IDGNS: What will the new people do? I mean, how will Wikimedia change as new people join?

Wales: We'll be able to do a lot more. I'll give you an example. We were approached by a mobile phone company from Portugal about having an advert that shows Wikipedia on a phone and what you can do with it. The point is that Wikipedia is well known enough by the general public that a mobile phone company can sell more phones if people think they can use Wikipedia on their phone. In the past we'd just get these kind of offers, and there was just nobody there to deal with it. With more people on board, the foundation can look into these kinds of things, can write more grants, can do more.

IDGNS: Switching gears a bit, there was some talk at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei about frustration over content licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License versus the Creative Commons License. Is there anything coming up to resolve the differences between these two licenses?

Wales: We have delightful religious wars over terminology (chuckling). It's difficult to sort out the religious battles. Wikia tries to use the GNU Free Documentation License everywhere, but sometimes we can't because some of these communities we've acquired may have already existed under a Creative Commons License.

In Wikipedia, when they've had a Creative Commons License that's incompatible with Wikipedia, then people can't move content back and forth, like you can't take a Wikipedia article and use it on Creative Commons Wikia, and you can't take our stuff and put it back on Wikipedia.

A core principle of Wikipedia itself is to be neutral and try to write neutrally and try to avoid battles that result in acrimony. The foundation has always been correctly very principled about the licenses that we use, but we don't try to shun similar licenses. We really work for license compatibility and to solve those issues. In a way, the foundation has taken a very extreme position, but in a very non-activist attitude.

I believe that in the future a lot of these license issues will be worked out. The GNU Foundation and Creative Commons are trying to reduce incompatibilities, particularly when you have license incompatibility on licenses that have the same spirit. In principle, everybody agrees on some kind of revision to one or both kinds of licenses to ensure compatibility. The devil is in the details. The outcome could be a change in one or both of the licenses, or a new license.