It is unlikely that jimmy Wales, Jimbo to friends and really good acquaintances, will ever attain the legendary status of Linus Torvalds. Not that the first is an unknown; a Google search for him throws up about 601,000 results as compared to 1,320,000 for Torvalds (to put that number in perspective, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gets 225,000). The comparison with Torvalds is apt. What the man did to software, Wales wants to do to content.

No one knows how the idea struck Wales, a derivatives trader who made his fortune in the boom years of the early 1990s. After cashing out, he founded bomis.com, an all-purpose portal that made money selling images of women sporting little or no clothing. The site is still there, as are the images, but it wasn't rad enough for Wales, who had enough money to indulge his pursuit of cool. So, in 1999, the man founded nupedia.com, an online encyclopaedia. That was far removed from selling girlie pics online, but it still wasn't cool. Then, someone showed Wales the wiki software. "This allowed people without any knowledge of creating html (Hyper Text Markup Language, the language of the internet) to make modifications, so we decided that doing something like Wikipedia, where any visitor to the site could make their own changes, to co-exist side-by-side with Nupedia might be a good idea," he says. It was, as time was to prove, a very good idea.

James, in New Delhi, India, to participate in a design conference, says all this very matter-of-factly. In reality, the $500,000 (Rs 2.2 crore at today's exchange rates) invested by the man in Wikimedia has created an online democracy of information. There's Wikinews, a recent effort to allow users to edit entries on news; there's Wikicities, a for-profit effort (the only in the Wiki family) to create communities; but the most succesful is Wikipedia, a free web-based encyclopaedia accessible at www.wikipedia.org with over 1.3 million entries in 180-plus languages including Cymraeg, Euskara, Islenska, Hindi, even Sanskrit. (there are only 35 languages with over 1,000 entries and almost half the entries are in English). Wiki, for the record, is Hawaiian for quick, so Wikipedia is the 'quick encyclopaedia'.

So what is so special about an online encyclopaedia? Nothing other than the fact that it is bigger than Britannica (six times, in terms of the number of entries, although that could be because of the way things are categorised; twice as big, in terms of number of words). The unique thing about Wikipedia isn't the fact that it is free; the unique thing about Wikipedia is the fact that it is free. Confused?

Every entry in Wikipedia is made by a user of the website; users can add, delete and edit entries. Wikipedia, for those who still haven't got it, is online democracy at work. This is a site made by the people, for the people. Which fits in well with the definition of democracy on the Wikipedia website. Democracy is a form of government under which the power to alter the laws and structures of government lies, ultimately, with the citizenry. Well, there are no laws here, but there are entries.

Same as other really good democracies, Wikipedia has a 'benevolent dictator' looking after things, and Jimbo, he of average build, receding hairline, and shirts strangely reminiscent of a man from Infinity Drive, Cupertino, California (Wales himself is from Florida) is it.

Wikipedia is nothing short of a revolution. From fewer than a thousand entries in January 2001 with only nine people effectively working on entries, today there are over 13,000 people who make at least five edits every month at Wikipedia. Two years ago, Wales pulled the plug on Nupedia, which was a far more structured information-sharing initiative with in-house editors, researchers, the works. By doing so, Wales admitted that unleashing 'wiki' on the internet had changed the information economy.

But can you really trust Wikipedia? "Nobody is an expert about everything, but everybody does have a lot of knowledge about a few things," says Wales, insisting that some Wikipedia-contributors are experts, "professors, academics and researchers".

The real issue, claims Wales, is not the accuracy of information but the threat of online vandalism. The wiki format makes it possible for anyone with half a brain to indulge in online vandalism. "The great thing about Wikipedia is the community atmosphere. There are people who police the site looking for vandals and report any instances of vandalism to the site administrators," says Wales.

Like any user-developed encyclopaedia will, Wikipedia offers a highly subjective (American?) view of the world. The entry on the 'Heavy Metal Umlaut' (those two little dots over a vowel popular in the names of heavy metal bands like Motörhead), for instance, is longer than those on Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.

Wikipedia is free, and because it is distributed on 'Open License Distribution' like Linux, anyone can actually download it, print it and sell it to make money. "There are a lot of people without access to the internet. Now, say, if someone downloaded and printed the Hindi Wikipedia, it would be great. It would make information available to so many more people," says Wales. "Just like companies make money from Linux, it is fine if people make money off Wikipedia."

Wikipedia is a hit; Wikinews is much too young to be anything; and Wikibooks (textbooks compiled the wiki way; should be a hit in this country) just a gleam in Wales' eye. Still, the wiki-thing looks like it is here to stay.