on 或许依然
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
establish 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 many 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 Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikitionary.
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 10 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’re more than 11 million monthly
edits to all Wikipedias in
all languages. According to one survey, we have about twice the proportion of
PH.Ds compared to the general public. On the English
Wikipedia, almost 50% have no religion and 40.6% 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 with the
discussions and reviews, committees and notice boards, Wikiprojects 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 is 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 be
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 even better.
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