Wikipedia too complicated to edit, says founder Jimmy Wales

LONDON - Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has said that the site is too complicated for many people to modify.

Wales, 44, said the site, which bills itself as “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”, wants a new generation of contributors, including more women, and aims to increase its users from 400m to 1bn by 2015.

But growth means a new interface for the online encyclopaedia, which is the world’s fifth most popular site, and which will celebrate its 10th anniversary on January 15.

“We have to support our old power users because they build the site. But we also need to have a ramp for new users,” the BBC quoted it as saying.

He said a lot of people were “afraid” to contribute to the site by the sometimes complicated code, known as Wiki mark-up, which is needed to format entries.

“If you click edit and you see some Wiki syntax and some bizarre table structure - a lot of people are literally afraid. They’re good people and they don’t want to break something,” he explained.

As well as initiatives such as “adopt a user”, that allows experienced Wikipedians to take a new user under their wing, he said his for-profit company Wikia had been doing a lot of work designing simple “what you see is what you get” editing tools. (ANI)