wikipedia

Founder says the online resource serves more to help people than to make money ANY deep-pocketed new media mogul looking to add online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to its trophy belt can forget it - founder Jimmy Wales is not selling.

Not that he controls the hugely popular site these days - the board of the Wikimedia Foundation does that - but Mr Wales, who is in town this week, retains much influence given his kick-start role.
Wikipedia's numbers tell the story: It boasts 263 million users, or roughly 31 per cent of the Internet population; has 253 different language versions; and is one of the most trafficked websites online.
It is hard to put a price on all that but bear in mind that online search engine Yahoo! tried to buy social networking site Facebook for US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) last year.
'It just doesn't make any sense to [sell],' Mr Wales told The Straits Times at the Ritz-Carlton Millenia Hotel yesterday.
'We think of ourselves as a charity, with a big-picture vision of a free encyclopaedia for every single person on the planet that is in their own language.'

Along with Nupedia's editor-in-chief Larry Sanger, Mr Wales launched Wikipedia in 2001, based on the use of wikis. These are webpages designed to enable anyone to contribute or modify content, and in so helping, create the product.
Wikipedia took off; Nupedia did not.
'The truth is, we're a product of the dot.com crash. We had no choice but to innovate,' he said.
His philosophy since day one has been: 'Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.'