Wikipedia is one of the most important websites on the Internet today, but you might be surprised
to learn that it began as a side project of another online encyclopedia, that was called
Nupedia, to be a traditional encyclopedia, written by experts, free and online, but only
one person had final publishing authority and it wasn’t quite taking off. As a founder
of Nupedia, I led the group to form a farm team of sorts for future Nupedia articles.
We used a new software platform to make collaboration easy, the Wiki, Wikipedia. It happened to
be the perfect way to write mini-pages very quickly. Soon enough, Nupedia couldn’t keep
up, and Wikipedia took center stage. We were creating not just a free content encyclopedia,
but a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Other language editions appeared quickly (over
270 at last count) and it was soon followed by sister projects, like Wiki Source, Wiki
News, and Wiktionary. In 2003, I created the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that Wikipedia
could keep up with its own growth. Wikipedia gets almost 400 million visitors every month.
And the list of sites visited more often is very short and very famous. Wikipedia celebrates
its 10th anniversary in January 2011, and in these ten years has become one of the most
popular websites in the world. I still lead the community, and the Wikimedia Foundation
helps us to make Wikipedia what it is today. Who does edit Wikipedia? Over time, as many
as 1.2 million people have contributed to Wikipedia. As of 2010, there are more than
11 million monthly edits to all Wikipedias in all languages. According to one survey,
we have about twice the proportion of PhD’s compared to the general public. On the English
Wikipedia, almost 50% have no religion, and 14.6% of French editors claim to believe in
Pastafarianism. It would be fair to say that most Wikipedians are not average. One reason,
maybe, is that editing a single page is easy, but getting heavily involved is harder. The
community is defined by more than 200 combined policies, guidelines, and essays, to say nothing
of the discussions and reviews, committees and noticeboards, Wiki projects and more.
All the site content is decided by Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors. The Wikimedia Foundation
has no editorial role whatsoever. The foundation’s job is to keep the servers running and the
lights on. But there’s more to it than that. The foundation is also growing Wikipedia’s
presence worldwide. More data centers to speed up Wikipedia worldwide, and even bringing
its first office outside of the United States to India. Wikipedia is already very popular
in the West and in the North, a new challenge is going to making Wikipedia available to
the developing world as well. The foundation is a charity and runs entirely on donations,
some from corporations and institutions, but the vast majority from its millions of editors
and readers. It’s incredible what has been accomplished already, but Wikipedia is far
from done. As any reader knows, some articles are very good, but some are not. Wikipedia
still needs a lot of work. Yet, this is a new challenge, not just building an encyclopedia
from scratch, but making it better. More accurate, more citations. Not just broad, but deep.
There’s never been anything like Wikipedia before, and its future horizon is very, very
long. As Wikipedia enters its second decade, it’s up to all of us to make sure it gets