Jimmy Wales: Browsing Beyond English

Internet is evolving to include more languages and cultures. Meanwhile the rise of English as the world�s second language is only speeding up

By Jimmy Wales

Published: May 27, 2010 09:18:39 AM IST

Updated: Jun 1, 2010 08:04:33 PM IST

Credited with creating Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales , 43, is the archetypal Internet entrepreneur and celebrity. Intensely curious even as a child, Wales spent hours poring over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias. Wikipedia is the outcome of Wales’ vision that every single person on the planet is given full access to the sum of all human knowledge. Before becoming an Internet entrepreneur, he worked at a futures and options firm in Chicago where he earned his fortune. Wales is the president of Wikia Inc. and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The knowledge-sharing we take for granted in English — we just assume we have easy access to any information we want — has not been true for many other languages.

Take Africa. The number of books published in African languages, the number of newspapers, the number of outlets of information, they’re quite small. Say you speak Wolof, a language in Senegal; the information available is much less than if you could speak in English or French or German. But now, thanks to the efforts of volunteers (and started, incidentally, by a chap in Switzerland), there is a Wolof Wikipedia with over a thousand entries.

World wide, the number of people speaking English is actually quite small; but for a long time, the people who spoke English and the people who had computers were basically the same people.
Now, the economics have shifted dramatically away from top-down content toward community-created content. And we’re moving very quickly to a world in which all kinds of people have access to the Internet; through mobile devices, through inexpensive computers. And they’re not speaking English, so they’re going to be building the Internet in their own languages.

The next wave of globalisation, on the Internet in particular, will see more cultures and languages being represented.

There are obstacles, of course.

Like device interfaces. But they’re not fundamental flaws; it’s more about things not being translated properly, keyboard input methods not being taken care of appropriately. They’re important problems, but they will be solved, with some effort. The Open Source movement is doing a really fabulous job producing fonts, keyboard input methods and things like that. As more people come online, it just makes economic sense to provide that market with all that they need.

And there will be a certain amount of reinventing the wheel. But culture does get transmitted; the early adopters, eagerly working on the Wolof Internet, say, will also be speaking English or French, and they will transmit best practices. It won’t take as long as it did the first time.

If anyone’s imagining that the developing world is going to start with dial-up modems, they really miss the point. You already have the 3G mobile network so basically you just need a device to connect. The question is what devices they will use to connect, and when those devices will become affordable. Like with telephony, where people who have never had a landline leap straight to mobile phones, we will see people who have never had an Internet connection leap straight to broadband.

Connectivity via mobile will reduce the digital divide. While it is true that right now, being able to access the Internet through a smart phone isn’t the same experience relative to accessing via a computer, I think it’s just a matter of stages, as devices get cheaper, for that to improve.

And, meanwhile, the growth of English as the second language for the rest of the world will accelerate. In a more connected world, the incentives for ordinary people to learn English only become stronger. For example if you’re a Bengali speaker, and you’re interested in talking to people in Thailand, English is the natural choice.

But it doesn’t mean other languages will die. The Web is a powerful tool for preserving languages that would otherwise be lost. We see this in a lot of the smaller European languages that have very active Wikipedia projects. For example, the Welsh Wikipedia is quite an active community and they have 27,000 articles and this is true even though virtually everyone who speaks Welsh also speaks English. They just take a lot of pride in keeping the language alive and having a place to share information and knowledge and so forth. In the Netherlands, people speak Dutch in the streets, and yet, as far as I can tell, virtually everyone in the Netherlands speaks perfectly good English, not just a few university graduates. And Dutch Wikipedia has more than a half-million articles.

You can have both your local language and culture, and also have that English connection to the broader world.

(This story appears in the 04 June, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)