (www.icommons.org) works on a number of projects and campaigns to help build the capacity of people around the world working to grow the awareness and availability of commons-based knowledge and culture. From Heritage Day sprints in South Africa, to the development of software to promote and organise commons-related projects/nodes, to the annual iSummit that brings together people from around the world to celebrate and build free culture and open knowledge, iCommons aims to build the network of the global commons into one that advances the goals of the free Internet.