Wikimania Debuts with Higher Encyclopedic Standards

In excess of 300 persons have witnessed an argumentation from Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales at the Wikimania three-day conference, pushing for higher quality standards in the online encyclopedia's services as quantity is no longer the main focus after surpassing the 1.2 million articles.

"Although we've always had this goal of Britannica quality or better, we're not there yet," Wales said. "We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these articles numbers going up. ... We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality."

While wikis are software programs dedicated to general use presenting advanced creation and editing functions, being the basis and the building blocks of Wikipedia, the service's scope has surpassed that of more traditional encyclopedic approaches. Along the way Wikipedia has struggled with increasing criticism regarding information accuracy. Negative publicity did not render the encyclopedic service inoperable; it just conducted to control restrictions on adding and editing entries. Now Wales will push for the elimination of controversy associated with Wikipedia by raising the quality standards.