Wikipedia

If you wanted to learn about Wikipedia, there’s a good chance you’d look it up on Wikipedia. With 18 billion page views monthly, it has become the default first (and often last) stop for research.

The software behind Wikipedia is relatively simple. But the site’s impact has been enormous. Its crowd-sourced articles tap into a worldwide community of experts and editors, democratizing the process of sharing and updating information.

We need reliable information. But how and where to get it? Ask an expert, or tap into the wisdom of crowds? There aren’t enough experts to update every topic. Yet crowds can be swayed by fads or drawn into “edit wars.”

Wikipedia’s solution? Trust crowds, but not for new information. Instead, have them summarize what’s already published!

Throughout history, most information sources were static. Printed encyclopedias took years to produce, and were updated only occasionally, if ever.

Wikipedia, by contrast, is a living resource, with continual corrections and additions. So it’s rarely outdated. But that makes it vulnerable to shifting interpretations, as well as attempts at self-promotion.

The brilliance of Wikipedia isn’t its software, which is technically straightforward. Rather, it’s the ideas behind that software—and its implementation.

Wikipedia articles accept constant additions from users worldwide. One key to making that work is the software’s built-in “undo” features, essential for a user-created resource where changes sometimes must be rolled back.

Open source software lets anybody study the underlying code, or copy it to create their own personalized version. “Open content” knowledge is similarly open to improvement and reuse.

Wikipedia is open content and powered by open source software. It is also the most famous “wiki”—software designed to enable collaborative writing.

If you build it, they will come. And write. And research. And edit.

Wikipedia is a global community with over 100,000 volunteer editors and writers. To ensure that other volunteers don’t undo their work, contributors need to follow the rules. That means summarizing published information, not presenting original research or opinions.

Why do so many people, from over 150 countries, donate their time?

Motivations are as diverse as the contributors themselves. They range from the urge to add to—or correct—common knowledge, to showing off expertise or keeping alive minority languages such as Maltese and Catalan.

From ancient Egypt’s Library of Alexandria to 15th century China’s Yongle Encyclopedia, people have long sought to collect and organize the world’s information.

Twentieth century visionaries such as Paul Otlet and Douglas Engelbart conceived technologies to make that process collaborative, incorporating contributions from all kinds of people. But Wikipedia was the first to realize such collaboration on a large scale.

The World Wide Web began as a collaborative medium, but its authoring features disappeared early. Ward Cunningham’s “wiki” software mimicked some of those lost capabilities.

In the late 1990s, a struggling commercial online encyclopedia called Nupedia launched a wiki to generate articles, which experts would then edit and refine.

After its 2001 launch, Wikipedia—the wiki created to generate raw articles for online encyclopedia Nupedia—swiftly eclipsed its parent. But explosive growth sparked tussles between owner Jimmy Wales and Editor-in-Chief Larry Sanger, author of editing rules that still govern Wikipedia.

Wales favored ditching the experts and trusting crowd sourcing. Sanger preferred keeping the experts, but ended up leaving himself.

Dizzyingly fast expansion strained Wikipedia’s code. In 2002 volunteer programmers undertook a massive rewrite to handle the traffic.

Growth also brought headaches, from digital graffiti to bogus articles that chronicled everything from phony wars to the (fake) pet crocodile of 18th-century English poet Lord Byron. A reassuring study, however, claimed claims Wikipedia was is as reliable as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.