In novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand introduced the philosophy of Objectivism, which is usually described as placing a premium on reason, observed reality, and, especially, the pursuit of one's own self-interest. So why on Earth would Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales call himself an "Objectivist to the core"? After all, he founded Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) - the hugely popular online encyclopedia that neither pays the millions of contributors who write and edit entries on every topic imaginable, nor charges the millions of people who use it every day. What's his self-interest in creating a free library for the world?

"I'm a big advocate of individual rights," Wales said. "I'm a big advocate of personal freedom, and of reason. There are many, many different ramifications of that. One of them is that I believe people ought to be thoughtful and they ought to make reasoned decisions, and in order to do that, they need information. You can't make reasoned decisions if you don't know things."

Based on his approach to Wikipedia, Wales seems to want people everywhere not just to know everything, but to own what they know. Per the wiki model, anyone at all can write, edit, discuss, and debate any article published on Wikipedia. It's the ultimate democratization of content - a self-correcting, ever-expanding, infinitely collaborative warehouse of information.

Wikipedia launched in early 2001, initially just in English, and was soon followed by versions in German, Catalan, French, Chinese, Dutch, and dozens of other languages. Today, it's available in more than 250 languages; the English-language version alone has more than two million articles. Wales, who began his career in the finance sector, sits on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikimedia, and also serves as president of Wikia Inc., the for-profit company he co-founded in 2004 that offers advertising-supported free hosting for wikis of all types.

During a recent interview with Convene, Wales, 42, was relaxed and low-key - which perhaps you'd have to be if you invited everyone in the world to come into your library and start marking up your books.

Did you create Wikipedia to meet a specific need?
I was watching the growth of the free-software movement - open-source software. I saw people coming together in a new paradigm for software creation, and building very successful, very large projects. Under a lot of simplistic thinking about incentives and things like that, people would have thought that this wouldn't work. And I was seeing that it was working, so I started thinking about what are some of the other things that people can collaborate on, and came up with the encyclopedia as a concept.

What's the advantage of Wikipedia over a traditional encyclopedia?
First of all, the comprehensiveness of the project is dramatically higher than any traditional encyclopedia. Just the sheer scale is something completely new. Additionally, the timeliness - everything is updated very, very quickly. Certainly if you look at a Wikipedia entry about John McCain, you expect it to have information about what happened yesterday in it. You don't expect that from Britannica. It's just not possible for them to update as frequently as we do.

Has Wikipedia developed the way you expected it to?
Pretty much. Over the years, we've become a lot more open, and we've tried really hard to innovate software features that allow us to be more open. That's kind of contrary to a standard story arc that you'll see from time to time - "Oh, Wikipedia used to be really open, but now they lock articles," and things like that. It's really the opposite.

For example, if we have a problem with vandalism on an article, one of the things that we'll do is temporarily protect it, so it can't be edited. A few years ago, we decided we didn't like that, so we had a new feature called "semi-protection," which means that, instead of no one being able to edit it, you have to have been around for four days before you can edit. That enabled a much larger group of people to edit things, instead of having to protect them.

As Wikipedia has evolved, has there been anything that's really surprised you about the whole project?
It's really been interesting to see how popular it has become, because in the early days I thought it could be very popular - but I thought it might make it into the top 100 of all Web sites. It's hard to imagine that one of the top five Web sites in the world would be an encyclopedia. That's pretty amazing.

Do you expect to see user-generated content become increasingly important to the way people receive information?
Absolutely. We're still just at the very beginning of this kind of community collaboration. I think there's still a long way to go in figuring out the right social models to do other kinds of things. At Wikia, we've got 8,000 wikis under way, building all kinds of works that are not an encyclopedia. Some of them are really pretty surprising.

When it comes to developing content under the wiki model, what's the role of the expert or the professional, as opposed to the passionate amateur?
The distinctions don't lose meaning, but they become much broader. One of the things that's really interesting is what I call "credentialism." This is the idea that only someone with a particular credential in a particular field is an expert - and that's almost never true. In fact, a lot of the people who are working on Wikipedia would be credentialed in one field, but they end up writing something completely different because it's a passionate interest. They're very often no less expert than someone who's credentialed in that field. We have to learn that the credential process is kind of an okay one, but it's really flawed.

