The History of Wikipedia

Great movements start rapidly with a novel twist on an old idea. For Jimmy Wales, his great idea came in January 2001. He was currently running a website called Nupedia that requested encyclopedia articles from academics, took the articles to other scholars for review, and posted them for free online. The website's progress was slow and laborious. After a year online it had only twenty-one articles. With the assistance of his Nupedia employee, Larry Sanger, Wales conceived of a new application of old technology that converted Nupedia into the now legendary Wikipedia.

The "wiki" technology was already used by internet communities to construct software by means of free collaboration between anyone who chose to edit the computer code. The revolution was to apply this technology to the realm of knowledge so that anyone could edit or create an encyclopedia article about any subject. In "open source" software, anonymous changes are easily judged by whether they are successful in fixing code problems. A challenge that Wikipedia had to face was the fact that in an encyclopedia facts are not as readily tested for accuracy.

Nonetheless, Wikipedia became a phenomenon. Since January 15, 2001, when Wikipedia went online, it has grown in popularity exponentially. The turning point in its popularity occurred when writer-journalist John Siegenthaler's Wikipedia biography was tampered with to imply that Siegenthaler had a pivotal role in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler wrote an editorial in USA Today that called Wikipedia a "flawed and irresponsible research tool." While the editorial brought mostly negative attention to Wikipedia, the attention allowed it to grow and improve in quality. It now has more than six million articles in 250 languages including 1.5 million English articles. Despite this popularity, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales only employs five people. The non-profit parent company of Wikipedia, Wikimedia, runs on less than $750,000 per year obtained exclusively from donations.

Wikipedia has in effect democratized the web. It receives its prose from the people and the people use its prose to find information swiftly. When people use a search engine to find information on a topic, the Wikipedia entry usually appears on the first page of the results. Wikipedia is the ninth most frequented site on the internet.

Many people assume that Wikipedia is riddled with errors because it allows anyone to post anything they want without official editing. However, a 2005 article in Nature compared Wikipedia with the venerable, centuries-old Encyclopedia Britannica. The journal took forty articles about math and science from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica and checked them for accuracy with experts. Nature found four serious errors in both encyclopedias. The journal also looked for "factual errors, omissions or misleading statements" and found 123 in the Encyclopedia Britannica compared to 162 in Wikipedia. This comparability of error points to the universal fallibility of compiling knowledge but also shows that under this limitation Wikipedia is a sufficiently accurate encyclopedia.

How did Wikipedia create such a functional operation? It is more than just the idea of everyone sharing information. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger also created a community around Wikipedia. The people who edit and create Wikipedia articles are not really anyone. They are a self-selected, self-titled "Wikipedians" who spend many hours working on articles. While two hundred thousand people are registered users of Wikipedia, only thirty-three hundred people do seventy percent of the work. A vibrant community has spawned. Wikipedians chat with each other about the site and individual articles. Thirty percent of Wikipedia consists of discussions about rules and regulations of the site and debates about what should be in the articles (as supposed to the actual articles which make up the other seventy percent of the site). Some Wikipedians have contributed to tens of thousands of articles. Wikipedia has about one thousand administrators who ensure accuracy and smooth over squabbles. Overall Wikipedians work constructively to create high quality articles. Wikipedians vote on which articles they think are the best and those articles end up on the website's front page as featured articles.

Wikipedia is successful by a wide range of definitions. Its relative accuracy, ubiquity, and simplicity of use have made it a transforming power in the modern age of information consolidation and reorganization. The examples of community building and democratic decision making are a sort of utopia of democratic governance. The non-profit status maintains a separation from the commercialism that dominates large enterprises and keeps central Wikipedia's mission of "distributing a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language." Wikipedia is an example of a company that is on the cutting edge of technology and increased social power through greater access to information.

Works Cited

"Britannica Bristles." Communications of the ACM 49.6 (2006): 9-.

Giles, Jim. Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Nature. 14 December 2005.

Kirschner, Ann. "Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia." Chronicle of Higher Education 53.13 (2006): B10-1.

Rosenzweig, Roy. "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past." Journal of American History 93.1 (2006): 117-46.

Schiff, Stacy. "Know it all." New Yorker 82.23 (2006): 36-43.

"Wikipedia", Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia. Retrieved: December 12, 2006.