INTERNET innovator Jimmy Wales, the man behind online encyclopedia Wikipedia, will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Free Thinking Festival.
The BBC Radio 3 festival returns to The Sage Gateshead over the weekend of November 4-6 with a host of distinguished contributors including Foreign Secretary William Hague, cultural commentator Germaine Greer, Jack Thorne, writer of TV series Skins, architect and landscape artist Charles Jencks, psychotherapist Susie Orbach, historian Linda Colley and influential churchman Dr Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The festival, which is in its sixth year and also took place at the Gateshead music venue in 2010, is a sparkling exploration of issues and ideas drawing large and enthusiastic live audiences and providing a wealth of programming for the BBC channel.
More than 30 events will take place over the three days of this year’s festival, all of which are free.
This year’s general theme is Change, with speakers asked to consider the mania for change sweeping the globe.
Jimmy Wales, one of the leading lights of the modern phenomenon of the internet and creator of one of the most referenced sources of knowledge on the planet, is likely to attract a large audience.
The 45-year-old American will share his vision of how the internet will continue to alter the world in radical ways.
According to Wikipedia, Jimmy Donal “Jimbo” Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and studied finance at university.
He became an internet entrepreneur in 1996 and in 2001 established Wikipedia, which followed an earlier online encyclopedia called Nupedia.
Whether he was solely responsible or co-founded the site with Larry Sanger has been a point of dispute but there is no doubt that Wales has become the man most closely associated with the enterprise, aimed at making the sum of human knowledge freely available to everyone.
The theme of change will certainly give the Rt Hon William Hague MP plenty of scope and he will discuss the dramatic political upheavals taking place around the globe and Britain’s role in the shifting world order.