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How the online "temple of the mind" became the go-to site for looking stuff up: A drama told in the open-source style of Wikipedia
ByDrake Bennett
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This article was produced under a loose interpretation of Wikipedia's collaborative principles. Where indicated, it was rewritten, corrected, and commented upon by outside participants.
It's easy to forget, but 10 years ago it took serious effort to find decent information on the Internet. Searching the Web was like picking through a vast antique shop: There was the occasional find, and a lot of secondhand junk.
Interested in Russian-made Tupolev airplanes? An obsessive hobbyist had a home page about them. Someone mentioned Volapük at a party? There was a university site with shards of information about the little-known language invented in the 19th century (not to be confused with the French avant-garde rock band of the same name). Then in 1999 came a simple idea from a search engine entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales: a free encyclopedia written by experts donating their time to draft articles and conduct peer review. The content would be copyable and ad-supported. It would be called Nupedia.
The site's team of PhDs moved at a pace that was indeed scholarly: In its first year, they created barely a dozen entries. Wales realized Nupedia needed a feeder site, something less exclusive that would attract writers. On this new site, any visitor would be able to write about whatever he wanted.
The experiment was unpopular with Nupedia's editors and advisory board—the fact that the uncredentialed were encouraged to contribute could, they reasoned, threaten the credibility of the encyclopedia. After less than a week, the new site was spun off into a separate project called Wikipedia—a "wiki" (Hawaiian for quick) is software that allows users to write, edit, and link Web pages on a single shared document. Within a year the new site had 20,000 articles. When Nupedia shut down in early 2003, it was stuck at 24 articles.
Jan. 15 is Wikipedia's 10th birthday. According to its own Wikipedia page, it has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages—including 118,000 in Volapük. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 120,000, and only in English. Free of charge—and of ads—the site is one of the most visited on the Web. It is the first stop for bar wagerers, high school paper writers, oppo researchers, and anyone trying to figure out what the Peace of Westphalia did or when the mortgage-backed security was invented or whom Ringo Starr replaced as the Beatles' drummer. The entry for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill went up on Apr. 21—less than a day after the rig explosion, and before anyone had any idea of its extent. "US Coast Guard has already launched a rescue operation," the article's last sentence read. (Comment)
Even some of the site's staunchest supporters admit they initially doubted it would amount to much. The idea sounds like a utopian social experiment: a record of the world's knowledge, produced and policed by volunteers. Today anyone can still contribute to an entry, and many do. But rather than collapsing into chaos and endless arguments over the exact diameter of the second Death Star (a debate that, in fact, continues), the world of the self-proclaimed Wikipedians has grown into a thriving online society. "Its existence is proof of a radically different way of organizing production," says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies social networks and the Internet.
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ByDrake Bennett
Browse Issues
Browse the BusinessWeek Archive
This article was produced under a loose interpretation of Wikipedia's collaborative principles. Where indicated, it was rewritten, corrected, and commented upon by outside participants.
It's easy to forget, but 10 years ago it took serious effort to find decent information on the Internet. Searching the Web was like picking through a vast antique shop: There was the occasional find, and a lot of secondhand junk.
Interested in Russian-made Tupolev airplanes? An obsessive hobbyist had a home page about them. Someone mentioned Volapük at a party? There was a university site with shards of information about the little-known language invented in the 19th century (not to be confused with the French avant-garde rock band of the same name). Then in 1999 came a simple idea from a search engine entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales: a free encyclopedia written by experts donating their time to draft articles and conduct peer review. The content would be copyable and ad-supported. It would be called Nupedia.
The site's team of PhDs moved at a pace that was indeed scholarly: In its first year, they created barely a dozen entries. Wales realized Nupedia needed a feeder site, something less exclusive that would attract writers. On this new site, any visitor would be able to write about whatever he wanted.
The experiment was unpopular with Nupedia's editors and advisory board—the fact that the uncredentialed were encouraged to contribute could, they reasoned, threaten the credibility of the encyclopedia. After less than a week, the new site was spun off into a separate project called Wikipedia—a "wiki" (Hawaiian for quick) is software that allows users to write, edit, and link Web pages on a single shared document. Within a year the new site had 20,000 articles. When Nupedia shut down in early 2003, it was stuck at 24 articles.
Jan. 15 is Wikipedia's 10th birthday. According to its own Wikipedia page, it has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages—including 118,000 in Volapük. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 120,000, and only in English. Free of charge—and of ads—the site is one of the most visited on the Web. It is the first stop for bar wagerers, high school paper writers, oppo researchers, and anyone trying to figure out what the Peace of Westphalia did or when the mortgage-backed security was invented or whom Ringo Starr replaced as the Beatles' drummer. The entry for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill went up on Apr. 21—less than a day after the rig explosion, and before anyone had any idea of its extent. "US Coast Guard has already launched a rescue operation," the article's last sentence read. (Comment)
Even some of the site's staunchest supporters admit they initially doubted it would amount to much. The idea sounds like a utopian social experiment: a record of the world's knowledge, produced and policed by volunteers. Today anyone can still contribute to an entry, and many do. But rather than collapsing into chaos and endless arguments over the exact diameter of the second Death Star (a debate that, in fact, continues), the world of the self-proclaimed Wikipedians has grown into a thriving online society. "Its existence is proof of a radically different way of organizing production," says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies social networks and the Internet.
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