Wikiworld

It wasn’t quite 10am on the last day of 2009. I was handing over my debit card to the cashier at a hypermarket, when I noticed a queue of people waiting (im)patiently for the opening of a mobile phone shop. There were dozens of them, and all different.

The shop opened. The queue moved forward. Our dependence on new technologies is no longer fiction, or something from academic trials. It’s now part of normal everyday life. Ironically, hours later I celebrated the first few moments of 2010 on a Skype video conference call with family and friends abroad, thousands of kilometres away, at no cost whatsoever.

In 2010, anyone can easily exist in many different places. The digital way of life has made “normal” a reality that until recently would have been impossible, through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Hi5. Whoever is unhappy with their “real” life, can replace it with a virtual one - a “Second Life”. The ability to express oneself freely on a blog, for example, is today commonplace, banal, and perfectly normal for millions around the world – especially the younger generation.

Even before 2009 was over, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia on the Internet) announced that he had managed to amass 7.5 million dollars in donations to keep the site up and running. The money will be used to cover operational costs of the company (a not-for-profit organisation), which includes maintenance of servers and widening of bandwidth.

Since it was founded in 2001, Wikipedia has been added to and updated by volunteers from all over the world. More than 340 million people use it on a monthly basis – almost a third of the world’s population with access to the Internet. Today it has 3,147,160 articles. It’s the sixth most visited website on the planet.

“Imagine a world where every person on the planet has free access to all of mankind’s knowledge”, says Wales. A dream? Now, you don’t even need to have access to the Internet. For 99 dollars, you can buy a small electronic device that contains 3 million Wikipedia articles. It’s called “WikiReader”, with a very simple touch screen, and runs on two batteries (AAA).

And if information today is so easily available - as never before in the history of mankind - so too is the identity of each of us becoming increasingly less private.

Microsoft recently made available a new tool that scours the Web to make a profile containing all information it finds on each Internet user, a bit like a Wikipedia for people.

The «EntityCube» is still at the trial stages, but its objective is to generate, from information found on the Internet, a mini-biography of the person in question - a profile of their social networking and all their online activities.

According to Bill Gate’s company, the site will be used to find information on any one of us, not just celebrities…