Munich. The 44 year old co-founder of the internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Jimmy D. Wales, has been honoured with an award from the Eduard-Rhein trust in Munich.

Wales receives the award, which also has a 20,000 Euro prize attached, for his idea to distribute over the Internet a free and international encyclopaedia, according to the trust. Bavaria's minister for scientific affairs, Wolfgang Heubisch, took part in the award ceremony at the Deutsche Museum. Wales started the project together with Larry Sanger in 2001; Wikipedia in German started 2 months later.  The name is derived from the Hawaiian "wiki" for fast. Currently there are 15 million articles in 260 languages available in the internet encyclopaedia, around 400 million people use it monthly. The Eduard-Rhein trust was founded in 1976 to honour outstanding research and development achievements on the subjects of broadcast, TV and information technology.