Wikipedia founderJimmy
Waleshas won the Nokia Foundation's €10,0000 prize for
2009 for his contributions to the evolution of the World Wide Web
as a "participatory and truly democratic" platform.
Presenting the award, Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research
Centre and chairman of the Nokia Foundation, said Wales had made a
unique contribution to accelerating online collaboration and
interaction for millions of people around the world, effectively
democratising information sharing.
Since Wales started it in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into one of
the web's largest reference sites, attracting more than 330 million
visitors a month. More than 75,000 contributors are working on more
than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.
Wales is also the co-founder of Wikia.com, a project that
expands the participatory editing model into new areas, allowing
the global community to come together to build "the rest of the
library".
Previous winners of the Nokia Foundation award include the ITU's
former secretary general
Pekka
Tarjanne (1996) and Linux inventor
Linus
Torvalds (1997).
This year, the Nokia Foundation also awarded 77 scholarships
worth €385,000 to support PhD students of information and data
communications technology.