wikipediaThe 42-year-old web guru, in an effort to show Wikipedia’s impact thus far, referenced a recent trip to a slum in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”

“Wow, that’s really cool, right? We’ve had some impact, even in such a place where I’m talking to this guy, and there’s mud streets, and cows, and it’s really quite a different environment from London.”

Wales’s popular online encyclopedia allows anyone with an Internet connection to make entries and edit content.

Speaking on the sidelines of an awards ceremony in London, Wales said: “We’re really just at the beginning, still, of collaborative efforts.”

“So, I think we’ve still got a long way to go.”

He acknowledged collaboration has its limits, noting that if “we said we want to write a novel about loss, and redemption, probably not so much public collaboration, that’s really an individual vision and a view of the world.”

“But for basic factual information, I think having an open public dialogue and debate and democratic process, seems to be very powerful.”

He said, however, that as computing power increases, “we need to really think about what are the political controls we need to have in place to prevent governments from abusing that kind of information.”

Wales’s remarks come after a report last month which warned that European governments are rapidly eroding civil liberties in a bid to gain “unfettered” access to individuals’ personal data in the name of tighter security.