Week 11 - Ted talks video on birth of Wikipedia

I found the Ted Talks video on the birth of Wikipedia particularly interesting for somebody who is interested in all aspects of social media and the concept of Wiki's whether through blackboard or google doc's. The speech was given by Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is funded by donations from the publics, which is not very much. Over 600,000 articles exist in the English language on Wikipedia, with over 2 million articles in other languages - some of the biggest languages covered include German, Japanese and French. One third of traffic to Wikipedia goes to English language sources, proving its globalisation. Outstandingly, Wikipedia has only one employee (a software developer). Wikipedia is made up of volunteers and volunteer system administrators. Wikipedia receives 1.4 page views monthly. The total monthly cost for website administration is just $5,000. How does it work? Social policies were introduced - a neutral point of view policy that involves a social concept of co-operation over all spectrums. This basically says - if there is a controversial issue - Wikipedia are to stay neutral and let both sides of the argument have their say. This is useful with religious and political articles. All changes made go to a recent changes page. These changes are monitored through e-mails or RSS feeds. Only 18% of changes to website are carried out by anonymous users. This goes to show that most changes are made by 600-1000 people in a closely knit environment in communication with each other. This is a fascinating statistic as these people are giving up their time on a daily basis voluntarily.