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 important policy papers in a more systematic way. Therefore, we look forward to working with you on seeing this resolution move forward and we thank you for your leadership on this important issue. Thank you very much.

Chairman. Thanks, Mr. Schwartz.

I appreciate your mention of the CRS. It is quite a remarkable office, much larger than what most people would guess. And it has within it real scholars on an extraordinary array of subject matter, policy matters, and they do very high quality work. It ought to be public. It benefits us, but it ought to be public for all of the many people out there who would benefit from seeing the product of this very high level research. Thanks for your support for that.

Mr. Wales, thanks for being here. We welcome your testimony now.

Mr. . Thank you. My name is Jimmy Wales and I am the founder of Wikipedia, as well as founder of the non-profit charity The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia project and several other related projects.

I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.

To introduce this potential, I would like to first talk about our experience with Wikipedia. The original vision statement for Wikipedia was for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we are doing.

Wikipedia currently consists of more than nine million encyclopedia articles in more than 150 languages. While the English project is the largest, with over 2 million articles, this represents less than one-fourth of the total work.

Wikipedia is currently increasingly important around the world with more than half a million articles each in German and French, and more than 250,000 articles in several additional European languages, as well as more than 400,000 articles in the Japanese language.

Despite being blocked in the People's Republic of China for the past 2 years, the Chinese language Wikipedia, which is primarily written by Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and around the world, is a healthy community project with more than 150,000 articles and a strong growth rate.

At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity, hard work, and freedom of speech.

Now I would like to talk a little bit about how open, collaborative media like wikis enable more efficient gathering and dissemination of useful information. Although it may be counterintuitive that opening up a wiki project leads to a more useful compendium of information, that is what our experience has been with Wikipedia.