— Wikipedia crawled from the smoldering crater of the dot.com crash
exactly one decade ago, a not-for-profit, communal effort to collect,
refine and publish the sum of all human knowledge, and make it
available for free to anyone with an Internet connection.
“The people’s encyclopedia,” as it was described this past week by
executive director of the nonprofit foundation that owns Wikipedia, is
starting its second decade by resolving to grow more representative of
all people. With its army of contributors skewed toward men, people in
their 20s and Ph.D.s, Wikipedia is opening its first offices outside
Wikipedia will diversify the community of “technical, geek-oriented
people” who built the online encyclopedia after its launch in 2001.
“We want more women; we want more older people, and
then obviously geographical diversity is very important as we’re trying
to move into more and more languages,” Wales told reporters on a
conference call last week. Wikipedia is opening an office in
Wikipedia marked its 10th anniversary Saturday with
scores of local celebrations around the world, as well as a party and
conference at its
headquarters. The collaborative, grass-roots effort was a huge
milestone in the development of the Internet, and it was also
significant for society at large, a number of Internet thinkers said
during the week leading up the anniversary.
Intentionally launched far from the mercantile mania of
into a verb and a multibillion-dollar business. It is now used by a
majority of Americans who access the Internet, with about 53 percent of
Web-connected Americans turning to it by mid-2010, up from 36 percent
in 2007, according to a new report from the
Around the world, in countries where governments
claim an exclusive right to define the truth, Wikipedia has become a
battleground between authorities and activists, say experts on digital
censorship. While critics have challenged Wikipedia’s accuracy and
bias, others say it has democratized the concept of who has the
authority to possess and author knowledge. Entries are developed
collaboratively, and anyone can contribute to most articles anonymously
or with a user account, with the evolving content agreed upon by a
consensus of contributors.
“It changed expectations, in that you can look up virtually anything and get a reasonable answer,” said
congressional legislation more accessible to citizens. O’Reilly said
that before Wikipedia “it used to be the educated person was the one
who knew a lot of things.” Now the ability for anyone, anywhere to
instantly look up arcane medical terms, or a line of Flemish kings, has
changed all that.
“That’s a profound change that is going to ripple through our society for decades to come,” O’Reilly said.
Nonprofit Wikipedia and very much for-profit
turned out to be one of the great partnerships of the first decade of
the 21st century. Because of the extensive Web links to sources and
other content within Wikipedia entries, they tend to rank high on a
“Wikipedia, hand in glove with
For longtime Wikipedia contributors like
Johnson started contributing to Wikipedia in 2003,
building on his interest in genealogy. “I started off writing about
very obscure people who had been dead for a long time,” he said, such
as Madame
Since then, Johnson has graduated to the Wikipedia entries of famous people like
contributing less prominent facts about their parents and childhoods,
the kind of specialized and detailed information that only an Internet
encyclopedia can offer.
“I’m interested in how people grow up,” Johnson
said. “Once they become famous, it’s not as interesting anymore, but a
lot of times the details of their childhoods are missed, because people
don’t know how to look.”
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