Net Value: Building the Wiki brand

Like the handful of individuals who dropped out of college only to stumble upon
much bigger things later in life - think Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Facebook's
Mark Zuckerberg - Jimmy Wales, 42, never finished writing his doctoral
dissertation. Instead, he made his fortune as a derivatives trader in Chicago,
pioneered nupedia, an online encyclopaedia that would redefine the development
of the Internet during the 21st century, and earned fame for co-founding
Wikipedia, the open-source, online encyclopaedia anyone can edit.

Indeed, almost eight years after what started out as a hobby for Wales,
Wikipedia has taken the Internet by storm. Look around for your average working
professional and he or she would have used Wikipedia at some point or other. Ask
any web-savvy individual and chances are, he or she would have contributed an
article or edited the content of an existing article in Wikipedia. It is one of
a handful of instantly recognisable Internet brands and the site currently hosts
more than 10 million user-generated articles in over 100 languages, attracting
close to 263 million unique users as at May 2008. Wales, Wikipedia's "dictator",
ambassador and public face, now travels the world delivering presentations on
its success.

Sporting his trademark trimmed-yet-scruffy beard and semi-casually dressed
during a recent visit to Singapore as key presenter at this year's Global Brand
Forum, Wales appears gruff on the exterior and a little aloof at first, but his
features quickly soften as he talks both wryly and passionately about his
brainchild. "Wikipedia began with a radical idea, and that's for all of us to
imagine a world where every single person on the planet has free access to the
sum of all human knowledge," he says.

"We want to portray the Wikipedia brand as an image of openness, participation
and quality," Wales tells The Edge Singapore. "Overall, when people think of
Wikipedia, I want them to think that 'this is something I can be part of' and
that's really important for everyone. It just seemed really obvious, that it
needed to be done. Everybody talked about the Internet being a great tool for
sharing knowledge and so I said, then, well, okay, let's share knowledge."
Owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation set up by Wales
to receive public funding for the project after initial funding from his
original company, explicit-content search engine Bomis - which sparked some
controversy - dried up, Wikipedia is freely licensed software written by
thousands of volunteers across the world. Wikipedia is funded solely by
donations from the public, with its only costs involving 18 employees and
monthly bandwidth. Last year, it spent about US$2 million (RM7.25 million) and
is estimated to be worth about US$3 billion, according to Wales in an interview
last year.

"But our main goal is to get a free encyclopaedia to everyone," he says,
explaining the point of having an open-sourced, user-generated encyclopaedia.
"This is why we chose the free licensing model, so that entrepreneurs or anyone
who wants, can take our content and do whatever he wants to with it."
With about a third of its articles written in English, Wales says the country
with the largest total number of contributors is currently the US, followed by
articles contributed in German. "Wikipedia is huge in Germany," he says. "People
love it there. But I guess what's interesting is the real growth these days in
non-English and non-European languages like Indian and Chinese. These days, it's
about the rest of the world."

"Wikipedia is certainly available in more languages than your average Facebook
or even Google search engine," says Debbie Swee, a market analyst from research
company IDC. "However, that does not determine its popularity, as usage in some
countries, particularly non-English speaking ones, is extremely low. Its usage
also seems largely proportional to age - the older the Internet user, the less
likely he or he is a Wikipedia user. This is mostly true of many markets in
Asia, where age is inversely related to length of experience with the Internet."

Sources:
Kang, W. C. (2008, December 1). Net Value: Building the Wiki brand. The Edge.