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Jimmy Wales interviewed by Al Jazeera

On 25 November, Jimmy Wales appeared from London on Al Jazeera's Morning Talk (حديث الصباح) program, giving a 20-minute interview (via a translator) with presenter Julnar Moussa (جلنار موسى). The interview was preceded by a 2-minute clip that explained how Wikipedia works. Moussa gave congratulations for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. Wales started off talking about how the Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit charity, and the purpose of Wikipedia, as a free encyclopedia.

A major question discussed was "How do we assess reliability of the information?", both generally and when it comes to divisive and controversial topics, such as politics. Moussa cited the Jerusalem article where it says Jerusalem "is the capital of Israel, though not internationally recognized as such" as a specific example which she thought was biased towards the Israeli point-of-view. Wales explained how Wikipedia has the Neutral Point of View policy, that different points-of-view should be represented in an article, that anyone can engage in discussion on the talk pages or get involved in editing. As for use by students, Wales explained that Wikipedia can be a starting point for searching for information but not the end point.

Moussa also asked "what about the other languages?" to which Jimmy Wales replied and explained Wikimedia's mission to provide free knowledge to all people in the world, many who cannot speak English. Wales also discussed Wikimedia's interest in doing more outreach in the Middle East to bring in more editors to the Arabic Wikipedia. Replying to a question about WikiLeaks, Wales said there is no relation between them and Wikimedia. (Full interview on YouTube Arabic-only)