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JIMMY WALES is 43 years old, wears red-framed glasses, and is from Alabama. All this I glean, not from his Wikipedia page, but from a face-to-face conversation with the man himself. And as if to illustrate that all information sources should be questioned, not just erratic Wikipedia entries, he tells me that his birth date, August 7th, is not what is written on his passport, writes FIONA McCANN

Yet despite the vandalism that has dogged Wikipedia from the get-go, it’s still the fifth most popular website in the world, and has added its own verb to the English lexicon. Want to find out about something? Just Wikipedia it. All this despite having begun as a by-product of Nupedia, another encyclopedia project being worked on at the time by Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger.