Had an exciting and enlightening dinner session with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Jimmy had come down to Chennai for a day, and was meeting up with Kiruba (I got the invitation to the dinner through him).

Other invitees to the dinner were Karthik and Liffy Thomas (Editors at Go Ergo, The Hindu), Venkatesh Chanrasekaran (Founder Trustee, Schools for India trust, whose aim is to open up 6000 schools over the country), David Appasamy (Chief Communication Officer, Sify), Chinmayi (popular playback singer, famed for singing Sahana in the Rajnikanth blockbuster Sivaji, Tere Bina in Guru).

Well to start off with, it was an amazing feeling sitting with the founder of one of the most recognised and respected websites on earth! It was interesting talking to him, and he came across as a very approachable person. He was also sitting on a tight schedule and was due to fly back to the US the next day, followed by a visit to South Korea (he was concerned though that South Korea isn’t as big on Wikipedia as other countries are).

Conversations ranged from the Microsoft+Yahoo possibility, his travels around the world, his presence at World Economic Forum at Davos (where he was selected Young Global Leader) to topics in a lighter vein. However, much of our question and the conversations were centred around Wikipedia, its evolution, the way ahead and convergence of multimedia into a wikipost.