How would you like the task of creating a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge? Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.org, is accomplishing just that. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written collaboratively by its readers and is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, containing 1.3 million articles and receiving around 80 million hits per day.

Wales gave us a few minutes to talk about the largest, most popular encyclopedia on the Web and its unique collaboration of editors.

DANA GREENLEE: What was the concept behind Wikipedia?

JIMMY WALES: It’s a freely licensed encyclopedia written online by thousands of volunteers. It’s free in that people can copy it and distribute it. It’s also free because there is no cost to go the Web site and take a look.

GREENLEE: I’m intrigued how people can contribute to it. This is not something you see very often.

WALES: All of the articles are being edited with software called a Wiki. It’s derived from a Hawaiian word that means “quick”. It’s basically quick editing software which allows people to collaborate very fast. Anyone can go to the Web site, sign up and edit articles – which is an amazing thing.

GREENLEE: Having anyone able to edit your Web site is flipping the idea of control on its head.

WALES: Every single change that people make goes through a “recent changes” page. There are mechanisms of supervision and control to go on 24 hours a day. We have a tight-knit community of people who are always hanging out in IRC, so it’s not quite as crazy as it seems at first glance. Yes, you can come in and edit pages but someone’s going to be watching it and revert it if you’re doing a bad job. It’s very grass-roots, very bottom up. There is very, very little about what we do that’s directed in a top-down manner, other than the big picture vision statement of some of our basic policies — like neutrality and being kind to each other — which I insist upon. Other than that, everything is organized by volunteers.

GREENLEE: Is what you’re building a central repository for all human knowledge?

WALES: Yes, exactly. I guess I wouldn’t use the word repository for an encyclopedia. A repository would be all kinds of information – opinions and original research, whereas an encyclopedia is really a synthesis or summary of human knowledge. We’re trying to do something that’s fairly big in the history of mankind.

GREENLEE: Wikipedia is in over 200 languages. It’s extremely global, as it should be. What countries embrace Wikipedia more than others?

WALES: Certainly throughout Europe it’s very big. The German Wikipedia is the second-largest with over 200,000 articles. I actually spend about half my time in Europe now. I get invited to conferences. I joke that I’m one of these rock stars in Europe that no one has ever heard of over here.

GREENLEE: The David Hasselhoff of the Internet world! I see Wikipedia ranked in the top 200 of most trafficked Web sites. Is it growing exponentially?

WALES: We double our traffic about every three months. One of the developers did a calculation test that indicated that if the amount of editing keeps growing the way it is, then in seven years every single person on the planet is going to have to edit Wikipedia 24 hours per day to keep up!

GREENLEE: What is the typical process for someone who wants to contribute to Wikipedia?

WALES: To start reading some articles and get a feel for the style. It’s good to visit the community portal and read some policy pages. Just click on “edit” on any page and make your changes and “save”. We try to make it very, very open and welcoming. Usually it’s better and easier to start editing an article that already exists—a spelling error grammar mistake is always a nice place to start. People are usually pretty amazed when they actually make their first edit – “Wow! It was that easy. I actually can edit that page!”

To explore, the encyclopedia is at wikipedia.org. Jimmy Wales blog is at blog.JimmyWales.com. The full 25 minute audio interview can be heard at WebTalkRadio.com.

Dana Greenlee is co-host/producer of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show, a Tacoma-based nationally syndicated radio and webcast show featuring technology news and interviews.