Happy birthday (and thank you) to Wikipedia
On 15 January 2001, a new online encyclopaedia was born: it was originally called Nupedia. The concept then was to invite experts to contribute articles and, by the end of the first year, they had a grand total of 22. The next year was not that much better.
The plan changed dramatically when the founders decided to use the idea of the wiki which enables any Net user to contribute an article or to edit one. In the first two weeks of the new approach, they had more articles than in the two years of Nupedia.
In October 2007, I wrote a column entitled “Is Wikipedia the best site on the web?” I concluded: “After years of using the site literally every day, I am a huge fan. It is not perfect, it is not brilliantly written, but it is hugely informative and very user-friendly. As a starting point to learn about a topic, it is currently unbeatable.”
At that time, Wikipedia had almost two million articles in English. It now has over seven million. But Wikipedia is a genuinely global resource with material in over 240 languages totalling over 66 million pages.
All this is done by volunteers, anyone can create or edit a page, and the whole thing is free to anyone with an Internet connection.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, the British Tim Berners-Lee, has written in his new book “This Is For Everyone”: “Wikipedia is probably the best single example of what I wanted the web to be” and calls it “an invaluable repository. of human knowledge that I consider one of the modern wonders of the world”.
I use Wikipedia every day. I’m so impressed at its scope and quality and so appreciative of its free availability that I donate to it each month.