The man who turned knowledge into pop culture
Jimmy Wales will be honoured with the Millennium Vision Award of the German Trend Day
12. July 2010 | « previous | next »
Many people dream of changing the world. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has done it. Today, he is the instigator for the future of Wikipedia. He quenched the world’s thirst for knowledge by using Web 2.0 technology to facilitate an open-access encyclopaedia to which everyone can contribute. Today, 15 million articles in 240 languages can be accessed free of charge, with the number of articles growing every day. Everyone who has access to the Internet can play an active part. The quality and neutrality of the content are cooperatively edited and by now, accepted worldwide.
Who is Wikipedia? All of us!
Meanwhile, the open wiki model of cooperatively collecting and editing articles has been successfully applied to the knowledge management of companies and institutions. The fast gathering of individual knowledge and open discussion of the content, errors or possible nonsense lead to up-to-date, pragmatic and effective results. The dynamics, flexibility and sensible self-regulation make the wiki model a standard for the networking society. Wikipedia works according to the laws of the mega trend Flow.Control. The culture of networking and cooperation as well as simultaneous competition brings about speed and quality. Here, Flow.Control. proves to be tried and tested practice.
The Millennium Vision Award belongs to the ‘future makers’.
The German Trend Day awards its Millennium Vision Award to people who presented and realized a vision within a decade. The laureates must have implemented an idea that is socially enriching, technologically innovative, economically revolutionary and of global relevance.
The trustees of the awarding jury are: Prof. Dr. Norbert Bolz, Technical University Berlin, Dr. David Bosshart, CEO Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Zurich, René Schuster, CEO Telefónica O2 Germany, Munich, and Prof. Peter Wippermann, Folkwang University, Essen.
Wiki generation will present the award.
The class 7b of Albert Schweitzer Grammar School in Hamburg will present the award to Jimmy Wales. The pupils of class 7b, who only recently won the title of “Best School Class in Germany” in a TV show broadcast by the German children’s TV channel ARD/Ki.Ka, belong to the ‘Digital Residents’. They have grown up with free digital access to knowledge. René Schuster, CEO Telefónica O2 Germany, will give the speech in honour of Jimmy Wales and will talk about the future of education under the conditions of mobile Internet.
It is tons too much honour to name Jimmy Wales as the central figure when thinking about Wiki-pedia.
The revolutionary wiki-wiki method has its roots in the early open-source community, a creative mixture of software developers, thinkers and world-changers in the mid 80’s. From here came the idea of self organising opensource projects and here was the golden combination of social software & open source organising methods born. The man who wrote the wiki software that gave web 2.0 a boost, was Ward Cunningham, active in this community up to now.
Jimmy Wales owned a website-company centred around “adult” content and this company put money in a web-encyclopedia-project managed by Larry Singer. The idea to change this web-encyclopedia into a web-based open source project, using wikiwiki software from Ward Cunningham, came from Larry Singer, who contacted a guy that knew more about this online collaborative software. The money from Wales company run out, and the project had to get a boost or would have been closed down. The rest is history.
Look for one of the first wikipedia-pages on wiki in the web-archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010412201411/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/WikiWiki
So if you’re talking trends and the development of something that changed the future – you’ll be much closer when you would honour Ward Cunningham instead of Jimmy Wales.
http://c2.com/~ward/
http://twitter.com/WardCunningham
Thank you for your input and further information on Wikipedia’s technological development. What we found and still find remarkable and award-worthy about Jimmy Wales is the fact that he established the encyclopedia as the number one source of knowledge for a global society. Wikipedia is accepted worldwide and has reached a worldwide audience and worldwide participation – thanks to, among others, Jimmy Wales.