Life, the universe and Wiki

An army of selfconfessed geeks aims to bring the meaning of everything to everyone by 2015. Peter Munro meets a few. In smallrooms beyond a corridor busy with a bathroom queue, dorm bunks and backpacks, the Wikipedians are plotting the new world order. Mildmannered men hatch wild schemes of omniscience with dreams of bringing true democracy to Iran and education to Indonesia, and enabling the next Einstein to come from Africa. They gathered at an inauspicious hostel in Frankfurt last month for the first international Wikimania conference. Among the bespectacled "missionaries" is Theo Clarke, a 47yearold management consultant from England, sitting with a laptop resting on his stomach. As his computer provides cricket updates from England, he preaches that Wikipedia has solved the search for knowledge. "Already it makes no sense to run a quiz competition because you can go to Wikipedia and get all the answers," he says. "It's everything we're ever going to need to know." Advertisement: Story continues below In less than five years, Wikipedia has become one of the web's greatest success stories. The online encyclopedia and its sister projects, including Wikiquote, record 60 million hits a day and have amassed more than 2.2 million entries in 120 languages, making Wikipedia the most detailed collection of information in history. Wiki, from the Hawaiian "wiki wiki" for "quick and informal", has thrust open the library doors to let the geeks in. Anyone with a computer can change, or delete, the 660,000 entries on the English Wikipedia site or add one of the 1250 new entries each day. Along the way, perhaps because of its unrivalled success, Wikipedia has become a repository for the ideals of the internet those dreams of free, accessible information and global conversation that seemed to go bust along with the dotcom boom. But it has also become a target for vandals and detractors, some of whom have been banned from contributing. In April, as white smoke was still curling from the roof of the Vatican, an Rosetta Stone Software anonymous user of the English Wikipedia briefly replaced the image of Pope Benedict XVI with one of the evil emperor from Star Wars. But Jimmy Wales, who cofounded Wikipedia in 2001, insists such mischief does not shake his faith. "Such pranks are a little disappointing, but given how insane the whole idea is in the first place that you could let anybody edit any page it's a miracle that so little vandalism goes on." The incident, however, has forced him to consider "freezing" certain entries once they have been checked and approved. Entries for controversial figures, such as the Pope and George Bush, may also be subject to a 10minute delay to stop pranks before they go live. Mr Wales sits at the top of the Wikipedia world as its benevolent dictator or "God King", although he prefers to be thought of as a ceremonial monarch. His mission is, "to create and give away a freely licensed encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language" by 2015. And his gaze has turned to the developing world. On his 39th birthday in Frankfurt, about 400 of his acolytes made plans to build sites in Arabic, Hindi and Bengali. They sparked schemes to use the open, editable Wiki software and weblogs to prop up reformist groups in Iran and to spur political dialogue in China.

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