 |
Jimmy Wales, the
founder of Wikipedia speaks
during a seminar on youth marketing in Africa
in Lagos, Nigeria,Tuesday, March. 27, 2012.
|
Jimmy
Wales,
the founder of Wikipedia speaks during a seminar on youth marketing in Africa
in Lagos, Nigeria, Tuesday, March. 27, 2012. The man who helped found Wikipedia
says the end of the printing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica signals a new
beginning for reference materials online.
Wales' first visit to Nigeria also
highlighted the growth of other languages besides English on Wikipedia,
particularly the Yoruba language of Nigeria’s southwest. While growth remains
slow and uneven, Wales said he hopes more users for the community-edited
website will begin offering new articles as creation on the English version has
slowed as it now has nearly 4 million entries.
"I'm an optimist about the
Internet as a force for preserving culture, while at the same time increasing
global culture. I don't think we have to have either/or," Wales told The Associated Press in an
interview in Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos.
Wikipedia's popularity remains high
among Internet users as print resources continue to suffer. This month, [March 2012]
the owners of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published since 1768, announced its
print edition will stop being available when its current stock runs out.
"It's the culmination of a
very, very long trend. In a way, it's a sad moment, but it's the way technology
moves on," Wales said. "Even if we think Britannica is what we want,
we really want Britannica on an iPad or a phone, accessible to us all the time,
not in dusty books on the shelf - no matter how beautiful those might be."
Wales
acknowledges
the limits of Wikipedia; a website he said is edited by a user base that's 87
percent male, with an average age of 26. He said he hopes a simplified editing
process will allow the reference site to attract a more diverse range of
contributors with knowledge in a variety of fields.
In Africa, Wales said that the
Yoruba language of Nigeria's southwest, including Lagos, led the continent in
actual pages in its own version of Wikipedia with more than 29,000 pages.
However, the majority of those articles came from "bots" - programs
designed to take data from a table and create a simple Wikipedia entry.
Detailed entries remain far fewer, as there appears to be one dominant user
creating the Yoruba entries, he said.
SOURCE: Associated Press
SOURCE: Associated Press
1 comment:
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