4 August 2005

FRANKFURT - In a few short years, Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia edited mainly by enthusiastic students, has become a major force on the internet: on Thursday the activists began a meeting in Europe to discuss the way forward.

A wiki is a web application that allows any surfer to add content or alter what has already been written.

The term is based on a Hawaiian phrase "wiki wiki", meaning "quick", and that certainly describes the Wikipedia: since 2001 it has grown to more than 2 million entries in more than 60 languages.

While the bulk of Wikipedia (640,000 articles) is in English, the choice of Frankfurt as venue for the August 4-7 conference reflects the huge role of German as number-two language, with the tally of 270,000 German entries surpassing the French and Japanese combined.

"Wikipedia's main obligation is to be neutral," said Jimmy Wales, father of the project, after his arrival in Frankfurt from Florida. Wales, 38, has a simple philosophy: information should be free to all and all Internet users should be free to write it.

With a web browser, anyone can fix a spelling mistake or wrong fact, add a paragraph or write a whole new article.

Other Internet users can check at a glance how the article was changed and by whom.

Wales' early work on Wikipedia was inspired by the open-source software movement. Wiki software was there before Wales: it dates from the mid-1990s. But the idea of using a wiki to distil the world's knowledge into a single reference work came from him.

In 2003, he created the Wikimedia Foundation to oversee the creation.

Kurt Jansson, 28, the chairman of the German Wikipedia association, says the local community of article authors is pretty mixed: "We've got 13-year-olds writing, and 80-year-olds."

A disproportionate number of the articles are written by university students, and the average age of contributors is about 30, Jansson thinks.

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