The standard criticism of Wikipedia is that when you have everyday people writing these entries, there's no one double-checking or triple-checking for accuracy. What's your response to that?
That accusation makes no sense, because people are constantly double- and triple-checking everything for accuracy. Obviously, things slip through the cracks. Obviously, there are errors in Wikipedia - there are errors in anything - but the whole process is designed to encourage that kind of checking. It's something that you just don't get without having that openness.

What's the relationship between Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation?
The foundation owns and operates Wikipedia, and is a charity. The core goal of the foundation is to support the original vision that I had for Wikipedia, which is to have a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language. When we look at Wikipedia as being a huge success, it is a huge success in English and all of the languages of Europe, and in Chinese and in Japanese. But beyond that, it starts to get a little shaky. We're really interested in figuring out how can we promote and support Wikipedia in all of the languages of Africa, India, [places] like that. That's really what the foundation is focused on - the fundraising for the infrastructure, and also working on outreach, and trying to support Wikipedia around the world.

What lessons or applications might meetings professionals take from the wiki model?
There are a few different things. There's been a trend in the technology sector toward what's called an unconference. The unconferences are very much influenced by the wiki model. The idea is, you get 60, 100, 200 interesting people together - I've never seen an unconference much bigger than that - and set up a white board, and people sign up for sessions. A lot of the sessions end up being eight to 10 people; someone's presenting, and then there's a discussion. These are really having a big impact on the way people think about conferences, at least in Silicon Valley and in the Web 2.0 world.

Obviously, I'm not going to recommend that for all kinds of conferences, but I do think it's a really interesting model, and there may be a trend there that could be applied at least as a part of meetings elsewhere. People will sometimes joke that the most productive part of a conference was the party afterward, because you actually get a chance to talk to other people instead of sitting in a lecture hall. I'm thinking it's something like that, except instead of just saying, "Let's have a party," it's actually saying, "That sort of peer-to-peer interaction is really valuable in the networking process, and we want to encourage that." That's very wiki-like in the sense that it isn't top-down. This might be a little disconcerting for traditional meeting planners who feel like their job is to decide what everybody's going to listen to and talk about, but I think it's an interesting trend.

The one thing I haven't seen be very successful, although lots of people have tried it, is the conference wiki, where at the beginning they announce that there's a wiki and everyone please go and edit during the conference - their summaries or discussions or whatever. That doesn't seem to work very well. But I do think that using all these kinds of tools to stay much more focused on hearing back from people, getting feedback in a much more high-bandwidth way than you would in the past, is really important. Meeting planners who take advantage of these tools - to learn what their constituents who are coming to the meetings are finding good and bad and useful, and what they really wish and want - will be successful, because they'll have a better understanding of what people need.

Why do you think conference wikis haven't worked out?
Because a wiki is really about a community. It's a software tool, of course, but a software tool isn't where the magic is. The magic is in the community. It's having a group of people who have relationships over time, with a shared goal and a shared purpose. A conference wiki is, like, everybody's just come together, and you're only here for three days. Generally they haven't tended to get very far.

What else would you like to accomplish?
Oh, I don't now. Maybe I'll take up bowling. [Laughs.] No, here at Wikia, I'm leading the Search team [http://re.search.wikia.com/]. That's a project that I'm really passionate about. We're doing an all-open-source search engine, all-open-source software. The idea of it is to be like a wiki in the sense that you can edit the search-results space. You can move the links around. You can delete things, you can add things, you can edit the text of what is said about each Web site. We're doing it all open-source, so anybody can copy our software and run a search engine of their own. It's basically applying all of my ideas to search.

Given your belief in the power of collective expertise, do you consider yourself a leader?
I consider myself a community leader - given that, in a community, as opposed to a military organization or business, everyone's free to come and go. You can really only lead people where they want to go already, so it's really more a matter of coaching, I would say, and inspiring and cheering people on, rather than any kind of command-and-control structure. I'm a very laid-back leader. [Laughs.]

Within the wiki model, do you need traditional leaders?
Absolutely. A big part of what goes on within a wiki community is a process of the community finding leadership. It's a particular style of leadership. It has to be a very gentle leadership. It has to be leadership because other people respect you, so it's a leadership based on reason and calm dispute resolution and things like that. People who are like that tend to be quite revered within the community because they're able to get things done. It's really an important part of the process.

Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.
The Leading by Example series is sponsored by the Canadian Tourism Commission. Visit its Web site at www.meetings.canada.travel.