Imagine everything we know in one place. Jimmy Wales not only imagines it, he's working on it.

The cofounder of Wikipedia has set himself the goal of accumulating all human knowledge in his online encyclopedia. And he says he's getting close—at least in the English-language version, where there are now nearly 2 million articles.

Of course, Wales has a lot of help. Anyone with an Internet connection can contribute to Wikipedia, which is how the site has built a library of 6 million articles in 250 languages with just seven paid administrative employees.

Now Wales is bringing his all-comers approach to search. Later this year he'll launch Wikia Search, an open-source search engine built and fine-tuned by users.

Do we really need another search engine? Wales thinks so. Search as it stands now is a cipher. Where do the results come from? Who decides how they're ranked? "As citizens of the Internet we should be concerned about how much of a black box search is."

Talk about Search Wikia. Why do we need something besides Google?
I want a completely open-source search engine with all the algorithms published, so people can see why things are ranked the way they are.

And it's users who will do the ranking?
They're one component. Human intelligence and human editorial oversight is incredibly powerful. But there's also got to be an algorithmic component, simply because you'd never be able to sort by hand everything anybody might search.

Is information better if it's mediated by people or is it just valuable in a different way?
It's too early to say confidently that we'll be able to produce better-quality search results. But compare searches from Google, Yahoo and Ask. They're all very similar. We've reached a plateau in search and to break beyond it we need to think in new ways.

You've said you imagine a day when everyone on the planet has access to the sum of all human knowledge. Is that the goal of Wikipedia?
That's always been our core mission. We still have a long way to go but we're optimistic.

How much bigger does Wikipedia have to get to reach your goal?
I think we're there, at least in terms of the English Wikipedia. Obviously there are lots of quality improvements to be made and still plenty of things to be written about. But we have a free high-quality encyclopedia.

Why are people so generous with their time at Wikipedia?
It's fun. It's an intellectual hobby. It's interacting with other people, trying to do something useful for the world. People just enjoy it.

Web 3.0: what's that going to be?
I'm a little skeptical that term has any meaning. As soon as Web 2.0 became all the rage as a term, people started saying, "Ah! What about 3.0?" I have no idea.

What's the first time you understood the power of information?
When I was a kid and I was a voracious reader. At a very young age I was into knowledge and information.

How do you manage information? Are you a gadget guy?
Not really. I do have a Sidekick and I am on IM a lot. Mostly I'm just buried in volumes of e-mail. I think e-mail is completely broken and I don't know what the world's going to do about it. Maybe Web 3.0 will be making e-mail not suck again.

Do you have any information heroes?
Larry Lessig, the Creative Commons guy. A couple years ago he declared e-mail bankruptcy. I admire that very much. He deleted all his e-mail one day and put out an announcement: "E-mail bankruptcy. If you sent me something I didn't read it. I deleted it. So start over again." That was pretty impressive.