Thefounder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales pronounced a speech during the anniversary celebration of his brainchild. It is worth reminding that Wikipedia is 10 years old.

In his speech he expressed anxiety about the development of App Stores. He considers that App Stores can make the Web less free.The event took place in Bristol and Jimmy Wales made the decision to make use of the opportunity and discuss the App Stores concept which is rapidly developing now. Mobile applications sold in iTunes, for instance, and many other similar stores can become hazardous for the Web in his opinion.

He considers that the danger is even bigger than the matter concerning the neutrality of net, which is hypothetical for the most part. Some issues are overblown as he stated in his speech as well. But still it is a difficult problem as it is a threat for the open and varied ecosystem.

It is worth saying that Wikipedia also has its store selling mobile applications. It has been running it for some years already and it was launched even prior to the App Store of the Apple Inc.

Wales also expressed hope that Wikipedia contributors will be diverse too. Wales said that 87% are men who are 26 years old in general. He plans to arrange the work with the resource easier and addition and editing of the content will be less complicated.

Wikipedia possesses 17 million articles at present. The biggest part of them (3.5 million) is written in English. At the moment being this is the biggest encyclopedia with over a thousand of new articles added daily. This statistics refers just to the English articles. Nearly 100,000 enthusiasts edit articles for Wikipedia. In spite of this fact this is not a commercial project and has only 57 employees who are paid.

The request for donation with Wales’ face was on every page of the website not long ago when the company was raising funds for its future development. The company coped with this task well and succeeded in getting the required amount of money, which is $16 million in particular.