Meeting Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in Perth

Today I had the privilege to attend a conference organized by education.au in Perth, Western Australia (my home town), entitled Challenging how knowledge is created.

The highlight of the conference for me was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. His vision is for every person on the planet to be given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Not long ago, Google.com was the source of all information, but now, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t visit Wikipedia for information on, admittedly, anything and everything.

I was excited at the opportunity to meet Mr Wales. It goes without saying that I have incredible respect and admiration for his vision, his ability to see it through and make Wikipedia what it is today. He’s an inspiration for my own modest efforts to contribute to a better world. Most people think of movie stars and pop singers as celebrities, but for me, Mr Wales is a true celebrity. With Wikipedia, he’s helped shape the world today and for generations to come. Just like how many of us grew up thinking the television has always been there, our children and children’s children will be born thinking Wikipedia has always been there.

I attended this conference with some expectations. Not only would I be privileged enough to hear Mr Jimmy Wales speak at the conference, I would get to meet like-minded people that were interested in collaborative sharing, and it also seemed like an opportunity to get the word out about TheBroth. I had to restrain myself a great deal when it came to my eagerness to tell everyone about TheBroth (which wasn’t easy).

During a break, I asked Mr Wales to pose for a photograph with the big presentation screen as a backdrop. From the expression of his face, I would think that I may have startled him with my request. At the end of the conference, I may have startled him yet again: Against my instincts, I walked up to Mr Wales and rudely forced my business card onto him. I know my action was very “in-your-face” and he may have really begun to wonder about this stern looking bald fellow (me!) but I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t taken that chance. However, Mr Wales gracefully took my card and dutifully stowed it away inside his jacket pocket, most likely together with many of the unsolicited business cards he received that day. There’s hoping he’ll look at it and comment on our project :-)

The conference itself was very insightful. There was a consensus amongst the attendants that the biggest hurdle with knowledge sharing was to create a culture where it’s actually considered possible and “normal” to share information in a wiki-like environment. No doubt this will take a few more years in many institutions.

The internet is changing our lives more rapidly than even the most radical visionaries could have imagined. It’s exciting to be part of this!

Tags: eduausem2007