It is the best charity on earth. The gift of knowledge by all for free. It is the gift of Wikipedia. If only more things were as free and giving as the information site is there would be a perfect world for all for free. The gift of sharing goods and services all over the world. Throw all money out. Throw out all greed and hate and suffering. Respect every living thing on earth the only living breathing planet we know. Finally a respect for all thoughts and opinions and ways of life. Well, most of it is a dream but Wikipedia is real.

Over 200 times per second and a billion times a month, someone clicks on Wikipedia. We live in an era of instant gratification and the site satisfies the information argument. The on line encyclopedia debuted 14 years ago and has been updating and perfecting itself daily. It used to be considered a novelty with its accuracy being a hit or miss but not anymore. It has evolved into a very good source for quick and easy concise information. Now it is one of the world’s busiest websites with the accuracy vastly improved.  Most importantly it is a unbiased charity where an army of unpaid collaborators contribute.

Jimmy Wales is the founder of the site and gave it its unusual name.  He says that wiki means quick in Hawaii and he wanted quick collaboration of information given to all for free. Once a year the hard core contributors come together to meet from all over the earth. 2,000 people showed up in London this year speaking many different languages from all over the world. Now this must be the true United Nations providing good for the world truly united in thought and charity. They were people from all ages and economic backgrounds. Yes, young and old, rich and poor joined by the bonds of curiosity over information.

From Aardvark to ZZ Top it is all edited. It is a never ending worldwide syber conversation. They post new comments and argue about accuracy and what is worthy of notice. There are 12,000 new pages created every day a grand total of 35 million articles in 288 different languages. I didn’t even know there were that many different languages spoken now. It is about 100,000 people from all over the world contributing to the   web site from every political persuasion.   From 5even years old to 75 years old. What they all have in common is that they are all smart and passionate with accuracy. They are careful, cautious and serious. We need more of that in all facets of society.

All people can make an edit and they do. Just hit the edit square and type. Three times per second 12,000 times per hour someone somewhere makes an edit small or large and the articles keep piling up. The growth of the encyclopedia can be endless.  The website’s headquarters is in San Francisco with a staff of about 200 people working in a laid back environment. Their primary importance is to develop rules and computer code to eliminate as many errors as possible. There are computer programs that scan the site for evangelism and vulgarity that is unacceptable. Bias can sometimes be hard to eradicate.  Since it is a non -profit you will not find a single Internet billionaire.

The money to keep the site up and running comes from donations that are large and small. Last year people from around the world gave $51 Million dollars in 70 different currencies .It means that advertising which is all important on everything else on the Internet is thankfully not even a consideration on Wikipedia. So that makes Jimmy Wales a guy from Huntsville, Alabama the Internet’s most famous knowledge broker.  We all had the limited set of books called the encyclopedia in our living rooms. Then the Internet came in the 1970’s and blew up a new world of current information. No longer did we look to see what was the most recent President mentioned in our sorry pile of books to determine how recent they were. Now we have Wikipedia on the Internet. Jimmy makes a comfortable living from speaking engagements.