Wikipedia founder marks 10 years

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the website and said he had suffered airport security embarrassment over confusion with the WikiLeaks site.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, has become the fifth most visited internet site in the world.

Featuring some 17 million articles in 270 languages, the site operates by allowing anyone to contribute and edit articles to it, and is now visited by more than 400 million people across the globe each month.

Mr Wales, a former futures and options trader from Alabama, acknowledges some of the information that makes its way on to the site is not entirely accurate. But on the whole, mistakes "are normally caught quite quickly" by a team of volunteer administrators, he says.

"When we look at the overall accuracy of Wikipedia, when it is compared with traditional encyclopaedias, it comes out very well," Mr Wales told the BBC.

Mr Wales said he was often mistaken for being the founder of WikiLeaks.

Following WikiLeaks' release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and its founder Julian Assange being wanted in Sweden over rape allegations, Mr Wales is keen to point out his site is entirely separate from WikiLeaks.

He said: "I suppose when Julian Assange got started he named his project WikiLeaks, I think in homage to us, but of course they are not a Wiki. Wiki is the software that we use, which is collaborative software, whereas WikiLeaks has nothing to do with that per se."

The name similarity has resulted in several awkward moments, a recent one a few days ago, when Mr Wales arrived in England.

When asked his occupation by a customs officer at Heathrow airport, he told her he was the founder of Wikipedia. The startled customs officer replied "the founder of WikiLeaks?" and almost dropped her pen, Mr Wales said.

Source - Yahoo.