Yesterday I listened to a podcast from a speech given by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. The podcast was created last year (old material) but there were still many concepts that I found intriguing.

Some points I would like to highlight include:

• With the open source and free license business model of wikipedia, it means that someone could take that code and start over with another project. But due to this it will always remain non-proprietary and free.
• The information is flowing from all directions, not a direct translation from English to another language. According to Alexa the current breakdown stands at:

And last year when the podcast was created, Wikipedia was ranked between the 17 - 20 place for most popular website. Here are the stats from today:

It is ranked (by order) in the U.S. behind Yahoo, Google, Myspace, MSN, Ebay, YouTube and Facebook.

• The Wiki Foundation is extensive, housing such products as Wikipedia, Wikiquotes, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, WikiUniversity, plus much more. The wealth of information is amazing!
• The whole business is ran by volunteers, with the paid staff (as of last year) equaling two programmers.

But one of the most intriguing points was the idea that in order for the website to work, the Wikipedia team had to leave the site as open as possible, with as few rules as possible. Wales, the CEO, compares this structure to his previous business of Newpedia that was built on the same concept, but with a hierachary of loops that a published article had to jump through prior to release. Wales quickly realized that these loops were “not any fun” and so no one, inlcuding himself, wanted to create articles.

The current issue of Time magazine has the article “Getting Rich Off Those Who Work for Free.” Sure the title sounds like an outrageous capitalist slogan, but the article is fantastic and highlights such examples as Wikipedia, Firefox and Linux. In summation, the peer-contributed sites might not be completely accurate or unique but rather stand as a way of improving existing technologies. Some of the volunteer work is able to pull a price, for instance tech people with Linux knowledge, while other markets, such as Digg and Flickr, still rely on these volunteers as “a market has yet to emerge to price this new kind of labor.”

I feel like I should draw some conclusions from this conglomerate of information, but am going to leave it for now.