Curiosity is defined by Wikipedia as “an unknown number of behavioural and psychological mechanisms, which have the effect of impelling beings to seek information”.

For simplicity’s sake, the online encyclopaedia could replace that rather wordy interpretation with the name of its founder, Jimmy Wales, for he is the embodiment of the term.

“Look at this tree over here,” the bearded, bespectacled 40-year-old says as he bounds across the unkempt lawn of his back garden in suburban St Petersburg, Florida.

“Do you think these are oranges or grapefruit? Maybe lemons,” he adds as he bends to peer at the large, yellowish fruit on his tree. “They are too big and round for lemons, too yellow for oranges and too small for grapefruit.”

And with that, he’s off towards his modest, single-storey house, unidentified fruit in hand. From the geeks who call him their “God-King”, to industry leaders such as Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive, and musical artists such as Peter Gabriel, Mr Wales is admired for his dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.

He is best known as the founder of Wikipedia, a project he began as a hobby in 2001 with a former friend, Larry Sanger, which has now ballooned into the largest encyclopaedia in human history.

But the vast internet reference work is just one element of Mr Wales’s vocation, which is to give everyone on the planet with an internet connection free access to all the accumulated knowledge in human history and to give them the tools to exploit it. “Imagine a free college education for everyone anywhere in the world with all the resources that you could ever need online,” he says. “The implications for the Third World are astounding.”

The Wiki phenomenon is based on a set of rules and principles and some fairly simple open-source publishing software. The rules and principles govern what Mr Wales describes as a “rag tag band of volunteers” tens of thousands strong and known as “Wikipedians”. They create and edit the more than 1.5 million entries in the English language Wikipedia and the many millions more in its 200 foreign language versions.

“It is a user-mediated community,” Mr Wales says. “The users decide what is right and wrong in a process that usually leads to the right thing being published.”

This method has come in for some strong criticism, not least from the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and from Mr Sanger, who is creating a rival to Wikipedia. Accuracy and plagiarism are the biggest concerns but Mr Wales insists that the self-governing editorial policy of Wikipedia is just like any media organisation.

“A newspaper has editors and fact checkers. We do not know who they are but we trust them to do a good job. That is how we work at Wikipedia.”

The online encyclopaedia is one element of the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity that contains all of Mr Wales’s not-for-profit ventures. These include a dictionary, a directory of species and a free library of textbooks and manuals called Wikibooks. “Wikibooks is a very exciting area and I think key to the idea of free education,” he says, adding that the ultimate ambition is to offer a set of textbooks on just about every university course in the world.

To achieve this, however, Mr Wales says that governments around the world must rewrite copyright law. He believes that all material should be copyrighted for 14 years — as was the case in the US. Once this period expires the copyright holder should be allowed to reapply for another 14-year period by registering with the Government and paying a fee. “That way things that are economically viable will continue to be protected because they will be worth registering, and things that are not, but may have some intrinsic cultural or educational value, would be allowed to fall into the public domain of their own accord.”

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