Wikipedia founder Wales opens up on mobile

LONDON--Of all the keynoters speaking here at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2009 conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is clearly the wild card. But his presence makes perfect sense--the Symbian Foundation continues its efforts to migrate the Symbian operating system to an open-source model, and with Wikipedia, Wales pioneered the concept of open-source content, inviting volunteers from across the globe to collaborate in the creation of a non-profit, free online encyclopedia written and edited entirely by users. Eight years and roughly 13 million entries later (about 3 million of them in English), Wikipedia looms as an ever-growing testament to what the open-source model can achieve.

"Wikipedia began with a radical idea--that everyone would be given access to the sum of all human knowledge," Wales said, adding that the site guarantees contributors and users four basic freedoms: To copy, modify, redistribute, and redistribute modified versions of all its available content. "We are fully global in every aspect," he added, noting that Wikipedia entries originate via most of the world's languages. Wales nevertheless noted that Wikipedia contributors are far scarcer in emerging markets where broadband penetration is poor--the site presently includes about 50,997 articles written in Hindi, a language native to roughly 280 million people. "The developing world will be coming online through mobile devices," Wales said. "We're working to empower those people and become accessible to them."

Wikipedia's growing mobile profile includes an iPhone application, a content partnership with European operator Orange and a dedicated ereader device released by open mobile product manufacturer Openmoko. In an interview with FierceMobileContent following his keynote, Wales said the iPhone application has fared well so far, generating strong download numbers and positive user reviews, but admitted Wikipedia has little to do with its mobile partnerships--he said its mission is to work with its user community to improve the quality of its online content, with very little software development taking place in-house. He nevertheless endorsed Wikipedia's migration onto mobile devices: "I'm really excited about this stuff. We want the widest possible distribution for our content."

Wales also encouraged mobile developers to further incorporate Wikipedia content into their mobile applications, saying he's surprised the programmer community hasn't seized on the obvious possibilities to integrate entries into location-based services. "A lot of entries have been geo-tagged, and Google Earth has a Wikipedia layer, so all the pieces exist for someone to create a great application for mobile," Wales said, suggesting that such an application might offer users Wikipedia information on the five most noteworthy sites or locations in their immediate vicinity. Sounds pretty cool--and like Wales' other big ideas, it's there for the taking. -Jason

P.S. For additional live coverage from Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2009, check out the FierceDeveloper website.