Re: Whom would you interview and what would you ask?

Description: Spreading Wikipedia to all the languages of the world.

Transcript:

Oh wow! So for me, one of the things that I’m really interested in is how can we get the growth of Wikipedia in all the languages of the world? And so the kinds of people that I’m interested in meeting with and talking to about this are people who are really working, you know, on the ground in IT, in places like Ethiopia or South Africa even, to say, “Look, what’s useful? What’s missing? What do you need? How can we help? What are some of the pieces of the puzzle that we might not see from our end of things?” That’s for me, very, very interesting. And in fact when I’m traveling, I spend quite a bit of time trying to visit schools in many parts of the world to really figure out how we might be able to help, or even if we can help, which is sometimes maybe we can’t. Not long ago, I was visiting and met with the principle of a school in Sangam Vihar, which is a squatter colony in Delhi. So this is a very, very poor place – mud streets and so on. And this school is there. It’s a private school. It’s for-profit, actually, which is interesting. And they’re providing what looked to be a good education. It didn’t look like much fun – very rigid sort of Asian style school. But it looked like good, quality education going there. And I went to talk to them and to ask them how might Wikipedia impact their work, or how might my community be able to produce something they might find useful. And I came away thinking, you know, there’s not a whole lot we can do for them right now. They’re doing okay. Certainly there’s things that other people can do. But in terms of what my community could do right now, it’s fairly limited. And so at least in that context I learned, gee, well it’s not much to do right now, but let’s go back and think about this. You know because I feel such a strong personal responsibility in this area, because now we have enough of a public face, enough good will that people really turn to us as a potential organization to fund to help with some issues in places like that. And it would be completely unconscionable for us to accept funding to do projects that are idiotic. And so if I’m thinking about who I would most like to sit down and interview, it would be 100 or 1,000 different kinds of people working on those kinds of issues in those kinds of places to really learn what’s practical, what’s useful. Another kind of partnership between wealthy western institutions to make themselves feel good doesn’t seem very practical to me.

Recorded On: 8/10/07