Wikipedia
Long live Wikipedia: a beacon of truth in a post-truth world. Where would we be without it?
I enjoyed this week’s New York Times interview of Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. You can watch it on YouTube HERE. REMORANDOM owes a lot to Wikipedia. It’s a big resource for me – and it’s an endeavour that I’m proud to support financially – albeit very modestly. The world needs more people like Jimmy Wales, and it prompted me today to unearth our Wikipedia chapter from REMORANDOM 4.
Remo
Until the end of the 20th century, an encyclopedia was something printed, that typically came in multiple alphabetised volumes, and lived in your book shelves ready to be consulted – but static and frozen in time. The Encyclopædia Britannica, although founded long before in 1768, was a good example of this.
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was launched on 15 January 2001, by American internet entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. That changed everything.
According to The Economist, Wikipedia:
“has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment”.
The idea quickly gained traction. By 2004, Wikipedia had versions in over 50 languages, and it soon emerged to become a dominant source of online information.
In 2007, the English version surpassed 2 million articles, a number that is today over 3 times that. Check out the video of Jimmy Wales discussing the birth of Wikipedia at TEDGlobal in 2005. See below or HERE.
Wikipedia became a trusted source of information despite early criticisms, with research showing that its accuracy was comparable (and indeed superior) to traditional encyclopedias like Britannica. As the number of articles grew, so did its cultural and academic recognition. Wikipedia became a widely cited resource, with students, journalists and the general public relying on it for quick information.
Wikipedia’s mission of providing free access to knowledge was heralded as a breakthrough in democratising information. It aligned with the broader open-source and open-access movements. People on Wikipedia essentially come together to write history in real time.
The Wikipedia community has played a pivotal role in its success, and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that oversees it, has pioneered innovative governance models, from consensus-building to the introduction of policies like Neutral Point of View (NPOV), Wikipedia’s core non-negotiable editorial policy, encouraging editors to provide balanced perspectives on contentious topics.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Along with the ongoing sustainability challenge involved with raising money from donations to cover annual expenses, Wikipedia has endured its fair share of controversies. One of the perennial issues with Wikipedia has been vandalism, where users deliberately edit pages with false or inappropriate content. It continues to be a challenge. Critics have also pointed out systemic biases in Wikipedia’s content, particularly regarding gender, ethnicity and geography … and more recently political bias.
All in all – it’s currently hard to imagine a more trusted source of information on the internet. So, long live Wikipedia. Where would we be without it?
Postscript
Also, check out @depthsofwikipedia on Instagram – a fascinating and humorous exploration of the more obscure, bizarre and quirky corners of Wikipedia, e.g. Diego, the sexually voracious tortoise. Created as a social media project in 2020 by Annie Rauwerda, a then student in neuroscience at the University of Michigan, the project has since expanded to other social media platforms, where it highlights the weird, wonderful, and often forgotten articles that exist in the vast expanse of the online encyclopedia. Watch Rauwerda’s 2023 TED Talk below or HERE.
Videos
REMORANDOM Book Chapter
